Vitamin D Benefits

We hear about vitamin C all the time; how it’s great for colds, how it’s superb at lowering the histamine levels in our blood and so helping us reduce allergy symptoms…

But when do we hear about the health benefits vitamin D?

Right now is the answer, because the reading I’ve done lately has convinced me that my advice up to now needs adding to and including the contribution from the “sunshine vitamin”, vitamin D.

The first news is that what we call “vitamin D” is not a vitamin at all. The technical part of the definition of a vitamin includes the fact that we need to eat particular foods to get it and if we don’t we suffer some symptoms. So with vitamin C, if we don’t eat enough fruit we get weakened bones, nails and skin. Vitamin D on the other hand the body can make just by being exposed to the sun….

….which of course is why we call it the sunshine vitamin in the first place.

So really then the “sunshine vitamin” is really a hormone. I know that’s a surprise so I’ll say it again, “Vitamin D is a hormone”.

Hormones are control chemicals. The body uses hormones to make big changes so we can expect vitamin D – and nobody is going to rename it now, we’ll keep on calling it “vitamin D – as I was saying, we can expect vitamin D to be powerful.

So what does it do, really?

Well we know it helps us avoid the bone disease of rickets. This was common even in rich countries early in 20th century. As the atmosphere was cleaned up by legislating against the use of coal fires, more sunshine got through to street level and children playing outside received enough vitamin D to virtually abolish rickets.

This is like vitamin C guarding us against scurvy. OK fine, now what else does it do?

More About Vitamin D – the allergy connection

There are hints of the deeper powers of D all around. The Wiki tells us, “The molecular basis for thinking vitamin D has the potential to prevent cancer lies in its role in a wide range of cellular mechanisms central to the development of cancer”

And

“Low levels of vitamin D has been associated with cognitive and behavioural effects; low levels of vitamin D may affect general brain development and functioning and has been associated with seasonal affective disorder, Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia”.

This is serious stuff here and I’m only going to take it that D has powers that we don’t quite understand and we probably need to up our dosage, but I still want to find a firm link with Allergies.

I first found a connection with Asthma. Here is one article “Is vitamin D deficiency to blame for the asthma epidemic?” from http://u.nu/8dxzd

Really this should be enough to satisfy anyone because the mechanism of asthma and allergies is via histamine and is essentially the same but I wanted a study explicitly on Allergies.

This study includes Allergies and Asthma “Maternal vitamin D intake during pregnancy is inversely associated with asthma and allergic rhinitis in 5-year-old children” in other words the more vitamin D was taken by the child’s mum during pregnancy the less chance the children have of getting Allergies and Asthma. I thought that was pretty amazing!

And then this really got my attention: “Season of birth and food allergy in children.” http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20408340

What this says is that suppose we reckon that vitamin D from the sun is anti-inflammatory and against allergy we should be able to notice that kids born in the winter will get more food allergies. (Because they get less vitamin D)

So they did the study. They looked at 5 years of kids visiting 3 hospitals in Boston, Massachusetts for food allergy problems and let’s give you the actual words in the study

“CONCLUSIONS: Food allergy is more common in Boston children born in the fall and winter seasons.”

That nails it!!

They continue and end with this, “We propose that these findings are mediated by seasonal differences in UV-B exposure. These results add support to the hypothesis that seasonal fluctuations in sunlight and perhaps vitamin D may be involved in the pathogenesis of food allergy.”

Removing the scientific gobbledegook, this says that if you have a low level of vitamin D in your blood you are more likely to suffer from food allergies and if you want to suffer less then raise your vitamin D level!
The study of 1002 children showed clearly that more food allergies were suffered by kids with less vitamin D. Or to put it the other way round, kids with higher level of vitamin D in their blood were less likely to have Food Allergies

So now you are wondering how to raise your vitamin D level and Beat Allergies?

Keep Reading and I’ll tell ya…

Really there are only 3 ways to get your vitamin D

1.    sunshine – the easy and free way
2.    Diet – eat foods with enough Vitamin D in them
3.    Supplements – take a well formulated capsule or even a liquid

Let’s put some detail in here…

1.    This way depends both on the weather, the season and the amount of clothing you wear so unless you live in a very sunny place all year round it is probably best to use Diet and or supplements
2.    Diet – do you like mushrooms or mackerel? Strangely enough mushrooms and especially Japanese mushrooms have large amounts of Vitamin D. Oily fish and Cod liver oil is well known for it’s D. Some folks avoid this due to fears about pollution of the seas with sewage and metal pollution
3.    Supplements – take a minimum of 1,000 IU of D3. You can get these at lots of places but here is one connected to the Vitamin D Council

Or if you prefer to shop at Amazon check this one out

There’s plenty of others but this looks good to me.

All The Best

Alex