Tag Archives: nutrient deficiency

Supplement with Vitamin D NOW!

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Several weeks ago, the local paper printed a story by the Associated Press that was entitled “Vitamin D deficiency widely overestimated, experts warn patients.”  This story was carried by most major news’ outlets at a time when supplementation for vitamin D is necessary in the northern latitudes.  The article was based on a paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) by four scientists that were on the Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) food and nutrition board for vitamin D and calcium.  The IOM reported in 2010 that you only needed 600 to 800 IU per day of vitamin D from all sources whether you were a ten-pound baby or a three-hundred-pound adult.  What the NJEM paper and the news article fail to mention is that there was a statistical error found in the study and confirmed by several universities.  The real value should have been reported at over 7,000 IU per day of vitamin D3. Follow link to read about the error.

One of the researchers, JoAnn Manson of Brigham and Women’s Hospital Boston, is doing a study given 26,000 patients 2,000 IU per day.  She hopes to compare the study against statistics from the general population. The problem for Manson is that her study is extremely flawed because now most of the population knows that you need more than the 2,000 IU per day.  She wants to slow down the supplementation of the general population to validate her study.  The news article emphasizes “there’s an epidemic of needless testing and too many people taking too many pills for a deficiency that very few people truly have.”  If that is truly the case, then why is she doing the study at a higher level of supplementation?

It is amazing that the medical industry has been trying to keep the general population deficient of the vital hormone, vitamin D3, for a very long time.  The problem goes back to the 1940s when the US sued seventeen multinational corporations for conspiracy of price manipulation and not putting an adequate amount of vitamin D in over-the-counter supplements.  Why?  The original reason for this criminal act was about making money from discoveries that may not have been patentable. The withholding of the information has gone on so long now that the economy is at risk if everyone gets enough vitamin D to be healthy. Government action has now fallen in step with the medical industry because of the economy. Why has it been two years since the error was found and the public has not been notified?  How would an adequate amount of vitamin D affect the economy?  One medical practice gave their patients enough supplements to make the general population replete in critical nutrients.  Office visits went from four per patient per year to one visit per patient per year. Think how the patients’ health most have improved—think of the dollar loss to the medical practice.

So, what to believe?  People with light colored skin typically will make in twenty minutes, about 20,000 IU of vitamin D3, with mid-day sun exposure in the summertime with sixty percent of the skin exposed. People with dark skin may take 3 to 6 times longer.  Who are you going to believe, nature or the medical industry?  In the winter our immune systems become depressed because of reduction in the amount of vitamin D3 made from sun exposure. Colds and the flu increase and more people die from chronic disease. Let the researchers play their games while you protect your health with adequate vitamins and minerals.  It is time to have empathy for the health of the population based on science.

This winter you should supplement per twenty-five pounds of body weight per day with approximately: deficient-vits-and-mins

  • 1000 IU of vitamin D3
  • 100 mg of magnesium (not magnesium oxide as you do not absorb it)
  • 500 mg vitamin C
  • 5 mg zinc

If you weigh 175 pounds, the amount of supplementation of these nutrients in which we are deficient would be 7,000 IU of vitamin D3, 700 mg of magnesium, 3,500 mg of vitamin C, and 35 mg of zinc.  This of course is not the whole story of nutritional deficiency, but it would be a great start to get you through the winter.  –Pandemic Survivor

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Vitamin D–Conspiracy Theory or True Conspiracy

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In the current political campaigns, there is much rhetoric about the far left and the far right and how each is promoting conspiracy theories about the actions of government.  This is all to shame each candidate’s position and all about winning the election.  How do we separate truth from fiction?  I have been personally attacked purposely with ridicule, told to stop talking about vitamin D at my major source of social activity, and scorned with humor in my declaring that the practice of medicine has been taken over for the sake of the economy.

Conspiracy

In the words of James Carville to President Clinton, “It’s the economy, stupid.”  The history of vitamin D has been filled with cover-up for the benefits of vitamin D for profit. There were seventeen multinationals named in a lawsuit by the US Government for conspiracy for vitamin D at the height of WWII: Charles Bowman for General Mills Corporation, E. I. du Pont de Nemours, Quaker Oats, Standard Brands, Gelatin Products Corp., Borden Co., Carnation Co., Nestle Milk Products, Inc., Vitamins Inc., Abbott Laboratories, Meade Johnson & Co., William S. Merrill Co., Parke-Davis Co., R. Squibb & Sons, Winthrop Chemical Co.  “General Mills Corp. was named as a co-conspirator, but will not be a defendant in the action.”  This of course is when the government still had a conscious for individuals.  I am sure that you recognize many of these companies.

The medical profession corrected many of the errors by recommending the use of cod liver oil, CLO, to prevent and cure rickets and improve general health.  The use of CLO continued until a well-known pediatrician made the statement that Vitamin D could cause birth defects. The use of CLO was abandoned over this fear.  This was in the middle of the 60s when the thalidomide scare for birth defects was at its height. Then in the 70s, a well-known pharmaceutical took over a sun screen company and heavily promoted “sun fear” for the sake of profits of their chronic disease drugs, which accounted for over eighty percent of their sales.  The dermatologists were captured and used as agents to continue to promote sun fear because of skin cancer.  (45-minute video Skin Cancer/Sunscreen the Dilemma) This video was made in 2009 and there have been advances in sunscreen that blocks both UVA and UVB.

Sun fear continued well into the 2000s, even when thousands of peer reviewed papers were published about the benefits of vitamin D.  The FDA even tried to sue the sunscreen companies for inappropriate labels but were defeated in court, thus ignoring the science–there is no science that sunscreen prevents melanoma.  The court action was defeated by lawyers of the sunscreen industry led by John Roberts, now Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.  I guess he was just doing his job as a great attorney.

I had thought that the Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) Food and Nutrition Board would get it right based on the science.  Their findings were published in December of 2010.  The finding was that only 600 IU of vitamin D was required from all sources whether you were a ten-pound baby or a three-hundred-pound person.  They tried to cover themselves by stating that the study was only about bone health.  There were many problems with this board for ethics.  The studies they chose were provided by the Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality a division of US Health and Human Resources and not independently selected.  They treated studies with vitamin D2 as equal to vitamin D3. There were many conflicts of interest on the board; a direct violation of ethics policy for the National Academy of Science of which the IOM is a division.

But the real issue of the IOM’s finding came when a professor at the University of Alberta took the same data that the IOM used and found a statistical error.  The real finding should have been 10 plus times the recommended amount by the IOM.  This error was later confirmed by the scientist at Grassroots Health and two universities, Creighton University and the University of California San Diego.  The real amount of vitamin D from all sources should have been at least 7000 IU per day to achieve the goal of 99.5% of the population with a serum level at or above 20 ng/ml of 25(OH)D.

It has now been almost two years and no action has been taken by the US Government to correct the error.   Why has our Government ignored the error?  “It’s about the economy, stupid.”  There is much evidence to show that low vitamin D levels cause disease.  Think of the many deaths and more importantly the pain caused by this error in the general population.  By raising the serum level of vitamin D in the general population to over 45 ng/ml 25(OH)D, the medical economy could shrink by as much as fifty percent–ouch!  Watch this short video (at 4:30, Does Less Sun Mean More Disease) about vitamin D and the doctor’s practice that reduced office visits from four per patient per year to one visit per patient per year.  This was great for the patients, but what about the financial health of the doctor’s practice?

If we translate this effort of one practice to the general population, what would happen to a medical economy that represents almost twenty percent of GDP.   This practice not only used vitamin D; in addition, they gave their patients additional magnesium, vitamin C, B12, and zinc.  The correction of one vitamin is not all that is required to bring the population to a greater health.  If you were a Congressman or the President, which decision would you make–the health of the individuals in the population or the financial health of our institutions?  Which would cause more harm?  The government has chosen the general principle for Health and Human Services as “markets before mandates.”  (Secretary Michael Leavitt–Principles lower right) A general conspiracy or a policy that protects national economic security?

You just cannot make this stuff up out of whole cloth.  As an individual, you should follow the science as described by Grassroots Health.  I know it will take some time to read through this article and the links, but your health or your money? Beliefs change regularly as we have new experiences.  That happened to me when I discovered I was deficient in vitamin D (not D2), vitamin C, magnesium (in an absorbable form), zinc, correct proteins, iodine, vitamin A (not beta carotene), B12, and folate (not folic acid). I avoided more back surgery and healed from chronic pain and sleep apnea.  I arrived at my conclusions through faith in a being greater than us and by applying engineering principles to my health with an MS in engineering, forty years of engineering practice, and more than 9,000 hours of reading about vitamins and minerals.  –Pandemic Survivor

©2016 Mark Pegram

Supplements are useless if you want to die!

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Don’t take vitamins and minerals as they are a waste of time and money. You get enough nutrients through the food that you eat. This is repeated over and over again by the powers that control our health. Food is much more important to your health than medicine and yet we spend almost 77% more on health than we do on food (1.264 trillion for food and 2.237 trillion for healthcare). When you are trying to determine the purpose and paths that are placed on us, often the statement, “follow the money,” arises.

We find that we are last in the twenty wealthiest countries of the world in life expectancy and spend much more than any other country on health. If the numbers for spending on healthcare and food were reversed, then we might have a chance for a much longer life expectancy.

I am often asked what I take to prevent illness. When I tell them, there is much concern about taking so many tablets. In the mind of the average American is the issue that this many ‘pills’ could have very serious side effects and might make them sick. This is what has been perpetrated on the American public. Vitamins and minerals are not good for you and like pharmaceuticals should be pharmaceuticals are not good for you like vitamins and minerals. However, vitamins and minerals do not have serious side effects like pharmaceuticals. But if it is in the form of a pharmaceutical then we make assumptions that are not correct about the side effects. Please note that I have said vitamins and minerals. When you start to take herbs then this is no different than taking a pharmaceutical. Most pharmaceuticals have some basis in herbal origins.

The issue is how we process foods and change the characteristics of the nutrients. In many cases nutrients are not only changed, they are completely stripped from the food through processing. The major forms of processes that destroy food are over-heating and mechanical shear like homogenization and size reduction. A change in the characteristics of enzymes, protein, and fat affects the ability of the body to absorb the proper nutrients. We have now arrived at the point that we must take supplements in addition to the food that we eat to be healthy. Of course this says nothing about the synthetic vitamins that are put into our foods or pesticide and herbicide toxins affect on health.

Here are the additional nutrients I take on a daily basis. Compliance by most in taking the additional nutrients is difficult because it is not a fast food burger or a bowel of ice cream. Also, the form looks like pharmaceuticals and we fear side effects.

daily1This looks like pharmaceuticals when in fact; it is just food that has to be made up from our loss in modern processes. Nutrient deficiency is the number one cause of poor health and reduced life expectancy in the US. There are not any harmful side effects. There is only health from food. For the powers to tell you otherwise is about the money made from your poor health. – Pandemic Survivor

Deficiency Disease in a Modern World – Part 1 Vitamins

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The suggested vitamins are not meant to treat, cure, diagnose, prevent, or mitigate disease.  If the substance is so stated by a doctor, then it must be considered a drug and follow all the rules for drugs by the FDA.  Have you ever known a doctor to prescribe a vitamin to treat your disease symptoms?  I do believe this is a significant mistake by the medical community.  Please consider the following diseases and the associated cause.  If you had one of these, would you not want your doctor to tell you how to overcome them without prescribing a drug?

Pellagra:  cause vitamin B3 niacin deficiency and tryptophan deficiency

Blindness and night blindness: vitamin A deficiency

Beriberi: vitamin B deficiency or thiamin B1

Scurvy:  vitamin C deficiency

Rickets:  vitamin D deficiency

Anemia:  iron deficiency

Goiter:   and interesting disease caused by iodine deficiency

Malnutrition:  deficiency in fats and proteins

If we look at all of the vitamins and take deficiency to the worst case then we can find the following deficiency diseases and the use of vitamins for treatment of disease.

Biotin – a B complex vitamin: Hair loss, brittle nails, and scaly red rash, neurologic symptoms of depression, lethargy, hallucination, and numbness – birth defects of abnormal development of the embryo known as teratogenesis

Folic Acid – B complex vitamin: megablastic anemia or fewer large red blood cells reducing oxygen carrying resulting in fatigue weakness and shortness of breath – during pregnancy because of rapidly dividing cells folic acid deficiency leads to neural tube defects that result in spina bifida or anencephaly, both are devastating and sometimes fatal – Other birth defects that are prevented is certain types of heart defects and limb malformations.  Important roles in DNA and RNA synthesis

Niacin:  B3 or nicotinic acid has already been mention for pellagra – symptoms of pellagra include dementia, diarrhea, dermatitis, and death.  In the skin thick, scaly dark pigmented rashes.

Pantothenic acid or B5:  Numbness and painful burning in the feet.  Use of a pantothenol ointment has shown accelerated wound closure

Riboflavin or B2:  Deficiency may impair iron absorption – redness and swelling of the lips and mouth, sore throat, cracks and sores outside the lips and may include formation of blood vessels over the eyes or vascularization of the cornea – other associated diseases include – cataracts and migraine headaches

Thiamin or B1: Beriberi affects the cardiovascular, nervous, muscular, and gastrointestinal systems.

Vitamin A: Deficiency in vitamin A is the leading cause of blindness in children in developing countries.   Immune system impairment resulting in a higher incidence of infectious diseases Implicated in disease prevention of cancer, lung cancer, breast cancer – used medically to treat retinitus pigmentosa acute promyelocytic leukemia, and various skin disorders.

Vitamin B6:  severe vitamin B6 deficiency include irritability, depression, and confusion; additional symptoms include inflammation of the tongue, sores or ulcers of the mouth, and ulcers of the skin at the corners of the mouth

Vitamin B12:  Deficiency symptoms include tingling of the arms and legs, difficulty walking, memory loss, disorientation, dementia with or without mood changes.

Vitamin C: prevents Scurvy, and to some degree cardiovascular disease, stroke, cancer, gout, lead toxicity, and plays a role in immunity.  Has been used to treat vasodilatation, hypertension, cancer, diabetes mellitus, common cold,

Vitamin D:  Deficiency can best be described by saying that vitamin D controls in some part over 2700 genes.  Whether they are off or on can significantly impair your health in disease states that have many descriptions.  Muscle weakness, immunity, cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, bone growth, cartilage growth and cellular differentiation.

Vitamin E: including impaired balance and coordination (ataxia), injury to the sensory nerves (peripheral neuropathy), muscle weakness (myopathy), and damage to the retina of the eye (pigmented retinopathy). Has been used to prevent clots and too high dosage may result in hemorrhage.

Vitamin K:  Deficiency results in poor bone mineralization and impaired blood clotting.  Symptoms include, nose bleeds, bruising, bloody stools, and life threatening intracranial bleeding or another form of stroke.  Used to treat osteoporosis (Japan monitors serum levels for this purpose)

So the next time you go see your doctor with tingling feet and neuropathy, would it be better for your doctor to suggest that you get an adequate amount of B vitamins in particular B12, B6, and B5 first before prescribing a calcium channel blocker to relieve the pain?  Has the snake oil salesmen of the early twentieth century put on pharmaceutical cloths and are now protected by the government’s FDA?  Why is it necessary for senior citizens to have an average of seventeen prescriptions to treat symptoms without first being sure they are getting an adequate amount of vitamins to treat the disease?

And this is just the vitamins.  What about diseases from mineral deficiencies?  – Pandemic Survivor

REF: Most of the info on deficiencies were taken from the Linus Pauling Institute Oregon State University

For more information on vitamin D deficiency and hair loss, click here.