Tag Archives: heart disease

Amazing Media Reports or Popular Press Propaganda

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This Labor Day weekend, I was alarmed by the media reports about life extension and supplements and a new drug development. First the new drug development that startled me as it sounded a lot like a vitamin D analog.

I was watching Fox News on Monday morning. Yes I know, if you have a liberal political persuasion you have already labeled me and not consider reading further. There was an interview with a doctor about a new drug that would significantly reduce heart disease and also significantly reduce all-cause mortality. It will likely be approved by the end of the year. This sounds a very fast track. A very fast track is a good thing if there are no side effects, a low number needed to treat, NNT, and we can put an end to heart disease. The drug had not been named which was another surprise to me. What really got me going was the description of how it acted. Here is the print article from Fox News.

It was not only reported to reduce heart disease, it was also stated that it would significantly increase life expectancy. Why was I alarmed? It sounded like vitamin D3. First there was the interview with a Dr. Joseph Prendergast from about 2007 where he reported that he had been extremely successful in treating heart disease with vitamin D3 and L-arginine. He said in the interview that he had been so successful that a three physician cardiology practice in the same town that he practice had moved to another town because of lack of business. He had treated more than four thousand patients. Then there is the description by Dr. William Davis, a cardiologist and author of the book “Wheat Belly”, that claims in his practice there are not anymore emergency calls from his patients. He says that he used a variety of nutrients with Vitamin D being a very important one. And then I remembered all the published papers on how vitamin D3 significantly reduces heart disease collected by Henry Lahore at VitaminDWiki.    Cardiovascular Disease  Also the many articles at the Vitamin D Council related to cardiovascular disease and vitamin D3.  And on and on.

What is more alarming is the NNT, before a positive outcome, the prevention of death. “About 32 people would need to be treated with the new drug to prevent one death from heart-related causes. “ This description does not sound as if the drug is effective as just plain vitamin D3 that can be purchased over the counter. This sounds significantly different that the experience of Dr. Prendergast and Dr. Davis and the multiple of medical papers published on the subject.   As a society, are we so set in maintaining the medical economy that doctors cannot tell people that vitamin D is very significant in the course of heart disease? When other specific nutrients are added and changes in diet, heart disease could be a thing of the past.

The second report was on CBS 60 Minutes. They had a segment on research with the aging of what extended life and what did not. It was very educational and interesting until Leslie Stahl asked about supplements. The answer was no, there was not any significant reduction of death with supplements. She then asked a much scripted question. No help from vitamin E? No. No help with vitamin A, vitamin B, and vitamin C. No. No help with a multiple vitamin? No. Notice the order of vitamins not to take the listener to vitamin D as they were not in alphabetical order. Also note that the question was not asked about vitamin D. There was a bottle of vitamin D3 plainly on display in the cabinet. Plainly getting the viewer to believe that vitamin D3 has no affect without stating. Subliminal communication at its best! There are papers stating that life expectancy could be extended by seven or more years with higher levels of vitamin D3? Mortality and Vitamin D3

Propaganda delivered at its very best! – Pandemic Survivor

Breast Cancer Survivor Takes on the Issues

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Carole Baggerly had her own experience with breast cancer. She then started to research the reason why. Her discovery; scientists have expressed the understanding that breast cancer is a deficiency disease. That is over her life time, her intake of vitamin D was not adequate. She was so upset and concerned about the issues that she started GrassrootsHealth. This is a consortium of more than forty scientists and doctors that are experts in vitamin D and nutrition. She discovered that it was not only breast cancer, but a host of chronic illness related to deficiencies. Take the time and watch her explain the issues in the first thirty minutes of this video presentation.  Carole Baggerly and Dr. Heaney, September, 2012  Presentation to Direct-MS Canada.

If you are concerned about the health of your children, yourself, your parents, the next hour is Dr. Heaney who has contributed significantly to the understanding of vitamin D. He talks about the longevity issues and decline with chronic disease because of nutritional deficiencies. There are many diseases that have now been linked to deficiencies that number into the hundreds. This is particularly pointed to vitamin D deficiency.

This discussion is fairly non-technical and is understandable by the average person. Dr. Heaney expresses the understanding that “things go better with vitamin D”. That is that vitamin D deficiency may not be the cause of a disease like TB, but not having enough vitamin D will prevent your body from properly healing. However, this understanding falls into the logic of the chicken versus the egg. In other words, if you had enough vitamin D would you have gotten TB in the first place? Dr. Heaney discusses everything from diabetes, heart disease, MS, pregnancy, and cancer to infectious diseases like TB. I give the video presentation six stars out of a five star rating system for understanding of chronic disease and the effect of vitamin D.  Presentation to Direct-MS Canada.

Your take away from this, is you, your friends, and your family should not suffer from vitamin D deficiency.   Standards within the medical industry have long been 20 ng/ml to 100 ng/ml.   There have not been any cases of toxicity below 200 ng/ml or 500 nmol/l.  There does not appear to be any downside at this level of vitamin D.  Some laboratories have decreased the upper number, 100 ng/ml, to whatever they are measuring the population. Best health for you can be reached with a vitamin D serum level, 25(OH)D between 40 ng/ml to 80 ng/ml; note this is still within the normal range as defined by medicine. It is not how much you take; it is where you maintain your serum level. Everyone responds differently to their intake from all sources of vitamin D. The only way to know is to test.  Dr. Heaney says to maintain a level above 40ng/ml will require an intake from all sources of 5000 IU or more of vitamin D3 per day.

Please note this presentation is in Canada. The measurements used are in nanamoles per liter or nmol/l. To convert ng/ml to nmol/l multiply ng/ml by 2.5. So the normal range of 20 to 100 ng/ml is 50 to 250 nmol/l. Get your serum level tested to give your body a chance to thrive. If you choose to do it through GrassrootsHealth, you become part of the study that will help to advance health in the population. – Pandemic Survivor

Test by GrassrootsHealth: banner_ad_long5company postingVideo of how to do the test:  bscvideothumbnailv3web

Millions Needlessly Die of Vitamin D3 Deficiency

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Well, in my satire on the presidential declaration of a national emergency it seems that I got my numbers wrong about the amount of death from vitamin D deficiency.   I had used 400,000 deaths that is an extrapolation used in William Grants paper on what would happen if everyone in the US were to take 2000 IU of D3 per day.  “Reducing the Burden of Disease Through Adequate Intake of Vitamin D3.” http://www.sunarc.org/GrantGrassrootsHealth.pdf Since Dr. Grant wrote this paper that used data from 2001 new research has come to light.

I received an email today from the John Cannell, Vitamin D Council, that said that William Faloon, Co-Founded of Life Extension Foundation, had written a new article with a retraction of his data from the letter of 2007.  http://www.lef.org/magazine/mag2007/oct2007_awsi_01.htm His new numbers that appeared in the January, 2009 issue of Life Extension Magazine shows that there could be well over a million deaths in the US every year from vitamin D deficiency.  http://www.lef.org/magazine/mag2009/jan2009_Millions-of-Needless-Deaths_01.htm

So what are we to believe?  I always like to check my data from an independent source.  If we consider that vitamin D has the possibility of reducing all chronic disease by 40 percent what would that mean for America?  If you will recall my post on Health Care Reform Heal the People we found that the death rate in Mexico is 4.8 per 1000 per year and in the US the death rate is 8.4 per 1000 per year,  or 43% less deaths per year in Mexico.  CIA Fact Sheets:  https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2066rank.html So you ask what the disparity of data is.  Do they have a better health care system?  The answer of course is that they are a sun-splashed country in the lower latitudes which means they most likely have higher vitamin D levels than the US.  And not only that,  but much of the population lives above 5000 ft which is above much of the atmospheric moisture and pollutions and this allows a higher incidence of UVB radiation to make vitamin D.  Also their winters are not as cold so more of the human body is exposed because they simply wear fewer clothes.

The death rate in the US of 8.4 minus the death rate of 4.8 is 3.6 per 1000 population per year.  If we take that most of this is from the difference in vitamin D levels then the US could reduce death by 3.6 times 307,000 thousand (307 million US population) per year.  This works out to 1,150,000 people per year.  If we say that there are more deaths because we have more cars and higher incidence of toxins because we are (were) a more industrialized nation, we would still have well over a million less deaths from vitamin D3 deficiency every year.  This would decimate the medical and medical insurance industries to say nothing of big pharma and over-the-counter goods sold at retail as remedies for whatever.  If the deaths are reduced by this much imagine how much less suffering and pain there would be from disease.

This is one heck of a survivor story as Mexico has significantly less death and suffering than the US because of vitamin D3.  I know the above may not be very scientific but it makes a lot of just plain common sense.  Imagine the millions of needless deaths in other countries because of this dread deficiency in a world with a population 6.7 billion people with a large portion living at the higher latitudes.

William Faloon sent this article to all Congressmen and Senators:  http://www.lef.org/magazine/mag2009/jan2009_Millions-of-Needless-Deaths_01.htm

While you are basking in the sun write your Congressman, The President, and the Secretary of Health and tell your friends.    – Pandemic Survivor

Heart Disease, Cholesterol, and Vitamin D3

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I have written several post of vitamin D and heart disease and there is so much more.  There is an exciting article about heart disease and the effect of vitamin D at WebMD.

By Dr. Michael Richman, MD, FACS on Cardiovascular Disease and Vitamin D.  Part 1 and Part 2.

As we begin our plunge into vitamin D winter then heart disease that has been arrested by getting an adequate amount from the sun will become more active.  As you can see from this Harvard news article, it is important to start supplementing with vitamin D.  However, here again we find that mainstream medicine is too conservative in the amount of vitamin D.  It is better to follow the directions from the home page of the Vitamin D Council to assure that your level of 25(OH)D3 is above 50 ng/ml to have the best effect on heart disease and the upcoming expectation of a serious flu season from the H1N1 virus.

As we have discussed in other post, vitamin D is made from cholesterol.  So the marketing of statin drugs and their use in lowering cholesterol may not be beneficial to your health.  The article, “Vitamin D is Synthesized From Cholesterol and Found in Cholesterol-Rich Foods” by Chris Masterjohn from May 2006 will give you a better understanding of how this works.  His comments on vitamin A are also important to the understanding of how A and D work together in your body.  Here is the research page from the Vitamin D Council on heart disease.

Going into the sun is not enough if you live above about 35 degrees North latitude after September.  Start supplementing to the directions of the Vitamin D Council.    – Pandemic Survivor

Heart Disease and Diabetes

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As you may already know, the insulin surges that occur when you are diabetic cause a significant amount of plaque to build up in the arteries.  It seems that insulin surges for whatever reason are the cause of this unfortunate course of the disease.  There is hope however that this does not have to be the course of the disease.

You can read the paper, “Human serum 25-hydroxycholecalciferol response to extended oral dosing with cholecalciferol” by Heaney et. Al with an explanation of how blood sugar and insulin is blunted once your serum 25(OH)D is above 32 ng/ml.  It is an open source paper and I would suggest that you read the full paper if you are diabetic or at least have your doctor read it. From PubMed

Also ‘The Vitamin D requirement in health and disease’ by Dr. Heaney.

Dr. Joe Prendergast of California has a long time practice of endocrinology.  He has treated many diabetics and has had great success in reducing the amount of heart disease in his practice.  Dr. Prendergast discovered in the early nineties that he had a significant amount of heart disease.  His father had died at an early age of this disease.  He decided that he was going to do all that he could not to follow the same course.

He contacted Dr. Victor Zhu who is was head of research at that time at Stanford University to see what he was doing about heart disease.  Dr. Zhu set him up with one of his research fellows that was testing mice with arterial plaque.  Dr. Prendergast decided that he was going to try the same course of treatment that had proved to clear the arteries of the mice.  After a number of years he was imaged again for another purpose and it happened to be the same radiologist.  The radiologist discovered that Dr. Prendergast arteries were clear.  They checked to be sure that the patient file had not been substituted that indeed it was Dr. Prendergast that showed no arterial blockage.

Dr. Prendergast who was at one time head of the board of endocrinology for California decided that he was going to treat the diabetics in his practice.  He has treated over 4000 patients.  The heart disease had reduced to such a low rate in the small city between San Jose and San Francisco that the three man cardiologist practice closed and move to another town.

It seems that he treated his patients with a combination of vitamin D3 and l-arginine.  As you may know there was a Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine 1998 awarded for the understanding of the communication pathways for nitric oxide, NO, and how through its signaling pathways it affects the function of the arterial wall cells.  This is what happens when heart patients take nitroglycerin.  However the NO is released in a lower amount when using l-arginine.

It would seem that with such success that this practice would have been adopted by all the doctors treating diabetes.  The vitamin D3 does it thing with the genetics, insulin control, blood sugar control, and the all the other good benefits.  Dr. Prendergast has even written a book about his success in using nutrition with his patients, “The Uncommon Doctor.”

But you know, you do not have to take my word for it.  The owner of Apple Health, David Stouder, was so fascinated by the number of people that were coming to his store to buy vitamin D and the success that they were having in the course of their disease that he decided to interview Dr. Prendergast.  You can go hear the interview at the website set up specifically for that purpose.  www.nutriphobia.com (writers note October 17, 2009 – Unfortunenately this interview has been taken down and I was unable to find it on the new website.  Here is his video comment at youtube )  The first six audios are simply about overcoming the fear of vitamin D and the button ‘click to hear Dr. Joe Prendergast’ is the audio interview with Dr. Prendergast and the above story.  I know that if I were diabetic, I would have my doctor get in contact with Dr. Prendergast for a consult at his practice Endocrine Metabolic.

If you have heart disease or diabetes I would certainly hope that you would spend some time in reviewing this understanding and get your doctor involved.  It is not only your life but it is the life of each patient that your doctor chooses to treat.

In the main time – GO INTO THE SUN!  – Pandemic Survivor

Heart Disease and Vitamin D3

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I will spend some time in talking about vitamin D3 and heart disease.  In the maintime you should just go read Dr. William Davis at the Heart Scan Blog.  He is a cardiologist from Milwaukee that has this vitamin D thing and heart disease figured out and is treating his patients with diet and nutrition.

Dr. Davis most recent post is about D2 and D3 and how D3 is so much more efficaious than D2.

Here are all of his post on vitamin D.  He has 67 post of vitamin D so I will not be able to compete with that but will try to provide you with a summary.  In the maintain just go read and it will be a real education for you.

If you have heart disease then you definitely need to spend time with Dr. Davis.  GREAT job Dr. Davis!  I know that you have saved many lives.

– Pandemic Survivor

Thinking about Cholesterol

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Let’s just stop for a while and do some critical thinking about cholesterol.  I am not bound by having a medical degree or much education in the biological sciences.   This frees me from boundaries that are typically imposed when trying to come up with a new theory or hypothesis.  There are just about always these preconceived notions about how a process works that stops researchers from considering other pathways or avenues or even superhighways though they are clearly marked.  Of course this is really good for the keepers of the cash cow.  With that out of the way this makes it possible to allow my imagination to run free without restraint.

Okay so researchers, maybe you should pay attention to what I am about to say because some day it may make you a super star if you pursue my line of thinking.  However, if you work for one of the companies that make statin drugs and start talking about what I am proposing then you better put your things in a box and start looking for a new job.

So what is cholesterol?  It has the word sterol in it so that most likely makes it a fat.  So what do we know about fats?  They are necessary for life because I remember the story about the arctic explorers that had this canned food that was primarily carbohydrates and protein and they started to get sick and bloat.  It was later discovered that you have to have fat to survive.  It has also been discovered that we do not need carbohydrates to survive but this battle still rages on.  We do know that low fat foods that have the fats replaced with sugars or other carbohydrates just make us fatter.   I have proved this over and over by the amount of weight that I gain when I eat low fat foods.  And on top of that, the low fat foods just make me want to eat more.

Now there have been all of these stories about how cholesterol in the blood causes your arteries to clog up with plaque and this stops the blood flow.  When your blood does not flow for more than about five minutes you die and this is not good to a long life.  I have read studies that say that too much cholesterol causes this plaque problem and heart disease.  I have read studies that say there is no correlation between cholesterol and heart disease in more recent literature.  It was suggested that since a high amount of cholesterol would cause heart disease and that since cholesterol is fat that we eat too much fat and this causes us to have heart disease.  This seems so counter intuitive to the understanding about the explorers that did not get enough fat.

We can just put all of that aside and say that cholesterol is a marker and not necessarily a cause and effect for heart disease.  Now what does being a marker mean?  Well it means that a certain thing is an indication that something will happen.  It is like the speed indicator in your car.  If it says that you are going 70 mph that the car is going very fast and all the physical things that you can expect to happen at this speed will happen.  The speed indicator is not the cause of the car moving at this speed.  The indicator only says that the car is going at this speed.

Now, when I had severe back pain and my vertebral disc were failing and I had sleep apnea, I had very high cholesterol readings.  I had one test that indicated that my cholesterol was over 240.  The test also said that my fasting triglycerides were 680 or extremely high.  I also had problems with my heart because I was having pre-ventricular contractions and one time even a sudden fast heart rate.  My heart rate went over 200 bpm and stayed there for over 15 minutes.  I was in so much pain from the pressure on my spinal cord that I just thought that maybe this was it and I would just die and get rid of the pain.  However, my heart slowed down and I was just fine except for the severe continuous ever hurting downright destroying evil pain – pain – pain.

Then I started taking vitamin D3.  My spine healed.  My sleep apnea went away because the nerves for the lungs and throat were free to do what they were supposed to do.  My heart started working just fine.  My energy returned.  My brain healed.  My mind cleared. And guess what else happened.  That’s right on my last blood test, my cholesterol was 175 and my fasting triglycerides were 72.  Now how could this be because since I have been out of pain I eat the worst diet ever.  I am still overweight (BMI 130) even though recently my metabolism seems to be speeding up and I have lost 10 lbs in the last month. I eat now because I can because there is no pain when my gut gets big unlike before when my spine was shot.  So why would eating cheeseburgers and french fries and milk shakes cause my lipid profile to improve?

Thinking about arterial plaque, I have recently read that this plaque is a very small percentage of the gooey stuff that holds it together from cholesterol.  It is mostly calcium dross.  I like the word dross because that is what forms when you get too much oxygen over molten metal and so this is what happens in the arteries and not the veins where the oxygen is low.  Too much oxygen in the arteries causes the calcium in the blood to form dross.  This makes about as much sense as what we have been told about how the fat causes our arteries to plug.  If it was just fat, then the veins would clog as well.

So following the logic of the ‘eat low fat’ people, we should just stop breathing as this would not allow oxygen into the arteries and cause dross to plug them.  Now you guys that majored in the biological sciences still with me or have I sucked all of the air from your systems?  I know this is way out, but what fun!!!!!!!!!

When reading about how our body makes vitamin D, I discovered that the ultraviolent B radiation on cholesterol in the skin causes it to turn into vitamin D.  This vitamin D along with some isomers and other products like metabolites that it forms makes up our vitamin D physiology.  Now not being hampered by a biological religious cult, I would just think that as our bodies get enough vitamin D to where systems get satisfied that we stop making cholesterol.  When we do not go out into the sun and our vitamin D level gets low, our liver and skin spits out lots of cholesterol and our body starts screaming at us, ‘GO INTO THE SUN’.  We go into the sun and if there is enough UVB then our body makes D3.  We are happy as our pineal gland starts spitting out the commands for all of these happiness squads of hormones that can now act because we have enough vitamin D.

Process of vitamin D being made from cholesterol, University of California Riverside.

This also makes sense from understanding that the plaque in our arteries is a calcium plaque and the primary system for controlling calcium absorption is vitamin D.  If we do not have enough vitamin D then calcium serum regulation falls to the parathyroid hormones like a failsafe system.  We survive and do not thrive.

And while I am thinking about it, I do not believe there is a single case of secondary hyperparathyroidism when the serum 25(OH)D level is above 40 ng/ml in the medical literature.  At least that is what a bunch of guys from Spain have said in 2003.  You would think that knowing how PTH and 25(OH)D work together that we would increase the level of 25(OH)D before we started chopping out peoples parathyroids.  This happened to a friend of mined and he simply increased his 25(OH)D, his serum calcium normalized and he did have to get his parathyroids chopped.

So then, cholesterol is just a marker for low vitamin D levels in the body which means that we need to take action to get the level of vitamin D up so that over 2000 genes can turn off when they are supposed to be off and on when they are suppose to be on.

Changing the cholesterol level to try to prevent heart disease then would be like making the speed indicator on the car read 35 mph when we are really going 70.  We are just looking for an accident to happen because we do not know that we are going so fast because of the artificial indication.  I suspect this is what happens when we take statin drugs which I understand are just bad mimics of the vitamin D feedback system that tells us to stop making cholesterol.  This is really bad because when we do go into the sun we do not have adequate amounts of cholesterol to make vitamin D.  Okay, biological geeks, did you get it?  This is the reason for all the confounded data in your studies because your theories just – well- truly suck!

I say to you, the manufacturers of statin drugs, that I do not believe that you are so bad at logic and biological science that you could get this so wrong.  I think that you had dollars signs in your eyes because you could not figure out a way to profit from healthy people replete in vitamin D.  So it is obvious that you love money more than people even though it is the people, your customers, that is providing you this money.

I suspect that there is enough data out there from other studies that an energetic researcher could crunch around to show that when peoples serum 25(OH)D levels are less than 32 ng/ml that they have a problem with high cholesterol.  Get the levels up to above 50 ng/ml for a couple of months and I would suspect that you would see a significant drop in cholesterol.  It happened to me and others that I know.  Are our bodies just freaks of nature?

It seems that doctors that have tried this on patients with heart disease have had great success.  Why don’t you go visit with Dr. William Davis at the Heart Scan Blog and see for yourself.

Even better –GO INTO THE SUN!!!!!!!!!!!   – Pandemic Survivor

Genetic, Epigenetic, and Vitamin D3

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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

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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

Vitamin D Council Research Links by Disease

Well, I hope that you find this useful and that you do not think that just because your disease of interest is not in this list that it does not have a vitamin D vector.  This seccosteroid is the most important steroid of the human body – Vitamin D3.

There is a lot of pain and death listed above.  Shine the light on this research!!!  – Pandemic Survivor