Pope Francis

Wednesday, 9 December 2015

The Man may not despise his bodily life (Catechism of the Catholic Church, §364) - Health, Vitamin D

Blood levels of vitamin D are associated with lower incidence of most cancers, heart disease, and dementia. Vitamin D protects against brittle bones and auto-immune diseases and dramatically lowers the incidence of cold and flu. Also “asthma, diabetes, stroke, multiple sclerosis, and cognitive decline.” The RDA of vitamin D is absurdly low, and also inconsistent with the recommended blood levels. Many people have to take thousands of IU daily to get their blood levels into the ‘normal range’ of 30-74 ng/ml, especially in the winter when there is no sun to supplement dietary vitamin D.

 Vitamin D deficiency is a public health concern. Mediated by classical endocrine effects, vitamin D deficiency is causally linked with bone and calcium disorders. Non-endocrine actions of vitamin D are also widely recognised and these effects are mediated by local tissue activation of vitamin D bringing about intracrine effects in non-classical sites. Supported by large volumes of observational studies linking low circulating vitamin D with negative outcomes for many common disease states, there is growing interest that vitamin D may be central to the pathology and outcomes of many common diseases, including cardiovascular, cancer and autoimmune conditions. This article explores the quality of evidence linking vitamin D and various disease outcomes, and furthermore describes some of the cellular and molecular mechanisms of vitamin D action that may help explain some of the incongruity of data observed in observational versus interventional studies of vitamin D supplementation. 


(See more in: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26634683)

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