06.07.07
Vitamin D is really, really good for you
[Note: a later study says that vitamin D, while good for colon cancer, isn’t the miracle that the study I report on here says it is. Drat.]
Vitamin D — sunlight — turns out to be really really good for your health. “The one-fifth of premenopausal women who consumed the highest levels of vitamin D and calcium […] had a one-third reduced risk of developing breast cancer compared with those who consumed the least.” One third! That’s significant! Update: 60 to 70 percent lower!
There have been a number of other studies recently that have connected low vitamin D in heart disease, multiple sclerosis, and diabetes.
The easiest way to get vitamin D is from sunlight, but that doesn’t help people in northern climes like Canada and Scotland in the winter. There is vitamin D in milk, but if you don’t get any from sun (like in northern winters) you’d have to drink three litres per day to get enough. (I drink an unusually large quantity of milk, but even I only drink about a litre per day.)
Yes, it is true that more sun exposure increases the risk of skin cancer, but it turns out that skin cancer is much easier to notice, diagnose, and treat (being on the surface and all). It’s just not as big a problem “Fifteen hundred Americans die every year from [skin cancers]. Fifteen hundred Americans die every day from the serious cancers.”
Unfortunately, it’s impossible to give a blanket recommendation of how much vitamin D supplement you should take. It depends on the latitude, the time of year, how much you are outside, and how dark your skin is. The lighter your skin, the more vitamin D you can absorb from sunlight. Also, vitamin D is fat-soluable, so it is possible to get too much.
So lay off that sunblock!
Best Webfoot Forward » Folate is really, really good for you said,
June 7, 2007 at 8:14 pm
[…] mentioned that vitamin D is really, really good for you. Folate — vitamin B9 — is also really, really good for […]
Best Webfoot Forward » Drat. said,
October 30, 2007 at 3:55 pm
[…] This study says that vitamin D is not as good as the previous study I mentioned showed. Vitamin D does help against colon cancer, it says, but nothing […]
best time of the day to get vitamin d from sunlight said,
June 28, 2008 at 5:03 am
[…] […]
vitamin d deficiency said,
November 28, 2010 at 4:15 pm
Vitamin D acts being an agent that prevents and cures diseases for example rickets and osteomalacia. Rickets is a popular bone disease which usually occurs commonly in children as a result of poor vitamin D IU amounts. If the same deficit occurs in adults, the trouble is called osteomalacia. This disease is significantly prevalent among women after the age of 40. The cause might be due to a diet that is certainly deficient in Vitamin D, accompanied with poor sun’s rays exposure. Other causes include things like mal-absorption syndromes, diarrhea, surgery in the digestive tract, liver and kidney diseases or make use of anticonvulsants such as phenytoin along with barbiturates.