Anti Aging Health and Nutrition

Posts Tagged ‘vitamin d’

In this video, Carole Baggerly of Grassroots Health sits down with Dr. Cedric Garland of the University of California San Diego School of Medicine’s Moore’s Cancer Center, to discuss his breakthrough paper.

Dr. Garland has introduced a revolutionary new screening for cancer that could eliminate as many as 50,000 cases of breast cancer or colon cancer each year. Using a new computer modeling system that can detect cancer based on Vitamin D levels in the blood, this early detection ability means that physicians will no longer have to wait until a tumor is actually formed in order to detect it.

Vitamin D deficiency is a leading cause of these conditions, and can be overcome through nutritional supplements and exposure to the sun.

Vitamin D is a “fat-soluble” vitamin produced by a small series of foods and produced within the body when ultraviolet rays from the sun hit the skin. A study conducted in Finland, links higher levels of vitamin D to a lower risk of Parkinson’s disease.

The first hypothesis thought out by scientists from the National Institute for Health and Welfare, Helsinki, Finland, was that Parkinson’s disease “may be caused by a continuously inadequate vitamin D status leading to a chronic loss of dopaminergic neurons in the brain.”

The study was published in the July issue of Archives of Neurology, and by the end of the 29-year period, in which 3,173 Finnish men and women (between the ages of 50-79) free of Parkinson’s were followed, 50 of them had acquired the illness.

The researchers said Vitamin D “has been shown to exert a protective effect on the brain through antioxidant activities, regulation of calcium levels, detoxification, modulation of the immune system and enhanced conduction of electricity through neurons,” but still haven’t been able to clarify how this nutrient influences the risk of developing Parkinson’s disease.

Finland has limited amounts of sunlight, and so its population has constantly low vitamin D levels. After considering other elements such as the body mass of each subject and their physical activity, the subjects with the highest levels of vitamin D were found to have 67% lower risk of developing the illness than those with the lowest levels of vitamin D.

Many Americans also suffer from low Vitamin D levels, due to limited exposure to sunlight due to skin cancer concerns. Vitamin D supplements are recommended to prevent Vitamin D deficiency, which is linked to a number of health concerns including osteoporosis, autoimmune diseases, hypertension, muscle weakness and brain health.