by Ian Wishart
About The Author
Ian Wishart is an award-winning journalist and author, with a 30 year career in radio, television and magazines, a #1 talk radio show and five #1 bestselling books to his credit. Together with his wife Heidi, they edit and publish the news magazine Investigate and the news website www.investigatedaily.com.
For Heidi
Vitamin D
Ian Wishart
HOWLING AT THE MOON PUBLISHING LTD
First edition published 2012
Howling At The Moon Publishing Ltd
PO Box 188, Kaukapakapa
Auckland 0843, NEW ZEALAND
www.howlingatthemoon.com
email: [email protected]
Copyright © Ian Wishart
Copyright © Howling At The Moon Publishing Ltd, 2012
The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
Vitamin D is copyright. Except for the purpose of fair reviewing, no part of the publication may be copied, reproduced or transmitted in any form, or by any means, including via technology either already in existence or developed subsequent to publication, without the express written permission of the publisher and copyright holders. All Rights Reserved.
ISBN 978-0-9876573-1-2
Typeset in Adobe Garamond Pro and Monotype Modern
Cover concept: Ian Wishart, Heidi Wishart, Bozidar Jokanovic
Book Design: Bozidar Jokanovic
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LEGAL NOTICE: Criticisms of individuals, companies or incorporated societies in this book reflect the author’s honest opinion, for reasons outlined in the text or generally known at the time of writing
INTRODUCTION
Seven years ago, I began researching this book. I didn’t know it then, of course. At the time vitamin D was an ‘emerging issue’ mostly confined to the medical literature and with little spillover into the popular press, particularly in Australia and New Zealand.
While the northern hemisphere was more attuned to the lack of vitamin D available at higher latitudes, the sunny south was blissfully ignorant. It wasn’t possible to be vitamin D deficient down under, or so they thought.
Investigate magazine became the first mainstream media outlet in New Zealand to raise the vitamin D debate, and question whether our national obsession with slip, slop, slap was actually costing lives, not saving them.
For taking that stand, based on an ever growing body of literature, we were pilloried at the time by the establishment and by other media outlets raised on a diet of bureaucratic mushroom food.
It’s funny how things change. In the last 12 months it’s been hard to escape magazine and newspaper stories raising exactly the same issues we did all those years ago. Suddenly 25-hydroxyvitamin-D is the vitamin-du-jour. It’s everywhere.
One thing hasn’t changed, however. The health bureaucracy is still dishing out mushroom food to the news media.
Hence this book. Since 2005, I’ve set my inbox to receive daily Google news alerts on vitamin D studies so I could keep up with the science. Every morning, a summary of half a dozen or so of the world headlines on the subject were there to peruse, 365 days a year for seven years. That’s somewhere north of 15,000 news stories and scientific studies in my files. I’ve interviewed key people on both sides of the debate over the years and written many feature articles and news stories.
What this book attempts to do is collate the latest cutting edge research to give you the big picture on vitamin D in regard to your own health choices.
One in three of us will die from heart disease, one in three from cancer, and Alzheimer’s has a one-in-two chance of taking us if we make it to old age. Amongst the rest of us, well, the Devil will take the hindmost. In the race for a better life and a happier future, we’re all seeking that miracle ingredient that will actually stack the odds in our favour.
Is vitamin D that miracle?
As parents, we are concerned not just for our own health but our children’s. We spend fortunes on educational toys, extracurricular activities, anything to give our child the edge in an unforgiving world. None of us want to cause our children to be mentally or physically disadvantaged in any way.
Yet in dutifully listening to advice about avoiding the sun, in wearing make-up foundation with all-day sunscreen built in, we may have condemned not just ourselves but our children to a higher risk of some of the nastiest disorders known to humanity.
Vitamin D turns out to be the page upon which the story of life has been written.
Read the peer reviewed science in these pages and decide for yourself whether this is one supplement you need to take very seriously and, based on the evidence, frequently.
IMPORTANT NOTICE
What you are about to read is not intended as medical advice for your personal situation, because there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all solution. Most of you reading this will be vitamin D deficient or insufficient as defined by the latest internationally-accepted standards. If you wish to begin supplementation with some of the higher doses used by doctors and scientists in this book, see your own doctor first to ensure there is no clash with existing medication or an underlying health issue.
If necessary, donate a copy of the book to your local GP and let him or her pull up the medical research listed in here that’s relevant to your health condition, and tailor a programme best suited to your or your family’s health needs.
CHAPTER 1
THE STORY OF D
“There may be more beneficial than adverse effects of moderately increased sun exposure, even for total cancer mortality”
– Dr Johan Moan, Norwegian cancer researcher, 2008
The story of vitamin D is a tale as old as life itself. Ultimately, virtually all energy available to life on this planet derives from the sun. It has beaten down on the face of the earth for around 4.5 billion years, yet life has emerged and thrived, our DNA code seemingly designed to process sunlight.
Evidence of vitamin D synthesis has been found in the fossilised remains of plankton from more than 750 million years ago. With solar radiation from a young sun powering down on everything that swam, crawled, walked or grew, life could not have survived without some kind of mechanism to use and/or deflect the unrelenting energy emissions of the nearest star.
Plants developed photosynthesis and turned sunlight into food. Vertebrates converted sunlight into bones.
Synthesising vitamin D is crucial for developing strong skeletons. Without that process, bones remain fragile and/or soft. The mighty dinosaurs would have collapsed under their own weight into piles of flesh and lard, without vitamin D.
How then do animals cope with skin cancer? Surely staying in sunlight all day gives them a higher risk than humans? Apparently not. While skin cancers of various kinds, including melanoma, are quite common in animals, they are rarely fatal and can often be left untreated, say vets.[1] Animal bodies are sufficiently acclimatised to radiation to be able to keep skin cancers mostly under control. Natural selection works to ensure that tougher gene lines survive and the weaker ones are weeded out.
In apes, the mechanism for utilising vitamin D is different from humans. When solar radiation hits an ape or monkey, the vitamin D is created in the skin, but then secreted back up into the fur. It is from licking themselves while grooming, or picking out bugs from the fur, that the vitamin D gets into the mouth and is digested. It is from there that primates utilise vitamin D for bone and general health.
So what went wrong with humans?
For
tens of thousands of years we have adapted to solar radiation, the most obvious example being racial skin colouring. Humans living near the tropics are darker skinned thanks to melanin, the protective pigment in our cells that is switched on by sunlight as a defence mechanism against UV radiation. Populations living further north or south of the equator developed lighter skins, but why?
It now turns out that darker skins in the higher latitudes don’t allow enough vitamin D into your body because they block the weaker sun more efficiently. Darker-skinned people in Europe and North America, or New Zealand and southern Australia, for example, have greater health problems than light-skinned people. It is only in the past decade, however, that we have really become aware of just why that is: a lack of vitamin D.
The first records we can examine, with hindsight, for clues, date back to 450 BC, when Greek historian Herodotus noted that warriors from Persia had soft skulls. Nowadays, we know this to be a bone condition called osteomalacia, the adult form of “rickets”. Herodotus reckoned the Persians had soft heads because they wore turbans. Hippocrates, from whom medicine derives its ‘Hippocratic oath’, wrote about rickets around the same time, and also prescribed sunlight as a treatment for tuberculosis – a disease now known to be affected by vitamin D.
No one back then knew, of course, about the existence of vitamin D as such, or the precise reactions that sunlight triggered in the human body.
It wasn’t until the dawning of the age of modern science that researchers began making a closer connection between some of these conditions. In 1789, for example, a doctor prescribed cod-liver oil – now known as an excellent food source of vitamin D – for chronic rheumatism. Cod-liver oil was then experimented with, successfully, as a treatment for children with rickets in the 1820s. But it wasn’t for a further 100 years that science could finally put a name to the mysterious vitamin itself. Two lines of research, one working with cod-liver oil and another with sunlight, converged in the 1930s with the discovery that sunlight was creating in skin the same substance found in cod-liver oil. They called it vitamin D, and it formed when the substance 7-Dehydrocholesterol was exposed to ultraviolet radiation.[2]
For decades, science has known about vitamin D being crucial to bone and skeletal health, and children in the forties and fifties were routinely given doses of cod-liver oil and sunlight for good health.
During the same period, however, sunscreens were beginning to capture the public imagination and of course industrialisation was keeping people working behind closed doors in dark offices and factories.
Society was changing. For the first time in thousands of years, it was possible for people to really protect themselves from the sun’s UV radiation. Yet at the same time, skin cancer cases suddenly began to escalate.
In the early 1990s, a Norwegian Cancer Institute research scientist, Professor Johan Moan, made a significant announcement in the British Journal of Cancer: while the annual incidence of melanoma in Norway had quadrupled between 1957 and 1984, there had been no corresponding change in the ozone layer over the region. “Ozone depletion is not the cause of the increase in skin cancers,” his medical journal report notes.
As if to emphasise the rapid increase in skin cancer rates, the Norwegians re-analysed the data just a few years later and found the rates had grown again, a 600% increase in skin cancer between 1960 and 1990 – just thirty years! Yet still no change in ozone levels.
Why was skin cancer rising when supposedly increased UV through the ozone hole was not actually causing it?
For a long while, research on vitamin D languished on the fringes. The primary area of interest to public health authorities was putting in place campaigns easily understood by the public in order to reduce the growing epidemic of skin cancer.
Slip, slop, slap became a global catchphrase.
By the mid 2000s, however, strange results were emerging from scientific studies. Time after time, people with low vitamin D levels were found to have a higher risk of dying from cancer or heart disease.
In January 2008, Norway’s Johan Moan was back at centre stage with the publication of a report in America’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal,[3] based on new cancer data from New Zealand, Australia and Scandinavia. Moan had chosen the antipodes because the two southern hemisphere nations have the highest skin cancer rates and strongest UV radiation in the world, thanks largely to the ozone hole over Antarctica during the southern summer and the current tilt of earth’s axis.
Moan wanted to compare skin cancer data from New Zealand and Australia, with the same statistics in the Northern Hemisphere. His team chose racial and skin types that are closely related genetically, in order to get the best possible comparison. What they found shook up the world of vitamin D research.
While people downunder suffer much higher melanoma rates than their colleagues in the north, Australia and New Zealand’s survival rates are – paradoxically – much higher on a victim-for-victim comparison. The same applies to internal cancers like breast, prostate or colon – although Australasia suffers higher rates of those cancers, residents of New Zealand and Oz are also more likely to survive them.
Australians, who get more sun than kiwis, are more likely to survive their cancers than New Zealanders are, lending further weight to the theory.
What remains up in the air is the exact cause of many of these cancers. Modern diets are full of agricultural chemicals, with one Spanish study published 2008 finding every single Spanish citizen (100% of the study sample) has one or more agricultural pesticides circulating in their blood at significant levels. New Zealand and Australia, as heavy agricultural producers, may have correspondingly higher cancer rates for that reason. Even so, sunlight appears to have a significant impact in helping survive those cancers.
The data mined for the PNAS study raised doubts about whether sunlight was the driving cause of melanoma.
“The main arguments against the concept that sun exposure causes cutaneous malignant melanoma (CMM) are that: 1) CMM is more common among persons with indoor work than among those people with outdoor work; 2) in younger generations, more CMMs arise per unit skin area on partly shielded areas (trunk and legs) than on face and neck; and 3) CMMs sometimes arise on totally shielded areas [soles of feet, palms, inside the eyeball].”
Nonetheless, the PNAS study suggests that a “significant fraction” of malignant melanomas may be caused by sun exposure.
Leaving aside the cause, however, the PNAS study had some breakthrough data on cancer survival rates. If your vitamin D levels are high, you are around 30% more likely to survive “prostate, breast, colon and lung cancers, as well as lymphomas and even melanomas,” reports the study.
“Other investigators have found comparable results. These data argue for a positive role of sun-induced vitamin D in cancer prognosis, or that a good vitamin D status is advantageous when in combination with standard cancer therapies.”
At the stage the research was done, the upper “safe limit” of vitamin D supplement intake was believed by regulators to be 200 international units a day. Whilst the human body had become supremely efficient at converting sunlight to vitamin D without any toxic effects, too much vitamin D in food had been shown to be harmful in the past.
Moan’s study raised a conundrum, because it found the levels of vitamin D needed in the blood to help protect against cancer were far higher than you could achieve in 2008 taking the maximum recommended supplement of 200 IU a day in pill form. The only option then, appeared to be sunlight as a source of healthy vitamin D, which put Moan directly in the firing line of the skin cancer research community. That didn’t stop Moan from stating the obvious:
“Thus we conclude that…the sun is an important source of vitamin D…So far, epidemiological data for cancer argue for an overall positive role of sun-induced vitamin D. There may be more beneficial than adverse effects of moderately increased sun exposure, even for total cancer mortality.”
To understand why this m
ight be the case, you first need to understand a little about vitamin D. Ignore some of the long words and just follow the ball in the brief description that follows.
When UVB rays from the sun strike our skin, they set off a chemical reaction pre-programmed into our DNA. Dermatologists call the process “DNA damage” in a bid to scare people, but it’s entirely natural and has been part of our life cycle since the very beginning of humanity. The chemical in the skin that reacts to sunlight is called 7-dehydro-cholesterol which, as its name suggests, is a type of cholesterol. Without it, the reaction could not happen.
The 7-dehydro-cholesterol is transformed by the UV and thermal energy into the chemical we call vitamin D3, or cholecalciferol. This chemical is then circulated through the bloodstream into the liver where it is “hydroxylated” into 25(OH)D (aka calcidiol) – the actual variant of vitamin D that’s measured in blood serum levels.
Still watching the ball? The 25(OH)D is then spun off by the kidney and converted into a further form known as 1,25(OH)2D, (calcitriol) which is the variant used to regulate calcium absorption in your body and perform a whole lot of previously unknown functions.
“1,25(OH)2D acts as a molecular switch,” writes vitamin D researcher John Cannell, activating “target genes” and receptors throughout the body. One of the recent discoveries, for example, is that our immune systems use it to manufacture “naturally-occurring human antibiotics” within our bodies. If you have low vitamin D, your body’s immune system can’t manufacture its own antibiotics, and the implications of that don’t require a rocket science degree.[4]
But here’s the twist. Up until only a few years ago, it was assumed 1,25(OH) 2D could only be manufactured by the kidneys, and only for the purposes of the well understood skeletal health system. Instead, most organs of the body have since been discovered to have the ability to generate 1,25(OH) 2D for their own purposes. The brain, the heart, the stomach, the lungs, just some of the previously unknown systems for processing vitamin D independent of the kidneys. No other vitamin is like it.