Showing posts with label Vitamin D. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Vitamin D. Show all posts

Sunday, June 17, 2012

Soak Up Vitamin D Naturally

In Western New York, summer has finally moved in.  The sun is shining brightly and weekends are filled with barbecues and trips to the beach.

Don’t forget the sunscreen, right?

Not so fast.

Slathering on sunscreen could actually be causing deficiency in Vitamin D.

Some of the functions of Vitamin D include preventing cancer, boosting immunity, and maintaining healthy teeth and bones.  Those who are deficient often feel lethargic and catch colds and other bugs frequently.

Sunscreens can protect against both UVA and UVB radiation from the sun.  UVA radiation is associated with the aging and cancer-causing effects that we are all so worried about, but our bodies use UVB radiation to make Vitamin D! And Vitamin D actually protects us from those very problems.

Even low SPF formulas effectively block UVB rays and prevent our bodies from making Vitamin D.

Is it any wonder why Vitamin D deficiency is being called the new epidemic?

In fact, melanomas often occur on areas that are not exposed to sunlight, suggesting that there are other factors at play other than ultraviolet rays.  I’d guess it has to do with the inability of the skin to properly protect because of a deficiency of Vitamin D.

Dr. Joseph Mercola recently wrote about a boy who was so low in Vitamin D that he had rickets!  The cause was discovered when his mother reported that she was coating him from head to toe in sunscreen whenever he stepped outside.

Instead of sunburn, he was headed towards serious health complications because his body was prevented from doing what it was designed to do.

A usual, it distills down to common horse sense.

Don’t want too much sun for fear of a burn?

Wear protective clothing and spend part of the day in the shade.

Hell-oh!

Sunburn is never a good thing, but if it does occur, try my go-to natural solution.  Add a few drops of Calendula tincture to some cool water and gently pat it on the burn.  Cantharis 30 is also a great remedy should a burn occur.

Instead of depending on well-marketed skin products,  ill- informed dermatologists, and pop-culture edicts, buy yourself a jar of coconut oil, rub some into the skin and get outside.  And then thank God–the sun is finally here again.
*Some info in this article came the Dr. Mercola’s article that can be found here.

by Joette Calabrese

Friday, December 4, 2009

How to Prevent the Flu -- as Easy as 1, 2, 3...














The Real Cause of Colds and Flu

Many people believe that colds and flu are caused by bacteria, but this is simply incorrect. Colds and flu are caused by viruses, and using antibiotics to treat a viral infection is inappropriate and completely ineffective.

Viruses are orders of magnitude smaller than bacteria and have entirely different structures that make antibiotics useless. (Occasionally antibiotics are required if there is a secondary bacterial sinus infection or bronchitis/pneumonia, but this is the rare exception.)

It is also important to recognize that, although a virus triggers your cold or flu symptoms, it is not the real cause of the illness.

So, what is the real cause of colds and flu?

My simple and short answer has always been that it’s due to an impaired immune system. That’s still true. However, research has confirmed that “catching” colds and flu may be a symptom of an underlying vitamin D deficiency! Less than optimal vitamin D levels will significantly impair your immune response and make you far more susceptible to contracting colds, influenza, and other respiratory infections.

Although there are many ways you might end up with a weakened immune system, the more common contributing factors are:

  • Vitamin D deficiency, as previously mentioned
  • Eating too much sugar and too many grains
  • Not getting enough sleep
  • Insufficient exercise
  • Inadequately managing emotional stressors in your life
  • Any combination of the above
Read the full article my Joseph Mercola here.

Sunday, October 11, 2009

How Much Vitamin D Do You Really Need to Take?











When it comes to the benefits of optimizing your vitamin D levels, the evidence is simply overwhelming. Research shows you can drastically reduce your risk of cancer and countless other chronic diseases by getting safe sun exposure, using a safe tanning bed, or taking a high-quality supplement.

Yet, a great deal of people around the world have heard nothing of this great “discovery.” It’s even likely that your doctor is among them, which is why it’s so important to educate yourself.

As a result of flawed assumptions about sun exposure, and the subsequent recommendations, a vast majority of people are deficient in vitamin D. It’s thought that over 95 percent of U.S. senior citizens may be deficient, along with 85 percent of the American public.

Clearly, the word needs to get out but the mainstream media is slow to react. Plus, there’s no money to be made on selling vitamin D (it’s one of the most inexpensive supplements around) and sun exposure is free! So don’t count on any major corporations or drug companies to help get the message out (rather, count on them to try and suppress this lifesaving information).



Read the full article by Joseph Mercola here.

Tuesday, September 1, 2009

One Hour FREE Vitamin D Lecture to Clear Up All Your Confusion on this Vital Nutrient


By Dr. Mercola
Vitamin D deficiency is pandemic in the United States, but many Americans, including physicians, are not aware that they may be lacking this important nutrient.
The video above may be one of the most important videos for you and your family's health this year.
I urge you to find some time to view it so you can understand the nearly unbelievable benefits you will receive by understanding this vital nutrient.
In the second video, you will learn some important facts about sun exposure, as tanning incorrectly may indeed increase your risk of skin cancer...
For those of you who prefer to read your information, rather than watch it, I've summarized some of the most important points below.
But, again, please do take the time to watch the video lecture, as it has all the highly valuable details you need to know about vitamin D.

The Role of Vitamin D in Your Body

There are only about 30,000 genes in your body and vitamin D has been shown to influence about 3,000 of them.
That is one of the primary reasons it influences so many diseases, from cancer and autism to heart disease and rheumatoid arthritis, just to name a few.
Vitamin D isn't actually a vitamin, although scientists refer to it as such.
It's actually a steroid hormone that you get from sun exposure, food sources and/or supplementation.
The term refers to either vitamin D2 or D3, but D3 (chemical name 25-hydroxy vitamin D) is real vitamin D—it's the same substance produced naturally through your skin by sun exposure. Older research appears at odds on whether your body cares which form of D it's getting, but a study in the January 2011 Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism found that D3 is 87 percent more effective than D2, and is the preferred form for treating vitamin D deficiency.

Watch the full video or read the full article here.

Tuesday, August 4, 2009

Vitamin D Deficiency Reveals an Instant Health Care Reform Solution


















By: Mike Adams
The Health Ranger
NaturalNews Editor

(NaturalNews) There once was a Big Pharma zealot
More offensive than insect repellent.
He just couldn't see
What's in vitamin D,
"It's not useful unless we can sell it."

- by the Health Ranger

It's official: Vitamin D deficiency is so widespread in U.S. children that it poses a huge threat to the future health of an entire generation. A new study published in the journal Pediatrics paints a disturbing picture of vitamin D deficiency across the population of children aged 1 through 21. Three-fourths of young African American children, for example, are deficient in vitamin D. Much the same pattern holds true for Mexican American children. Even white kids, with their fairer skin and greater vitamin D production, hit the charts with 50% - 60% deficiency, depending on the age group.

Of course, in classic medical doublespeak style, health researchers don't actually call it "deficiency." (Because that would trigger a whole new urgency to correct the problem.) Instead, they call it "vitamin D insufficiency," while reserving the term "deficiency" for children who have virtually no vitamin D in their blood whatsoever.

Of course, "insufficient" means "deficient" in the real world, since kids who are now labeled as "insufficient" in vitamin D are, of course, actually quite deficient in the nutrient. And keep in mind that these frighteningly common vitamin D deficiencies exist even when the accepted standards of vitamin D levels in the blood are artificially low to begin with. If you use real numbers of the vitamin D levels required for peak human performance, the truth is that as many as 90 percent of U.S. children are chronically deficient in vitamin D.

"It's astounding," said Michal L. Melamed of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, in a Washington Post report (source below). "At first, we couldn't believe the numbers. I think it's very worrisome."

But why are American kids so deficient in vitamin D in the first place?

Sunlight deficiency is now at epidemic levels

The answer, of course, is because kids are sunlight deficient. And that's due to a few reasons: First, too many kids today spend most of their hours in front of computers, televisions or gaming consoles. The live almost like vampires, staying awake all night, sleeping during the day, living off the flesh of other creatures (beef jerky and hamburgers...).

Many of their parents, too, are part of the problem. Today's moms seem terrified that their kids might actually experience "the outdoors" for more than a few moments. They wait with air-conditioned cars at the school bus stops, then hustle their kids into pre-cooled cars to drive the quarter mile back to their artificially air-conditioned homes. Sunlight almost never touches these kids (they might turn to dust).

The sunscreen industry also shares some blame in all this, as it thrives on the silly idea that sunlight is bad for children and that all kids need to be smothered in sunscreen lotions before venturing outdoors. (Of course, they never admit their own sunscreen products are filled with cancer-causing chemicals in the first place...)

Above all, the medical establishment is to blame for vitamin D deficiency. Rather than teaching parents and children about the importance of vitamin D, they seem to have declared a blackout on most useful information about the nutrient, preferring instead to prescribe toxic pharmaceutical drugs to treat the symptoms of vitamin D deficiency. Osteoporosis drugs, in particular, are made virtually obsolete by vitamin D alone. That's why you don't see any drug companies talking about vitamin D -- it would destroy osteoporosis drug sales!

Why Vitamin D deficiency is big business for Big Pharma

The entire "sick care" industry (including Big Pharma) actually depends on widespread nutritional deficiencies in order to create repeat business. Vitamin D deficiency, of course, figures prominently in this equation: It promotes cancer, bone loss, obesity, depression and heart disease. It's no coincidence that these are some of the biggest profit earners for drug companies.
Drug company profits, to say it another way, depend heavily on widespread vitamin D deficiency. That's why medical schools (which are heavily funded by drug companies) and cancer non-profit (also funded by Big Pharma) almost never teach anyone about the health-protective properties of vitamin D. It's simply bad business to admit that a simple nutrient (that people can get for free) could prevent cancer or other high-profit diseases.

Check out all the popular cancer non-profit groups: The American Cancer Society, Susan G. Komen, etc. Have you ever seen any of them actually promote sunlight and vitamin D as a way to prevent or reverse cancer? Of course not! It's bad for business. They collect a lot more cash convincing people that they're "searching for the cure" when, in reality, the cure already exists: It's called vitamin D.
That's why I've often stated that these cancer non-profit groups are really in the disinformation business. In order to protect their own existence, they spread disinformation about cancer that leaves people ignorant about real solutions like vitamin D. As such, these organizations are inherently destructive and evil, and we would all be better off if they simply ceased to exist (or were shut down by the Justice Dept for their racketeering ways...).

Vitamin D as health care reform

When considering today's grand, lumbering debate over health care reform, you'd have to be a complete idiot to not realize that vitamin D could slash health care costs across the board. Considering that this one nutrient helps prevent so many diseases -- cancer, heart disease, osteoporosis, depression, obesity, diabetes, etc. -- it's almost like the "miracle health reform nutrient" that our modern world has been waiting for.

And yet there's not a single lawmaker in Washington who has uttered the name of this nutrient in the context of health care reform. In fact, it's a pretty good guess that most lawmakers in Washington are vitamin D deficient themselves. And their nutritional ignorance is, of course, inherited by the health care reform legislation these people craft. The end result? A truly short-sighted health care reform system that continues to pay for treatments of preventable disease rather than promoting a single nutrient that could slash health care costs by as much as twenty percent all by itself (by my estimate, anyway).

Despite all the bickering, the accounting, the negotiating and the grandstanding, the simple truth is that our health care reform dialog is missing half the picture: Nutrition!

This new research about widespread vitamin D deficiency supports this important point:

You can't talk seriously about health care reform unless you address vitamin D deficiency in the population.

Because unless you correct these nutritional deficiencies, all you're doing is flushing money down the Big Government toilet (which is almost stopped up from all the wads of paper money they keep forcing into it).

In other words, the entire dialog about health care reform taking place in Washington right now is a complete waste of time. It's absolutely useless. There will be no real health reform until you admit that nutrition plays a role in human health. And the FDA, of course, insists that all nutrition is biologically inert -- that only "drugs" have any ability to prevent or treat any disease, not vitamins or minerals. That's literally the FDA's official position. That's also the position of various medical associations, medical journals, med schools and far too many old-school doctors: Nutrition? It's not even on their radar.
Meanwhile, we spend hundreds of billions of dollars treating diseases that can be cured with vitamin D. Cancer is one of them. Most cancer tumors simply cannot grow in the presence of vitamin D. You show me someone on chemotherapy, and I'll show you someone who's deficient in vitamin D.

The vitamin D cover-up is, of course, a grand conspiracy. There is actually a concerted effort to downplay nutrition (and even outlaw it, if you're the FDA) while keeping the population nutritionally ignorant so that people remain sick, diseased, bankrupt and easily controlled by powerful corporations and oppressive governments. It's the new American way: Keep the people stupid, sick and broke. And it's working like gangbusters.

America will not survive its profit disease

Even while the American people are ridiculously diseased and bankrupt, the real sickness in America isn't with the people -- it's with the pursuit of profit. This cancerous condition has spread through the U.S. economy, causing corporations to abandon products and policies that help the People and, instead, promote products and policies that maximize corporate profits.

As a result of this insidious pursuit of profit, a huge portion of the U.S. economy is now based on ripping people off, selling them things that actually harm them: Junk food, diet soda, cigarettes, pharmaceuticals, chemotherapy, etc. Vitamin D, of course, produces no real profit (since it can't be patented), so it remains universally ignored by all the corporations that dominate health care today.

It's the same story with zinc, magnesium, calcium, selenium or natural plant-based nutrients. They're all ignored (or outlawed) because they generate no profits. That's why there's no real talk of solving our nation's health care crisis with nutrients like vitamin D -- even when the research clearly shows the majority of the population is deficient in the nutrient!

The whole situation is truly astonishing: The solutions to our health problems are staring us right in the face, but modern medicine refuses to acknowledge them (because they aren't made in a lab or available by prescription). So real solutions remain ignored while high-profit, short-term "treatments" get all the attention.

As long as that's the case, health care reform will simply never work. Even if you had all the money in the world, it's still not enough to pay for a nation of diseased people who are intentionally kept ignorant and sick. Sooner or later, you've got to either go broke as a nation or find a way to promote nutrition and wellness.

America, sadly, has chosen the former.

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Lack of Sunshine Causes One Million Deaths a Year














If vitamin D3 levels among populations worldwide were increased, 600,000 cases of breast and colorectal cancers could be prevented each year, according to researchers from the Moores Cancer Center at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD).

Read full article here.