The writer is vice president for research at Creighton University. He is an internationally recognized researcher in the field of calcium and vitamin D metabolism.
An Oct. 19 news story in The World-Herald highlighted the discrepancy in breast cancer mortality between blacks and whites, and a headline asked “Why can’t breast cancer be colorblind?”
The answer is: “It can be, and it is in the tropics, where the mortality of breast cancer for both races is lower than at temperate latitudes and approximately equal for blacks and whites.”
The factor that changes most dramatically when we move from the equator to higher latitudes, and the one for which the evidence is strongest, is vitamin D. The natural source of this nutrient is sunlight, which interacts with a chemical compound in our skin to produce vitamin D. Both skin pigmentation and high SPF sunscreens block that reaction.
Additionally, overweight individuals have a higher vitamin D need than do smaller individuals, and the combination of greater body weight and darker skin puts African-Americans living in northern latitudes in double jeopardy. Working and living indoors 24/7 only makes that situation worse.
Recently published results from national health statistics show that an astounding 98 percent of African-American teenage girls are vitamin D-deficient.
We once thought that vitamin D mainly helped the body to absorb calcium from food. We now know that is only a small part of the many effects vitamin D exerts in our bodies.
In brief, our cells and tissues are constantly accessing information stored in our DNA libraries to respond to the various stimuli and attacks they are exposed to every minute of every day.
Vitamin D is a key part of the cellular apparatus that accesses that information. When vitamin D status is low, our body’s ability to deal with these daily challenges is impaired, and many things can get out of control.
Vitamin D deficiency is now implicated in disorders as diverse as premature births, high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, osteoporosis and multiple sclerosis, and infectious diseases such as tuberculosis. It must be stressed that deficiency of vitamin D doesn’t cause these disorders. It merely interferes with the body’s own natural ability to defend itself against, or throw off, these other problems.
Is vitamin D just another “miracle” nutrient that seems to offer a lot of benefits but then simply fizzles in large-scale use? Almost certainly not. The body of scientific evidence supporting this important role of vitamin D is massive and growing rapidly.
Current intake recommendations are far too low to ensure vitamin D adequacy. Those recommendations were crafted 13 years ago by a panel of the Institute of Medicine, of which I was a member. Those recommendations are now out of date. Ninety-five percent of what we now know about vitamin D has been learned since then.
A year ago, the need to revise those recommendations led the American Academy of Pediatrics to double its recommendation for vitamin D intake in infants, children and adolescents, and two years ago the Canadian Academy of Pediatrics increased its recommendation for pregnant and lactating women tenfold (to 2,000 IU/d).
A meeting at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last spring, convened to develop recommendations for the elderly, included nine vitamin D-working scientists who, when polled, responded that they were all personally taking supplemental vitamin D in doses of 3,000 IU/d or higher.
There is an international group of scientists working under the name “D*Action” to promote improved vitamin D status worldwide. Readers can find out more by visiting D*Action’s Web site at www.grassrootshealth.net.
I need to re-emphasize that vitamin D is not a magic bullet and not a cure-all. It simply helps our bodies defend against many diseases.
While cancer may be the most emotionally charged of these, the really big-ticket items are babies with low birth weight. Reducing the magnitude of that problem, even by only a few percentage points, would not only produce healthier babies but also would save the country hundreds of millions of dollars in medical costs every year.
The question: to D or not to D? I believe it is time for all of us to D. An extra 1,000 to 2,000 IU/day would suffice for most of us.
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