(From HealthDay News) — Pregnant women with low levels of vitamin D may be putting their children at risk for language difficulties, Australian researchers report.

Taking vitamin D supplements during pregnancy may relieve the problem, they suggest.

“Adequate vitamin D levels among pregnant women may be important for the optimal development of their baby,” said lead researcher Andrew Whitehouse, an associate professor and reader in developmental psychopathology at the Telethon Institute for Child Health Research at the University of Western Australia. “However, it is important for the findings of this study to be replicated before any strong conclusions are made.”

Vitamin D levels among pregnant women have decreased steadily over the past 20 years, most likely because of less exposure to sunlight, Whitehouse said.

“The effects of lower maternal vitamin D levels on the developing offspring is not fully understood,” he said. “The current study found that women with vitamin D insufficiency during pregnancy have an increased risk of having a child with developmental language difficulties.” Read the rest of this entry

This abstract below looked at the absorption of Vitamin D as it relates to the type of fats we consume.  It also only studied people 65 and older so we can only conclude this applies to seniors, however we can make an assumption that it may apply to everyone.   The bottom line is that you don’t want to take Vitamin D with say just some fish oils.  You need some good fat.   Olive oil, sesame oil, coconut, avocado would be great fats to have with Vitamin D.

This is important to know as I some people will just take a vitamin D with a fish oil in the morning.   The absorption will be much lower this way than taken with a complete meal.

Read the rest of this entry

There is a study making headlines today that we do not need more than 600IU of vitamin D per day. You probably have seen the headlines. What is ridiculous is that this study only looked at bone health as a marker and ignored the thousands of other metabolic functions that vitamin D plays. Ignore the headlines – take your vitamin D and get it measured properly!

I’ll let the experts reply to this article, but I cut and pasted below a response to this study from the Vitamin D Council.

(Do get your vitamin D levels checked, but when you do make sure you do not take any in supplementation form for at least 2-3 days prior to the blood draw. Also it is the 25(OH)D level that is important although in some people the ratio of D2:D3 may be important such as some autoimmune diseases)

========

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.

Read the rest of this entry

For many years alternative MDs and practitioners have been against the use of a class of drugs known as bisphosphonates for improving bone density. The most popular bisphosphonates is Fosamax. The bones in our body are constantly breaking down and reforming. It is said by some that every 7 years you have a new skeleton. Bones are dynamic and living not static structures – hence lies the problem with taking bisphosphonates long term. Bones are broken down by cells called osteoclasts and new bone is created by cells called osteoblasts. Bisphosphonates block the formation of osteoclasts so that bone cannot be broken down. This most definitely will increase bone density and in the short run reduce fracture risk. However can you see what the long term consequences of this are? It creates brittle bones. The bone cells become dried out because they should have died and been replaced by new cells, but the bisphosphonates prevented the destruction of old cells. Another study was just released that showed long term use of bisphosphonates increases fracture risk.
Read the rest of this entry

For a few years now I’ve always taken Vitamin D during the winter and felt it helped reduce the incidence and severity of colds I would get.   Now a study just published shows that giving vitamin D to school children reduced the incidence of influenza.   We should all be having our Vitamin D levels checked, especially if we are one to get a lot of colds each year.    Taking 1000-2000IU/day through the winter may be your best bet if you cannot get your blood tested.   There is almost no risk of developing any toxicity at 2000IU/day, unless you already had high levels of D in your blood.

Read the rest of this entry

For a few years now I’ve always taken Vitamin D during the winter and felt it helped reduce the incidence and severity of colds I would get.   Now a study just published shows that giving vitamin D to school children reduced the incidence of influenza.   We should all be having our Vitamin D levels checked, especially if we are one to get a lot of colds each year.    Taking 1000-2000IU/day through the winter may be your best bet if you cannot get your blood tested.   There is almost no risk of developing any toxicity at 2000IU/day, unless you already had high levels of D in your blood.

Read the rest of this entry

More than a decade ago (even just a few years ago) alternative MDs that used supplements and suggested patients take Vitamin D above the RDA of 400IU/day were called quacks.    The inaccurate ‘truth’ stated over and over again is that above 400IU/day you can get Vitamin D toxicity.    Read the rest of this entry

I know so many friends, especially ones with young kids, that have such a fear of sunlight. We need sun and it is my belief that children need to be in the sun, not coated with chemicals that are toxic and cause cancer! Yes sunscreen can cause cancer because we are lathering on chemicals that then cause oxidative damage to our DNA. The current medical thinking is that the most important reason we want to be in the sun is to increase our Vitamin D levels. Michael Holick MD a researcher at Boston University (an alma mata of mine) has a great presentation about Vitamin D and sunlight. Read the rest of this entry

When people want to reduce their fracture risk the first thing most people think about is calcium.  However there is much more to reducing fractures than just taking calcium. There is plenty of research to show benefits to vitamin D, strontium, boron, silicon, magnesium and other trace minerals for increasing bone density and reducing fracture risk.    In addition, one vitamin that you do not hear too much about in the mainstream media for fracture reduction is Vitamin K. Read the rest of this entry

There is an increasing awareness how a large percentage of the population is vitamin D deficient and the ill health effects caused by inadequate Vitamin D levels. If someones blood work comes back as below 30ng/ml I usually dose them with at least 10,000IU/day for 3 weeks then cut down to 5000IU/day for a couple of weeks then wait a week of no supplementation and retest. I usually hear comments about vitamin D toxicity, but as BU researcher Michael Holick has stated – “doctors have never seen a vitamin D toxicity – it is all theory”. Read the rest of this entry