The Astonishing and real benefits of enough vitamin D3....

Today's Post:  Tuesday, 2-16-2016

Over the last five to ten years the research on the health protective effects of enough vitamin D3 has been consistently positive and surprisingly diverse.

I got an email that reminded me of this and had some detailed information about vitamin D3 and the various technical terms that describe it and its lesser relative vitamin D2.

(Earlier in the month – February 3, that email I got was from the health information outfit, the Natural Health Sherpa.  But I wanted to add so much more to that, it became today’s post.)

1.  Vitamin D2 may be made synthetically.  It's called ergocalciferol.

And that version may not be as useful or safe as the natural vitamin D2.  

What I did not know until I read this today is that there IS a natural vitamin D2 from plants:  It's apparently in mushrooms and brewer’s yeast and some other plants.

We do know that it is a third or a fourth as effective as D3 and that you likely shouldn't take a lot over 1,000 iu a day of it; and above 4,000 iu a day might not be a good idea at all.

Since D2 is neither as valuable or as safe as D3, likely it's best only gotten from foods.

2.  D3 we make when our skin is exposed to the sun; and we eat it or get from supplements from animal sources.  

Since people routinely get 20,000 iu a day in the summer or more with zero side effects, 20,000 iu a day to twice that much is almost certainly safe to take.  Sustained intake every day of 50,000 iu may be too much.  But it's not until 100,000 iu a day or more that ANY negative side effects have been reported according to a Wikipedia article I read.

3.  D3 is the form we eat in animal foods and oils, or take, or our sun exposed skin apparently makes.  It's called cholecalciferol.

(In the body, our liver and kidneys convert D3 to the form the body uses called, Calcitriol.)

4.  A recent study showed that the current recommended supplement amount of vitamin D3 of 7,000 to 10,000 iu a day or a bit more lengthens telomeres and slows aging!

5.  We also know that that much D3 has an astounding double benefit to our immune system: D3 both makes our immune system dramatically more effective at killing harmful bacteria and viruses –

AND it makes our immune system that much more ACCURATE at only killing harmful bacteria and viruses & NOT attacking parts of us.

a) If there is a virulent and even deadly form of the flu, many people severely deficient in D3 will get it, have a severe case and even die of it while people who take the currently recommended 7,000 to 10,000 iu a day may not even get it!

(There is a study that showed the first part of this did happen to severely vitamin D3 deficient people during a virulent and deadly flu outbreak in Europe.  And, many people who take 10,000 iu a day of vitamin D3 or more don't get the flu at all.)

In cold & flu season this is very useful.  People who take that much D3 often escape getting variants of the flu not in that season's flu shot. 

AND when they do get the flu shot, it goes from somewhat probable it will protect them to almost certain they will escape those flu variants the flu shot covers also!

b) And, 10,000 iu a day of vitamin D3 not only makes most autoimmune diseases far less likely, 

a recent study proved that 10,000 iu a day reduced one of the immune factors in the blood stream that causes MS very  significantly!

6.  Other studies show that that much D3 helps make and keep bones strong and prevents and maybe even helps reverse osteoporosis. 

NOT drinking any soft drinks and doing effective strength training too even at older ages and even for women dramatically increase this effect of course.

7. Other studies show that much D3 helps injuries heal faster.

In fact, when a football team in Georgia had their players take that much D3 year round, the first year they did that the number of players who were injured dropped in half!

(A local doctor who treated patients in a hospital and saw his patients he gave that much D3 to get well faster and heal from injuries faster suspected that much D3 would prevent injuries too! 

The study on the football players found it did just that!)

There is even some evidence that 7,000 to 10,000 iu a day helps build muscle strength and size as one of the causes of this besides stronger bones and tendons.

A recent study in Medical News Today found that D3 reduced the felt soreness from a hard workout but INCREASED the local inflammation in the exercised muscles.  Apparently this helps trigger the repair and increase in strength when that happens.

This study found out WHY enough D3 speeds muscle repair and stops soreness from hard exercise while Advil does NOT!!

8.  For good health and building bone strength, in addition to the 7,000 to 10,000 iu a day of D3 it also helps to eat foods high in magnesium and take 400 to 800 mg a day of magnesium; 

3 mg a day of boron, and vitamin K2.

Vitamin K2 sends the calcium you eat to build your bones AND it prevents it from hardening your arteries or even helps reverse the process!

K2 comes in many forms.  The MK4 form is in the Carlson 5 mg K2 supplement that I take.  The MK7 form seems to be most effective and is in the 90 mcg Jarrow K2 supplement I take.

And, the dairy products I eat and drink from cows fed only grass have the MK 8 & 9 forms.

This was initially established by the pioneering dental researcher, Weston Price.  (See his research still available through the Weston Price Foundation.)

Nearly 100 years ago, he visited many of the people’s who still ate the same way they had been eating for well over that long and who DID NOT eat wheat or sugar.

He was inspired to study as many of these people’s as he did by their incredibly good dental health. 

Besides not eating grain or sugar and eating locally available foods, none of these groups were vegan vegetarian although most of them ate a very large amount of vegetables.

They all ate some form of animal protein which included a then mystery ingredient that powered their good dental health and had other health benefits.  We now know that ingredient is vitamin K2.

It’s also worth noting that most of these groups lived outside enough to get well over 5,000 to 10,000 iu a day of vitamin D3 from sunlight.

9.  And in the Feb 3 email from the Natural Health Sherpa is this list of benefits.  Many are very important to know and not listed above!:

"....vitamin D has been shown to benefit other aspects of bone health. 

And an increasing amount of research has linked vitamin D3 deficiency to a number of other health conditions including back pain,

both insulin resistance and pre-eclampsia during pregnancy,

impaired immunity, multiple sclerosis, macular degeneration, and even some cancers."

In addition to making the bones in your spine stronger and possibly keeping the discs in between strong, this says that enough vitamin D3 will help prevent back pain while super low D3 can cause it.

If you have insulin resistance, this can cause high blood sugar which causes Alzheimer's disease and the other harms type 2 diabetes causes.  

So besides stopping harmful grains and sugars and adding vigorous exercise most days of every week and taking supplements like cinnamon, alpha lipoic acid to fix insulin resistance to protect yourself, taking 7,000 to 10,000 iu a day of vitamin D3 may also help.  

In addition, the harm that kills the beta cells that make insulin which can cause low insulin or type 1 diabetes is thought to be an autoimmune disease AND taking that much D3 will help prevent this and may at least partially reverse it.

Once pre-eclampsia during pregnancy begins to happen, the health and even the life of both the mother and the unborn baby are at risk and begins to be harmed!

So, if enough D3 can prevent this at all, this is extremely important to know!

Because enough D3 both boosts the immune system's ability to kill harmful bacteria and viruses AND do so more accurately and NOT attack you, that it's not surprising that D3 also tends to prevent impaired immunity, multiple sclerosis, and some cancers -- because your immune system when strong kills cancer in its early stage.  

And, by keeping your telomeres longer, enough D3 also prevents that DNA damage that causes some cancers to begin with!

However, that enough D3 also helps prevent macular degeneration and protect your eyesight is new information to me.  

This may be because of the reduction in DNA damage or that one of the causes of macular degeneration is an autoimmune process that enough D3 helps prevent. 

The summary is that vitamin D3 is both an essential vitamin for any of these reasons let alone ALL of them at once! ---

and that the optimum intake of vitamin D3 of at least 7,000 to 10,00 iu a day is quite a bit higher than it was once thought to be.