Vitamin D Deficiency - Part One

This article written by Marek Doyle is long, so I separate it into two articles. This is the beginning of the article. I put it here since it contains useful information about vitamin D.

What Do We Need to Know?

What if I told you that there is a vitamin for which half the population are deficient, and that correcting this deficiency reduces their coronary risk by half? What if I told you that correcting this deficiency would also improve their mood and energy levels/metabolic rate, insulin resistance, and immune system? And that the levels of this vitamin have a stronger correlation to cancer risk than any other?Would you ask me why no-one told you about this earlier?

You'd be right to - the widespread deficiency of vitamin D is one of epic proportions, yet it rarely discussed. If you conduct 20 training sessions per week, then 10 of these are with clients whose hormones, organ systems metabolism are impaired by the lack of such a key nutrient. The most popular aims of my clients are to lose weight and improve their health (in that order); insufficient levels of vitamin D will make weight loss harder and make optimum health impossible. Together with a lack of magnesium, zinc and omega-3s, our food sources and our lifestyles make vitamin D deficiency an epidemic.

There are receptors for vitamin D in 30 different types of tissue, and vitamin D is involved in the transciption of more than 200 different DNA sequences. Put simply, there is very little it is not involved with. Vitamin D is required to manufacture tyrosine hydroxylase, an important enzyme that is required to make dopamine. Without sufficient dopamine, there is insufficient stimuli of the hypothalamus, which can result in mood disorders and a depressed metabolism/hormonal output. It also supports the production of insulin at the pancreas, proving thoroughly beneficial in both type 1 and type 2 diabetes. A study of of more than 10,000 Finnish children given 2,000 IU/day for a year showed a 78% reduction in the incidence of type 1 diabetes in the 31 years of study, and even a lower intake of just 800 IU/day has been shown to reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes by a third. On a day to day basis, vitamin D improves insulin sensitivity. Vitamin D also improves leptin sensitivity (leptin is the hormone that tells us we are full). Reversing insulin and blood sugar swings and reducing over-eating will help weight loss no end.

On a more long-term basis, vitamin D levels are a strong predictor of cardiovascular risk. Data shows that a clear correlation from the incidence of heart attack to the rate of vitamin D deficiency. A 2007 study showed that men with blood levels below 15ng/mL were 2.42 times more likely to suffer a heart attack than those who had levels above 30ng/mL. It also confers powerful protection against cancer; vitamin D increases the self-destruction of mutated cells, reduces the reproduction of cancer cells and interrupts the growth of blood vessels to tumours. Higher blood levels of vitamin D have been shown to be protective against all forms of cancer, reducing risk by between 25% and 50% in a number of studies. That is spectacular. If any of your clients have a family history of cancer and are concerned as to their own risk, advise them to get their vitamin D levels checked.

Another method through which vitamin D improves cancer risk is by enhancing the immune system. It strengthens the innate response, which makes it much more effective against viruses, yeasts/fungi, intracellular bacteria and tumours. The most impressive thing about this enhancement of the immune response is that optimal levels of vitamin D provide protection against colds and infections but also auto-immunity and allergic reactions, especially eczema. With this combined effect, this makes vitamin D one of the best immune modulators known and confers measurable and noticeable benefit when levels of this nutrient are addressed. This is great for your client but also great for you - less sessions cancelled through illness!

A look at how we obtain vitamin D explains the current epidemic of deficiency. Humans make vitamin D3 (cholecalciferol) quite freely when exposed to sunshine.. The other sources are from diet - Cod Liver Oil and, to a lesser extent, fish oils in general. Meanwhile, the RDA has remained at a woefully inadequate figure of 200 IU. And therein lies our problem; as a society, almost none of us get the amount of sunshine we have evolved to receive, and very few get the amount of oily fish they were designed for.