Good article from the Vancouver Sun about the benefits of vitamin D.
If you are reading this newspaper, chances are you are overdressed. Biologically speaking, you should be next to naked and on a beach a long way south of Canada. Your skin should be soaking up sunshine and manufacturing vitamin D -- something it doesn't do for people who live in a land of limited sun, long sleeves and indoor jobs.
For years medical researchers didn't see the picture this way. Since the 1950s they've known that sunshine causes skin cancer. But in the past year, a second picture has emerged in mainstream medical conferences and journals. The vitamin D from sunshine helps prevent some cancers that are generally seen as more dangerous -- among them breast, colon and endometrial cancers. It appears to have a role in fighting infection and in preventing such immune-system diseases as multiple sclerosis. Most recently, evidence suggests it prevents heart attacks.
It's not a miracle pill. But early indications suggest when it comes to health measures you can control, taking vitamin D may rank up there with quitting smoking.
Yet nearly all Canadians are probably deficient in this so-called "sunshine" vitamin, the only vitamin you can't get in large amounts from a good diet.
And much of this information has been staring scientists in the face, generally unrecognized, for 40 years or more.
The breakthrough came last year from rural Nebraska. Some 1,200, aged 55 and up, volunteered to take either vitamin D or a placebo, a "dummy pill," for four years. Neither the women nor their doctors knew who was getting which pill -- an approach called "double-blind."
Joan Lappe, who teaches and studies bone health at Creighton University in Omaha, organized the study. Vitamin D is essential for building strong bones. It acts as a hormone to help bones absorb calcium; without the vitamin, you can swallow a mountain of calcium and it won't do much good.
For the past five years, though, Lappe has been trying to determine if vitamin D prevents other disease -- especially cancer. That's why she recruited the Nebraska women.
The results this June bowled over long-term medical researchers. Women who took vitamin D and calcium had 60 per cent less breast, lung and colon cancer at the end of the trial than women who took the dummy pill. And when she dropped the cases discovered in the first year, assuming those cancers had been present but unnoticed when the trial began, the reduction in cancer in her vitamin D group was an astonishing 77 per cent.
http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/story.html?id=2afe61fa-d92f-426d-a401-5611c495e418&p=1Yeah, but what if you take a drug that makes you overly sensitive to the sun? What do you do then? How much time in the sun is the max for helping with Vit D ??[QUOTE=Jesse88]Yeah, but what if you take a drug that makes you overly sensitive to the sun? What do you do then? [/QUOTE]