Vitamin D casts cancer prevention in new light

globeandmail.com

Attention, all my pale, pale friends on the East Coast: Get out in the sun!

Sun is the best way to get vitamin D into your body. This is important because "researchers are linking low vitamin D status to a host of other serious ailments, including multiple sclerosis, juvenile diabetes, influenza, osteoporosis and bone fractures among the elderly."

AND

... perhaps the biggest bombshell about vitamin D's effects is about to go off. In June, U.S. researchers will announce the first direct link between cancer prevention and the sunshine vitamin. Their results are nothing short of astounding.

A four-year clinical trial involving 1,200 women found those taking the vitamin had about a 60-per-cent reduction in cancer incidence, compared with those who didn't take it, a drop so large — twice the impact on cancer attributed to smoking — it almost looks like a typographical error.

And in an era of pricey medical advances, the reduction seems even more remarkable because it was achieved with an over-the-counter supplement costing pennies a day.

One of the researchers who made the discovery, professor of medicine Robert Heaney of Creighton University in Nebraska, says vitamin D deficiency is showing up in so many illnesses besides cancer that nearly all disease figures in Canada and the U.S. will need to be re-evaluated. "We don't really know what the status of chronic disease is in the North American population," he said, "until we normalize vitamin D status."

The best source of Vitamin D is sunshine on bare skin with no sunscreen. That's right, NO SUNSCREEN. It only takes about 15 minutes a day with full body exposure for caucasians, and the darker your pigmentation, the longer the exposure you need to produce the same amount of D. People in Northern latitudes need to take supplements as well, since the sun loses strength to create D as you get further from the equator. Yet another reason I belong on an island in the tropics. *sigh

So to all my little vampires and goth kids that I love so much - risk the sunlight for a few minutes a day and show some skin. It's not enough to make you wrinkle or tan, and that's what those compacts of white makeup are for, anyway. These results are too dramatic to ignore.