Steve Gibson (34:07)
Yeah, yeah, healthy adult residents of Washington county, Maryland, who provided samples of serum, meaning their blood. Between 1974 and 1975, serum samples were thawed for all cases of colon cancer. So what happened is decades later, this study was done. So serum samples from back in 74, 75 were thawed for all cases of colon cancer and for two controls per case, meaning other people who did not have colon cancer and matched for age, race, sex, county of residence and date of serum collection. Sera, meaning plural of serum blood samples were analyzed blindly for 25 hydroxy vitamin D. Okay, that's that main circulating vitamin D, which is what's measured. That's the output of the liver before it goes into the kidney. That's sort of the storage form. Individuals whose 25 hydroxy vitamin D levels were greater than 20 nanograms per milliliter. And I'll talk about these numbers in a second. Get this. Greater than 20 nanograms per milliliter had 1/3 the risk of colon cancer compared with 1/3 the risk of colon cancer compared with those with lower concentrations. Okay, so there's one, a different study. This is from the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2004, reads most to give some context, I'll sort of give a little more coming into this. Most humans depend on sun exposure to satisfy their requirements for vitamin D. Solar ultraviolet B photons, I.e. uVB, are absorbed by 7 dehydrocholesterol in the skin leading to its transformation to pre vitamin D3, which is rapidly converted to vitamin D3. Season, latitude, time of day, skin pigmentation, aging, sunscreen use and glass. That is the presence of glass between you and the sun since UVB is blocked by glass all influence the cutaneous production of vitamin D3. Once formed, vitamin D3 is metabolized in the liver to 25 hydroxy vitamin D and then in the kidney to its biologically active Form 125 Dihydroxy vitamin D. Vitamin D deficiency is an unrecognized epidemic among both children and adults in the United States. Vitamin D deficiency not only causes rickets among children but also precipitates and exacerbates osteoporosis among adults and causes the painful bone disease osteomalacia. Vitamin D deficiency has been associated with increased risks of deadly cancers, cardiovascular disease, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis and type 1 diabetes mellitus. Maintaining blood concentrations of 25 hydroxy vitamin D above 80 nanomoles per liter, which is in the literature. Sometimes they describe the concentration as nanomoles per liter but often also as nanograms per milliliter. The conversion is 2.5. So 80 nanomoles per liter is about 30 nanograms per milliliter. Says not only is the maintenance greater than that important for maximizing intestinal calcium absorption but also may be important for providing the extra renal 1 alpha hydroxylase that is present in most tissues to produce 125 dehydroxy vitamin D3. What he's saying there is that this is necessary for vitamin D to act directly on all these other tissues rather than being used for calcium regulation. Calcium homostasis Although chronic excessive exposure to sunlight increases the risk of non melanoma skin cancer, the avoidance of all direct sun exposure increases the risk of a vitamin D deficiency which can have serious consequences. Monitoring serum 25 hydroxy vitamin D concentrations yearly should help reveal vitamin D deficiencies. So that's sort of a bit of overview, but here's another. This is a this is titled Prospective study of predictors of Vitamin D Status and Cancer Incidence and Mortality in Men. And I'm going to skip the preamble and just. And I have all of this. I've got links to all of this on the page at GRC. It says from multivariate models an increment of 25 nanomoles per liter in predicted vitamin D level was associated with a 17% reduction in total cancer incidence. I got lost my track here. Oh incidence. And they go into the statistics. A 29% reduction in total cancer mortality with a relative risks of 0.71. That is if you had an increase in serum D levels and a 45% reduction in digestive system cancer mortality, 0.55. And then they summarize showing that the results were similar when they controlled further for body mass index and physical activity level. So basically saying that when all other influences were removed, vitamin D level in the blood had a direct bearing on cancer incidence. And there's like studies which describe similarly that higher levels of vitamin D are connected to lower levels of many different types of cancer. Pancreatic colon, rectal stomach, prostate, lung, breast, bladder, uterine, esophageal, kidney, multiple myeloma. I mean, it just goes on and on and on. There was one doctor who is at the ataScadero, he's an MD and psychiatrist at the Atascadero State Mental Hospital. John Cannell, because he knew that vitamin D positively influenced vitamin D mood. You know, we've all heard of seasonal affective disorder where people get kind of moody and gloomy in the winter, not surprisingly, when there's much less exposure to sunlight and when the sun is at a greater angle, not as often or as much overhead. It turns out that the atmosphere absorbs uvb. And so if the sun is not almost directly overhead, you're not getting much vitamin D. So he had his ward on vitamin D just for its psychological benefits. A flu went through the hospital that was bad enough that wards needed to be quarantined, he said. I've seen two interviews where he mentions how the ward to one side of him had such a flu outbreak that it was quarantined. The war did the other side of him and the ward across the hall as well as on the floor below. He knew that his patients had had social interactions with the inmates in the other wards and that the nurses were cross covering his ward and the other ward. So he figured that his people were similarly being exposed to this influenza. Not one single patient that he was treating in his ward came down with the flu, despite the fact that it was epidemic and to the level of quarantining. And now as a consequence, everyone at Atascadero receives vitamin D supplementation because of the strong evidence for its immunizational effect. So I mentioned to you when we were briefly talking about this last week, that there's even a theory now about where Caucasians came from, because it is believed that humans evolved in Africa with deep, dark, melanin rich skin which balanced the, the, the strength of the equatorial sun. It is now we understand that this hormone, which unfortunately has been mislabeled a vitamin to its, you know, I mean, which is, I think, largely responsible for a lot of people thinking, oh, well, you know, I probably get enough of this in my diet. I'm not going to worry about it. This, this hormone was, was, has always been generated by the sun's UVB interaction with our skin. And as we evolved, our population grew. We began to migrate away from equatorial Africa, north. What we now believe happened is that as we left the equator, the UVB radiation that we evolved under. I mean, literally just like oxygen, I mean, that important. You know, as I run through, I look at all these things that we are beginning to understand are relating to low levels of vitamin D. You might think, wait a minute, you know, how can, how can vitamin D fix that? Well, that's asking the question wrong. It's that we always had much higher levels of vitamin D in our blood than we do now. Because we evolved naked in the sun. I mean, and even now, here we are in industrialized mode. Basically living in dark UVB blackout caves called our homes and offices. Where no UVB radiation gets in. Where we're getting much less sunlight than we were even a couple hundred years ago when we were out farming and getting exposure to the sun. And of course, unfortunately, even more recently. There's been a great public relations campaign warning about the dangers of skin cancer. You must put on sunscreen when you go outside. So there's actually been many other things even recently which have begun to happen which confuse people. For example, autism has. It's been noted that it's on the rise. One theory is that, oh, well, we're just diagnosing it more. We're more aware of it. So we're more, you know, we're looking more closely. However, what they have found is that the incidence of autism directly correlates with the latitude of the mother of autistic children during pregnancy. The further away mothers are from the equator, the greater incidence of autism in their children.
