Do you work for a co that sells Vitamin D motorway?
Seriously though i have always thought a light tan is healthy
Vitamin D deficiency has been linked to a rapidly expanding inventory of ailments””including heart disease, cancer and the common cold. A new discovery demonstrates how the vitamin plays a major role in keeping the body healthy in the first place, by allowing the immune system's T cells to start doing their jobs.
In order for T cells to become active members of the body's immune system, they must transition from so-called "naive" T cells into either killer cells or helper cells (which are charged with "remembering" specific invaders). And, if ample vitamin D is not around, the T cells do not make that crucial transition, a group of researchers led by Carsten Geisler, head of the Department of International Health, Immunology and Microbiology at the University of Copenhagen, found. They draw this conclusion based on their experiments with isolated naïve human T cells.
"When a T cell is exposed to a foreign pathogen, it extends a signaling device of 'antenna' known as a vitamin D receptor, with which it searches for vitamin D," Geisler said in a prepared statement. If there is an inadequate vitamin D level, he noted, "they won't even begin to mobilize."
Vitamin D is "THE KEY THAT UNLOCKS THE DNA LIBRARY"
It turns genes on and off at a dizzying rate.
Vitamin D truly is the center of the universe.
~ Dr. Russell Chesney, professor and chairman of pediatrics at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center in Memphis.
The citizens of Scotland have a very poor health record and a life expectancy that is one of the lowest in the Western world. This poor health record holds true for all social classes. It is now known that living in Scotland also results in extreme Vitamin D deficiency due to chronic lack of sunlight. (164) While deficiency in the UK is widespread the situation in Scotland is worse than for the rest of the country.
Scotland receives 30-50% less ultraviolet radiation (UVB) from the sun than the rest of the UK due to its high latitude and persistent low cloud cover. Vitamin D levels are consistently found to be even lower in Scotland than the rest of the UK. (168)(165)(166) (167)
Indeed, Glasgow, with one of most cloudy climates receives a similar amount of UVB as Kiruna in Northern Sweden which is way above the Arctic Circle.
Experts in Vitamin D now suggest that Scotland's poor health record is a direct consequence of Vitamin D deficiency particularly in childhood.
Multiple sclerosis could be prevented through daily vitamin D supplements, scientists told The Times last night.
The first causal link has been established between the “sunshine vitamin” and a gene that increases the risk of MS, raising the possibility that the debilitating auto-immune disease could be eradicated.
The incidence of MS in Scotland is one of the highest in the world where as many as 1:300 people suffer from the disease. This is a least twice the rate seen farther south in England. (110) Scotland is exposed to at least 50% less UV radiation than Southern regions of the UK, resulting in significantly lower Vitamin D levels.
CORRELATION AND CAUSATION
Correlation and causation, closely related to confounding variables, is the incorrect assumption that because something correlates, there is a causal relationship.
by Martyn Shuttleworth (2008)
Causality is the area of statistics that is most commonly misused, and misinterpreted, by non-specialists. Media sources, politicians and lobby groups often leap upon a perceived correlation, and use it to ‘prove’ their own beliefs. They fail to understand that, just because results show a correlation, there is no proof of an underlying causality.
Many people assume that because a poll, or a statistic, contains many numbers, it must be scientific, and therefore correct.
PATTERNS OF CAUSALITY IN THE MIND
Unfortunately, the human mind is built to try and subconsciously establish links between many contrasting pieces of information. The brain often tries to construct patterns from randomness, so jumps to conclusions, and assumes that a relationship exists.
Overcoming this tendency is part of academic training of students and academics in most fields, from physics to the arts. The ability to evaluate data, subjectively, is absolutely crucial to academic success.
Question earlier in the thread about
Higher latitudes Vitamin D and Health...
What has changed is DIET
The Inuit (primal Diets ) and Original Tasmanians
( Seafood is only real good source of Vitamin D.. esp SEALS )
Did not have Vitamin D problems or need such pale white skins
Even so our genes still "think" they are in the Tropics
and need both adequate and stable vitamin D levels
Vitamin D is used once and then more is needed
It seems Every Time a cell needs to do something
It looks for Vitamin D
Motorway
Show us some evidence mate instead of wooly headed dreamtime assumptions.
gg
is regulated by vitamin D.
You are saying that eg cancer causes low vitamin D levels, not the other way around. The problem is that Professor Joanne Lappe directly disproved that theory in a randomized controlled trial when she found that baseline vitamin D levels were strong and independent predictors of who would get cancer in the future. The lower your levels, the higher the risk. Furthermore, increasing baseline levels from 31 to 38 ng/ml (77.5 to 95 nmol/L) reduced incident cancers by more than 60% over a four year period. Therefore, advising patients to become vitamin D deficient, will cause some patients to die from cancer.
It turns genes on and off at a dizzying rate.
A five-year research project by Oliver Gillie, a scientist and writer, demonstrates extensive and remarkable parallels between Scotland’s dull weather and indices of disease.
It suggests that the “Scottish effect”, the country’s hitherto unexplained high mortality rate compared with other industrial countries, is in large part down to lack of sun. Crucially, a shortage of the “sunshine vitamin” is established as a factor in higher rates of multiple sclerosis (MS), diabetes, hypertension, arthritis, several types of cancer, cardiovascular disease and other ailments that together give Scotland one of the worst health records and highest premature mortality rates in Western Europe.
Dr Gillie’s study – Scotland’s Health Deficit: An Explanation and a Plan – echoes world-wide research on vitamin D deficiency but goes further, showing how the higher rates of disease in Scotland mirror closely the lower amount of available sunlight.
A lack of sunshine in Glasgow and the West of Scotland reflects levels of chronic illness that which cannot be explained by deprivation alone. A lack of sunshine on Orkney and Shetland – only 24 per cent of the maximum number of hours possible – corresponds to the highest prevalence of MS in the world.
I think it offers the potential for treatment which might prevent MS in the future,” Professor Ebers said.
“Our research has married two key pieces of the puzzle. The interaction of vitamin D with the gene is very specific and it seems most unlikely to be a coincidence of any kind.”
Warnings over sun exposure could now also be called into question – sunlight allows the body to produce the vitamin.
Professor Ebers said: “Serious questions now arise over the wisdom of current advice to limit sun exposure and avoid sunbathing. We also need to give better advice and help to the public on vitamin D supplements, particularly pregnant and nursing mothers.”
The news has momentous implications for Scotland and other northern countries, where the incidence of multiple sclerosis is the highest in the world. It will give added urgency to recent moves by Scotland’s Chief Medical Officer to consider recommending vitamin D supplements.
Deficiency in vitamin D, caused by lack of exposure to sunshine, has been increasingly linked to the cloudier climate in Scotland and other northern latitudes. The deficiency is twice as common among the Scots as it is amongst the English – and Orkney and Shetland have among the highest rates.
Studies have also shown that fewer people with MS are born in November and more in May, implicating a lack of sunshine during pregnancy.
The breakthrough comes after a groundswell of expert belief in the importance of vitamin D. Last November, at a conference organised by the Scottish Government, international experts urged vitamin D supplements for Scots to be tested “sooner rather than later” to find whether they could improve the nation’s health.
Researchers for the World Health Organisation said there should be large, randomised trials as there was strong evidence that increased daily intake of vitamin D could significantly improve health.
The seminar followed evidence, revealed in The Times, that Scotland’s poor health record has close links to vitamin D deficiency. Last September this newspaper reported evidence from scientists in Canada that children with early symptoms of multiple sclerosis have low levels of vitamin D.
Until now there has been no scientific proof of the links. However, Professor Ebers and his team have shown that vitamin D affects a particular genetic variant, identified as the one that increases the risk of developing MS threefold.
They suggest that a shortage of the vitamin alters this variant, thus preventing the immune system from functioning normally.
Professor Ebers said: “Whether it’s at the core of MS is going to take some further work, but it does look like a reasonably good chance.”
Last October Professor Ebers, in an article in The Times, backed the idea of distributing vitamin D supplements in Scotland to guard against conditions that may be linked to a deficiency, including MS.
“It is plausible that some 200 cases a year of MS might be prevened in Scotland alone by giving vitamin D to mothers and children,” he wrote.
And no, I'm not going to spend hours trawling through dozens of links.
Motorway, to therefore deduce that Scotland's poor health record is purely attributable to lack of Vit D is surely stretching a very long bow?
Motorway, the ABC's Radio National, in "The Health Report", broadcast Monday mornings and evenings, had an interesting discussion today on many so called randomised controlled trials. It is enlightening.
I happen to have a background in the area, and am only too aware of some of the very dodgy 'science' that is presented.
And no, I'm not going to spend hours trawling through dozens of links.
If I were to consider taking exogenous Vit D I would be discussing it with my doctor.
I happen to have a background in the area
Australians don't realise that many of the medications they'll be consuming in the future will have been trialled in India. The reasons drug companies are going there are that it's cheap and ethical controls are weak or non-existent. Indian researchers are sounding warnings. Also, an eminent statistician talks about problems in reporting of medical trials.
The subjects were 1179 community-dwelling women randomly selected from the population of healthy postmenopausal women aged >55 y in a 9-county rural area of Nebraska centered at latitude 41.4 degrees N. Subjects were randomly assigned to receive 1400-1500 mg supplemental calcium/d alone (Ca-only), supplemental calcium plus 1100 IU vitamin D3/d (Ca + D), or placebo.
The sewers of the developed world are awash with vitamins excreted by the worried well, who keep large national and multinational snake oil vitamin companies in business.
I believe that excess vitamin D has affected the Great Barrier Reef and led to the Crown of Thorns infestation.
As regards the Scottish nation, they drink to excess, are brainless to let a Libyan mass murderer free for a litre of fuel, fight at football matches and queue to watch a foreign monarch attend church every Christmas in inclement weather.
They need more than Vitamin D mate.
gg
It may well be that the lack of Vit D does contribute to reduced overall good health, but the suggestion that the two factors imply causality is superficial and unrealistic.
Doug Altman: Well if we're thinking of randomised clinical trials in particular evaluating new treatments in terms of methodology the most crucial aspect of a randomised trial is the way in which it's decided which patient receives which treatment and that should be done using a random process.
So one would look for reassurance in the journal article that this was done in an accepted method. But often we find in a ridiculous proportion, maybe three quarters of publications they just don't say how they did it. They say oh, we randomised but there's no detail, we're being asked to take it on trust that these people did what they say they did.
And I'd like to do that but we know when we look at some publications where they've used the term randomised we know sometimes the detail shows that they didn't actually do it properly. In terms of the results what we're hoping to see is that the researchers had pre-specified what they were most interested in looking at and that they had then analysed that and reported that.
National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) is a division of the United States federal agency the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). As such, NCHS is under the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Its headquarters is located at University Town Center in Hyattsville, Maryland, near Washington, D.C.
Motorway, I don't have sufficient interest in this topic, certainly insufficient to match your messianic zeal about it, to be bothered arguing.If you look at the trials on Vitamin D
They are either Government Studies like the
Or They are from leading Research Universities
eg Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom.
Motorway, I don't have sufficient interest in this topic, certainly insufficient to match your messianic zeal about it, to be bothered arguing.
Low Vitamin D in Newborns Linked to Wheezing
Study Shows Link Between Low Levels of Vitamin D in Cord Blood and Respiratory Infection Risk
By Katrina Woznicki
WebMD Health News
Reviewed by Louise Chang, MD
Dec. 27, 2010 -- Infants at age 3 months who had newborn blood levels of 25-hydroxyvitamin D -- a measurement of vitamin D -- below 25 nanomoles per liter (nmol/L) were twice as likely to develop respiratory infections as infants who had levels at 75 nmol/L or higher, according to an international study.
I read an interesting book a few months ago, the title and author of which, regrettably I have now forgotten.
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