As usual, I was innocently minding my own business one day when I got a message from a man I have long respected. His name is Paul Stitt and he founded Natural Ovens in Manitowoc. Ever since the day when I read my first book attacking white flour, sugar and white rice, I had been aware of the value of watching what I eat. I had stumbled across Stitt's book "Beating the Food Giants" about trying to make a bread that was as wholesome as possible and still survive economically.
That day, Stitt's message was about vitamin D. His 37 year old son had broken his thigh bone in a biking accident. That's a strong bone and yet the doc said his son was suffering from osteoporosis. Stitt was amazed. The son drank milk, ate cheese and seemed to have a diet with enough calcium. Stitt is a biochemist and he started reading the literature. His master's is from U. of Wis. - Madison, where vitamin D was first isolated. His reading took Paul to research and publications showing that the vitamin D situation was a poor one.
People at latitudes out of the tropics don't have much sunshine, which the body uses to make vitamin D. No matter where they are, people are afraid of skin cancer and use sun lotion to block the sun from their skin. At many latitudes, including most of the US, there are months when it is too cold to leave the skin bare. Modern life is mostly situated inside, in the kitchen, at a desk, in front of the tv or game console. Besides, all that, as people age, they lose some of the ability to make vitamin D.
Research is uncovering and re-discovering connection between vitamin D and many sort of health and un-health. This page from the University of Oregon http://lpi.oregonstate.edu/infocenter/vitamins/vitaminD/ seems to be a good one at summarizing the many important relations between D and the rest of the body and its functions.
After reading Stitt's message, I asked my doctor for a test of my level of the vitamin. The analytic test ("25-hydroxy") is not a common one and it takes a little while to get results on it. When I conferred with my doctor about the test, he told me something that really grabbed my attention. He said that he had just returned from a medical conference. He admitted that, given my results, he would have informed me that I had too much D in my blood, HAD WE CONFERRED BEFORE HIS RECENT CONFERENCE. However, at the conference, he had learned more about the vitamin and our need for it. With what he learned at the conference, he needed to tell me that my D level was too low!! Same result, too high and then too low??!! You don't have to be a statistician to realize such non-overlapping, such instability of opinion, of standards is a red flag.
Over the next few years, I read everything I could about vitamin D. My doctor has become known in this area for his advocacy of getting one's 25-hydroxy result into the 50's or higher. He has sent me to tanning booths and overseen my taking 6000 units a day for a couple of years. Meanwhile, our local pharmacy has begun selling 1000 unit vitamin D pills right along side the 400 unit pills, which has been the standard for decades.
I love taking 1000 units pills daily and taking one chocolate of 2000 units from Debbie's D-Rich Foods, which was started by Stitt but has since been sold. http://www.drichfoods.com/
I love taking 1000 units pills daily and taking one chocolate of 2000 units from Debbie's D-Rich Foods, which was started by Stitt but has since been sold. http://www.drichfoods.com/
Lynn only takes the pills, since her level is high enough with just them and the chocolates, while tasty, provide 70 calories she doesn't want.
Some people say that the old 400 unit standard was in place because it was an amount that prevented rickets in children but that getting rickets is on the very low level of vitamin D. Much current research implies have enough in one's body does way more than merely prevent rickets. Look into the problem, get enough D, which usually means supplements since foods can't do and see what you think.
