The Real Story on Vitamin D: interview and transcript – Grant Dec 2022

YouTube 66 minutes

Introduction

0:00:13.8 Brown: Welcome everyone. Dr. Susan Brown at the Center for Better Bones and Alkaline for Life. And today we're gonna give you the real story on vitamin D. We're gonna talk about the real story on vitamin D, and it's our great fortune to have with us one of the major Vitamin D researchers in the world and this is Dr. William Grant. He has actually published over 284 articles on vitamin D. He's one of the world thought leaders in vitamin D. And interestingly enough, he began working with vitamin D long before others were actually even thinking about vitamin D. He's a director of a nonprofit called Sun Arc, sunarc.org. And an interesting part of the story of Dr. Grant is that he was a, what I call a hard scientist. He's a physicist, and he was working for NASA and other groups doing very high technology, sort of remote sensing. But he became interested in the potential of the sun and in health and health and how it related to different aspects of the environment. So, Dr. Grant, welcome.

0:01:23.2Grant: Thank you.

0:01:24.4 Brown: Welcome to our discussion. We have many women and many men around the world who are interested in maximizing their health. And Vitamin D is course central. But tell me, how did you go from being a scientist at NASA to actually looking at these... All kinds of issues of health and sun exposure and vitamin D. How'd that transition occur?

0:01:47.3 Grant: Okay. So I was working with NASA in Langley Research Center in Virginia. And I was doing optical remote sensing of the atmosphere, studying vertical profiles of ozone and aerosols and flying around the world. Now, in the early '90s, 1990s, I undertook a Sierra Club project about the Southern Appalachian eco region and how to save this region. And I worked with a forester, Howell Lox from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. And he introduced me to the ecological study approach. In ecological studies, you treat populations as individuals. It can be defined by state, for example. So you look at the average health status for the state, then you look at the average risk modifying factors for the state. And what we applied this to was the oak and hickory forest decline in the Eastern United States.

Alzheimer’s and diet

0:02:52.0 Grant: And we found that ozone affected the red oaks and acid rain affected the white oaks, but then I was on a NASA trip to New Zealand in 1996. And read about the Honolulu heart study finding that Japanese American men in Hawaii had two and a half times as much Alzheimer's disease as native Japanese. Now my mother had Alzheimer's, so I had been reading up on Alzheimer's and found that people with Alzheimer's had more aluminum in their brains. And I recalled that in the forest soils under acid deposition, the trees pick more up, more aluminum because the oxides of aluminum and transition metals are dissolved. And so this forest soil sends the trees, all these transition metals instead of calcium, magnesium, potassium.

0:03:43.6 Grant: And so I said, "Aha, it's got to be the American diet. That's the major risk factor for Alzheimer's, and I can prove it by doing an ecological study." So I came home and got the data for 10 countries, of prevalence data for Alzheimer's for 10 countries, got the dietary supply data and found that total fat and total caloric supply were highly correlated with Alzheimer's disease around the world. If they had... If European countries had more fish in their diet, that slightly reduced the Alzheimer's disease rate. And if it was a country with mainly a rice based diet like India, China, and Japan, very low rates of Alzheimer's. I went to the University of Kentucky made a presentation, said, "Fine, we'll publish that." It was an electronic publication. Came out on June 17th, 1997. I went to the National Press Club, had a press conference, and told the world that dietary fat and high caloric supplies a big risk factor for Alzheimer's. It was like, I got on Dan Rather and CNN. So I got on the major news networks that evening, and it was like hitting a home run at the first time bat in the major league, the baseball team, which was much more recognition than I got from my atmospheric study work. So I was hooked.

0:05:00.9 Brown: Yeah, and that's such an early observation about how diet relates to Alzheimer's. And so yeah, I see how that was and such an important contribution. And then you went on to look at the sunlight and vitamin D and...

0:05:15.4 Grant: Yeah. So in 1999, the earliest p[0:05:18.3] ?? cancer mortality rate was published with 10 color gradations. This is for breast cancer for females 1950, 1979. And what you see is that in the North East, the rates are very high, in the South they're very low.

0:05:34.3 Brown: And these are the breast cancer rates, you say? Yep.

0:05:37.1 Grant: Right.

0:05:37.4 Brown: Yep.

Cancers

0:05:38.2 Grant: And the same thing had very similar patterns for colon cancer, bladder cancer and maybe another dozen types of cancer. And at first I tried to explain the distributions based on dietary factors, very quickly realized that we pretty much have the same diet throughout the country, except maybe in the south. They have a little bit different diet down there, but otherwise it's pretty much the same. So then I was referred to the papers by Cedric and Frank Garland starting in 1980, where they hypothesized that since they found that colon cancer was inversely correlated with annual sunlight, that vitamin D probably reduced the risk of colon cancer. They even went out in 1985 and showed the dietary of vitamin D reduced the risk of colon cancer. In 1989 that vitamin D levels were inversely correlated with development of colon cancer. So I got the NASA data for Solar UVB at the surface for July, 1992, and did a correlation study between the UVB and the cancer mortality rates. Published that in the Journal Cancer in 2002. And it started a lot of research on vitamin D and cancer, but I had...

0:06:53.3 Grant: And I hadn't done a complete job. I had, left off the states, along the Mexican border because they had very high stomach cancer rates, and I couldn't understand why. I later figured out it was because the Mexican Americans they have a lot of H. Pylori because of poor sanitation in Mexico, so they're more prone to stomach cancer.

0:07:13.2 Brown: I see.

0:07:13.4 Grant: Anyway, I added all the risk modifying factors like alcohol, smoking, poverty, urban, rural resonance and so on. And then started sending this revised manuscript to the journals. Nine major journals rejected it. They just didn't wanna get ahead of the curve on vitamin D. But finally it was published in a Greek journal as a conference proceedings from a conference in Germany. And as good, it's been highly cited ever since. So, that's how I got into UVB. And then I retired from NASA in 2004, moved to California to do health work full-time.

0:07:52.6 Brown: It's so interesting because all the... It's only common sense that we vowed in sunlight for millions of years. The body has been adapted to sunlight. Vitamin D is found in all forms of existence, not only with every tissue in the human body, but even the algae. Everything. Vitamin D is just an integral part of living in this environment, fueled by the sun. And as an anthropologist, I've always looked at, if you say, "Well, what's a great vitamin D level?" I say, "Well, let's look and see what we evolved on." And now they've done studies in like East Africa and showing that the average person would have a 40 to 50 level if you lived outdoors, if you lived exposed to the environment. And so it seems to me it's really simple. Let's just duplicate that level. If you wanna go higher, there's some research showing benefits, but at least to have that for the minimum level.

0:08:43.1 Brown: And now we're kind of surprised at the kickback this resistance to vitamin D. Almost an attempt truly, I would say an attempt to discredit vitamin D. And I want you to talk to us about that, particularly in terms of the vital study, which was a very large study looking at vitamin D and omega-3 fats and the outcome on things like bone health and cancer. And my opinion is that it's really amazing that the way that was reported, they can say that vitamin D was of no help to bone. And so I looked at the study and I see some of the flaws in it, but I want you to tell us a little bit about that background and what your thought is.

VITAL trial did many things wrong

0:09:24.1 Grant: Okay. So Vital was designed around 2010. And at that time the health, the epidemiologists and the researchers, universities who designed clinical trials just adopted, or adapted the same type of trial that was designed for pharmaceutical drugs.

0:09:48.0 Brown: Right, exactly.

0:09:49.5 Grant: And for drugs, the only source of the agent or the drug is in the trial and they assume there's a linear dose response relationship. Well, vitamin D is not a drug. I mean, it's a nutrient. You have... And it's not vitamin D per se that is related to outcomes is 25 hydroxy vitamin D that's related. So Robert Heaney in 2014 outlined the guidelines for nutrients, including vitamin D in which you really have to base everything on two vitamin D levels, try to enroll people with low vitamin D levels, give them enough vitamin D to raise the high vitamin D levels that affect the disease outcomes of interest and measure their achieved vitamin D level. Well, Vital, did everything wrong? First of all, the average vitamin D level for the people reporting it was around 31 nanograms per milliliter, and that's what's ordinarily considered sufficient.

0:10:50.5 Brown: Right. Okay.

0:10:53.0 Grant: And then they gave them only 2000 IU per day, which was dictated by the national institute of health, in part because they were concerned about, adverse effects at higher levels. But Michael Holick has shown that if you have your skin exposed for the equivalent of being in the sun for a couple hours, you can make about 20,000 IU vitamin D. So 2000 is like 10% of what you can make in the sun in a day.

0:11:22.5 Brown: Alright.

0:11:22.8 Grant: And, then they ran the test for four... Study for about four and a half years. They collected some data on vitamin D levels, but they had to analyze the results in terms of intention to treat. In other words, they just lumped all people who got 2000 IU...

0:11:39.6 Brown: I see, yeah.

0:11:40.6 Grant: Vitamin D in the one side and those who didn't on the other side and found that... Well, they did find a beneficial result in terms of all cancer mortality rate, if they omitted the first two years or one or two years of the study. But the New England Journal Medicine has a policy that you can only report one outcome for trial in an abstract. And then, all the press coverage only studied that one thing, that there's no effect for cancer. There's no effect for cardiovascular disease. But if you look under the hood, you'll see that, for people with BMI, less than 25 kilograms per meter squared, they had a significant 25% reduction in all cancer incidents. And if you looked at African Americans, they had a non-significant, almost significant 25% reduction. So and for cardiovascular disease, they found no effect, no matter how they sliced it. But cardiovascular disease has a lower threshold for optimal than does cancer. So, that's not surprising. More recently, they did find that that autoimmune diseases were reduced significantly by the 2000 IU per day.

0:12:55.8 Brown: So let me interrupt this, this so important that the consumer learned to look, not just at the headline, but try to dig a little deeper. Like with the bone aspect. We know that if you have a 31 ng, Heaney showed it years ago, you're probably okay with bone. You're probably able to absorb calcium and not get too high parathyroid. So they, the people had a sufficient level already for bone when they started the study. And many of the people, most of the people, but then they also use a dose that was so small, 2000 that it wouldn't help the people that really... That really had very low vitamin D levels and that raised vitamin D slowly. We see many clients that need 6000 to get a 40 or 50 level, and others only need 2000, so that individual variation, like you say, you really must look at the whole person, see what their level is, and when you have adequate levels, that's when you tend to see the benefits, and if you give more, it's not gonna necessarily help bone, it may help with another disorder, but it's not gonna help bone.

0:14:00.1 Grant: Right.

0:14:03.3 Brown: So we can all take a breath, a deep breath at the vital... We don't pay too much attention to the vital study, we go back to the research, showing that 90% of the people that have a hip fracture are low in vitamin D, for example, and that's a pretty strong statement. We go back to this thing that we evolved in sunlight, we try to have at least that 50... 40, 50, 60 level of vitamin D. I think that's important, and I was struck by... You wrote an article with a friend of mine, Susan Whiting, a Canadian researcher, and you guys showed that, in Canada, they're allowing... They're recommending... I think it's a very low level of vitamin D, say 21 Ng, and she said, "If you just... "

0:14:58.6 Brown: You guys said, "If you just raise that level to 40 Ng," which is what we're saying all native populations had... Native populations had a bit more than that, that you would reduce... What did you guys calculate? You said you'd reduce the medical costs in Canada by 12 billion, 12 billion a year, just suggesting people have an adequate level of vitamin D, and the premature deaths would be reduced by 23,000. Now we can imagine, in the US, which we have like five times the population, or so, we have such great savings, why is it that there's such resistance to a simple thing like saying, "Let's make sure all the population has adequate vitamin D. We evolved in it, our genetic machinery depends on it, it's actually a substance that's turned into a hormone." What is the resistance Bill? What's going on here?

Health system makes money by treating, not preventing or curing

0:15:32.3 Grant: Well, it turns out that our medical system is primarily controlled by people who make money treating people, Big Pharma, the hospitals, etcetera, etcetera, and what they found they can do, is borrow and use the disinformation playbook that's been developed for stalling progress on fighting climate change, was used by tobacco industry, they sowed confusion about whether smoking really caused lung cancer, to hold off on regulating tobacco, the sugar industry has used it. When I published a paper and had a press conference, in 1998, showing that, for men, it was animal fat that clogged the arteries, for women, it was added sugars, by producing triglycerides, the Sugar Association and the Heart Association, both, jumped all over me and spiked the story, because they had not... This Heart Association, did not do their homework to find out that, yes, triglycerides clog the arteries. So this disinformation playbook is very effective, and I can tell you, quickly, what the elements are, if you like.

0:16:48.1 Brown: Sure, I would like to know that, because I've always wondered... I'd like to get the public interest back into public health, instead of this commercial interest into public health.

Playbook to oppose vitamin D science

0:16:57.1 Grant: Right, okay. So I published this at the Ortho Molecular Medicine website in 2018, and I had heard of people from the Union of Concerned Scientists give a talk at the Commonwealth Club about it, and I said, "My god, it sounds like what we're doing for vitamin D." So I checked, and sure enough, the first thing is the fake, which is conduct counterfeit science and pass it off as a legitimate research. I would put it in that category. Conducting clinical trials, these randomized controlled trials, using a drug approach instead of the nutrient approach. The second thing is the blitz, harass scientists who speak out with results who are viewed as inconvenient for industry. In 2018, the Kaiser Family Foundation wrote a hit piece on Michael Holick, which was published in the New York Times, a big piece in the New York times, and they said, "He took money from the indoor tanning industry, he made money selling a book on the sunlight, he takes money from the vitamin companies, he's tarnished."

0:17:57.3 Brown: Yes.

0:17:57.7 Grant: Nevermind Of course, that doctors take money from pharmaceutical companies.

0:18:00.3 Brown: Yeah.

0:18:00.5 Grant: The diversion, they'll manufacture uncertainty about science, where little to none exist, such as pointing to the clinical trials, not finding an effect on vitamin D, whereas the observational studies, and now the Mendelian randomization studies, very strongly support vitamin D in a causal manner. Then there's the screen, buy credibility through alliances with academia and professional societies. In other words, they give money to the... Bill Gates has given, what, $134 million to mass media around the world, and they want... It's very hard to get a paper, an article in the papers now about vitamin D, especially with Vitamin D and COVID.

0:18:40.5 Brown: Because of interest... Because his interest are in vaccination and not in solving the problem at a simpler level.

0:18:50.6 Grant: Right, and also didn't... Yeah, and also, he's opposed to Ivermectin. Again, it's a very simple approach, and it competes with the expensive drugs and vaccines. And finally, the fix, they manipulate government officials or processes to influence policy inappropriately. So if you look at the CDC, the FDA and the NIH, all the leaders have been working for Big Pharma and represent the interests of Big Pharma, not of the American population, in general. So there's all that opposed to vitamin D because it's the most efficient way to improve health, and so inexpensive, that the more they can bury it, the more profits they can make in treating cancer, cardiovascular disease, COVID, etcetera, etcetera.

0:19:43.6 Brown: Yes, and you've written such... So many articles pointing out the benefits of vitamin D and many other researchers, also, and I really think it's time that each individual takes charge and say, "Okay, I wanna have at least that level of vitamin D, which is so important for immunity and cardiac health, and cancer prevention that my ancestors had, as they went through this human evolution."

0:20:08.4 Brown: It's like pretty striking. I think we're moving away. We're moving out of this dark age where certain interests dictate what we're gonna learn and what we're gonna know and what we're gonna research and what we report. But the vital study was over the top as far as unfairly representing the data on vitamin D. So I want all of our listeners to be aware. Vitamin D is extremely important for bone health like Calic would say you can swim in calcium if you don't have vitamin D. Vitamin D is really the people who seriously fracture, who... People who fracture are vitamin D deficient. Like I mentioned, rare to find a hip fracture where you're not vitamin D deficient. And in fact, I have that challenge. I got the vitamin D hip fracture challenge. Show me anybody who's fractured a hip and wasn't vitamin D or had a extremely low level of vitamin D. Bill, you've also written on COVID. Tell us a bit about COVID and vitamin D. I mean, there's so much research showing that if you're low in magnesium, if you're low in omega-3 fats, if you're low in vitamin C, you're more vulnerable to these infections. What's your thought on vitamin D and COVID?

Vitamin D fights COVID in many ways – such as by production of cathelicidin

0:21:11.9 Grant: Okay, so vitamin D is an important to have member of the family of compounds that helps the immune system, both the innate and the adaptive immune system to function well. So for COVID, I hypothesize that first of all, it would induce production of a compound called cathelicidin, which can kill viruses and bacteria. And it's been thought to be very effective for flu and pneumonia and tuberculosis. And the other thing, important thing it does is vitamin D reduces the production of the pro-inflammatory cytokines. Cytokines are chemical messengers that go from one cell organ to another cell organ. And when you have an infection, so COVID starts with a SARS infection, and young people don't react to it very strongly, but the elderly people might have a very strong reaction through production of a very high amount of these pro-inflammatory cytokines leading to what's called a cytokine storm.

0:22:16.6 Brown: Right. Right. Right.

Got mild COVID even when having a 100 ng level of Vitamin D

0:22:17.5 Grant: And that can then start damaging the surface layers of all the organs and lead to damage and possibly to death. So there have been many studies on vitamin D and COVID and in general the finding is that it does help protect against infection, but the effect against infection is not as strong as the infection. The protection against the more adverse effects of COVID of the infection. So for example, I had over a hundred nanograms per milliliter of vitamin D level in September when I caught COVID, and it was a five day event. I lost just one night of sleep from the sore throat, but it was a very mild effect. And now all I have is a raspy voice.

0:23:15.9 Brown: Right. I see.

0:23:17.0 Grant: That's my long COVID effect.

Zinc is another nutrient that helps the immune system

0:23:18.5 Brown: Much less a serious effect. Whereas zinc and... Zinc into the cell and quercetin getting zinc in the cell is very antiviral. The vitamin D helps to reduce the severity of the symptoms and the severity of the inflammation.

0:23:33.8 Grant: Right.

0:23:34.6 Brown: All of the nutrients are important. And I think what we've learned from COVID is that we need to be nutrient replete that we've been running on empty and we see whether it's omega-3 fats, whether it's magnesium, whether it's zinc, whether it's these plant compounds in quercetin, we need to... Or vitamin C, which is such a great agent. I really appreciate that. And you also recently... I mean, you've written 284 articles, and I understand you did a review recently on Alzheimer's. You kind of started out with Alzheimer's, looking at Alzheimer's and diet, and then you have some thoughts about vitamin D and Alzheimer's disease.

Vitamin D association with Alzheimer’s is reduced by poor genes

0:24:07.7 Grant: Yeah, so it's interesting that... Well, vitamin D does play an important role in Alzheimer's. It's been shown to be a causal risk reduction factor through these genetic vitamin D studies in which it is essentially a replacement now for the randomized controlled trials, you look at the genetic variations of genes in the vitamin D pathway. And if you take a large enough group of people like a hundred thousand, you essentially randomize them according to their genetically determined vitamin D level and ask do they develop Alzheimer's? And they are in the other disease. And it's been shown that yes, that does hold for Alzheimer's. And also the observational studies show that you need at least 30 nanograms per milliliter to protect against Alzheimer's. So I looked up the mechanisms and the mechanism they include reduced brain aging, reduced cellular senescence, raising the high density lipoprotein, HDL cholesterol levels, reducing risk of mitochondrial dysfunction, and reducing oxidative stress. Oxidative stress will... With three radicals will start destroying the neurons.

0:25:22.7 Brown: Yeah, yeah.

0:25:23.3 Grant: Yeah. So I mean, these effects also apply to other organs as well.

0:25:28.2 Brown: Exactly. And other disorders as well. That's... It's such a basic foundational thing and people sometimes don't remember that we produce vitamin D... Through ultraviolet radiation, we can produce some vitamin D, but then the body converts that into a hormone and that hormone affects every tissue in the body.

More genes affected if take more Vitamin D

0:25:48.4 Grant: Exactly. So what happens when... The hormonal version of vitamin D is called calcitriol. And almost every cell in the body has a vitamin D receptor coupled to chromosomes. And so when the calcitriol binds to the vitamin D receptor, it can then affect the expression of many genes, maybe a 10th or so of the genes in the body up-regulating or turning on maybe two thirds of those and down-regulating or turning off maybe one third. And Michael Howick had a study published in 2019 in which he showed that if you took four I think a small amount of vitamin D maybe affected 400 genes. If you took 4000, it maybe affected 600. If you took 10,000, it affected over a thousand genes. So one assumes that the... If the gene is affected by vitamin D it's affected in a good way.
- - - - see also VitiaminDWiki 1289 genes changed with higher doses of Vitamin D - RCT Dec 2019
0:26:43.6 Brown: And you know what, what you see too, what we have to understand is that there's a... The body titrates, in other words, if you give it a little bit of something, it's gonna use it for the most important thing first. So if you give a little bit of vitamin D, it's gonna use it to absorb calcium. Because that is life threatening, if you don't absorb calcium. If it get a little bit of more, it might strengthen the muscles. It might actually boost the immunity. So it might actually... We tend to forget that the body is dealing with scarce resources. If we don't give it an abundance, it has to deal with the scarce resource, put it in the most important plate first, and then you may not... They were amazed. Like for example, with hospital studies of fracture, when they discovered that vitamin D might help, they gave tiny doses, like 800 units, and still within two months, the fracture the hip fractures decreased. They say, how can it be? But it's because it strengthened the muscles and there was enough vitamin D to absorb calcium and strengthen muscles. So we're just basically understanding the tiniest bit about the amazing nature of this human body. But one thing's really true, we have to have the basic building blocks in order for the body to do its miracles. And we certainly shortcut this on vitamin D.

0:27:57.2 Grant: Right.

0:27:57.7 Brown: So really it's a, to me as an anthropologist, it's so simple. We say 40 to 60mg. There's some argument... I think the grassroots health, I often talk about grassroots health. It's a wonderful nonprofit group. This really took it... Taken into their own responsibility with Carole Baggerly to really look to see how vitamin D could help health worldwide. And I think they see with higher levels of vitamin D, a terrific cancer reduction in their studies. I think it was like a 70% reduction in breast cancer. Was it with a 60 or 70 level of Vitamin D? Do you remember that?

Grassroothealth participants have good Vitamin D results – but have low BMI and take many other supplements

0:28:34.1 Grant: Right. Yes. They took results from two clinical trials in Nebraska, plus their own volunteer group. They have a program where people can have a vitamin D test every six months and report their health outcome, and they can then use those in studies. There's a... It turns out that the BMI for the people in the clinical trials in Nebraska was more like 30 or 28, whereas the BMI for those in the grassroots health cohort group or volunteer group was more like 24. And it turned just like in the vital study your lower BMI even as... Has an effect on risk of breast cancer just like vitamin D does. They're somewhat independent because a higher amount of fat generates more systemic inflammation. And systemic inflammation is a risk factor for quite a few diseases.

0:29:34.2 Brown: Yes, yes. And we're not saying it's simply that just vitamin D is gonna solve all the problems, but it's an important component. But, you know, you bring up an interesting point about weight. So if a person is heavy, if they have extra fat, do they need more Vitamin D? Does vitamin D get sequestered in the fat? How's that go?

Obese need to consume more vitamin D, and perhaps need higher blood level too

0:29:53.3 Grant: Well, yes. There's two thoughts on that. One is that, there's a dilution effect, larger mass needs more input. And the other is that there's the fat may sequester it. But what we're finding now is that suppose you need 30 or 40 nanograms for some disease. The people who are obese may need somewhat higher. And we're still trying to, I'm trying to work that out now, how much more they require. And just, it turns out in the vital study, the people in all three vitamin D BMI categories had the same 12 nanogram per milliliter increase in 25 of vitamin D level. But the heavier ones didn't have any benefit on cancer. So you gotta try to tease that out.

0:30:40.9 Brown: And yes, that I understand. But people still could rely on their own testing. We talk about these test kits where you can test your vitamin D. So it would still hold that if you have a blood level, you're in pretty, it's the blood level. We're basing the risk on the blood level of vitamin D.

0:31:00.7 Grant: But yeah. Normally we consider the blood level would be the indicator of the risk, but it has gotta be modified by the amount of the body mass index. And we're... I think I cleared that out.

0:31:12.9 Brown: I see. That's so interesting. You know, the many viewers have some questions. We're gonna go over these, but let me ask you one question. That this whole thing with dark skin people with afro... Black people, black skinned people, what's the... Of course we evolved light skins as we moved from Africa and we needed to be able to absorb more, the dark skin protects from the ultraviolet radiation. And as we moved north populations develop light skin because actually there was so much dysregulation of bone, there was... Was difficult to give birth because there was the malforming of the hip bones and the birth canal bone, the pelvic bone. So it's like light skin was an adaptation to a lack of sunlight to be able to... So how to do black people need... Do our levels that we're looking for vitamin D pertain to the same with black skin people? Is there any different metabolism of vitamin D in black skin people?

0:32:18.7 Grant: So I published a paper a year or two ago with Bruce Ames and Walter Willett on African Americans and vitamin D. And in the United States, the average white American has like 26 nanograms, the average Hispanic around 21 nanograms and average black around 16 nanograms. And we showed that that many that... Well the diseases for the most part don't care what color your skin is in terms of vitamin D level. That they will still benefit if they be get higher vitamin D levels. Unfortunately we don't seem to have made much traction among the African American community. But they will... I can't think of anything that where vitamin D wouldn't benefit them, same way it does for whites.

Pregnancy

0:33:13.3 Brown: So the same things. Whether you're dark skinned or not, you wanna measure your vitamin D level, you wanna have... We're saying a 40 to 60 level, you can us your opinion on the optimal level, but that just holds the same for all populations. You wanna make sure children, adults, the whole population.

0:33:30.9 Grant: Right.

0:33:31.6 Brown: Right. And pregnant women. That's pretty startling, the research on pregnancy, right?

0:33:37.1 Grant: Right.

0:33:37.5 Brown: Do you remember any of that off the top of your head?

0:33:40.9 Grant: Yeah. Well, Bruce Hollis and Carol Wagner, Medical University of South Carolina, they're premier researchers in that. And they did a study that Grassroots Health was involved with as well, showing that if you got above 40 nanograms per milliliter, you reduced your pre-term birth rate by about 60%.

0:34:00.1 Brown: Isn't that something?

0:34:01.2 Grant: Most Preterm birth is below 15 or 20 nanograms per milliliter. And then...

0:34:06.0 Brown: Such a simple thing to do to prevent the costly effects of preterm birth.

0:34:12.8 Grant: Right. And they had Hispanics and blacks and whites, and the effect was the same for all races.

0:34:19.2 Brown: It's startling that this doesn't make the headlines in the New York Times that say, all pregnant women get tested, save the chance of your child being born prematurely, which is terribly expensive for the medical system to handle.

0:34:31.5 Grant: Right. Plus the gestation diabetes and required Cesarean section delivery and pre-eclampsia, all sorts of adverse. And even miscarriages and birth defects and adverse effects on the children when they're growing up, that can be traced to what happened in the womb.

0:34:54.8 Brown: Yes. So even the child's development, as they grow, can be affected by the nutrient standards. The pinning down the vitamin D is such a simple thing, because one of these few things we can actually test. Every person can test it. There's no excuse. You go to your doctor and say, "I wanna be tested if they won't do it." When I started this campaign for vitamin D 20 year ago, doctors wouldn't test it. They said, "Why are we gonna test vitamin D?" The other day, one of my clients, I said, "Get tested for vitamin D." She said, "They don't do it." The nurse said, "We don't do it anymore. Everyone's, well, we don't do it anymore." It's like amazing not to draw that connection between simple sunlight exposure, the production of a hormone, which affects... I've heard 25% of your genes are affected by vitamin D. I'm not sure if that's exactly the number. But a very powerful hormone that we get from exposure to sunlight. We're not getting the sunlight, so we need to supplement with this. And the resistance to doing it is, it's striking. And it's so good that people like you remind us. People who've done... You've written 284 articles to remind us that get back on track with this common sense thing.

If not test vitamin D levels it would be OK to prescribe 4,000 IU

0:36:02.8 Grant: Well, lack of testing would be okay if the doctor said, "I'm not gonna test but start taking 4000 IU per day."

0:36:09.3 Brown: Right. And that's a really good point because 4000 IU seems to be above what the average person uses, is what I heard is. Is what you agree with? You think it's around 4000?

0:36:19.2 Grant: Well, that's maybe a little high. I think the average is more like 1000 or 2000 now. But there's a large percentage of people using 4000 or 5000. In fact, you know the story. You can find 5000 and 10,000, you can buy 50,000 over the Internet.

0:36:32.6 Brown: But you are... We really... We do see a few people... What we see that is amazing that most people slowly increase their vitamin D level. But some people are very responsive to vitamin D and they can get too high. You don't want to get too high. You can certainly absorb. Too much calcium maybe cause some problems. So we always are a champion of testing. Actually, test your level. Do you think there's much of a concern with too high vitamin D? What's your research on that? What's your thought?

1 Million IU daily was a problem after a while, got to 900 ng/mL level

0:37:05.6 Grant: Well, there's a famous example and a literature about a vitamin and mineral guru who was taking a million IU of vitamin D per day. He was selling a powder of nutrients and told this manufacturer to put a 1000 IU per day in the scoop. Well, the manufacturer confused micrograms and milligrams. It's 40 IU per microgram. So if you put in milligrams, it was a thousand times what he was told to. And the poor guy started getting bloody feet, couldn't think straight. He had to cancel his programs. And then they called in Michael Holick. And Michael Holick found out his vitamin D level was 900 nanograms per milliliter.

0:37:48.0 Brown: Wow.

0:37:49.0 Grant: Yeah. And so they just had him slowly come down. And when he got down to 400 nanograms per milliliter, the hypercalcemia disappeared.

0:37:58.7 Brown: Yeah.

Hypercalcemia = 200 ng for some people

0:38:00.0 Grant: Now some people can get hypercalcemia at 150 nanograms or 200 nanograms per milliliter. Other people can have 200 nanograms per milliliter and be okay.

0:38:07.7 Brown: Yeah, that's important, the guy tolerated, but he had some negative effects. And that's an important thing that maybe you get over a 100, 150, a few people will have serious problems. So we encourage people to stay below that. To stay in the 60, 70 range.

Prostate Cancer

0:38:25.9 Grant: One concern, there is some effect of high vitamin D level, adverse effect on prostate cancer.

0:38:32.3 Brown: Oh yeah, tell us about that.

0:38:34.2 Grant: Okay. So that was first reported from Finland in 2004. And I noticed that the maps of prostate cancer in the United States were different from the maps of colon and breast cancer. And that was the highest rates were in the Northwest and Northeast, and the lowest rates were in the Southeast. And so I figure out the mechanism I think that's happening is that, it's been shown that phosphorus and perhaps calcium are risk factors for prostate cancer. And so the classical effect of vitamin D is to increase calcium and phosphorus absorption. Well, if that goes to the prostate, it can help increase the risk of prostate. So there's a little effect on the low-level prostate cancer, and there's maybe an effect for very high levels of vitamin D, on adverse effects towards mortality. So one has to be a little concerned about that if it's the man. I don't know if a similar effect for women on any.

0:39:43.7 Brown: But wasn't that prostate story also that when people had sufficient vitamin D or higher levels, there was less fatal prostate cancer. Was that right?

0:39:53.5 Grant: Yeah. That that's been shown. Yes. And it's been shown in general that vitamin D is more effective in reducing mortality from cancer than reducing incidents. And that's because if you look at incidents, what vitamin D does is it works at the cellular level. It interrogates cells and lets them live and proliferate and so on, if they're good cells in the organ and not otherwise. But once the organ, the tumor starts growing, it needs blood vessels to bring nutrients and vitamin D can reduce the formation of blood vessels. And if it has to metastasize to really cause damage and vitamin D reduces metastasis. So and there has also been a study from Bruce Hollis showing that men with low grade prostate cancer can actually seem to reduce the number of positive cores of tumors by taking 4000 IU per day.

0:40:45.9 Brown: That's so interesting. Well, I'll tell you as an anthropologist, I'm just saying stick to the level that's... We evolved on. Probably... For most people it's maybe 4000 units to get to that 40, 50, 60ng level. And no matter what the situation, I think that's very advisable. Let's look and see the questions. We have a number of people wanted to ask questions. And we'll see how many we can get through. Do you wanna pick a question or you want me to pick the questions, can you see them there?

0:41:22.5 Grant: Okay, I'll take one here.

0:41:23.7 Brown: Okay.

0:41:24.2 Grant: Some people talk about getting vitamin D from food sorces and sunlight. Is this enough?

0:41:27.9 Brown: Yeah.

0:41:28.3 Grant: There was an interesting study from the United Kingdom published in 2011 by a woman by name of Crowe, C-R-O-W-E. She looked at meat eaters, fish eaters, vegetarians and vegans.

0:41:42.6 Brown: Yeah.

Vitamin D from meat is in a form not noticed by a standard Vitamin D test

0:41:43.2 Grant: And found that the meat had the highest vitamin D levels, which was 8 nanograms higher than the vegans. So it turns out that meat is a good source of vitamin D, but not well known because vitamin D is in the form of 25 hydroxy Vitamin D, the same vitamin D that's measured when you measure your vitamin D level. And it took scientists a few years to realize that they had to start counting that as part of a source of vitamin D. So vitamin D is only found in... Naturally found in meat. Mainly cold water ocean fish with... With... And then with eggs and in fortified milk. I don't think natural milk has any vitamin D, but, plants... Mushrooms are not a plant, they're a fungus and they have a vitamin D2, which is not as effective as vitamin D3. Vitamin D3 is what we make. And if you get a supplement, make sure it's vitamin D3, not D2. Doctors like to prescribe a vitamin D2 because it's on... It's patented, they make money, it's covered by insurance. It costs 10 or 20 times as much and a hundred times as much as vitamin D3. But it's, they can order from their pharmacist.

0:43:01.5 Brown: You know. Let's just... Let me interrupt you, let's review that because we get a lot of questions on that, that there's D2 and D3. And vitamin D3, cholecalciferol is a natural form of vitamin D and D2 was a synthetic and actually was developed... It was developed by a researcher who then patented it, made a synthetic and patented it. And so now it's still a drug, it's patented and they tend to use that under prescription, but it's a synthetic and it's not nearly as effective as D3. In fact, I've seen studies saying that it inhibits the action of D3. So we wanna encourage people to take the D3 and to be careful, you know, one thing is if your insurance pays for it that's cool. But like you say, it's very inexpensive. The natural vitamin D is very expensive... Inexpensive. There's no need to support a drug company by buying the synthetic vitamin D, which is not as good for you.

0:43:58.4 Grant: Right, right. Okay. Then turn to sunlight. You can only make vitamin D when your shadow is shorter than you are.

0:44:07.5 Brown: Right.

No problem with sun burn/skin cancer if have a good level of vitamin D – even if red-headed

0:44:07.9 Grant: So that means several months around the summer in general and a couple hours around silver noon, the dermatologist like to say, if your shadow is shorter than you, stay out of the sun to reduce risk of sunburn and skin cancer and melanoma. But we take a turn around and say, if you'll make vitamin D, you've gotta have a short shadow. Now, interesting. Couple interesting things about that. I have a colleague whose wife lives, they live in Illinois. And she's, freckled, red haired has skelty skin and would normally not do well in the sun.

0:44:44.5 Brown: Yeah.

0:44:45.1 Grant: But by getting her vitamin D level up to 70 nanograms per milliliter, she can stay in the sun for an hour without burning. And this is well known that it turns out that the skin has the mechanism to take... To make... To convert the 70 hydro cholesterol to, cholecalciferol to then convert the 25 vitamin D and then the Calcitriol. And so it actually has the mechanism there to fight the development of skin cancer.

0:45:13.2 Brown: You know, I saw that it can help prevent sunburn which is such an interesting thing.

A form of Vitamin D is stored in the muscles in the winter

0:45:18.8 Grant: Exactly. Yes. So another thing about... Now I've always wondered about why people have maybe 50% as much vitamin D levels in winter as in summer. Well a group in Australia, figured out what's going on, is that the muscle cells store vitamin D as 25-Hydroxyvitamin D.

0:45:38.0 Brown: I saw something like that yeah.

0:45:40.0 Grant: Yeah. In the winter, that 25-Hydroxyvitamin D is recycled perhaps by the parathyroid hormone that's joined with vitamin D levels in regulating serum calcium. And so it just keeps recycling this 25-Hydroxyvitamin D to keep levels up. So it's...

0:46:04.2 Brown: That's so interesting. We've underplayed muscle. I have thousands of clients who are so worried about little changes in bone density. We realize we lose muscle just like we lose bone. And muscle has many functions like to store vitamin D. So you want a strong muscular framework. That's really so interesting that it stores vitamin D for the winter, nature is pretty wise. It's packed some of that away. That's very excellent idea. So everyone build muscle. That's a very important thing. And you're even gonna enhance your winter vitamin D with that.

0:46:38.8 Grant: Right.

0:46:39.5 Brown: Let's see, Bill is there another question here you find interesting.

Should also increase Mg and Vit K and limit Ca

0:46:42.0 Grant: The bottom of the bottom here, what other vitamins should you take with your vitamin D to help with its function? Magnesium and K. Okay. So K2 is recommended if you're... Especially if you're taking high dose vitamin D because that helps put the calcium in the hard tissues like the bones and not in the soft tissues like the vascular system.

0:47:03.1 Brown: Right.

0:47:03.4 Grant: Some people have gotten calcified arteries from taking high dose vitamin D and taking vitamin D supplements. In fact, I think it's now understood that you don't wanna take more than maybe a thousand milligrams of calcium per day in supplements.

0:47:19.1 Brown: Right. Right.

0:47:19.8 Grant: Because you can overload your system. Magnesium has a lot of benefits. For one thing, it's sort of, maybe you know this better than I do. It sort of counters some of the effects of calcium, but it has many other benefits, which I haven't studied yet.

0:47:34.3 Brown: Yes. And the relaxation of the muscles, it's the... Calcium has been overplayed. Magnesium has been underdone is then there's no company sponsoring magnesium and getting your kale, getting your nuts and seeds to get high magnesium. But the important thing we always stress about this K2 in vitamin D is that everyone needs vitamin D, but their level may be... It's not a universal same level. You could certainly start out with 2000 units or 4000 units, measure yourself and see you get to that say 50 level.

0:48:05.3 Brown: Different people need different levels of vitamin D, the MK-7. We generally find that a couple hundred micrograms or 180 micrograms is really fine to actually, like you say, keep that calcium in the bone by activating Ostocalcium and keeping it out of the arteries by activating matrix GLA protein. So it's very pivotal in keeping that calcium, which we're increasing with vitamin D in the bone and out of the artery. And we don't need so much vitamin D now... I mean, so much calcium because vitamin D is becoming well known, foods are becoming fortified. So we agree we rarely supplement with more than five or maybe 600 milligrams of calcium, get the rest in diet.

Autoimmune, MS, etc.

0:48:49.4 Grant: Okay. Another question here is about vitamin D autoimmune disorders. Those include multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, I guess there's a thyroid autoimmune disease.

0:49:04.2 Brown: All kinds of... Yeah. Crohn's p[0:49:04.5] ?? all kinds of things. Yeah.

0:49:06.5 Grant: Okay. Multiple sclerosis is very interesting in that it shows a very, very pronounced latitudinal gradient, almost nonexistent in the tropics, very high rates in the polar regions. It is the disease with the highest latitudinal variation of anything.

0:49:23.4 Brown: I see. So it really would strongly suggest the sunlight exposure is very important for the development of MS.

0:49:30.4 Grant: In fact, there's some people who say that you can't tell whether it's sunlight or vitamin D which is having the effect. Now there are other benefits of sunlight than vitamin D production. One is liberating nitric oxide from nitrate stores in the skin.

0:49:49.4 Brown: Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Nitric Oxide generated by UV is also important

0:49:49.4 Grant: And the Nobel Prize for nitric oxide was issued around 1995 or so when it was found that it was very beneficial for cardiovascular disease. Well it has been Dr. Weller in England is... And colleagues are showing that it may be very effective in fighting COVID. It's well known that COVID rates are much lower in the summer than they're in the winter. And there's at least three reasons. One is vitamin D, the other is the nitric oxide, which has antimicrobial properties, and the third is temperature. I've been having arguments with some of my colleagues about whether temperature is a risk factor for influenza and COVID. And for example, in my case, I got... I spent a couple hours in the cool San Francisco evening and then went to an indoor auditorium with 1600 mashed peoples of whom some had COVID.

0:50:49.2 Brown: Yeah.

Immune sytem not work as well when it is cold

0:50:49.2 Grant: And the next day I had COVID. So it turns out when you get cold, when your throat gets cold, the capillaries shut down for one thing. It can't bring the nutrients there to try to fight it. But I also found a paper yesterday showing that the innate immune system tries to build little... Little molecules to fight the infection. But if it's cold, they can... Not as effective. So there are reasons that being cold is why colds are called colds.

0:51:22.9 Brown: Why, yeah. Yes. Why we cold is a challenge to the body to adjust the cold.

Coimbra protocol, with high-dose vitamin D, treats Multiple Sclerosis. etc.

0:51:29.0 Grant: Now, back to autoimmune diseases I think that most autoimmune diseases probably start with an infection or with a body's reaction to an infection. And that's one way that Vitamin D can help reduce the risk of autoimmune diseases. Now in terms of treatment, it's a little more questionable there, but there is a Dr. Coimbra in Brazil.

0:51:54.0 Brown: Oh, right. Yeah, yeah.

0:51:54.8 Brown: Who treats people with multiple sclerosis with 50,000 IU vitamin D per day. But he takes frequent blood samples and he is optimizing quite a few nutrients and compounds. And it's not something you can just start popping 50,000 IU and thinking you're gonna overcome your multiple sclerosis.

0:52:14.7 Brown: Yes. And what's the name of that? That's kind of a very interesting thing with this doctor in another country that's kind of doing innovative things. What's the Brazilian doctor's name?

0:52:22.9 Grant: Coimbra, C-O-I-M-B-R-A.

0:52:26.5 Brown: C-O-I-M-B-R-A. So you can look at his research if you're all interested in one... That approach to MS. He certainly is reported frequently as being interesting, but you never wanna take high dose vitamin D unless you're really testing, working with a professional to help you see the impact on the body. And how long does it... Dr. Grant, how long does it take to see the impact? If I start taking 10,000 units of vitamin D today, how long will it take me to see... When should I retest to see what it's doing?

Jumpstart dosing with a loading dose. Otherwise it takes months

0:52:55.1 Grant: Okay. So Robert Heaney post a paper in 2003, on Vitamin D dosing and changes in 25-Hydroxyvitamin D. And what he shows if you're taking like 2000 or 4000 IU, it may take three months to get up to plateau. You're gonna go start up and then you're gonna slowly build up from there. What's often recommended is that people use it a loading dose, maybe 20,000 or 50,000 IU a day for maybe a week or so, and that will then sort of jumpstart your vitamin D level and then back off. Now, if you just, you say you're doing 5000 IU per day, you might wait three months before testing.

0:53:39.4 Brown: Okay.

0:53:39.8 Grant: If you do a loading dose and then go back to something, you might be able to do that in a month instead of three months.

0:53:44.8 Brown: I see, I see. You know I've always been the... Had the impression that it's better to do daily vitamin D rather than to take like 50,000 a week. I would do 7000 a day since you have that. Do you have any thoughts on that? Does it make a difference?

Non-daily dosing is OK – up to the half life for 2.5 weeks

0:53:58.7 Grant: Okay, so there's a Pharmacological approach that you can dose at maybe half the half life. So the half life of 25-Hydroxyvitamin D is around 2 and a half weeks.

0:54:14.2 Brown: Okay.

0:54:14.6 Grant: So that means that weekly dosing is okay. There have been a number of clinical trials and... That use 100,000 IU every month and they've all failed.

0:54:26.5 Brown: Yes, they've all failed.

0:54:27.4 Grant: One month is just too long.

0:54:28.8 Brown: I see.

0:54:30.3 Grant: Now for nursing mothers, Bruce Hollis and Carol Wagner, have shown that daily vitamin D dosing is important because the nursing infant once you get unprocessed Cholecalciferol, unprocessed vitamin D3. Because it has to process itself, it can't take the preformed 25-Hydroxy vitamin D, so that is where you want to do daily-dosing. There may be other places where vitamin D has a direct effect and maybe possibly... See, most of the effects of vitamin D are through genetic effects through Calcitriol and the genes. But there are some effects that are related to Calcium independent of the genes, and I don't know whether those are related to D3 or 25-Hydroxyvitamin D. But there could be some cases where daily-dosing is better.

0:55:21.9 Brown: You know, it reminds me of one of my meditation teachers Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who said the body likes regularity. So, for me I would say just do that, do your 4000 a day, or if you're doing 50,000 a week that's 7000 a day. Usually you do 50,000 a week for maybe eight weeks, and then you retest to make sure you're not getting too high. But I like the daily dose, I think the body likes regularity.

0:55:49.7 Grant: Right.

0:55:51.2 Brown: So let's see what else we got here Bill, any other questions that... We have a lot of questions, let's see.

0:55:56.7 Grant: You choose one this time.

0:55:58.3 Brown: Okay. Do any type of Light treatments work to elevate vitamin D levels in the winter?

0:56:08.7 Grant: Yes, Sperti Company sells one that's has enough UVB to produce vitamin D and it's relatively inexpensive and... Deliberately...

0:56:20.0 Brown: That's, that's S-P...

0:56:20.2 Grant: Consider that, I don't know if you have some to recommend.

0:56:24.0 Brown: S-P-E-R-T-I is the company.

0:56:25.9 Grant: Right.

0:56:26.1 Brown: Sperti Light, and you can buy a Light and you just, they have instructions how long you expose yourself to it.

0:56:31.4 Grant: Right.

0:56:31.9 Brown: And what about tanning? What do you make of tanning?

0:56:34.9 Grant: Well, I used to help the Indoor Tanning Industry fight regulations, but we eventually lost and gave up. The legislators said that if indoor tanning produces Melanoma, that's worse than... That doesn't... Making vitamin D an indoor tanning bed, it doesn't compensate for that.

0:56:53.9 Brown: Right.

Tanning beds mainly produce UVA, not the UVB needed to create Vitamin D

0:56:54.4 Grant: It turns out that indoor tanning lamps generally have only about 2% of the UV as UVB, whereas in the mid latitude midday sun is more like 4% or 5%. So tanning, the UVA is what makes the melanin dark, UVB may start the melanin to grow, but it's UVA that makes it dark, and so that's why they have only 2% UVB.
– – – – Note on VitaminDWiki Vitamin D from low-cost UVB lamps – 1/10 the price of Sperti
0:57:20.7 Brown: I see.

0:57:21.2 Grant: And, there's not many studies showing... Well, the Melanoma is... It turns out that again Melanoma maybe started by... It's often started in areas that are not well, often exposed to the sun. It turns out, for example, that the Submariners had more Melanoma than Deckhands in the Navy, according to report by Cedric Garland 20 or 30 years ago. But once you get Melanoma, survival it depends on vitamin D levels, just like it does for any other type of Cancer, but it has a side effect. So I would say don't do... If you want to do tanning for cosmetic purposes, it's fine, but don't rely on that for producing vitamin D.

0:58:02.4 Brown: So better to use this Sperti Light, S-P-E-R-T-I, the Sperti Light. I have had clients who could not take vitamin D. The one client in particular who swore she would get adverse reaction like a stomach ache or something like that, so she did the Sperti Light, and she... You have to do it like a lot. And you have to follow the instructions, but she was able to get her vitamin D into an acceptable level, that's a good idea. Let's see if we've got time for one or two other questions. "I have been deficient of vitamin D and have to take 10,000 units to just barely maintain a 32 NG level in my blood. I am outdoors as much as others, and I eat a vitamin rich diet." So what do you make of that? If someone says, "Look, I've taken 10,000 and I can't get to 32 or I can barely get there."

Many reasons for a poor response

0:58:56.6 Grant: Okay, so there are a lot of genes involved in the vitamin D pathway and these genes have different forms, different alleles and some are more responsive to vitamin D than others are. And if you go to Grassrootshealth.net they have a curve, you can find a graph that shows there's a scatter plot, on the vertical axis is 25-Hydroxy vitamin D level report measured, and horizontal is the vitamin D dose. And you'll see there's a large spread of vitamin D levels. For any dose. There's a very high in homogeneity, a very high variation in 25-Hydroxy vitamin D. So, you know, there could be factors like maybe, your digestive system is not absorbing it maybe.

0:59:46.4 Brown: Right, right, right.

0:59:47.2 Grant: Etcetera, etcetera. Maybe you're heavy, so you just... The fact that you know what you get with what you take. If you wanna get higher, you'd take more.

0:59:57.9 Brown: Yeah. And I guess, so you'd say, I might say, well be sure to take your vitamin D with food with fat in it, and maybe try a different form of vitamin D, maybe get mycelial form that might be better absorbed in your particular case. But the byline is keep trying, you will need more to raise it and keep testing. Is that right?

1:00:20.7 Grant: Yeah.

1:00:20.8 Brown: Great. Yeah.

1:00:22.3 Grant: There are powder forms, there's lipid forms and they even put vitamin D in three in orange juice. So you can take it in with water, but as long as you have some fat in your GI tract helps.

1:00:37.0 Brown: Yeah. Yeah. So, and remember, we're blessed. There is simple tests. Your doctors can do it. You can get an at home test like we use at the center for Better Bones and Alkaline for Life. No reason to question. I do find that if, if I see an adult with low vitamin D I look at their kids, they're usually low. There is that strong genetic determinant you wanna pay. If you have low vitamin D, think about your mother. If you're worried about her fracturing, think about your mother and be sure to test the whole family, because it definitely runs in... You see very strong genetic correlations, that is for sure, such a simple thing to do.

1:01:11.4 Grant: And lifestyle correlations.

1:01:13.3 Brown: How is that now?

Vegans do not get the Vitamin D in meat

1:01:13.9 Grant: Well, if you have... You have a vegan family, they're gonna be all gonna be low and vitamin D.

1:01:20.1 Brown: Well, you know, that's right. When we look at nutrients, you know, I see so many vegans with bone health problems, low protein, low vitamin D, low vitamin B, low minerals. So pay a special attention if you're not eating animal products, test your vitamin D test your omega-3 fats test your iron levels. Be wise about it. As we forget that we live in a very toxic environment and we have high nutrition demands on us. We have to keep those antioxidants high. We have to keep our defenses high, and we cannot keep them high unless we have all those key nutrients. So yeah, we're encouraging everyone to take charge, take charge of their health. Let's see. Bill, we have a couple more here. Let's see here. Yes, there, oh, the one, this is, is there a best time of day to take vitamin D? Now you mentioned it has, it has a half life of 2.5 weeks. Does it matter what time of day you take it.

1:02:29.6 Grant: I think maybe middle day is probably better that there's been some concern that taking it in the evening might affect your sleep.

1:02:35.9 Brown: Okay, great. Well, Bill, we've done a great marathon tour of vitamin D and I congratulate you for all the years of just simply asking simple questions. Where does this disease occur? Is it related to something in the environment? Where does... Could even the acidification of the waters and the earth affect dementia by liberating more aluminum? We're really looking a lot into a pH balance and the importance for body and for the... And for the ecological environment. That's so fascinating, the work you've done and all the careful thought of looking to see how we can optimize health with vitamin D, recognizing all the variations and that individual must factor in their own circumstance. What closing thoughts would you have for our audience who's just really thinking how I can take care of myself and my family. I think that's, people are basically focusing on how can I overcome autoimmune disease? How can I... Is there any way I can help stay stronger longer? What would be your words of inspiration for everyone?

1:03:47.5 Grant: Well, I find the inspiration by searching the medical literature every day. I go to pubmed.gov and put in vitamin D and try to find out what the latest thing is. I have Google Scholar, give me updates on various topics. I go to scholar.google.com. But I think, honestly...

1:04:11.9 Brown: You know, I think hold it right there. I think that's brilliant because everything begins with awareness. So the first thing you do is you don't pass the book. You say, I'm gonna learn, I'm gonna learn, then I'm interested if I'm gonna learn, see what scholars are writing about. You can sort through that stuff and you can pick out what you understand. But that's a great idea to realize we don't know everything. There's a great lot of new information. And so maybe go right to PubMed or google.scholar and ask your question. That's...

1:04:37.9 Grant: And one other resource is vitamindwiki.com, that's operated by Henry Lahore, a retired Boeing engineer who spends 10 hours a day sucking in all the vitamin D literature and making it publicly available and systematizing it and making papers available, etcetera, etcetera.

1:04:58.0 Brown: Wait, this is vitamindwiki.com?

1:05:00.8 Grant: Right.

1:05:01.8 Brown: Great.

1:05:02.9 Grant: It's a wonderful source. And he's been at this five, six, 10 years maybe. And.

1:05:08.9 Brown: And of course grassrootshealth.org is a wonderful another great...

1:05:13.2 Grant: Dot net.

1:05:14.1 Brown: Dot net. Grassrootshealth.net is a wonderful nonprofit group that's made it a campaign to wake up vitamin D awareness for the good of the public worldwide, so grassrootshealth.net and vitamindwiki.com. That's I'm glad to hear of it. I didn't know that.

1:05:31.5 Grant: Right. Good.

1:05:33.8 Brown: Well, thank you very much. You've been very kind, spending so much time with us. We're gonna... We're gonna keep up the good fight of raising our nutrient status so all of us can stay well at summer, winter, no matter what we come across. So no matter what challenges we have, we're gonna fortify our bodies so we can manage to come out on top of all of this. Thank you very much, and I certainly congratulate you on your work and keep us informed. You're at 284 articles now, so there's probably a lot more coming and any things that you find really interesting, be sure to send it along. We'll pass it on to everyone and for the whole group, I thank you very much for the time and...

1:06:12.5 Grant: Well, thank you for inviting me. It was my pleasure to interact with you.

1:06:16.7 Brown: Great, great. And may everyone be well, we'll be in touch soon. Share this video with all your friends and if you like our videos, be sure to sign up. We are... We're on every social media trying to uplift the health awareness of all of us altogether. Be well, we'll talk soon.

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43 VitaminDWiki pages with TRANSCRIPT in title (as of Dec 2022)

This list is automatically updated

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45 items By Dr. Grant in VitaminDWiki as of Dec 2022