Vitamin D Deficiency is Epidemic

Vitamin D is in the news a lot lately. Before you believe too much of what you read in the paper or what you hear on some 24-hour news network blip, you should realize that if you search vitamin D on PubMed to see what has been published in the scientific literature, there are about 60,000 articles available. If you read three a day, it would take about 54 years to dig through what has been published.

Our primary reference is from a clinician's viewpoint, that is someone who likes to see actual improvements in peoples' health and symptoms.

Doctors Like Me Begin to Recognize the Need for More Vitamin D

When it comes to vitamin D, like most doctors, I pretty much ignored it until about 15 years ago. I began to read more about the consequences of vitamin D deficiencies. At first we figured that these deficiencies were probably rare but assumed that taking a couple thousand IU's per day might be a good idea just in case.

Vitamin D Problems Contributes to Autoimmune Problems?

One thing that helped spark an interest in vitamin D was the increase in autoimmune problems that I was seeing in my practice. It was puzzling as to why so many people reported problems like Hashimoto's thyroiditis and other types as well.

My research into autoimmune problems led to references to vitamin D (along with glutathione) being a key modulators of the immune system and therefore being an important component in quieting the autoimmune response.

Amazingly Low Numbers

So I began to order more and more blood tests looking at vitamin D levels. We typically saw values between 15 and 25 when it has been suggested by very conservative references that 50 is a minimum healthy level. Dr. Prendergast in Palo Alto, CA has been using higher levels of vitamin D3 supplementation for many years to treat many types of disorders including heart disease and his office told us that they like to see values closer to 100.

So we began to recommend 5000 IU's of D per day and noticed that even at that dose, some people would have trouble getting a blood levels above 45. We eventually adopted Dr. Prendergast's recommendation of 50,000 once a week and then subsequently added an additional 2000 to 4000 IU's six days a week as well.

Glyphosate Contributes to Vitamin D deficiency

Of course, we had two questions. One was what levels of vitamin D would be healthy and then why did we keep seeing such low levels. Most of life's questions have a multipart answer but one factor may be the increased use of glyphosate in our environment and food. Glyphosate is the active ingredient in the herbicide Roundup and has been shown in some studies to decrease the synthesis and utilization of vitamin D. Glyphosate has been found to be universal in our air, food and water. The additional proliferation of GMO foods has increased the exposure to glyphosate. I have two articles at OVitaminPro.com, one is a three-page summary and the other a 12 page more detailed version. Trust me when I say that you will want to know about glyphosates and how to protect yourself from them.

Cheap and Easy Remedy

Vitamin D is relatively cheap so it isn't a big money maker at OVitaminPro. If we were a pharmaceutical company we would be sure that you read newspaper and magazine articles that recommend that you don't take D3. Our primary goal is to help you get real results from your health efforts and for that reason we routinely recommend:

Pure Encapsulations Vitamin D3 5000

Protocol for Life Balance K2 MK-7 & D3

We can also recommend a trip to the Vitamin D Council to learn more.