It’s a conundrum: Ultraviolet B radiation from the sun is both the best source of vitamin D — the “sunshine vitamin” — and the the major cause of skin cancer. Get enough sun-mediated vitamin D and your’re courting melonoma; too little and the rest of your body will suffer. Vitamin D facilitates absorption of bone-building calcium, magnesium and phosphate, and a deficiency leads to osteoporosis (brittle bones) and osteomalacia (soft bones). Low vitamin D has also been linked to muscle weakness, heart disease, dementia, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. What to do? Check out any medical website and you’ll probably find the “sun, sardines or supplements” options.
Sun: Most of us suffer from “environmental mismatch,” the discrepancy between the environment in which our ancestors evolved and where we now live. Not just our environment, our behavior has changed, too: We slather on sunscreen and wear sun-blocking clothes. (Mothers in some religious groups wear long garments with hoods and veils, leading to a deficiency of vitamin D in their breastmilk.) Here in the U.S., 45 percent of 55 to 64 year olds are vitamin D deficient.
Sardines: They and other fatty fish, such as salmon, tuna, mackerel, are rich in vitamin D. We also now have vitamin D fortified foods, such as milk and orange juice.
Supplements: Between 31 and 39 percent (depending on the age range) of older (60+) Americans take vitamin D supplements, either alone or as part of a multivitamin routine.
So, you might reason, if I have a vitamin D deficiency and I’m not about to start sunbathing nude year-round or eating a lot of fish, I should be taking a supplement, right? Depends who you ask. First off, there’s no agreement what constitutes “deficiency.” It’s somewhere around a blood level 30 nanograms per millimeter as measured by what’s known as the “25(OH)D” test but different health groups have different recommendations. Secondly, there’s no consensus about the value of taking supplements. This from the Cleveland Clinic: “A University of Cambridge 2014 study found no evidence that vitamin D supplements reduced overall mortality.” But if you read the referenced study, you find: “Supplementation with vitamin D3 significantly reduces overall mortality among older adults.” From another reputable medical website: “Experts have recommended that postmenopausal women take calcium and vitamin D supplements to prevent osteoporosis,” versus “vitamin D supplements had little effect on bone density.”
This sort of confusion — rife among medical websites — extends to the recommended daily amount of supplemental vitamin D3 (as opposed to vitamin D2, which your body can’t absorb as well). The Institute of Medicine (IOM) recommends a daily allowance of 600 international units (IU) for people up to age 70 and 800 IU for those 70+. But virtually every site I consulted for this article recommended higher levels. The American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists, for instance, says that we need 1,000 to 2,000 IU per day just to maintain our 25(OH)D level above 30 nanograms per millimeter. Which is still well below the IOM’s 4,000 upper safe limit. (Beyond that and you risk kidney stones and other unsavory problems.)
Today, vitamin D screening during a blood test analysis isn’t routine, unlike, for instance, cholesterol. Apparently the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, which makes these recommendations, doesn’t consider it that important. Chances are, your doctor will only check your 25(OH)D level if you complain of fatigue or aching muscles or bones. So maybe it’s not worth getting too anxious about all this. Me, I’ll take my one-a-day vitamin D3 supplement and maybe ask my doctor her advice. Probably not though. For 2 cents a day, what’s the downside?
Barry Evans (barryevans9@yahoo.com) isn’t a physician (duh). Just because he isn’t talking to his doctor about vitamin D doesn’t mean you shouldn’t.
This article appears in Bringing Prey-go-neesh Home.
found out mine was low, started taking some of those lovely little yellow gel capsules – helped a LOT
Everyone in Northern CA should assume they have low vitamin D. Take the 5000 unit cap from Wal Mart, but, get some sun too!
I go to Hawaii in the spring and lay out with the seniors. Tough shit about cancer, but, if you live your whole life, you will die, 100% of the time.
I have already had a lump of Squamous Cell removed, so, this stuff is just going to happen!
Having low Vitamin D is linked to many disease states, and is implicated in behavioral disorders as well, so you are damned, one way or the other… Supplements don’t work as well as sunlight for mood disorders, so build the sun-room!
comments should not include walmart ads.
that said, th article’s author left out a significant indicator for health:
interoception.
Toward the end of the article, reference to pain is made.
This symptom is variable in many dimensions, but osteomuscular pain can indicate that insufficient UVB (just as neural informational cascades lead to specific types of pain, the nociception – pain sensation – can tell the organism the obvious: we are , then, more conscious than we may believe, and just as with actual hunger, we become unable to attend to less urgent activity, and even are drawn toward the specific response that will relieve the sensation.
Modern human dissociation from natural evolved sensations is in great part the reason for development of certain diseases which occur due , as was stated, to insufficient ingestion, attention, and exposure to environmental variables ubiquitous in nature.
Those of us with little melanin production descend from areas where little protection from UVB was necessary.
These are higher mid-latitudes with shade. That is forest. High open tundra and grassland/steppe habitats favored some steady melanin generation.
Much fiction also attends presumptive clinical prescription – numerous other factors affect the epigenetic and transcriptional changes leading to carcinogenic cell behaviors.
Bad habits, especially toxin ingestion can (there is some stochasticity) cause the normal apoptotic and necroptotic processes that help cells properly die when they become damaged enough that their damage signals thecells, the immune system, and/or other cells to remove the cell before it reproduces and produces results – from molecules to structures dangerous to the whole organism.
Although metastastasis is a normal cellular process (it is important in early development, immune and other internal communications), it has been little recognized by clinicians and those not educated in the beautiful and balanced complexities of multicellular organisms.
You may even have only heard of it in relation to the cells which cannot die due to their apoptotic capacity being damaged (in the relevant case, by UVB energy breaking molecular bonds in nucleotides). I won’t go into its utility here.
Cancers are, as I mentioned, cells that cannot die , instead growing and proliferating, and even causing some normally valuable stimulations, such as vascularization.
The processes, then, are peculiar, normal, and mysteriously wonderful, having evolved because multicellular organisms had to regulate individual cells to become more social, as it were, to give up selfishness to create a magnificent varied community. Every living individual organism you see is such a regulated community, with every cell exquisitely attuned to both its own integrity, as well as that of the integrity of the whole.
Although we, at every moment, give the basic products not useful to ourselves to others, others are required to translate sunlight into that which is useful and lifegiving to us.
Imagine how your CO2 drifts from your exhalations into the trees, which take it up, in part splitting it for the energy to bind more of it into their great bodies, , even as the split O2 is essential to us, and emitted from the tree during photosynthesis, is given to us, allowing us to feel and use energy for our own lives.
(not only oxygen, of course, but we even break down our very bones, giving back their constituents. The most persistent bone in our body is composed of utterly different atoms, molecules, cells and materials than it was 10 years ago!)
Without this active redistribution, life does not exist. take what you will from recognition of process identity on all imaginable scales, , with the understanding that in order to disrupt system integrity it may well be that numerous assaults must occur. For example Immune response to particulates, the fact that ANY alcohol ingestion is directly correlated with increase in incidence of cancers, and even disruption of cycling, from circadian to annual, also induces some chaotic oscillations in bodies (and in the minds which evolved precisely to monitor selves and surroundings, and are part of the body, directing multiple , regulated, coherent responses. The mind IS the body, then -without its capacity to direct movement, we animals can’t function or live at all). Just as the sun and earth, and all living things cycling materials and energy are a system, so are YOU a system; so is every cell, and so on down or up in magnitude.
We are minor parts of ecosystems, but because of our being part, integral to their workings.
We are in the middle of life – if out of balance, due to excess energy use, we damage the larger body, just as too much direct sun energy bumptiously elbows a single or few molecules into dysfunction, cascading the organism into dissolution.
It is healthy and important to seek medical assistance and knowledge. But do not attempt to remain in infancy, never learning, never making connections, utterly dependent upon another to monitor your life while you act to destroy it. Prepare yourself, if you desire healing – drop the KNOWN carcinogens, and habits that disintegrate the system that is YOU before they induce disintegration. Then treatment will have greater capacity to restore YOUR integrity, your system.
The column is titled Field Notes. Note -notice and assimilate – the whole field, the real world, which is not only around you, but occurs within and between you and that ever-marvelous world.