After 13 year of silence, the quasi governmental agency, the Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) Food and Nutrition Board (FNB), today recommended that a three-pound premature infant take virtually the same amount of vitamin D as a 300 pound pregnant woman. While that 400 IU/day dose is close to adequate for infants, 600 IU/day in pregnant women will do nothing to help the three childhood epidemics most closely associated with gestational and early childhood vitamin D deficiencies: asthma, auto-immune disorders, and, as recently reported in the largest pediatric journal in the world, autism. Professor Bruce Hollis of the Medical University of South Carolina has shown pregnant and lactating women need at least 5,000 IU/day, not 600.
The FNB also reported that vitamin D toxicity might occur at an intake of 10,000 IU/day (250 micrograms/day), although they could produce no reproducible evidence that 10,000 IU/day has ever caused toxicity in humans and only one poorly conducted study indicating 20,000 IU/day may cause mild elevations in serum calcium, but not clinical toxicity.
Viewed with different measure, this FNB report recommends that an infant should take 10 micrograms/day (400 IU) and a pregnant woman 15 micrograms/day (600 IU). As a single, 30 minute dose of summer sunshine gives adults more than 10,000 IU (250 micrograms), the FNB is apparently also warning that natural vitamin D input – as occurred from the sun before the widespread use of sunscreen – is dangerous. That is, the FNB is implying that God does not know what she is doing.
Disturbingly, this FNB committee focused on bone health, just like they did 14 years ago. They ignored the thousands of studies from the last ten years that showed higher doses of vitamin D helps: heart health, brain health, breast health, prostate health, pancreatic health, muscle health, nerve health, eye health, immune health, colon health, liver health, mood health, skin health, and especially fetal health. Tens of millions of pregnant women and their breast-feeding infants are severely vitamin D deficient, resulting in a great increase in the medieval disease, rickets. The FNB report seems to reason that if so many pregnant women have low vitamin D blood levels then it must be OK because such low levels are so common. However, such circular logic simply represents the cave man existence (never exposed to the light of the sun) of most modern-day pregnant women.
Hence, if you want to optimize your vitamin D levels – not just optimize the bone effect – supplementing is crucial. But it is almost impossible to significantly raise your vitamin D levels when supplementing at only 600 IU/day (15 micrograms). Pregnant women taking 400 IU/day have the same blood levels as pregnant women not taking vitamin D; that is, 400 IU is a meaninglessly small dose for pregnant women. Even taking 2,000 IU/day of vitamin D will only increase the vitamin D levels of most pregnant women by about 10 points, depending mainly on their weight. Professor Bruce Hollis has shown that 2,000 IU/day does not raise vitamin D to healthy or natural levels in either pregnant or lactating women. Therefore supplementing with higher amounts – like 5000 IU/day – is crucial for those women who want their fetus to enjoy optimal vitamin D levels, and the future health benefits that go along with it.
For example, taking only two of the hundreds of recently published studies: Professor Urashima and colleagues in Japan, gave 1,200 IU/day of vitamin D3 for six months to Japanese 10-year-olds in a randomized controlled trial. They found vitamin D dramatically reduced the incidence of influenza A as well as the episodes of asthma attacks in the treated kids while the placebo group was not so fortunate. If Dr. Urashima had followed the newest FNB recommendations, it is unlikely that 400 IU/day treatment arm would have done much of anything and some of the treated young teenagers may have come to serious harm without the vitamin D. Likewise, a randomized controlled prevention trial of adults by Professor Joan Lappe and colleagues at Creighton University, which showed dramatic improvements in the health of internal organs, used more than twice the FNB’s new adult recommendations.
Finally, the FNB committee consulted with 14 vitamin D experts and – after reading these 14 different reports – the FNB decided to suppress their reports. Many of these 14 consultants are either famous vitamin D researchers, like Professor Robert Heaney at Creighton or, as in the case of Professor Walter Willett at Harvard, the single best-known nutritionist in the world. So, the FNB will not tell us what Professors Heaney and Willett thought of their new report? Why not?
Today, the Vitamin D Council directed our attorney to file a federal Freedom of Information (FOI) request to the IOM’s FNB for the release of these 14 reports.
Most of my friends, hundreds of patients, and thousands of readers of the Vitamin D Council newsletter (not to mention myself), have been taking 5,000 IU/day for up to eight years. Not only have they reported no significant side-effects, indeed, they have reported greatly improved health in multiple organ systems. My advice, especially for pregnant women: continue taking 5,000 IU/day until your 25(OH)D is between 50-80 ng/mL (the vitamin D blood levels obtained by humans who live and work in the sun and the mid-point of the current reference ranges at all American laboratories). Gestational vitamin D deficiency is not only associated with rickets, but a significantly increased risk of neonatal pneumonia, a doubled risk for preeclampsia, a tripled risk for gestational diabetes, and a quadrupled risk for primary cesarean section.
Today, the FNB has failed millions of pregnant women whose as yet unborn babies will pay the price. Let us hope the FNB will comply with the spirit of “transparency” by quickly responding to our Freedom of Information requests.
John Cannell, MD
The Vitamin D Council
1241 Johnson Avenue, #134
Tags: vitamin D
The December 2010 ezine edition of The Health Gazette will be published as scheduled tomorrow.
This month Dr Jenny Tylee has a brief article titled Treating Chilblains. We also have Part 4 of our series on The Dimensions of Health.
Tags: chilblains, Health Gazette Ezine
The November 2010 ezine edition of The Health Gazette has been published as scheduled today. Subscribers will find a copy in their inbox and it will soon be in the archive.
This month Dr Jenny Tylee has a brief article titled Garlic – A Wonderful Herb. We also have Part 3 of our series on The Dimensions of Health.
With Shakespeare’s insight Juliet says to Romeo:
“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.”
There is wisdom in this idea when applied to the context of Romeo and Juliet. However, naming and language are very powerful tools for shaping people’s minds and their thinking and understanding.
Consider “holistic” health for example. What atrocious spelling. Instead of using wholistic we find holistic is most widely used.
Whereas wholstic might suggest whole-istic, or wholeness, completeness or something which is all-encompassing, holistic suggests almost the opposite. To me, it looks more like hole-istic, which suggests emptiness, being incomplete or having something missing. Making this label for an understanding of or approach to health look more like a hole than a whole is a tragic irony. Holistic health is about wholeness!
The Western tradition is particularistic and reductionist and this is represented in Western scientific thinking. It is also deeply rooted in Western language. An example occurs almost every time someone attempts to explain holistic concepts when they begin with a list of parts, never quite able to explain the idea of the whole in very satisfying ways. Consider health for example, typically people say that the holistic approach combines the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual aspects (or parts or components or dimensions etc) of a person. Others might add the intrapersonal and interpersonal or individual and social aspects. Notice the lists? See the parts of a person all stipulated? That reflects particularistic language and thinking.
Now here’s the real kicker. Particularism is virtually the opposite of holism. So quite clearly, it is a tough job to try to understand and teach holism when restricted to the language and ideas of particularism.
However, it is very important that we don’t give up. We must at least try our best. Why? Well, because people are actually whole beings, not collections of parts. No list will ever be comprehensive enough to capture the whole. As the definition of holism indicates, the whole is always more than the sum of the parts.
It is precisely because people are whole that holistic therapies, even if they seem strange to those unfamiliar with them, can be so effective. The holistic therapist (that is, any therapist of any type who recognises the wholeness of people and knows how to apply that knowledge effectively) may recognise that what presents as a physical illness is largely the result of an emotional problem, or that what presents as an apparent psychological problem is actually a physical (perhaps nutritional) problem. Equally, suitably skilled holistic practitioners may recognise that the key to solving a health problem means looking beyond simple physical and psychosocial viewpoints.
After all, the very suggestion that there is a strict divide between physical and mental is only an idea, one that simply reflects the strong Cartesian dualism in underlying Western philosophy. Whereas mental activity might be reducible to energy transactions, some may say, clearly the body is made of physical matter. Yet, more recently physicists claim that all the matter is ultimately just a collection of energy patterns and that, ultimately, absolutely everything is made of energy.
Nicola Siddons succinctly explains the physicist David Bohm’s way of seeing everything, including yourself, as different types of energy. This may still talk about body, mind and spirit since this type of language and thought is pervasive, but it does help by beginning to show ways in which even the Western-trained mind can conceive of an underlying oneness of what appears to be separateness and this is an important step in being able to grapple with the concept of wholeness.
As Nicola Siddons says at Holistic Healing Central, “So the idea of emotional release through massage or acupuncture is not particularly strange – and if you see the physical and emotional as just a spectrum of energy, it’s easy to see how physical disease may be linked to emotional and psychological problems.”
Nicola, who practices holistic healing, goes on to say: “Your body appears to create tension maps – almost like a physical hard drive of past events. You store mental and emotional trauma at a cellular level and if you don’t resolve those issues they often result in physical illness. Within holistic medicine you are trying to move to a better state of health by removing energy blocks in your system. These blockages create mental, emotional and physical symptoms.”
Well put. It seems we are in good hands with practitioners such as Nicola Siddons. We may have a long way to go in conveying the real concept of holistic health, hampered by restricted ways of thinking and inadequate language, but this only slows progress, it does not stop quality practitioners from getting on with healing.
Tags: holistic health, Nicola Siddons
The October 2010 ezine edition of The Health Gazette has been published as scheduled today. Subscribers will find a copy in their inbox and it is already in the archive.
This month Dr Jenny Tylee has an interesting article titled The Five Flavours of Herbs. We also have Part 2 of our series on The Dimensions of Health.
Tags: dimensions of health, flavours of herbs, Health Gazette Ezine