Ian Wishart - Vitamin D: Is this the Miracle Vitamin?

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: editorial@investigatemagazine.com

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

To get another copy of this book airmailed to you anywhere in the world, or to purchase a fully text-searchable digital edition, visit our website:

WWW.HOWLINGATTHEMOON.COM

LEGAL NOTICE: Criticisms of individuals, companies or incorporated societies in this book reflect the authors 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 didnt 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 wasnt 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.

Its funny how things change. In the last 12 months its 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. Its everywhere.

One thing hasnt changed, however. The health bureaucracy is still dishing out mushroom food to the news media.

Hence this book. Since 2005, Ive 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. Thats somewhere north of 15,000 news stories and scientific studies in my files. Ive 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 Alzheimers 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, were 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 childrens. 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 thats relevant to your health condition, and tailor a programme best suited to your or your familys health needs.

C HAPTER 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. 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.