Why Suffer Vitamin D Deficiency?

Posted on December 8, 2009 by Mark Pegram

During a recent interview Dr. John Cannell of the Vitamin D Council kept making the same point over and over. Here is the approximately one hour audio interview on vitamin D in health and disease. You may also find the link to this interview on the home page of the Vitamin D Council.

The point: Why suffer vitamin D deficiency in particular if you have any form of disease when it is perfectly safe to have the serum level of a sunny country?

Now the serum level for vitamin D in a sunny country is 54 ng/ml to 90 ng/ml per Grant and Holick. To achieve this level takes a different amount of sun exposure and supplementation for everyone as each person’s rate of use of vitamin D is different. There is no need to wait for some study to come out and say with certainty that vitamin D will treat or prevent this disease or that disease when it is safe at an extremely beneficial level.

Scientist will take many years to make treatment studies show the benefits of vitamin D for a multiple of reasons. No one wants to fund the studies when there is no profit to be made and government funding for treatment studies can be extremely slow. However, through anecdotal experiences that are communicated this paradigm shift can move very quickly.

Do not die vitamin D deficient! – Pandemic Survivor

Super Duper Vitamin D3!!

Posted on November 21, 2009 by Mark Pegram

Can leap tall buildings with a single bound, stronger than a locomotive, faster than a speeding bullet, look up in the sky, it’s chemo, it’s surgery, it’s prescription drugs–no-it’s the sun! It is difficult to set aside what ‘doctors’ are telling us about the sun and how dangerous it is and that it causes skin cancer when it is so beneficial to life. It provides the energy cycles for life and for people it is – well let’s see it allows the body to make vitamin D and this is our super hormone precursor to eliminate disease.

Everybody loves a good superhero and the above jingle when superman used to come on TV sent chills of excitement through my being. Now VITAMIN D sends chills of excitement through my body. It is difficult to imagine that one single thing can give us so much. It can bring our health to very close to eliminating all chronic disease. That is really a grandiose statement and you ask does it even have a bit of truth. THE ANSWER IS YES! YES I AM SHOUTING AT YOU SO THAT YOU WILL WAKE UP!

Institutions that derive their existence from treating people for illness have an ‘adverse reaction’ every time they hear the words ‘VITAMIN D’ because they know that their industry could just disappear. Chills race eerily down their spine in fear of our super protagonist. The medical profession would not disappear because there will always be need for treatment but all of those industries like insurance and special interest nonprofit (yeah right!) groups like American Pick a Disease Institute will fail miserably. If they do not completely disappear then their size will significantly decrease and all that means for society. What happens when you have a well population that is not bombarded by another commercial with two people sitting in bath tubs enjoying the view of an alpine forest? You can bet your bottom dollar that these institutions will fight hard to keep the understanding of vitamin D3 from becoming common practice as if it was always self-evident.

So here is our plot line. The SUPER DUPER VITAMIN D, our most loved of super heroes, comes to the rescue of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and a host of others including infectious disease like the flu and tuberculosis. These diseases are not the antagonist but are only a part of the evil that has been allowed to flourish in the population as the villains have kept us from the science of healing with their greatest weapon ‘THE LIE’. Who are these villains? These dastardly villains are none other than Phat Pharmer and its pretty promoter Weeping Willomeana Insurance and their sidekick Adverse Tising. With great fear they stalk you as they prowl on your TV in bath tubs to sell you the latest snake oil for your health. They have great cloaking systems designed around the lie to keep you from seeing the real light of the sun and your super hero that is waiting to rescue you, VITAMIN D. And all in this plot is the corrupt government that is trying to maintain a really large medical economy because all of our manufacturing jobs have been sent elsewhere because of the high cost of health insurance. What a twisted plot! It is the stuff of comic books and our everyday existence.

AWWWHH my excited friends with your help we can send a signal and the mild mannered UVB rays will step into a phone booth and out will come our super hero VITAMIN D3 to the rescue.

Coming soon: HOW TO ELIMINATE THE COMMON COLD and its dastardly promoter COLD REMEDIES!

In the mean time my excited friends – go into the sun! – Pandemic Survivor

Improving Insulin Sensitivity

Posted on November 14, 2009 by Mark Pegram

I read an article in the Wilmington Star News online that says that vitamin D is more effective than one of the major meds for controlling blood sugar. I am surprised that a pharmacist was willing to actually state the truth. I say congratulations for a job well done. Before we get into that let me tell you about a friend that I know that struggled with type two diabetes.

I had told him about the research on vitamin D and diabetes and he was excited to try and keep his serum level up as a means to achieve better health. After he started to supplement with vitamin D he said that he did not ‘sense’ the extreme up and downs in his blood sugar. He also said that this helped him to better control his appetite and he lost thirty pounds over a six month period. He got off all the meds for type 2 diabetes. Now his fasting blood sugar is normal. I am not saying that taking the vitamin D healed his type 2 diabetes. I am sure that the loss of the weight had a significant impact. In any case we have another survivor of a significant chronic disease and better he did it without staying on pharmaceuticals.

Okay so here is the story for the Star News online where this pharmacist says that vitamin D is five times better than one of the meds known as the ‘gold standard’ for treating insulin sensitivity. I find this most amazing! “A ‘D’ once a day will keep the doctor away”

If your doctor does not believe that vitamin D will have this kind of effect then I would suggest that you have him read the research that the pharmacist refers to. Also a really good paper is one by Dr. Heaney of Creighton University where he describes blood sugar being blunted and insulin response improves once your blood serum 25(OH)D is above 32 ng/ml (80 nmol/l). The name of the paper is ‘The Vitamin D requirement in health and disease’ as published in J Steroid Biochem Mol. Bio. Oct. 2005.

Taking a lot of vitamin D if you have type 2 diabetes is not going to do that much good if you choose to keep eating sugary and starchy foods. Even the best attempt at good health cannot overcome emotional eating. (you know I am overweight and love to eat lots of cheeseburgers and my lipids and blood sugar are excellent and they were not before vitamin D – I should ‘practice what I preach’ ) You may ( I am beginning this techniques myself) want to try the new emotional control techniques using motion that are being used like EFT (emotional freedom technique ).

Eat Healthy and go into the sun! – Pandemic Survivor

How Much Vitamin D? How Much is Safe?

Posted on November 13, 2009 by Mark Pegram

This question keeps coming up for good reason. It is so convoluted how the medical profession has treated vitamin D over the last hundred years because all types were called the same thing. First was finding the marker for vitamin D that told the story about how it affects chronic disease or the storage form 25(OH)D, twenty-five hydroxyvitaminD, or calcidiol. Typically and historically the industry has tried to use the steroid form or 1,25(OH)2D or one, twenty-five dihydroxyvitaminD or cacitriol to treat and the body’s mechanisms do not handle this real will. Second there was the problem with toxicity because they were using too much of the steroid and with the issue of over irradiation when the pharmaceutical industry processes D2. Typically the type that your body makes naturally, D3, when processed from lamb’s wool and fat does not require radiation. Here is the blog where I talk about the serum level of the storage form and testing.

So as not to confuse you further, please consider only taking D3 or cholecalciferol as a supplement as this is what the body makes naturally. If your doctor prescribes D2, ask him if it would be okay to take an equivalent amount of D3. D2, unfortunately, is the only type that you can get prescription. However, you can buy equivalent amount of 50,000 IU of D3 in a capsule thanks to the efforts of the Vitamin D Council. Thank you Dr. John Cannell!!! Just search the web for 50,000 IU of D3 and you will find several sources.

Now everybody cannot take the same amount and expect the same results. I always thought this was just wrong for other pharmaceuticals. Two aspirin for example for a 250 lb person will give a different effect than for a 100 lb person.

Everybody processes vitamin D differently so the only way that you can tell if you are getting enough is to have a serum test done. On the serum test you will only be concerned with your 25(OH)D.

So where should this level be? Let’s look at three practicing doctors because this is the best method for understanding what they have discovered in their practices. This is really how the art of medicine is practice anyway through trial and error in practice.

Dr. Elizabeth Vaughan from Greensboro, NC has a practice in integrated medicine. She has been a practicing physician since 1979. She also writes articles for one of the local health magazines, Natural Triad. She is board certified and is a fourth generation physicians on both sides of the family. I will not bore you with all of her credentials but if you want to read them they are here:

In her article for Natural Triad, “Lumpy, Bumpy, Painful Breast”, she stated that a serum 25(OH)D of 40 ng/ml is a minimum and that 70 ng/ml is the best protection.

Dr. William Davis is a practicing cardiologist in Milwaukee and writes the Heart Scan Blog. If you have concerns about your heart this is a must read. Here is what he has to say about vitamin D in his blog ‘A Healthy Level of Vitamin D’. He agrees with Dr. Vaughn that 60 to 70 ng/ml is the right level of 25(OH)D.

Dr. John Cannell of the Vitamin D Council is a practicing psychiatrist and here is what he has to say after studying papers and in discussion with other doctors about cancer. In his January 2008 newsletter about the possibility of treating cancer he says that your serum 25(OH)D should be above 60 ng/ml.

So there you have it with three practicing physicians all saying to get the best benefit that you really should be above 60 ng/ml with 25(OH)D. The amount of D3 that will you need to take to reach this level will be different for everyone and the only way that you know you have achieved this level is to test. Start with about 1000 IU of D3 per 25 lbs of body weight per day and then have your serum tested after three months. Your supplementation will by necessity be different in the summer and winter. Before taking anything be sure to consult with your doctor about any preexisting conditions and treatment protocols that you have. Most likely he will say that there will be no effect. If he tells you that you will turn your organ to stones show him the NIH material Vitamin D Fact Sheet that says that a serum level of 25(OH)D (Table 1) of 200 ng/ml or less on a consistent basis is safe. So there is a safety factor of three and if you consider animal studies from the NIH info at less than or equal to 400 ng/ml as safe then you have a safety factor of 6+.

In love, life and the pursuit of wellness always go into the sun!!! – Pandemic Survivor

Healtcare Reform – Heal the People

Posted on August 8, 2009 by Mark Pegram

Sorry to not have posted in a while. I had vacation and business to take care of. I am trying to post two to three per week. Send me your vitamin D3 survivor stories to email vitamindmark@gmail.com.

I have been truly amazed at the amount of misinformation that is thrown about during the debate over healthcare reform. There are both good and bad parts of the legislation that is being proposed. I believe that it is good if we can get to a health coverage that takes the enormous profits of the health insurance industry out of play and how the intent to profit negatively impacts health. I do not believe that the government taking over these profits as another form of tax is proper either. On the other hand the intrusion of government into our private lives can be devastating.

As I was surfing the channels listening to the comments by various ‘news’ channels I found Bill O’Rielly and Dick Morris talking about one of President Obama’s recent speeches on the mater. They were just about to end the segment when Dick Morris made the comment that Canada’s death rate from cancer was sixteen percent higher than the US. “Why would we want a healthcare system that would cause this much higher death rate”, he said. Bill agreed and they ended the segment. I decided to follow this line of argument.

I found the total death rate from all neoplasms or ‘new growth’ to be 184 deaths per year per 100,000 in the US for 2005. From Reuters. I did confirm that that Canada’s death rate from cancer was about 16% higher. In following the logic of modeling a country with low cancer death rates, I then looked at Mexico. I found the death rate to be about 90 per 100,000 or about half of what the death rate was for the US. Article in the Oxford Journals. This is about half the rate as the US so we most likely would want to adopt the healthcare industry in Mexico? Dick Morris, get a grip! Fear mongering is not the answer to healthcare.

I then looked at the death rate from all causes from the CIA data to follow Dick’s logic in how to discover a healthcare system that is most appropriate. I found the 2009 est. for the US to be 8.3 per 1000 with a worldwide rank of 102. I also found the death rate in Canada to be 7.74 per 1000 with a rank of 117 and Mexico at 4.8 per 1000 with a rank of 194. The highest death rate with the number 1 rank is Swaziland at 30.8 per 1000 and the lowest was the United Arab Emirates with a rate of 2.11 per 1000 and a rank of 223.

Now what are we to make of this? It is to be noted that the lowest death rates in the world are primarily in countries that are awash in sunshine. Countries in the Middle East are highly populated in the lower rankings as well as countries along the lower latitudes, closer to the equator, in the world. Swaziland at the highest is totally understandable because it has been devastated with the HIV virus. It is also the world’s last absolute monarchy which means that if you do not do what the government wants you die. With the amount of war going on in the Middle East, it is surprising to find the deaths rates so low. However, think of how these countries have so many days of no clouds and just bright sunshine.

Let’s think about Mexico. Mexico City has the highest population of any city in the world at almost 9 million. It is also located at approximately 7400 ft in elevation. This puts it above a lot of the atmosphere that blocks out UVB waves that generate vitamin D in the skin. As an aside it was the practice to build solarims for the treatment for TB in the first par of the first part of the 20th Century above 5000 ft. As we have discussed in other post, vitamin D3 has a vector in the pathology of all disease. It is interesting that the death rate from the H1N1 virus has been so high in this country. However, in general as the H1N1 has spread the countries with low vitamin D levels have much higher death rates from this disease.

Could it be that Dick Morris is just wrong in his statement? I think that the answer is absolutely yes. What should we do for the health of the population? The best answer for healthcare reform is to treat the populations of the world with the best available science. That is to be sure that everyone’s serum 25(OH)D3 level is above 50 ng/ml. As discussed earlier from a paper by Dr. William Grant of SUNARC.ORG the serum level of people in a sunny country is 54 ng/ml to 90 ng/ml. This could be done for about $20 dollars per person per year. What an inexpensive way to improve the health of all people. For the US this is only 6 billion dollars per year. I suspect that this is going to be significantly less than we spend on the H1N1 vaccine alone for this year. It is also just a ‘drop in the bucket’ of that 2.5 trillion dollar US medical economy. But here lies the problem. The medical economy could drop by 30% if we healed the population and what would we do with all those lost insurance jobs. I would not want to be president, but if I were, normalizing the serum 25(OH)D3 level would be the first thing I did.

Spend time in the sun!!!!!!!!!!!!!! – Pandemic Survivor

Nutrients for Back Pain

Posted on July 28, 2009 by Mark Pegram

As you know from My Story, I ‘grew’ out of back pain by taking nutrients that allowed the vertebral disc to heal. Now modern medicine says that this is not possible, but let us explore these two brief stories from people that I know that helped me get to the understanding of the nutrients that I took.

First it was a friend that was somewhat of an athlete. After a surgery on his knee to removed damaged cartilage, he spent enormous amounts of time in the sun with his shirt off. Against his doctors advice he continued to run. It is important to keep up exercise for cartilage health as this is the only way that fluids move in and out of the cartilage to provide nutrients. Cartilage is not feed directly by the blood system. After a year he went back to the doctor and had his knee imaged as a follow up to the surgery. The cartilage had grown back.

Second, I knew a lady that had back pain. She said that after the summer in her garden that her back pain had gone and that she had grown an inch in height. Again, significant height variation that is more than the normal from hydration is an indication of the health of vertebral disc.

The only thing that was in common with these two healings was sunshine and exercise. The sunshine provided the vitamin D and the exercise allowed nutrient flow to the cartilage.

Nutrients that I took:

Vitamin C 1000 mg/d

Multivitamin

Magnesium as glycinate 800 mg/d

Vitamin D3 – enough to keep my serum 25(OH)D3 above 50 ng/ml for me at 203 lbs this was about 10,000 IU/d in the winter and in the summer I only took 5000 IU/d

Vitamin A – from fish liver oil 5000 IU/d

Zinc – 25 mg/d

Boron – 3 mg/d

Calcium – 500 mg

Sulfur – MSM 1000mg/d and glucosamine sulfate 1500 mg/d

I could not really walk so I had purchased an inverter about three years prior. I am not promoting the Hang-Up brand but this is the one that I used and it worked very well. I would not really hang upside down but would rock 45 degrees back and then forward and this would work my spine like an accordion to pump fluids in and out. I did this twice each day for 10 to 15 minutes.

Now from looking at these vitamins it is hard to imagine that is all that I did. Let me tell you when you are in pain and the back is screaming at you the vitamin D does wonders. Of course I was under the care of doctor during this time and he told me not to take the vitamin D3 in such large amounts that it would make my organs turn to ‘stone’. He checked my serum calcium and my 25(OH)D and was satisfied that I was not doing anything harmful to myself.

There was not anything on the net about improving back pain with vitamin D at that time. However, now Dr. Gerry Schwalfenberg, University of Alberta, has published case studies on using Vitamin D. Improvement of Chronic Back Pain or Failed Back Surgery with Vitamin D Repletion: A Case Series Gerry Schwalfenberg, MD From the Department of Family Medicine, University of Alberta, Canada

In his case studies, he does not use as much vitamin D as I did. I do think that you should try to maintain your serum 25(OH)D level above 50 ng/ml as I stated above.

The pain got much better for about a 4 month period. It then started to hurt up and down my back, but the places where the bulges existed got much better. What was going on with my back as the disc healed was that the nerve roots were trying to find new homes as the disc increased in height. I could exercise the part of my spine that was hurting and it would get better the next day. After the first three months I was able to go to the gym. I had a very kind trainer that would help me exercise without putting any compression on my spine. Within 10 months I was able to do 125 lb dead lifts and the pain in my back was gone. I had grown back to my original height of 6 ft after six months and at the end of 10 months I was two inches taller than I had ever been. I am sure because I was kept out of the sun as a child because of my heat stroke that my DNA had never fully expressed itself.

I think that it is very important for cellular differentiation that you get both Vitamin A and Vitamin D. I got the largest growth spurt when I was taking both. Also please note that I was not using beta-carotene but vitamin A from fish liver oil. There has been much comment about not taking this preformed vitamin A. We always ate liver every other week when I was growing up and I never had any problems. Liver about the size of your hand has 100,000 IU of vitamin A. I say eat as the endogenous people did – like the wolf where the internal organs are consumed first. If you like liver then you have it made.

Again, do this only in the care of a doctor in particular if you have injuries in your cervical disc. I had stenosis so bad at C3-C4 and since this is where the nerve for the lung originates the surgeon was really concerned I would just stop breathing. I had severe sleep apnea (central) from this but after the pain was gone the doctor would not operate. The sleep apnea took almost two years to resolve but it finally got there. I have no more poping or snapping in my neck at all and can move it in any direction at will.

Sounds simple, it is simple. I still do not understand why no doctor ever asked to take my vitamin D level when DDD is so similar to rickets. I am truly sadden by the number of people that are still out there hurting when the solution is so simple. There is hope for your pain so be of good cheer. I know that it hurts and my prayers are for you.

Go nekkid into the sun! – Pandemic Survivor

The Tragedy of Deficiency Disease

Posted on July 22, 2009 by Mark Pegram

I was at the gym this morning on the treadmill when a woman that was a friend of my friend that was on the treadmill next to me came in. She had a cane and I discovered that she had just had a knee implant. It seems that she had a minor injury some 15 years ago and her knee continued to get worse until there was apparently no cartilage left.

I did not ask her age, but she appeared to be about 40 years old. She had dark skin which is a real problem for vitamin D deficiency. From the material that I have read it appears that about 80 percent of the population with light colored skin are deficient and 99 percent of people with dark skin are deficient. Here is an article today from the Visit Bulgaria website. It is a worldwide problem.

Of course the problem with dark skin is that the melanin content of the skin slows the rate of production of vitamin D3. This means that to get the same amount of vitamin D a dark skin person may need to stay in the sun 2 to 10 longer than a person with light skin depending on skin pigmentation amount.

If this lady had been treated with vitamin D when she first had the injury and educated in how much she needed to heal her knee, she would not have to had the replacement. It is difficult to imagine the amount of pain and the pain that she continues to have.

This first came to my attention with my neighbor that was an athlete and played baseball for a local college. He would have made it in the pros but it seems that he had a problem in hitting the curve ball. He had to have knee surgery when he was in his twenties. His doctor told him that he should not run. He loved the sun and spent as much time as he could in the sun with his shirt off. He ignored his doctor and continued to run. Later he had his knee imaged and discovered that the cartilage had regenerated. Sun and exercise seem to be the magic formula for him as the sun gave him vitamin D and the exercise allowed the flow of fluids to his knee.

Think about the list of diseases that you have read from a prior post and we see this ever day with friends and acquaintances that we meet. Pain from diseases are debilitating and life destroying. It truly grieves my heart.

To think that there truly is a relative simple solution of keeping the vitamin D level up is tragic.

GO INTO THE SUN AND SUPPLEMENT!!!!!!!!!!! – Pandemic Survivor

Lies, Damn Lies, and Vitamin D

Posted on July 18, 2009 by Mark Pegram

Where did we go so wrong with sunshine and vitamin D? Were these just people in the medical professions ignoring the facts as they concentrated each day on how to heal chronic disease? If they were truly concentrating on chronic disease, why wasn’t the pharmacology of vitamin D studied more for determining how it could possibly help to heal disease?

This is a lot of questions considering the millions of people who have died of these diseases in the twentieth century. How can we make sense of this without considering that just maybe some misdirection was happening? In the early forties, one researcher made the statement that the amount of skin cancer that was prevented by staying out of the sun was minor compared to all the other cancers that could be prevented by going into the sun. What happened to him and why wasn’t this line of research pursued?

Well it seems that there was some fear going on by those who held intellectual property rights to vitamin D and how it could be used to treat disease. Supplements that you could buy over the counter had been made with extremely small amounts of vitamin D to the point that it was not beneficial for use. It seems that the manufacturers thought that these supplements would interfere with their sales of prescription drugs. I suspect there was also the thought that there were other applications like cancer that could be treated and prevented with higher amounts and the dollar signs were going off in their eyes.

The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation held the rights to the vitamin D patents and licensed them to anyone who wanted to make vitamin D products. It seems that they were trying to manage the license to maximize profits without concern of what they were doing to the health of the community.

The government brought suit against WARF and 17 other entities for trust violations on vitamin D in 1944. It appears that there was ‘arbitrary and unreasonable prices’ and limited the potency of preparations so that it would not compete with their pharmaceutical products. Now since this was when WWII was raging, I doubt that anyone in the press was paying too much attention. What were a few kids with rickets not being able to get the vitamin D they needed as opposed to all that was going on with the war?

The settlement in the case happened when WARF turned over the patents for public use. Here is the headline from the NY Times in 1946:

VITAMIN D PATENTS GIVEN TO THE PUBLIC; U.S. Court Decree Ends Civil Anti-Trust Suit Against Wisconsin Foundation PROHIBITIVE COST CITED Asst. Dist. Attorney Says Persons Who Most Needed Rickets Cure Were Unable to Get It

Special to THE NEW YORK TIMES
January 15, 1946, Tuesday
Page 16

CHICAGO, Jan. 14–Patents controlling Vitamin D, the so called “Sunshine Vitamin,” which prevents and cures rickets, became public property today when Federal Judge John P. Barnes signed a consent judgment terminating a civil anti-trust suit filed last October against the Wisconsin Alumni Foundation and seventeen other defendants.

You can purchase the article from the NEW YORK TIMES archives.

It seems that this brought an end to the misadventure with vitamin D as far as rickets was concerned. The patents had become public property so that anyone could make D3 and the market place would make the vitamin readily available to those who needed it. But then THE LIE began to be perpetuated about how D3 and D2 were equal in the human body in the 1930’s. This was great news for WARF because they continued to control the rights for many D analogs and perhaps D2 as well. D2 is not a natural substance in the body as it is made from irradiating fungus.

But of great concern is that the beneficial findings on vitamin D and its effect on chronic disease were not published because WARF wanted to protect its intellectual property. It appears that letting people die was okay as long as WARF protected its property. You can hear a recent presentation at youtube where Hector De Luca, professor of biochemistry UWM, describes this very thing. You can hear how wonderful the drug has been to Wisconsin in funding research but says nothing about how many people died because they did not publish the beneficial findings. Vitamin D, the New Old Wonder Drug: Listen to the introduction about how many vitamin D analogs have made life wonderful for millions of people and profited WARF. It just makes me angry as this protection of an institution for profit brought much disease that led to pain and death to others in not telling how just plain vitamin D3 would get the job done. All very legal and deadly! It looks like the thing that they were sued for in 1944 is still going on in a different format.

If you really wanted to protect your patents on vitamin D analogs and improve your market size, how would you do it? You certainly would not want to report how good a job just plain old vitamin D3 would do as this is the least expensive of the supplements on the market. If people got replete with D and 75% of chronic disease disappeared what would happen to the medical industry? After all, it has a right to protect itself and its growth.

You know what would really be great for the growth of this industry would be to figure out some way to keep people out of the sun. If we can’t keep them out of the sun at least figure out a way to prevent the skin from making vitamin D. Remember that cute little girl with her ‘hiney’ showing bright white as the dog pulled her paints down from the 1960’s? And here is Plough, Inc. finding a great new market for selling a consumer product that would be really beneficial to millions to reduce burns and prevent skin cancer – sunscreen – the DAMN LIE.

It did prevent sun burns and this was great for the entertainment industry and all the ‘fun parks’ that were being developed because people could stay out in the sun longer and spend more money. However, since sunscreen was presented in the sixties, the rate of skin cancer has gone up about two fold or more.(See Note 1.) There is a great article in To You Health called, “ The Sunscreen Dilemma”, by Jacob Schor, ND. For further reading you may also consider this as well hypothesis about melanoma from 1993: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8287144 . The increase of many other chronic diseases has been documented during the same period. The vector of vitamin D3 in so many chronic diseases is amazing and I suspect the number one cause of the increase in chronic disease. The second being exposure to so many industrial chemicals that in some cases are put into our foods and call ‘food’.

So Plough did really well in the sixties selling Coppertone and its Dr Scholl’s line of foot products. So what if you created a market by keeping people out of the sun and increasing chronic disease – how could you profit from it? By developing and selling drugs for treating chronic disease. So Schering a company that specialized in drugs to treat chronic disease merged with Plough in 1971 to form Schering-Plough, Inc. In a recent review of SP’s annual report it was interesting to note that 20 percent of their income was from their sunscreen products and 80 percent was from statins, hypertensive, chemotherapy, and other drugs for treating chronic disease. It was the ‘70’s when the push for really using sunscreen products truly began and it was a great marketing campaign to sell pharmaceuticals for treating chronic disease. What—?

Now with a pending class action suit that was filed against SP and others in California in 2006 and at least one study coming back to show that sunscreen may actually make the incidence of skin cancer worse, Schering-Plough sells out to Merck. Now I suspect depending on how the common stock was handled that the liability exposure was significantly reduced by this acquisition.

Ah, lies, damn lies, and the conforming to the institution for protection of the institution truly is evil as described by M. Scott Peck in ‘People of the Lie” when empathy is not taken into consideration. Dr. John Cannell of the Vitamin D Council simply says that we have ignored the facts over the years. I say that we have ignored the facts as negligent misadventure with intent to profit from death and disease.

GO INTO THE SUN AND DO NOT WEAR SUNSCREEN. STAY ONLY LONG ENOUGH UNTIL YOU JUST START TO TURN PINK. WEAR THE LEAST AMOUNT OF CLOTHES POSSIBLE DURING THE MIDDAY SUN. IN THE WINTER USE TANNING BEDS OR SUPPLEMENT WITH VITAMIN D3. – Pandemic Survivor

Note 1: Skin cancer rates from 1975 to 1995 annual percentage rate increase was 5.1 percent. Given that the natural logarithm of 2 times 100 is about 70. 70/5.1 = 13.7 years to double. So at 28 years we would have a factor of times 4. http://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/othskin.html SEER fact sheet on skin cancer.

Genetic, Epigenetic, and Vitamin D3

Posted on July 14, 2009 by Mark Pegram

Researchers clear your minds as this is the opportunity for new novel designs for preventing and healing disease.

Note 1.

Dr. John Cannell of the Vitamin D Council says that Vitamin D3 targets over 2000 genes or about 10% of the genome. We have long thought that we are predisposed to get this disease or that disease because our genes were pre-programmed. We have thought that the genes were responsible and this is correct. But in the human body it is not only that the genes exist, it is whether it is turned off or on.

Not being hampered by an education in the biological sciences I can freely speculate about how this happens. We too often are so tied into how a certain thing works. Our models that we have created in our minds become permanent fixtures. This may or may not be how a process actually presents itself. Science has had a long history of confirming a certain theory only to find out later that there is more or worse it is not even close to being accurate. However, the theories that we have developed allow for many wonderful outcomes.

This is the case with genetics. It is my belief that everybody has a reasonably reliable gene map. That is; it is capable of given you a healthy life. Something in our environment has allowed this gene map to be turned off/on. Genes are almost ‘digital’ in this matter. Only on occasion do we have a part on gene and part off gene. Or some cells may be turning on a gene and others may be turning off the same gene or a ‘fuzzy logic’ sort of action. This happens in tumors where the immature cells continue to grow and their program to stop growth does not act for apoptosis or programmed cellular death.

The genes are present so you cannot really say that we are genetically predisposed. What has happened is that either because of the stress of the environment or the diet that we consume has had a significant impact on our genes. Yes there is imprinting from parent to child, but can that be affected by our present environment and our diet. Evidently this is how the vitamin D3 works.

Here we introduce epigenetics as a way to turn off and on genes. Epigenetics time line can be seen at this google page where a history of our understanding of this science is displayed. We see that most of the work in this science did not start to happen until the twenty first century. We mapped the genome and found that we could not with certainty say that this gene caused a certain happening. The gene existed, but it was whether it was turned off/on. This control ‘above genes’ is known as epigenetics.

This idea about how our environments stressed us and our diets affected us in this manner was promoted in a book by Bruce H. Lipton, Phd ( you may find his work here: http://www.brucelipton.com/) called ‘The Biology of Belief’. Now this was too far out for most doing research in the biological sciences because they had always believed that if the gene existed it would give you a certain result. It is like saying that because you have a light bulb with power attached that you will have light without consideration for whether the switch is turned off/on.

Some years ago Dr. Randy Jirtle at Duke University starting doing work with twins to try to make some sense of biology versus nurture. His discovery was that it is both. You can find out more about his work at this PBS Nova Science Now website. There is a short video describing his findings. Be sure to watch one of his researcher’s ‘Tale of Two Mice’ in the middle of the page. In brief what they found was that by feeding the mother certain nutrients that they could make the offspring either thin with a brown coat or fat with a gray coat. I am like the fat mouse with the gray coat.

This lead to the discovery that bisphenyl-a or BPA could give an undesirable effect. Many recent news articles have been published about how BPA would affect your baby. Here is a recent article form the Chicago Sun-Times. If the bottles that you were using had this form of plasticizers then you could expect a not so good effect on you child. I believe that by now all of the baby bottle manufacturers have voluntarily removed BPA as they were most likely concerned over the liability.

If you would like to read more about Dr. Randy Jirtle’s work you can find it at his geneimprint website. Also here is his Duke web page for the researchers. It has a brief description of the current work on carcinogenesis.

It seems that methylation or the binding on the surface of genes by methyl groups (free radicals) keeps the genes from expressing themselves for your health. There are some great images from ‘A Tale of Two Mice’ above that clearly show how this works. Now some genes we want turned on and some we want off. In the case of the mice it was a ‘fat gene’ that was staying on constantly. By feeding the mice methyl donors, the gene was forced off. This seems like a very precarious balance that we need to negotiate. After all in the press we read about how ‘free radicals’ are really bad for us but in some cases it appears that they are a necessity. I would suspect that when you are eating the right things this ‘fat gene’ gets turned off and tells the body to not eat any more food. I also suspect that the mounds of junk food that we eat do not have the right kind of methyl donors.

Now Dr. Cedric Garland and Dr. John Cannell (Newsletter on Vitamin A) have both expressed concern over too much Vitamin A as they believe that it somehow ‘blinds’ the receptors for vitamin D or VDR’s. Dr. Cannell thinks that taking any preformed vitamin A may give you a problem. He thinks that people should only get their vitamin A from carotene and let the body make whatever retinol and retinoic acid that it needs. I do not believe this is the case. This gives me a real disconnect when you read articles about how too much beta-carotene is not good if you have prostate cancer and lung cancer. This most likely is because vitamin A and vitamin D are antagonist and they deplete each other as the body is using them for health. Without enough vitamin D to balance the A the cancer gets worse.

During the healing of my vertebral disc, I found that by taking vitamin A from fish liver oil that the cartilage healed quicker. I had my major increase in height where I actually grew an inch and one half (a sign of healing vertebral disc) in three months when I started taking this form of vitamin A.

I had found from the Oregon State Micro Nutrient center; and from this article from Japan; that vitamin A and vitamin D worked together for cellular differentiation of chrondrocytes or the cells that form cartilage. There were many more articles but these two will get you started.

It seems that dimers are formed from the large family of retinol receptors or RXR and vitamin D receptors or VDR. Also I found that retinoic acid receptors, RAR, and thyroid receptors, TR, work in synergy for cellular differentiation as well. I also started a seaweed supplement for iodine for a healthier thyroid. If you chose to read more then you may find a paper on this understanding at the Journal of Biological Science, Nuclear Import of the retinoid X receptor, the vitamin D receptor, and their mutual hetrodimer.

So where does this lead us. Given the body of work by the many scientists on how vitamin D prevents so many different diseases, I propose that vitamin D3 is the ‘master switch’ of epigenetics from nutrients. It acts like a shepherd in allowing the body’s various hormones to act for your health. Genes that need to be on get turned on and genes that need to be off get turned off.

The new body of research and drug development for treating various diseases should be pointed toward the combination of nutrients for healing. I know that the work will most likely be pointed toward drugs and we will just have to read the research to find out what combination of foods will give us health. After all, our system of medicine is about treatment, the money that results, and not prevention. However, now that we know the ‘master switch’ or vitamin D3, we can start down the road to health.

I have not lost the weight even though vitamin D3 has a significant effect on blood sugar and insulin which are some of the controls for appetite. I am that fat gray mouse. What are those methyl donors -give me some of that! Somehow I need to overcome the ingrained statement in our family at dinner; ‘Now I need just a little something sweet.’ I suspect that this saying is gene imprinting from my mother-in-law. Don’t worry; she does not have a computer. Our environment and how we perceive ourselves and our needs definitely affect our genes.

Get rid of all the bad carbs, eat more good fats, be sure to get enough protein, eliminate the artificial sweeteners because we do not have a clue, and GO INTO THE SUN.

– Pandemic Survivor

1. Okay researchers, how are you going to make some sense of the combination of nutrients? I do not think our present statistical method for evaluation of combination of factors will get the job done. I know that we have forever been using analysis by the variance. This type of model requires way too much data to determine what is happening with certainty and really does not point to which factor and their interactions that gives you the result. In manufacturing, I learned a method of analysis of the means which allows you to use small data sets of 3 to 10. It will plainly show which factor causes what result and more importantly the interaction of the factors and results. This interaction is what is extremely important in epigenetics. ANOM has been shown by many scholarly papers to be as precise as AOV. Ellis R. Ott, (ASQ bio) developed ANOM for his work in military and industrial applications which require much accuracy before making a process change. You can learn the method from his book: ‘Process Quality Control’. This graphical method will point you to the correct solution without headache. I am sure that it is available from Amazon as well.

Vitamin D, Disease, and Research

Posted on July 13, 2009 by Mark Pegram

In 2006, I went to PubMed, the government clearing house for medical publications, and just entered vitamin D in the search engine and limited the search to that year. There were over 2,100 papers. I just did this for 2008 and there were over 2,300 papers. If you limit it to the last ten years it comes up with over 17,000 papers. The published recent work on vitamin D is voluminous.

The Vitamin D Council has provided a wonderful list of diseases that have been associated with vitamin D deficiency on their research page. You go there, pick the disease and it sends you to PubMed right to the abstract of the article. If you do not have a subscription to the particular journal you can purchase the article from the publisher online.

In reading this list, it makes me wonder why there are so many diseases and so much research and yet the medical profession is not treating with vitamin D. There are so many diseases that are a result of or have a component related to D deficiency, you would think the news organizations would be all over this, but I digress.

If you are a doctor or a researcher and you are trying to just get a feel for the research that is out there then Dr. John Cannell has organized the research by disease. It is a starting place as there are still many diseases that he has not listed. For example, I had degenerative disc disease that is really a form of osteoarthritis. This disease caused severe chronic pain, muscle wasting in my legs, central sleep apnea, memory loss from brain shrinkage with the pain, and other symptoms from oxygen deprivation from the sleep apnea. If we took sleep apnea we find that it is not in the list because no one has done any research on it and vitamin D even though it has an obesity and stenosis vector which both can be tied directly to vitamin D deficiency. There is a lot of work that is left to be done and a lot of miss-education of doctors, researchers, and the public in general that needs to be corrected.

Another disease that is not listed is psoriasis and I know that it can be treated with vitamin D according to Dr. Michael Holick of Boston University. Dr. John Cannell has done a great job and we are grateful for his work, but the tentacles of vitamin D reach far and long in the course of human health and disease.

If you do not find the disease that you have interest with, then just go to PubMed and search on the disease itself and components of vitamin D. Also I am sure that if you can identify research and that has not been listed then the Vitamin D Council would be interested. Send that along to them.

Let’s just make a copy of the list without comment to see how long it is:

Vitamin D Council Research Links by Disease

Addison’s Disease
Allergic Hypersensitivity
Alzheimer’s Disease
Ankylosing Spondylitis
Asthma
Autism
Autoimmune Illness
Benign Prostatic Hyperplasia
Bladder Cancer
Brain Cancer
Breast Cancer
Cancer
Celiac Disease
Cerebral Palsy
Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD)
Chronic Pain
Cognitive Function
Colon and Rectal Cancer
Cystic Fibrosis
Depression and Seasonal Affective Disorder
Diabetes
Endometrial Cancer
Epilepsy
Ethnicity and Vitamin D
Eye Cancer
GastrointestinalFunction
Gaucher’s and Fabry’s Disease
Vitamin D and Genetics
Graves’ Disease
Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis
Heart Disease
HIV and AIDS
Hypertension
Inflammatory Bowel Disease
Influenza
Innate and Adaptive Immunity
Liver Cancer
Liver Function
Lung Cancer
Lymphoid Cancer
Melanoma
Mental Illness
Mineral Metabolism
Multiple Sclerosis
Muscular Weakness and Falls
Obesity
Osteoarthritis
Osteomalacia
Osteopenia
Ovarian Cancer
Pancreatic Cancer
Parathyroid Function
Parkinson’s Disease
Pediatrics
Post menopause
Pregnancy and Lactation
Premenstrual Syndrome
Prostate Cancer
Renal Function
Rickets
Sarcoidosis
Sickle Cell Disease
Skin Cancer
Stroke
Toxicity
Toxin and Radiation Exposure
Tuberculosis
Turner’s Syndrome
Vitamin D Deficiency

Other items of interest for Vitamin D with links to the research:
Best Science
Commentaries and Editorials
Genetics
Requirements
Reviews
Treatment
UV Exposure
Veterinary and Animal Studies
Worst Studies