Even more good news about vitamin D....

Today's post: Thursday, 9-4-2008

Unusually high levels of calcium in the blood may help cause increased calcium deposits in the plaque that is deposited on the walls of your arteries.
And, increased calcium deposits in arteries is both very predictive of future heart attacks and tends to create hard to treat or reverse high blood pressure from decreasing blood vessel flexibility caused by the hard calcium deposits.

A recent health news article also reported that unusually high levels of calcium in the blood was predictive of prostate cancer.

However, that same article noted that one of the methods available to effectively lower such excessively high blood levels of calcium is to take vitamin D.

Apparently, as we are all descended from people who spent most of their lives outdoors which gave our ancestors ample vitamin D from sun exposure, we evolved to process calcium properly to go into bone growth and repair instead of building up in our blood by having the use of thousand of iu’s daily of vitamin D from that sun exposure. In other words, abundant vitamin D became a necessary part of the normal processing of calcium in our bodies.

In the case of prostate cancer, the higher levels of blood calcium might help the growth of cancers cells in some way. But, there have been so many studies now showing that vitamin D helps prevent cancer, my bet is that both the increase in prostate cancer and the high blood levels of calcium are caused by insufficient vitamin D.
But if it is the calcium being high that causes the increase in prostate cancer, since taking enough vitamin D will bring it down, this study strongly suggests anyone wishing to avoid or slow prostate cancer should be sure to get enough vitamin D.
In fact, regardless of which way the causation goes, this study strongly suggests anyone wishing to avoid or slow prostate cancer should be sure to get enough vitamin D.

The wonderful news that taking enough vitamin D also looks to be strongly protective for your heart from this action to prevent excessively high levels of calcium.
Similarly, it also looks as if it will lower high blood pressure in some people and be quite likely to keep it from getting worse for people who take enough vitamin D.

Some people today still get a lot of sun exposure even in the winter to some degree because they spend all day outside as a part of their work every day. Mail carriers are one example.

For those people who still work outside the 400 iu a day in a multivitamin may be enough vitamin D because they get several thousand iu a day from sun exposure.

But for almost everyone else today who likely works inside most days, it looks as if the desirable intake of vitamin D3 is at least 2,000 iu a day in addition to the 400 iu from a multivitamin.
And, since sun exposure can help generate 10,000 iu a day or more of vitamin D, the optimum level of vitamin D intake may be closer to 10,000 iu a day.
The good news is that 1,000 iu capsules of vitamin D are quite inexpensive with 100 going for about $5 or $6 now. 5,000 iu capsules are not much more costly.

A doctor local to me who specializes in treating heart disease is using higher doses of vitamin D with his patients. I hope to get some input from him on his rationale and results from giving his patients as much as 50,000 iu of vitamin D. If I am able to do so, I’ll post that information here.

Meanwhile I now take 2400 iu a day of vitamin D in addition to the 400 from the multivitamin I take & any I get in foods or from sun exposure.

After reading this information on vitamin D’s likely ability to help prevent heart disease, high blood pressure, and prostate cancer, I’m very glad I no longer take less.