Vitamin D is essential for bone health, but that doesn’t mean you have to risk the effects of sun damage just to get your daily dose. UV rays can cause premature aging of the skin and skin cancer, whereas dietary sources of Vitamin D don’t.
Your body must have vitamin D to absorb calcium and promote bone growth. Too little vitamin D results in soft bones in children (rickets) and fragile, misshapen bones in adults (osteomalacia). You also need vitamin D for other important body functions.
Vitamin D deficiency has now been linked to breast cancer, colon cancer, prostate cancer, heart disease, depression, weight gain, and other maladies. These studies show that people with higher levels of vitamin D have a lower risk of disease, although they do not definitively prove that lack of vitamin D causes disease — or that vitamin D supplements would lower risk.
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COPENHAGEN, Denmark — Two leading experts in the field of vitamin D agreed to disagree yesterday here at the 2013 European Congress on Endocrinology during a lighthearted debate on the subject of whether or not everyone needs more vitamin D.
But their arguments were backed up by some serious science, and they both concurred that there are certain groups of people in whom it is necessary to ensure that vitamin-D levels are sufficient, such as pregnant women and those at risk for or with osteoporosis. And they also agreed on one way people can obtain more vitamin D: by going out in the sun for 30 minutes per day.
Where they differed, however, was that the vitamin-D proponent, Chantal Mathieu, MD, from Catholic University, Leuven, Belgium, said the list of people who need sufficient vitamin D “is so long that it really just makes more sense to give everyone small doses.”
In the opposite corner, however, Mark Cooper, MD, from University Hospital, Birmingham, United Kingdom, argued that it is really only necessary to supplement specific, at-risk groups of people. “I am an investigator in randomized clinical trials of vitamin D, and I have nothing personally against [it], and I use it in my patients. But I tend to give it to people who actually need it, and that doesn’t really include most of us,” he observed.
And Dr. Cooper — who noted that there is a huge sector of the scientific community that is “evangelical” in its pro–vitamin-D stance — warned that physicians have been here before, with many other nutrients that subsequently, in large intervention trials, turned out to have a null effect or even be harmful. In fact, there is already evidence of risks with supplements of vitamin D from randomized clinical trials, with no evidence of benefit, he argued.
“Vitamin D — we all need more? Most of us don’t, and more could actually do more harm than good.”
What Does Vitamin D Do, and How Is “Deficiency” Defined?
Dr. Mathieu said the key role of vitamin D “is to promote resorption of calcium via the gut. One big lesson from all of the literature is that vitamin-D deficiency is not only bad because it’s vitamin-D deficiency, but it also creates a bad calcemic status.”
Vitamin-D deficiency is generally defined as a level of less than 20 ng/mL (<50 nm/L), and there are correlations in large observational studies “indicating that if you are vitamin-D deficient you get more cancer, especially colon cancer, you get more cardiovascular diseases, your immune system doesn’t function properly, and overall you have a higher risk of dying,” she stressed.
Going out in the sun is one option to boost vitamin D, she explained, noting that “even the dermatologists in Australia have reversed their zero-tolerance stance on the sun” in the past 2 years and conceded that 15 to 30 minutes per day in the sun “is allowed because it gives benefits.” Nevertheless, the benefits must be balanced with the risks, she added, noting that “it’s exactly the same wavelength of UV that you need to make vitamin D that also causes skin damage, aging, and skin cancers. So go back to nature and expose yourself to the sun, but do it with caution.”
And she noted that UV rays in Northern Hemisphere winters are not strong enough to produce adequate levels of vitamin D, regardless of how long is spent in the sun. In addition, darker-skinned people, particularly those who do not expose themselves to the sun or who cover themselves, are particularly at risk. “We still see rickets in my country, in dark-skinned children who are exclusively breast-fed and whose mothers avoid the sun or are covered,” she observed.
“You can also take it from foods,” she explained, but added that the “only really rich food source” of vitamin D is cod-liver oil. “Salmon and mackerel from the ocean is a good source”; however, most of this fish is now bred in farms, and farm-bred fish do not have a lot of vitamin D.
If our skin cannot make enough vitamin D under the UV, just give vitamin D, give the hormone.Dr. Chantal Mathieu
“So what do we do? We are endocrinologists. If the thyroid fails, we give thyroid-hormone substitution. If our skin cannot make enough vitamin D under the UV, just give vitamin D, give the hormone itself.”
This News is brought to You Courtesy of Dr. Mark Bishara and The Paragon Plastic Surgery & Med Spa in Mansfield and Southlake, TX
Low Vitamin D Tied to Aging Problems: A new study has found that low vitamin D levels in people over 55 are associated with an inability to perform ordinary tasks of daily life. Dutch researchers studied two groups of older people – one of 725 men and women aged 55 to 65, and another of 1,237 older than 65 – to see if they could walk up or down a 15-step staircase, dress and undress, stand from a sitting position, cut their toenails, walk outside unaided for five minutes, and use their own or public transportation. Then they did blood tests for vitamin D levels. After controlling for factors including age, physical activity and chronic diseases, they found that in both groups, a vitamin D level below 20 nanograms per milliliter was associated with an increased number of disabilities compared with those with a normal level (above 30).
Why Breast Cancer Is More Likely to Kill Black Women: A diagnosis of breast cancer is more likely to lead to early death for black women than for white women, a disparity that’s mainly the result of having more health problems before cancer develops, new research shows. Of the black women on Medicare who were told they had breast cancer, 55.9% were still alive five years later. That compared with 68.8% of white women who were the same age, lived in the same area and were diagnosed in the same year, according to a study published in Wednesday’s edition of the Journal of the American Medical Assn. But the more that white women had in common with black women, the smaller the discrepancy became.
This news is brought to you courtesy for Dr. Mark Bishara and The Paragon Med Spa
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Cosmetic Surgeon Dr. Mark A. Bishara, M.D., serving Fort Worth, Arlington, and the surrounding area.
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