Steve Gibson on Vitamin D
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Radio Interview: http://www.grc.com/sn/sn-209.htm August 13, 2009 Security Now, with Leo Laporte
Leo: Steve. Why are you so tan?
Steve: Everyone who's been listening to this podcast for years knows that I focus on code writing and computers and technology. A hobby of mine, which I've become increasingly focused on as I've been aging, is health. It began when I was flying up to visit you in Toronto and appear on Canadian TV with Rogers Cable. I'd be at the airport and seeing people older than I, but not lots older than I, who were having trouble moving around. They were being really careful standing up and sitting down, and moving slowly.
At that point I was probably 50 and today I'm 54. And I remember making a promise with myself that I am not going to be that person when I'm that age. I'm willing to do anything it takes, every single day, so that I'm able to jump around more or less as I do now as I continue aging. My focus is not on trying to live as long as I possibly can. I'm focused on quality of life.
But if you think of a chart that shows your quality of life over time, so that the horizontal axis is your life running from birth to death, and the vertical axis is how you feel, your physical well-being. You can imagine somebody who smokes their whole life, who abuses alcohol and drugs, doesn't take care of himself, might have a relatively straight line decline from birth to death, where they don't age well. My goal would be to keep the slope of that line as horizontal as possible. That is, keep health up as high as I can for as long as I can, and then to have it just drop off a cliff, kill me in a week when it's finally time.
But the point is, from a math standpoint, you want to maximize the area under that curve, because that's the best health you can have for the length of time that you're alive. So my focus on health, which I've now had really to a much greater degree since I turned 50, because it was that I've got the time, I've virtualized GRC, my employees are working at home, I'm able to work with a great deal of freedom. There's no excuse not to exercise, not to make sure I'm eating well, and not to do some research, since I've got the Internet. And it's just an amazing - it makes this information so much more available. So I subscribe to a number of newsletters. And I've been focused on various aspects of health. I pretty much knew about cardio years and years ago and have tried to keep myself in shape.
And what happened, maybe about three months ago, was just sort of bumped on the radar screen were various mentions of Vitamin D, which was not something I'd ever looked at or thought about. I was actually more aware of things like the B vitamins and their importance because modern food processing tends to kill off the B vitamins. They're fragile. So food is fortified basically to put back in what processing kills. And I knew about E and C. And but somehow Vitamin D had never - this is something I had never really looked at very much. But I finally got to a point a couple months ago where it's like, okay, what's going on with this?
And so I began to poke around and do some reading. And I thought, whoa, wait a minute, this is seeming much more significant than I recognized. And probably about four weeks ago, so about four weeks into this, I decided that this was something that I really needed to understand. And I also at some point figured I need to involve my family and friends and ultimately this podcast. So just for one week I need to beg our listeners' indulgence. I'm going to - I want to share what I have learned and see if, for the sake of information, maybe it will resonate with some people. Maybe at some point in the future when other information surfaces they'll go, hey, wait a minute, I remember Steve talking about this. He thought it was important. These other people think it's important. Maybe that will be enough to catalyze some thought.
So there's so much that's important about this. First of all, there's a real problem with it in that it's not a vitamin at all. Never was.
Leo: What is the definition of a vitamin?
Steve: By definition, a vitamin is something which you do not make endogenously. That is, your body does not make it. It's something that you must acquire through nutrition from outside sources.
Leo: It's an amino acid, too, right, isn't that what it means? Vital amino acid? No, maybe not.
Steve: I don't know where the word comes from. But I do know that it's got to be a dietary source. Well, what happened was that it was discovered because of a chronic deficiency in an unknown substance. As we became more industrialized and people moved from rural settings into cities, and especially as children were employed in buildings, like in factories, they began getting rickets, which is a severe underdevelopment of skeletal bones. Now, what happened was that there was the discovery that cod liver oil cured this malady that children had. And so for generations parents, mothers, would, like, force their kids to have a tablespoon of cod liver oil.
Leo: I remember that from "The Three Stooges" or "Our Gang".
Steve: Nasty, oily-tasting stuff. You really don't want it. Because it turns out that this thing called Vitamin D - and it's such a shame that it's been lumped in with the vitamins because it is a steroid hormone.
Leo: Really.
Steve: It is the most powerful steroid hormone in the human body. It is so powerful that when measured, the units of measurement of the active form - and I'll explain what the metabolic process is in a second. But the metabolic form is measured in picograms per milliliter. That is, we have grams, milligrams is a thousandth, micrograms is a millionth, nanograms is a billionth, picograms is a trillionth. So it's on the order of 20 to 50 trillionths of a gram in our blood. Amazingly little of this goes a long way. But it is found in almost no dietary sources. That is, we cannot get D from our diet. It turns out that fatty fish is a source of D. But where it comes from, the way we get it, is from the sun.
And which I think is really interesting because the first known application for Vitamin D, and really the only place where it has received lots of attention, is in our body's calcium metabolism. You know, it's generally felt that all life on earth came from the seas, first started in the oceans, evolved in the oceans, and then literally crawled out onto land and needed to adapt. Well, the ocean is a rich calcium bath. And so calcium is a fundamental component of the way we operate. And our bodies, the human body manages and maintains the concentration of calcium to the best of its ability within relatively narrow margins. We need to have enough calcium from our diet, which it's easy to get. But you have to have Vitamin D in addition to calcium in order to build bone. D is inextricably linked to calcium metabolism. And so but for a long time, for hundreds of years, that's the only thing that we knew that it did.
Well, looking back at early humanity, we also know that we evolved in sub-Saharan, equatorial East Africa, the cradle of humankind. It is believed that when we were coming out of being apes covered with fur, that as we evolved to be larger and have more muscle mass, we began to have a problem with cooling because our larger muscles were generating too much heat. So evaporative cooling wasn't working - it was having a problem if we were covered with fur. So we literally lost our fur in favor of skin and more evaporative capability.
The problem with that was that we were then being exposed to intense sunlight since our skin was no longer being protected by fur. So what started out as being lighter skinned, we ended up developing a much more rich melanin content. Melanin is the pigmentation in skin. And so we ended up literally becoming black in order to deal with the constant powerful equatorial sun in East Africa. And the blackness of our skin allowed us to tolerate the sun.
But ever since the beginning, we were also using sun, that is, the ultraviolet radiation, for fundamental chemical reactions which take place in our skin. A precursor of cholesterol called 7-dehydrocholesterol, or 7-DHC, that exists in our skin in abundance in youth, and we lose it as we get increasingly older, that 7-dehydrocholesterol, when it is zapped by an ultraviolet photon, it converts, that 7-dehydrocholesterol is converted into an early form of what unfortunately we have labeled Vitamin D. It's not stable in that form, and so it shortly changes its bonds around and just under thermal isomerization converts into something called cholecalciferol, which is the form of Vitamin D that you can also get in a supplement. That's transported to our liver, where our liver changes it through a process known as hydroxylation into the Vitamin D which is measured in our bloodstream, something called 25-hydroxy Vitamin D. And that's sort of the bulk storage form of this chemical.
Our kidneys takes it the next step further, hydroxylates it again, and turns it into this super potent steroid hormone. Now, that's involved directly, it's that hormone which is involved with the regulation of calcium metabolism and our bones. It turns out, though, that many other organ systems in our body also have the ability to deal directly with Vitamin D. And this is the information which is finally, due to the advancing of our medical science, finally becoming clear to people.
I want to shift gears here for a second and run through a number of recent studies which have been done, just to give people some sense for the pervasiveness of the influence of this. I have a - I'm holding a textbook, 450 pages, titled "Vitamin D: Physiology, Molecular Biology, and Clinical Applications." I've read so many journal articles and studies that I'm becoming sort of well-versed with the names of these people. And if I see a chart in a popular text on Vitamin D, I remember seeing that chart in the original source material.
Leo: Wow.
Steve: So this is Chapter 13, where he's talking about non-calcemic actions of 1,25 dihydroxy Vitamin D3. Okay, that's the output from our kidney, the final stage, which is this powerful steroid hormone. And he says, "Under historical perspective, when 1,25(OH)(2)D was discovered, it was assumed that specific Vitamin D receptors would be present in calcium-regulating organs, including the intestine, bone, and kidney. In 1979, Stumpf et al...." and then he has a reference to the back of the chapter, where he talks about that study, "...reported on the localization of radiolabeled Vitamin D in Vitamin D-deficient tissues and found that the radiolabeled Vitamin D was localized in the nuclei of cells in the small intestine, kidney, and bone, exactly as expected.
But remarkably, they also find, by auto-radiographic analysis of frozen sections of tissues, that this radio-tagged Vitamin D was also present in cells in the gonads, thymus, pituitary gland, pancreas, stomach, breast, teeth, placenta, and skin. This observation was the impetus for the identification of the Vitamin D receptors, called VDRs," and this is at the genetic level, "in all of these tissues, as well as in several tumor cell lines of leukemia, breast cancer, melanoma, squamous cell carcinoma, colon cancer, and prostate cancer. VDR activity was also detected in cells related to immunity, including circulating monocytes, activated T and B lymphocytes, and macrophages," which is all part of the way our immune system functions.
So to give some sense for what is beginning to be understood, I've just jumped to Chapter 22 under "Epidemiology of Cancer Risk in Vitamin D." It reads: "A nested, case-controlled study was conducted using subjects from the Johns Hopkins Operation CLUE Cohort. This cohort consisted of 25,620 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, the 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 one third the risk of colon cancer compared with those with lower concentrations..."
Leo: Wow, one third, wow.
Steve: A different study from the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 2004, reads: "Most humans depend on sun exposure to satisfy their requirements for Vitamin D. Solar ultraviolet B photons," that is, 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, you know, 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, 1,25(OH)(2)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 I 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.
It says, "Not only is the maintenance 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 1,25(OH)(2)D(3)." 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 homeostasis. "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 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 titled "Prospective Study of Predictors of Vitamin D Status in Cancer Incidence and Mortality in Men." I've got links to all of this on the page at GRC. It says, "For multivariate models, an increment of 25 nanomoles per liter in predicted Vitamin D level was associated with a 17% reduction in total cancer incidence." And they go into the statistics, a 29% reduction in total cancer mortality with a relative risk of .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 Dr. John Cannell, an M.D. and psychiatrist at the Atascadero State Mental Hospital. He knew that Vitamin D positively influenced mood. 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 patients on Vitamin D just for its psychological benefits. A flu went through the hospital that was bad enough that wards needed to be quarantined. 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 ward to 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 wards. 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 immunizing 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 strength of the equatorial sun. Now we understand that this hormone, which unfortunately has been mislabeled a vitamin, 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 hormone 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. 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, 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, 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 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.
Leo: Now, correlation doesn't equal causation.
Steve: No, and that's a very good point. My favorite example of that is - imagine that someone like an alien came down who knew nothing about the way we operate and was watching a random street in New York, and noticed that suddenly everyone put their umbrellas up and, oh, look, then windshield wipers began operating on all the cars. Well, if you didn't know any better, you could say that raising umbrellas caused windshield wipers to go on. When in fact...
Leo: They both are caused by the same thing: rain.
Steve: It's called a confounding factor and it is the major problem with many clinical studies. The problem is that because you cannot patent Vitamin D, it is incredibly difficult to perform the expensive studies that eliminate confounding factors.
Leo: Right, there's no incentive to do this.
Steve: Yes, there is no financial incentive, so it's left to universities and research hospitals that have limited funding, especially now. There was a study done between the years of 2000 and 2005 that took 1,179 women in Nebraska, which I think is at 41 degrees north latitude. This was a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled study. That's the gold standard of studies. It divided the women in half. It gave half of them a placebo and calcium, and the other half 1,100 IU per day of Vitamin D and calcium. If you ignore - oh, and these were all - in the year 2000, when this began, they were all, as far as anyone knew, cancer free. If you ignore and throw out the first year of any cancers that were found, on the premise that those were already in the process of developing, during the rest of this study the women who were taking the Vitamin D plus calcium had 0.23 percent incidence of any type of cancer. 0.23.
Leo: I presume that's well below normal.
Steve: So in the other group of the women, you established their cancer rate as 1.0, so it's less than one quarter the number of incidence of cancer. So these studies exist. They are being published by Harvard and in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, I mean, not flaky, strange publications that no one's heard of, major fundamental research. But the problem is, you can't patent Vitamin D.
The other problem is that the rate of production of Vitamin D as we age really falls of. Now, I should mention something that I haven't said before, and that is that just this morning I had my fourth weekly test. I didn't get in the mail my third results, which would have indicated where I was after my second week. But what I did starting four weeks ago, I'm sorry, three weeks ago today, literally, was I had a reference Vitamin D level taken. I knew, after all the research I was doing, that I was going to be putting myself on Vitamin D, to a much greater level of Vitamin D than is in my multivitamin.
One of the problems with supplementation, and there is a problem with supplementation, is that Vitamin D can be toxic in very high doses. It is fat soluble, so it's not excreted from our body on an ongoing basis. So like any fat-soluble vitamin, there's a concern that it will build up in your tissues over time. Nobody has ever become Vitamin D toxic from sun exposure. But it has been determined that, for example, half an hour in the sun will generate about 10,000 international units' worth of Vitamin D, which then over the course of a couple days enters your bloodstream.
Well, I knew that I was going to be adding some substantial Vitamin D to my daily regimen after all this research that I have done. But I had no idea what my current Vitamin D level was. And I wanted to try generating it by the sun because once I started adding Vitamin D to my diet, I would never stop. And there were other things that I had added where I was thinking, gee, I wish I'd taken a measure beforehand so I could know what it was before. So I thought, let's play with this.
So I found out to my tremendous shock that I am substantially deficient. There's four levels of Vitamin D terminology that the medical community uses. You have deficiency, insufficiency, sufficiency, and toxicity. So you obviously don't want to be toxic. What you want is to be sufficient, and really neither insufficient nor deficient. And I am deficient.
Leo: Really.
Steve: I have a great diet. I eat lots of salads. I like fish. I sort of avoid meat. I'm not afraid of it, but I'm doing everything I should. I have regular annual checkups. My cholesterol is where it should be, blood pressure is where it should be, a little higher than I would like it. But it turns out that adequate levels of Vitamin D lowers blood pressure. In fact, it turns out that there is a seasonal sine wave cycle of blood pressure. The extent, the amplitude of the sine wave varies with latitude, and it is synchronized to the calendar. It is well known that blood pressure goes down in the summer and goes up in the winter. It is also, of course, we know that people tend to get colds in the winter, and they get the 'flu in the winter. Why? Well, maybe, and we don't know this, but it's because our Vitamin D stores are depleted. There was one study that attempted to demonstrate that watching too much television caused autism, that is, watching TV and autism were related. And it's interesting because it turns out that the people who did the study didn't actually interview people for how much television they watched. Instead they used the rainfall figures in the area.
Leo: So they correlated it to rainfall, not TV watching.
Steve: And they said, well, we don't really know how much TV kids are watching. But probably if it's raining...
Leo: Figure they're inside, yeah.
Steve: ...they're inside. What they were inadvertently doing was they were measuring probably the amount of sun that these kids were getting. And that's where the correlation was. And in fact, when this was pointed out, they have revised their study in order to correct that. So the proper level of Vitamin D is something which is still unknown, believe it or not. The way the RDA, the Recommended Daily Allowance, was established was that because we really didn't know, the one thing we did know was that a tablespoon of cod liver oil would prevent rickets. And since it had been given for so many generations, for so many years, and not caused a problem, they said, well, how much Vitamin D is in cod liver oil? It turns out it's 400 IU. So that's what they said, okay, we'll just say that that's the recommended daily allowance, 400 IU.
The problem is that being in the sun for half an hour supposedly generates 10,000 IU. So substantially more. And in fact, studies have been done of lifeguards, and farmers in Puerto Rico, that measure the actual level of Vitamin D they have in their blood. And in this common term of nanograms per milliliter, they're in the order of 50 to 70. So the current clinically accepted range is 32 to 100. A hundred - I read the study, and I've got a link to it on my page, where the guy who did this, who set the 32 to 100, and you can read all about how it was established. And he says, well, I just set 100 sort of arbitrarily because it's higher than we generally see in anybody who has a lot of constant sun exposure. We don't know that it shouldn't be higher or that any higher level is toxic. But it would seem that a hundred is sort of a good place because that's all we know at this point.
Anyway, my first test showed me at 23.6 nanograms per milliliter. And a week later, after a week of sun, where I'm spending half an hour in noonday sun, completely exposed, I mean, 100 percent, baby, the way I was born, dropped to 21.3. I'm guessing that this is just, you know, it's just the tolerance of the lab test. I hoped by this time to have the results of the second week, which would be the third test. And a week from now I should have the results after the third week of the fourth.
But for whatever reason, it doesn't look like I'm seeing any production. In the studies I've read, when you do get sufficient sunlight, your Vitamin D level jumps up. It does take many weeks for it to reach whatever maximum it's going to. So it's sort of an exponential rise. But I would have certainly expected to see something after seven days of regular exposure. It looks to me like I'm unable to produce Vitamin D through being out in the sun. It's disturbing to me that after five years with my internist, my doctor who was assigned to me, I mean, he was fast to give me a blood test and a so-called CBC, a complete blood count, to look at all of the things that are typically considered. I know exactly what my HDL and LDL and triglycerides and all that stuff is. He never checked my Vitamin D. Now, maybe if something were, like, really off, like my blood calcium was off, he would have said, well, let's check your Vitamin D.
Leo: That's what Dr. Mom was saying, is what about your serum ionized calcium?
Steve: Yeah. And that's where it should be. So maybe that would have brought him to do it. But clearly I'm at a level now that is way low, based on current thought. I would like to raise my 21 to something between 50 and 70 as a goal. And that's what I will likely begin doing.
Leo: And you think that sunbathing is the key.
Steve: No, no, no. Remember, this was just an experiment. I only wanted...
Leo: Because there's other risks associated with that, of course.
Steve: Well, yes. There are three types, interestingly, there are three types of skin cancer. You have squamous cell carcinoma, basal cell carcinoma, and malignant melanoma. Malignant melanoma is the cancer that everyone worries about. Interestingly, though, it generally appears on areas of the skin that are covered by clothing, probably because statistically most of us have more than the majority of our skin covered. The squamous cell carcinoma and basal cell carcinoma is the kind that we see on our hands, arms, and face. It's also the kind that your dermatologist can freeze off easily, and it's not a big deal as long as you've got someone looking at your skin from time to time, like your doctor takes a look at you to make sure that you don't have any of that.
So the UV radiation definitely damages skin. It can be carcinogenic. And it does generate Vitamin D. What is believed is that, as we migrated away from the equator, because we are so dependent upon Vitamin D, that it became a powerful natural selection factor in our evolution. And, you know, we know that our evolution took millions and millions of years. It looks like from the studies that we've done, that as we left the equator and populations moved north up into Europe, that we depigmented in something like several tens of thousands of years, maybe like 50,000 years. Because suddenly the high melanin content we had, which was protecting us from the sun at the equator, was also now blocking our ability to produce Vitamin D, which is a critical, I mean, an absolutely critical component, I believe, of human health.
We know when it's really low that you develop chronic problems with calcium management and bone. Your body takes calcium from your bones to preferentially manage your blood calcium level because that's even more important. So your bones represent essentially a calcium well, or a calcium repository that, if you don't have enough Vitamin D and/or calcium in your diet, there are mechanisms that'll pull calcium from your bones, which you don't want. But now we're learning that it's very likely that this very powerful and necessary hormone has been incorporated into many other systems in our body.
And I imagine that many of us listening to this podcast are in the same position I was. I mean, I'm not a sunbather. I'm not out in the sun. I actually, I mean, I get a little bit of sun. I'm not afraid of it. And I want to make sure I don't burn. But the problem is that, again, we're in an information deficit because studying these things costs money. And you can't patent the sun. You can't patent sunlight.
Leo: There's an analog because we know that salt is very good for treating a lot of things like cold sores and so forth. But nobody's going to study that because salt is free and cheap and unpatentable.
Steve: But what's really interesting is there are Vitamin D analogs which the pharmaceutical companies are exploring.
Leo: Sure, yeah.
Steve: Uh-huh. They're making little tiny tweaks...
Leo: You can make money on that.
Steve: Exactly, because that they can patent. And in fact there are now some effective psoriasis medications which are all based on Vitamin D analogs. So they tweaked the molecule a little bit. There is a problem with high levels of Vitamin D because, as I mentioned, it is toxic in really high levels. But they want to use the very powerful, the 1,25(OH)(2)D, which is what your kidney produces. They have found that it is extremely good at fighting cancer. The problem is, if you gave someone enough of it to fight cancer, it would turn you into limestone. So that's not a good thing.
So what they're trying to do is they're trying to find a variant of this Vitamin D which will have the effects they want and mitigate the effects they don't. If they can do that, then they can patent it and create a new drug. I'm not averse at all to using the medical system, if I need to. I'd much rather stay healthy, not need major surgical intervention of any kind. And so Vitamin D will be part of my regimen going forward.
And the takeaway, I think, would be, for those listeners who have a doctor, who are the kinds of people who know what their cholesterol is and so forth, next time you go, say hey, let's find out what my Vitamin D level is. And I'm sure that if my doctor knew that I was 21, he'd say, oh, I mean, even the blood test results shows the level, 32 to 100, and shows me as extremely low. He would have said, oh, well, we probably need to put you on some Vitamin D, give you some Vitamin D supplementation, and we'll retest in 90 days. There's no indication that it could hurt. And my sense is it can only help.
Leo: So you're going to start taking supplements.
Steve: Yes. In fact, today. I did my last - I've done my three weeks in the sun. I don't have the results...
Leo: I still like getting the sun, and now - I have Italian skin. So, and of course I get checked every year for skin cancer. But I like getting some sun. I just - it feels good.
Steve: Well, it turns out that it also releases, being in the sun releases a - shoot. It's a form of narcotic.
Leo: Yay. No wonder it feels so good.
Steve: No, I mean, again, it's not surprising, I mean, we were meant to be in the sun. We evolved in the sun. I think more than anything else from a...
Leo: Yeah, it's a natural - it does, it feels good. It feels like this is where I should be. Same thing with the ocean. I feel good when I'm at the ocean. It's where I should be.
Steve: Well, and, I mean, we grew up with our parents saying, oh, go outside and get some sunshine, it's good for you.
Leo: Not anymore. Not anymore.
Steve: Not anymore.
Leo: Oh, our kids are slathered with sunscreen. They wear big bonnets. I mean, they don't get the sun anymore.
Steve: Yeah. I mean, so there really has been a change. There is study after study that demonstrates that cancer, autism, allergies, diabetes, an amazing number of maladies have latitudinal correlations. And they've even noticed, for example, that even at a high latitude, if you're at a high altitude, then the incidences of these problems drop because you've got less atmosphere between you and the sun. And the other problem is, you cannot get sun that matters in the morning or in the afternoon. It's got to be when the sun is almost directly overhead.
Leo: Oh, that's interesting.
Steve: The reason is that there's this beautiful gap in atmospheric absorption, right through what we not surprisingly call the "visible spectrum." And you know, we call it the visible spectrum because that's what we see. But you'll notice we don't see in the ultraviolet. I mean, the ultraviolet and the visible are, like, they're the same range of radiation. We don't see in the ultraviolet because it's dark most of the time in the ultraviolet. It's only briefly light for a few hours around noon. And then the sun's angle becomes such that the UV radiation, the UVB, which is between 290 and about 320 nanometers, it's almost completely cut off.
So evolution would never give us vision which is only useful for a couple hours during the day. Instead we see in the visible spectrum, which is not absorbed the way UVB is. And so we're able to, for example, hunt by moonlight or see from the time the sun comes up to the time the sun sets, which is much more useful. But at the same time, that visible radiation doesn't have the energy and doesn't have the wavelength to interact with us chemically the way UVB does. So we need that UV radiation.
And again, I want to make sure that people understand, I'm not suggesting, I'm not promoting spending time in the sun. I was about to say that I've read some studies, but again we're in a study deficit here, that say that by the age of 50 our ability to produce Vitamin D cutaneously, endogenously in our skin, has fallen by half; and that by the age of 65 it's down to 25 percent of what it was. So you cannot get the D you need through sunlight.
And you did notice, maybe you weren't kidding, that I'm a little tanner. I've been - I was looking at how much sun I was getting and whether I was tanning. After three weeks of half an hour a day, I have tanned a bit. Not too much. But the problem is, tanning is a regulating mechanism. Tanning is the production of this melanin polymer, which is 99.9 percent efficient at absorbing UVB. Melanin absorbs UVB and turns it harmlessly into heat. So it protects our skin from DNA damage. Unfortunately, it also protects it from generating Vitamin D.
Leo: Oh, interesting.
Steve: So here's the problem. I'm clearly receiving enough sun because I'm adapting to it. My skin is darkening, which is my body's attempt to down-regulate the amount of UVB radiation that I receive. In the process, it's down-regulating my ability to produce Vitamin D. So my point is that, as I get older, and what happens is we lose the cholesterol in our skin. You know how, like, so-called, you get thin-skinned? It is a loss of cholesterol in our skin which reduces our ability to produce Vitamin D, yet we're still going to be able to get tan. You don't lose your ability to tan. So what that says is that, when you're no longer young and able to produce as much Vitamin D as you did, no amount of sun can give it to you because your body is going to tan and down-regulate not only, well, down-regulate all the UVB that gets into your skin and to further cut off D. So I think the only solution is to monitor your Vitamin D levels and supplement.
Now, the good news is, because it's not patented, because it's inexpensive to make, it's very inexpensive. One of my favorite suppliers is a company called Now Foods. And my favorite place for buying stuff is IHerb.com. Great service, great delivery, very good prices. Now Foods has a 5,000 IU Vitamin D which their label recommends you take one every three days. Taking Vitamin D infrequently like that works because it has on the order of about a three- or four-week half-life in our body. It lasts a long time because it's fat-soluble. So our liver takes it up, and our fat tissues, all of our adipose tissues dissolve the Vitamin D.
It's very easy to swallow because remember how concentrated it is. We're only talking about micrograms of D. It's made in huge vats of olive oil because it's fat soluble. So they start with a huge vat of olive oil, pour a carefully measured amount of Vitamin D in, then dissolve that Vitamin D, and then they produce these little tiny gel caps. So 120 of those costs $8.80. Well, if you take one every three days, that's a year's supply of Vitamin D in a useful dose. That would be 1,666 IU per day. The U.S. government has said even that 2,000 IU per day is an absolutely safe dose. Many nutritionists feel that that's way too low. But follow the label, and then you're getting a useful amount of Vitamin D for $8.80 for a year.
Leo: Yeah, yeah.
Steve: I've looked at this stuff. And if I had to take one thing, if I were - I was going to say on a desert island. But even on a desert island, I don't think I can any longer make a sufficient amount of Vitamin D by being in the sun because I'm going to tan, and that's going to cut off what I would have been able to make.
Leo: Is there a risk to supplementing? Can you overdo it?
Steve: Yes. The risk is at the high end. And in fact this is the conundrum, is that our government has - our government does put D in stuff.
Leo: Milk.
Steve: It puts D in milk. And...
Leo: Aren't we getting, because we're all drinking Starbucks, getting a lot more milk than ever before?
Steve: Well, here's the problem, is milk has actually gone out of fashion. And we're not drinking the kind of milk we do. Believe it or not, rickets has made a comeback in the last few years.
Leo: That's unbelievable.
Steve: Because children are not drinking milk. Parents are not...
Leo: It's soda pop.
Steve: Exactly. Exactly. And sugary fruit drinks. So the government mandates that 400 IU be put in a quart of milk. And the problem is you would have to drink about 10 quarts of milk a day...
Leo: Okay, I don't drink that much.
Steve: ...in order to get a physiologically useful amount of Vitamin D. But here's the problem. If the government - because this is a powerful steroid hormone. If the government did...
Leo: They can't put more in, yeah, yeah.
Steve: Exactly. If the government did raise the levels of D that were in our food supply, there's a wide variation in the amount of different types of food that different people eat. Maybe there is someone who drinks quarts of milk a day.
Leo: So they could be doing themselves harm if they had to much of it.
Steve: If there was too much...
Leo: If they were supplementing and they drank four quarts a day and they were getting out in the sun and on and on and on.
Steve: Yeah, I mean, I think that the only, I mean, the really responsible thing to do is to get a test. You can buy your own, as I have been doing. I go to a lab every Wednesday morning, to LabCorp. There's a group called Life Extension Foundation, LEF.org. They offer retail blood testing services. So you pay them, they mail you the forms, and then you take that to a lab nearby. They take a vial of blood. And then about five days later, you get the results. It's $67 for a nonmember, or $47 for a member. So if you were going to do several of these, I think membership is $75 a year, so you get a discount.
Leo: I know what people are thinking: I'm just going to go out and buy some Vitamin D tabs without getting tested. Is that a bad idea?
Steve: I don't think so. As long as you follow the label, you cannot be toxic because...
Leo: Don't overdo it.
Steve: ...for example, Walgreens will have 1,000 IU, and it'll probably say take one or two a day. And follow the label, and you're fine. This 5,000 IU from Now Foods says take one every three days. Because, for example, it has the half-life it does, some doctors will megadose their patients monthly, like give them 100,000 IU - but I'm not recommending that. You absolutely would only do that under a doctor's care. But my point is that you can take a large dose and then let it be acquired by your system and then used over time as your blood level drops. It's just easier for me, for example, to do one every three days. Or I will be monitoring my blood level, so I will probably take more because I'm wanting to find out what level I need to take in order to put my blood where it should be.
So again, ask your doctor for a Vitamin D test. Get one for yourself. Or think about getting some real D. I should mention that there are two types of D that you can purchase. There's D2, which is called ergocalciferol; or D3, which is cholecalciferol. D3 is what we make. Cholecalciferol is the only kind you really want to take. It is essentially biologically identical to what we manufacture. There is some concern, for example, I think it's not kosher, believe it or not, because it's made by irradiating the lanolin from lamb's wool.
Ergocalciferol is made from irradiating fungus. So it's 100 percent plant based, but it's Vitamin D2. And some studies have said that it only raises your Vitamin D levels about 25 percent as high as D3. So D3, which is what we make when sun hits our skin, is substantially more effective than D2. So I imagine what you would find, you know, for example, that this Now Foods Vitamin D is Vitamin D3. Walgreens drugstores in their little health section, what you want to look for is the cholecalciferol. And 1,000 mg per day is without question safe. The U.S. government says that up to 2,000 is safe. Nutritionists believe safe dosages are far higher. I wouldn't go there unless you knew what your blood levels were, you want to make sure. It is possible to be hypersensitive to Vitamin D. There are some genetic conditions that could cause complications at much higher levels.
Leo: Yeah, we should emphasize, we're not physicians. You should check with your physician before you do anything. And probably ask your physician what he thinks and get a D test. Are there natural food sources? I like to get this stuff from food. Can I eat a lot of broccoli or something?
Steve: No. That's just it, Leo. It is not in our food supply. It's interesting, the only way the Eskimos were able to keep their relatively high level of pigmentation is eating oily fish. They have a diet high in fish, and fish is the only source. Three and a half ounces of salmon has about, I think it's 380 IU of Vitamin D. And again, there are studies that have been done that estimate we use about 4,000 IU a day. I've seen numbers like 3,800, 4,000, something like that. So again, you would need to be eating an awful lot of salmon, what, 35 ounces of salmon a day, which you might get tired of after a few days.
Leo: And it might not be good for you for other reasons.
Steve: Exactly. So also it turns out that cod liver oil is really not the best source. It does give you Vitamin D. It also contains the other fat soluble vitamin, Vitamin A. And a lot of Vitamin A can be a problem. And also Vitamin A genetically looks very much like Vitamin D, and there have been reports that say that A can block the positive effects of Vitamin D, that is, other than on calcium metabolism, where we know that it's effective. So getting A in the form of beta-carotene is really what you want because your body is able to convert as much as it needs over to A.
Anyway, that's my readout on D. I think it's important. It's not a vitamin. I think it's had a bad rap by being misnamed a vitamin by early, early medical science that didn't know what it was, but just said, oh, well, it's a nutritional thing because it's in cod liver oil. In fact, it's not anywhere else in our diet because we evolved in the sunlight. We need it, otherwise all kinds of things start not working as well as they should.
And there was in fact, it was funny, I was talking to some friends at Starbucks a week or two ago, and one of the people said they'd just seen a news blurb saying that 70% of U.S. children are Vitamin D deficient. I mean, it is a problem. But the conundrum is, because it is a powerful hormone, we can't put it in our food supply. We weren't meant to get it really in our food supply. There's barely enough now to prevent rickets, and it's not even doing that anymore because people aren't - they're staying away from dairy products more than they should. But if we put a lot more in, then there'd be the possibility that people could reach toxic levels of it.
So, I mean, it needs to be done. Young people in the sun is probably what you want to do, although there's a concern about skin cancer, which is to some degree warranted. So I don't really see a way other than using supplements and doing it with care and wisely. I think it's important.
Leo: Steve Gibson. You know, this is a little bit of a departure for the show, but I think a fascinating topic. And I can see why you were anxious to share it with us. Thank you.
Steve: Well, so I didn't give the web page. I'm in the process, as I record this, of - I have a lot of it. All the pages are assembled here at home. I haven't yet put them up on the site, but it'll be at http://www.grc.com/health/vitamin-d.htm And that will be for anybody who wants to read this research. I've captured PDFs of all of this. They're all online. People can poke around, read this for themselves. I hope maybe I've given people something to think about.
Leo: I'm going to run out and get some Vitamin D, I can tell you that right now. Steve, thank you so much for joining us. Steve's page is GRC.com. That's where you'll find SpinRite, the world's finest hard drive maintenance and recovery program. Also lots of great free stuff.
You'll also find, if you go to GRC, 16 kbps versions of this show, for people who don't have a lot of bandwidth. We've got transcripts you can share with friends. It's all there at GRC.com. We do this show live, and you're invited to join us every Wednesday. We do it around 2:00 p.m. Eastern time on live.twit.tv. And of course you can download the show after the fact from iTunes and all the other podcast aggregators. It's absolutely free. But join us Wednesdays at 2:00 p.m., live.twit.tv.
Steve: One thing I did want to add is that to send me stuff is GRC.com/feedback. And I would be very interested in any feedback that people have about this topic. Next week is our Q&A.; I would imagine that, if there's sufficient interest in this, as will be demonstrated by feedback on the topic, that the Q&A; will be wrapping up loose ends about this.
Leo: Good.
Steve: Which would be great.
Leo: Great. Steve, have a sunny and lovely day.
Steve: Thanks, Leo.
Leo: And we'll see you next time on Security Now!.