I’m sure you’ve heard about some of the benefits of vitamin D, which is a chemical that helps build strong bones (preventing rickets), and which is even included in milk in some countries due to the way vitamin D harnesses the calcium in it.
Since it’s shown on product labels in many countries, you may also know that the generally recommended daily allowance (RDA) of vitamin D is 400 IU (International Units). However, did you also know that just 30 minutes of sunlight helps your body to produce a massive 20,000 IU of vitamin D? So why is the RDA set so low?
The answer is that the RDA only refers to the amount of vitamin D your body needs in order to keep your bones healthy and stave off rickets. So that brings up another question. What does your body do with those thousands of extra IUs created by sunlight. Does it simply flush them away? The answer is absolutely not. Vitamin D is actually an essential steroid hormone that humans need to stay healthy.
As well as helping calcium get to your bones it is used in numerous other ways, staving off cancers such as pancreatic, colon, rectal, stomach, prostate, lung, breast, bladder, uterine, kidney, ovarian, and more. It also helps to regulate blood pressure, improve immune system function (preventing colds and flu), boost autoimmune function, reduce inflammation, and help cure or ease many other ailments.
Dr. John Cannell (Executive Director of the Vitamin D Council) on vitamin D
But vitamin D isn’t simply a cure for these things. It’s a chemical needed by your body to prevent it failing in all these ways in the first place. It’s as essential to you as air and food. However, it is not a vitamin, no matter what anyone tells you, because vitamins are a class of chemicals that your body cannot make naturally, and which you need to obtain in your diet or through supplements. Vitamin D, however, is made in huge quantities by your body – but only as long as it receives some sunlight (just 20-30 minutes a day is enough to keep your stocks fully replenished). So, sadly, vitamin D was poorly named by its discoverers, and maybe if it wasn’t lumped in with all the other vitamins (dietary supplements), it wouldn’t be so lightly dismissed, and would instead be hailed as the super drug that it is.
When your levels of vitamin D start to drop you begin to notice it quite quickly. Firstly you become prone to more colds and flus, then you may get general aches, pains and allergies. And over the long term you may even develop cancers and other ailments. For example, have you noticed how you mostly only catch a cold in the winter? It’s not because cold viruses are only active at that time – they are in the environment all year round. It’s because in the summer you usually tend to catch enough sunlight to create sufficient vitamin D to fend these viruses off.
But there’s a problem with the modern lifestyle. Although we love the sun, we usually put on so much sunblock cream that the ultra violet (UV) light needed by your skin to make vitamin D can’t get through. We also spend far more of our time indoors and out of the sun than we would have even a hundred years ago, further reducing our exposure to sunlight.
The result is that rickets, a disease we thought was long gone, is making a comeback in some parts of the western world. What’s more, the drug industry is making a fortune amounting to billions of dollars a year selling ‘remedies’ that do little more than ease the pain of a cold. And so, of course, they don’t want to sell you a product that would prevent colds, since it would destroy one of the largest industries on the planet. Yes, believe it or not, the cold and flu industry is truly staggering in size.
And there’s another reason they will never tell you about vitamin D, and that’s the fact that it is unpatentable and incredibly cheap, costing only about 2.4c a day as a dietary supplement. So there’s next to no profit in it for them. But there are companies that will sell you a year’s supply (360 capsules) for $15 or less. What’s more, whereas over the counter ‘remedies’ do little to relieve a cold, which still will last 10 days or so, these vitamin D capsules will actually prevent you catching many colds in the first place. And more than that, they bring the added benefits of helping your body stay healthy and cancer free (among other things).
My family has been taking vitamin D supplements of 5,000 IU daily for many years now (but not in the summer since it’s generally unneeded), and we very rarely catch colds or get the flu. And even when we do it lasts only a day or two, because our bodies have high enough levels of vitamin D year round, and quickly bring it to bear against any virus that tries to gain a hold. In fact we take a few extra capsules at the first sign of a tickly throat, and that almost always puts an end to it before any cold can start.
Disclaimer: I’m not a doctor, and I will not and cannot diagnose you for any illness or treatment. Nor can I prescribe a suitable dose of any supplement, particularly since everyone is different. Some people may spend a lot of time in the sun and require fewer vitamin D top-ups, and others may have problems with too much calcium in the blood, and therefore extra vitamin D might not be a good idea. But I do urge you to discuss vitamin D with a qualified health practitioner or consultant, and see whether it would be right for you. And make sure you also discuss the correct dosage, because the RDA of 400 IU is woefully inadequate for the majority of people.
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