Interview with transcript of Dr. Grant on Vitamin D and Cancer by Dr. Moss - June 2022

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Podcast on YouTube

Podcast is also on MossReport.com

In this episode, Dr. Ralph Moss talks with William Grant, PhD, one of the leading experts on vitamin D and cancer. Grant is the founding director of Sunlight, Nutrition, and Health Research Center (SUNARC) of San Francisco. He has a doctorate in physics from the University of California at Berkeley.

Dr. Grant is the author of ~300 PubMed-listed articles on vitamins, 163 of which concern the relationship of vitamin D to cancer.
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You can download the Moss's free Cancer Incorporated book

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Transcript

0:00:05.2 Welcome to The Moss Report with your host, Dr. Ralph W. Moss.

0:00:14.5Moss: Hi, this is Ralph Moss and welcome to The Moss Report. Today on our podcast, we have a very special guest, William B. Grant and Dr. Grant is, dare I say, the leading writer and expert in the United States on the topic of vitamin D and specifically the use of vitamin D in the prevention of disease. And, we wanna talk of course, specifically about cancer. Dr. Grant is the director of the Sunlight, Nutrition and Health Research Center in San Francisco and the author of an extraordinary 284 publications on vitamin D that are listed at PubMed the government's database on all medical topics.

0:01:13.9 Moss And I noticed, Bill that your latest publication was with two scientists whom I greatly admire, Bruce Ames who is a emeritus professor at Alma mater, UC Berkeley, and also Walter Willett who's recently retired, I believe, but the leading epidemiologist at Harvard. So you're hanging out in some very impressive company. And I think it's a indication of how far you've come in the 20 odd years that you've been working on this with your incredible persistence that you've brought this topic of vitamin D to the forefront really, of many people's consciousness. So welcome to our program.

0:02:00.9 Grant Well, thank you. Good to interact with you.

0:02:03.2 Moss Yes, and we have corresponded before, about, I look up, I see that about 10 or 11 years ago when I was coming to California to speak, we had some correspondence at that time, but it looks to me like the topic that you are, dare I say, really preeminent and which is interrelationship of vitamin D with health has really taken off in recent years. And so I wanted to talk to you about that and what this struggle has meant for you personally, how this happened. Because one thing that I find so interesting is that you really are kind of an outsider-insider in the sense that your PhD is in physics from Berkeley. I mean, it's fantastic credential, but, maybe some people might find it surprising that you have become a health expert, basically. So I'm wondering how did that transition happen?

Alzheimer's

0:03:10.7 Grant Okay. It's an interesting transition. When I was working for NASA Langley research center in Virginia, I also, volunteered with the Sierra Club and got involved with a project to look at how acid rain and ozone were affecting the Eastern hardwood forest. And in doing that, I learned from a forestry professor Oly Laux how to the ecological study approach where you treat populations as defined geographically as entities. And then you look at the statistics, say for disease outcome or forced outcome versus the risk modifying factors. And after I learned this in 1996, I read that in Hawaii, the Japanese American men, there had two and a half times the rate of Alzheimer's disease as native Japanese.

0:04:07.6 Grant My mother had Alzheimer's and I knew people with Alzheimer's probably had more aluminium in their brains. And I recalled from the forestry study that acid rain frees up aluminium, and the trees pick that up and go into decline. And I figured, well, probably the American diet is the reason they have more Alzheimer's in Hawaii than in Japan. And I can prove that by doing an ecological study. And so I got the dietary supply data from 10 countries, the prevalence of Alzheimer's and show that total fat and total energy supply were highly correlated with Alzheimer's disease, fish modified the risk, reduced the risk a little bit and countries that had mainly mainly a rice based diet had very low rates of Alzheimer's. I had very...

0:04:52.2 Moss Very low, had low rates?

0:04:54.4 Grant Yes. Like India and China and Japan. And I had that vetted by university of Kentucky and then published in their journal Alzheimer's disease review. And I hired a press agent, went to DC and announced to the world that diet was a main risk factor for Alzheimer's disease.

0:05:13.6 Grant And I made the national TV news with Dan Rather in CNN, and it was like hitting a home run at my first time bat in the major leagues.

0:05:22.4 Grant And here I was a atmospheric scientist at NASA who was studying ozone and aerosols and going on international trips, but I was really more of an instrument manager and not really a scientist. Now, all of a sudden, I found that if I combined two data sets, I could really make some progress. And then the next study I did was on sugar and heart disease, showing that for an ecological study, again, that for heart attacks, and globally added sugar was the main risk factor for women. But for men, it was animal fat. And it turns out John Yudkin had talked about sugar being the main risk factor in the '60s. But Ancel Keys talked about animal fat, Ancel Keys did all studies on men and he argued stronger than John Yudkin did. And so it was, fat was the big booga boo and sugar was, not accepted because they didn't understand that you eat sugar you form triglycerides, they clogged the arteries just as saturated as fat does. The heart association finally realized that about a decade ago, but they couldn't get on board back in 1998. Then 1999, the Atlas of cancer mortality rates from the United States from 1970 to 1994 was published. It had these beautiful maps with five shades of red, five shades of blue.

0:06:43.2 Moss Yes, I remember that, yeah.

0:06:45.2 Grant And I posted some of the images on my website sunarc.org. And at first I tried to find the dietary links to the cancer, but that didn't work, we essentially have more or less the same diet country-wide. Then I went back to the paper by Cedric and Frank Garland from 1980. Now, when they were beginning graduate students at the School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins, they saw the early maps from the National Cancer Institute, which had only five grades of shading, and they had just driven from San Diego to Baltimore, they knew it was very sunny in the Southwest United States, not very sunny in Northeast. And so they said to themselves, "Well, it's got to be sunlight." And the most important effect of sunlight is production of vitamin D, therefore vitamin D less reduced the risk of colon cancer. It took them six years to get their study published, and then it was in a British journal, the International Journal of Epidemiology, that was in 1980. They then went on and did a study separately on breast cancer, ovarian cancer, and more on colon cancer, but they weren't getting much traction and they sort of lost hope. So I came along in 1999 as seen in the new maps, and I got the NASA data for solar UVB doses at the earth surface for June 1992, and had to digitize that map to the 500-some odd state economic areas in the cancer atlas maps. And finally got that all together and did the analysis just for UVB, and I sent that to the Journal of Cancer in 2002.

0:08:38.7 Moss UVB meaning ultraviolet?

0:08:41.9 Grant Yeah, that's a short wave length from a UV, it's about 3 or 4% of the total UV hitting the earth's surface, and UVA is the longer wavelength, so UVB is from 290 to 315, nanomoles, nanometers. I'm confused by the units here. So, the reviewer said, "Great paper, but get it edited by a text editor." I did, it got published, and then the critics said, "Well, why did you leave out the states along the border of Mexico, and why didn't you include other risk-modifying factors?" So I duly put those, I finally realized that the problem along the border was a lot of Mexicans lived in these border states, and they had a lot of H-Pylori infection and a high rate of stomach cancer. I hadn't realized that at first. And when I put in all these other factors, I got the same results for UVB in vitamin D, but now I showed that, yes, smoking was a big risk factor, poverty was risk factor, is dependent whether you're a urban or rural resident and whether you drink alcohol.

0:09:54.6 Grant And I sent it back to Cancer, and they said, "Well, it's interesting, but we'll pass." Eight other journals passed, they just didn't wanna get ahead of the curve and really promote vitamin D. Finally, I got Cedric Garland involved as a co-author, and we got our paper published in a Greek journal and a cancer research as a result of the proceedings for UV and vitamin D cancer conference in Germany. And this paper has got maybe 200 or 300 citations by now, so it's accepted. So the first paper in 2002, then encouraged other people to think about cancer more carefully, and Robert Heaney and Jon Lapis group at Creighton University, re-analyzed the data they had from a clinical trial and show that Aha yes, the women taking Vitamin D and calcium has significantly lower incidents of cancer than the women taking just calcium or taking placebo.

0:11:03.0 Moss Were they given this in the course of a trial perspectively?

0:11:07.7 Grant Yeah, they were studying osteoporosis and the effect of vitamin D and calcium on osteoporosis. Because until the year 2000, the only known benefit of Vitamin D was reduced risk of bone diseases and rickets, for example, rickets. The ecological studies are not given any credibility in the medical system, and they really hadn't looked much at the observational studies for Vitamin D and cancer or anything else. So this, if you looked at the number of publications on Vitamin D, there was one slope, about 10% or so increase per year until 2002, then after this publication went up more like 20% per year, because now the field was open, well, if it can do cancer what about cardiovascular disease? What about diabetes? What about infections? And so the field really started taking off then.

0:12:02.8 Moss Yes, that's a profound effect. What is your overall opinion in terms of preventing cancer? Should most people be increasing their exposure to sunlight? Should they be taking a supplement? If they do take a supplement, I know you're gonna tell me that it has to do with the level of the optimal level of the vitamin in the blood, but is there a safe level that people could take that would be beneficial to the vast majority without running the risk of any toxicity?

0:12:44.3 Grant Okay. First, go back to the maps I produced. If you look at the maps today, there's much less of an evidence of UVB reducing risk of cancer, that's because people are heavier. They've been convinced by the dermatologist that sun is bad. You've got to wear sunscreen, including in the makeup. You've got to cover up. You're gonna get sunburn et cetera, et cetera. And also it turns out even if you do go out in the sun every day in the United States, half of the year you can't make any vitamin D.

0:13:17.6 Moss Why is that? You mean just because the sunlight is just too weak?

0:13:24.3 Grant Yeah. It depends on the solar zenith angle or elevation angle. If your shadow is shorter than you are, you can make some vitamin D, if it's longer than you are, you really can't.

0:13:34.0 Moss I see.

Grant takes 5,000 IU daily, is at 60 ng

0:13:34.5 Grant So you've got to be near within a couple of hours of solar noon during the summer and forget about it during the winter, unless you're in the Southern Florida. But even if you do make vitamin D... Well, it's shown that vitamin D levels go up in the summer to maybe 28 to 30 nanograms per milliliter for Whites and around 20 nanograms per milliliter in the winter. So it's about maybe 30% variation of summer and the winter. On the other hand, if you take vitamin D, you can raise your level to 40, 50, 60, 70, 100 nanograms per milliliter. Now it turns... Okay, the Institute of Medicine claimed that you could take 4,000 international units of vitamin D per day, which'd be safe for everyone, but they admitted that they saw no adverse effects up to 10,000 IU per day. And other studies have shown even up to 30,000 IU per day. There's very little adverse effects. So for example, I take around 5,000 IU per day and my 25-hydroxy vitamin D, which is the vitamin D level measured by your doctor is around 60 nanograms per milliliter. Now two studies... So grassrootshealth.net is an organization that promotes vitamin D and they also enroll people in trial studies where they're allowed to take whatever vitamin D doses they want. And every six months they're sent a blood spot kit so they can draw blood and send it back and within two weeks, find out what their vitamin D level is.

0:15:15.0 Grant And these tests are very accurate, costs about $70. And they've been used now in clinical trial... In observational studies. And anyway, what they've shown, and I've got one of the maps here in front of me, they looked at the frequency distribution of breast cancer incidents by 25-hydroxy vitamin D measured within about... Within a six months to a year prior to diagnosis of breast cancer. So they find that those who got up to 70 nanograms per milliliter had 80% reduction in breast cancer incidents compared to those with around 25 nanograms per milliliter, which is about right for average White-Americans, and about even a little bit more reduction for 16 nanograms per milliliter, which is what you have for African-Americans.

VITAL: Was restricted to 2000 IU of Vitamin D

0:16:12.4 Grant And for overall cancer, all types of cancer, they showed about a 70% reduction for Whites and about a 80% reduction for Blacks. And this was based both on using their volunteer participants, as well as those who took part in the Lapi Heaney studies from Creighton University. And they would look at each categories by different vitamin D levels. So, unfortunately, if you look at the vital study out of Harvard by Joan Manson and colleagues, published in 2019, they were limited by the national institutes of health to 2000 IU per day. Now, I'm not sure why they did that. My own ideas that maybe they didn't wanna show an effect of vitamin D and what happened was... And then the people enrolled in the study had a mean or median 25-hydroxy vitamin D of 31 nanograms per milliliter. So if you looked at the results for the entire 25,000, half of whom are given vitamin D and others were allowed to take up to 600, 800 IU per day, even if they weren't on the trial. You didn't have a significant effect of vitamin D, but if you looked at those with a base BMI, body mass index, less than 25, they had a significant 25% reduction in cancer incidents.

0:17:50.5 Grant And the African-Americans had an almost significant reduction of 25%. And if you had omitted the first one or two years of the study, you had about 25% reduction in all cancer mortality. So unfortunately in New England Journal medicine only permits one outcome to be reported in the abstract, which was no effect. You had to go into the paper, look at the supplementary, look at the secondary results to find there was an effect. So, and this one way, the medical journals that worked for Big Pharma can sort of disguise the results and keep on track that there's no benefit for vitamin D.

0:18:29.0 Moss Fascinating. Oh, it gets so many things that you've brought up, but in effect, they gave an ineffective dose of vitamin D and then they announced that it has no benefit. I mean, that's what it sounds like when in fact, if you go into the data, for some categories, there was a benefit. Now, did you say... I didn't quite catch this. Were you saying that people with the higher body mass index had less of an effect or less benefit than the people who were more slim? Is that what I'm hearing?

0:19:12.1 Grant Yeah. Yes. Because as Robert Heaney point out, there's a dilution effect, the larger the mass, the lower the vitamin D level for the same vitamin D dose.

0:19:22.4 Moss Right.

0:19:26.0 Grant And in another study on diabetes, on progression from prediabetes to diabetes, they were out of Tufts University were allowed to use 4,000 IU per day. And they showed that under a BMI of 30, there was a benefit.

0:19:39.1 Moss Mm-hmm. And what is, and so what do we, what do you hear in terms when you bring these issues up with, you know, more conventional researchers or skeptical, you know, people who are skeptical, what sort of arguments do you, do you most frequently get thrown at you?

One doctor prescribes 50,000 IU weekly for Cancer (D2)

0:20:01.4 Grant Well, the study, the report, the, the word from Harvard is observational studies don't mean anything ecological studies, we can forget clinical trials are the only thing that matter. And so, you know, it's hard to argue with that point of view. On the other hand I know a an oncologist at UCSF here in San Francisco who gives all of his cancer patients 50,000 IU of vitamin D per week he uses D2which you can obtain by prescription, which is not as effective as D3, which you can also get, you can get over the counter, very inexpensively at 50,000 IU per day, even from Amazon.

0:20:40.7 Moss This would be Don Abrams, probably.

0:20:44.3 Grant That's correct. That's correct.

0:20:45.6 Moss Yeah, not too many sympathetic integrative oncologists at UCSF but he's certainly that but so you're saying the more effective form is the one that they, the consumer could actually get on their own.

0:21:01.5 Grant Right. Right.

0:21:02.5 Moss D3.

0:21:03.7 Grant D2 is made from fungi and mushrooms and the like, and yeast and it's a different molecular form. It doesn't last that long in the body, it hasn't been proven as effective in clinical trials as D3, D3 is generally made from sheep's wool lanolin that's UVB treated and purified and it's the same form as we make in our body. And some people think that there's a difference between sun produced vitamin D and oral vitamin D. There isn't a difference to D3. On the other hand, there are some extra benefits of sunlight exposure. As recently become knowledge that first of all, UVA, the long wave UV helps liberate nitric oxide from nitrogen compounds under the skin and nitric oxide can lower blood pressure.

0:21:54.5 Moss Yes.

0:21:55.1 Grant But it can also fight viral infections. And there's a very two very good papers on that recently by Weller and by somebody else out of England showing that this is one of the ways that that sunlight reduces the risk of COVID 19. And as we know now, there's sort of a pause in the COVID 19 pandemic this summer.

0:22:18.3 Moss Yeah.

0:22:19.1 Grant Uh, but around October, November when the sun goes down and the vitamin D levels go down, the nitric oxide levels go down, It's gonna start coming back. And right now they're claiming, oh, it's the vaccine that's doing it.

0:22:31.1 Moss Yes.

0:22:31.2 Grant Well, not exactly it's maybe contributing.

0:22:33.9 Moss Yes.

0:22:34.5 Grant But nature has a way of fighting it as well.

0:22:37.1 Moss So we saw the same pattern last year, in a way, although later in the summer it did, it did pick up tremendously, but going into most of the summer, it seemed as if it was greatly diminished. And nobody explained that that dip. And I see you do have some articles that you've written about COVID and vitamin D our, you know, focus here is on cancer of course, but it's all very fascinating. People should look up your articles in PubMed. And there's some other places like scholar.google.com, where they can probably get the full text of many of your 284 publications on this field. So what about prostate cancer though? There seemed to be a, sort of a mixed bag as it were when it came to preventing prostate cancer.

0:23:32.9 Grant Yeah. My hypothesis is the following first of all...

0:23:36.6 Moss Why don't you state what that is. Yeah. State what the problem is.

Prostate Cancer

0:23:42.7 Grant Okay. The problem is that at higher levels of vitamin D or greater sun exposure there's actually an increase incidence for prostate cancer. On the other hand, higher vitamin D levels are associated with reduced risk of aggressive prostate cancer. The one that kills you so what, okay. As we mentioned earlier, the classical effect of vitamin D is to increase calcium and phosphorous absorption and regulate metabolism. Well, it turns out that calcium and more like more likely phosphate are risk factors for prostate cancer drinking milk is a risk factor for prostate cancer. So if the, you raise your vitamin D levels, you're gonna increase your calcium uptake, and that can then increase the risk of these minor non virulent prostate cancers.

0:24:46.7 Grant On the other hand the mechanisms of vitamin D for reducing cancer death includes first of all effects at the cellular level, they sort of every, okay. Vitamin D operates through genes, it's a, you take in vitamin D it's converted 25-hydroxy vitamin D. And then when it gets another hydroxyl group, it becomes 125 dihydroxy vitamin D or Calci trial, which is a hormonal version, which can go into the vitamin D receptors that are in every cell. And they're coupled to the chromosomes and they can affect gene expression. Upregulating maybe a few thousand downregulating a few hundred. And so and it goes in and interrogates a cell and asks, well, cell, do you belong in this organ? And if so, we will let you differentiate and proliferate, if you don't, we'll just have you commit suicide or apoptosis. So that's a way this immune surveillance is one way to keep cancer rates down then if the tumor starts to develop, it needs angiogenesis, it needs blood vessels growing around the tumor to supply the nutrients it needs. Well, vitamin D can can sense that and vitamin D can help retard the angiogenesis around tumors.

0:26:16.5 Grant And then in order to... If a tumor's just isolated, just in a self-contained place, it's not gonna do much except grow. It's gotta really invade other tissues it has to metastasize and vitamin D has several mechanisms to reduce metastasis. So it turns out that, like in the cancer mortality maps, that's on my website, vitamin D sunlight has produced vitamin D to fight cancer at all these stages. If on the other hand you get somebody who's got cancer, and it's already gone through the angiogenesis is already maybe going to the metastasis stage, you've lost some of the benefits of vitamin D. And so I did a search of literature this morning and found that a sort of mixed evidence on whether treating cancers at the later stages has much benefit. So it's really a matter of trying to prevent, but also you wanna use vitamin D as an adjuvant manner going along with whatever other modalities you have.

0:27:24.1 Moss Well, for sure. Right. Nobody's gonna just do that alone, but I guess the question would be for a person who has prostate cancer or has had prostate cancer, is it a smart thing to do to take 5,000 units of vitamin D per day? Let's say.

Hollis: Low-grade prostate )with tumors) reduced by 4,000 IU daily for a year

0:27:45.1 Grant Yes. In fact, that study was done by Bruce Hollis and colleagues and Marshall at medical university, South Carolina, they took men with low grade prostate with tumors. They did a biopsy, they then put them on 4,000 IU of vitamin D per day for a year and checked. And they found that there was a reduction in the number of biopsy cores compared to those who are on the placebo. So the studies...

0:28:22.9 Moss Was it a significant reduction?

0:28:25.0 Grant Yes, it was significant. It was published in 2012.

0:28:30.1 Moss Okay. Yeah. Well, that's a very impressive thing. So in other words, it's basically downregulating the cancer to the point where maybe the men wouldn't need immediate action in terms of their cancer. Did they have biopsies to test.

0:28:48.2 Grant Yes. Both before and after.

0:28:51.6 Moss So you're saying that the... Like the Gleason scores had went down on average in the people who were taking the vitamin D?

0:28:58.9 Grant I think that's correct.

0:29:02.2 Moss Wow. That's tremendous because there's a cutoff point beyond which you have to take action. If you have a prostate tumor, and if you have like a Gleason six or even a lower grade, Gleason seven, you can do what's called active surveillance. You don't have to have treatment right away.

0:29:22.1 Grant Right.

0:29:22.6 Moss So this could be a very important part of a holistic approach to this incredibly common form of cancer. And what's the difference? I mean, I was looking just before for another purpose, looking on Amazon at vitamin D supplements and chuckle, there's so many, first of all, secondly, I think most people would be shocked by the price of vitamin D and I mean, that shocked by the low cost of it. We've gotten so used to $150,000 and up for cancer treatments. And it's hard to find a vitamin D pill that costs more than a quarter. And in fact, some of the very good brands seem to be three, four and 5 cents per day per pill. Am I right?

0:30:19.5 Grant Right. My sponsor is Bio-Tech Pharmacal. And if you buy the 50,000 IU pills, you get a hundred of those for $30 and that's about $10 for your supply at about 5,000 IU per day. Now in Europe...

0:30:36.0 Moss Why would you take 50,000 though?

0:30:38.9 Grant The half life of 25-hydroxy vitamin D is about two and a half weeks. So pharmacologically, you can take something at half the half life or so, on the other hand as Bruce Hollis has shown, there are benefits of having daily vitamin D, it's sort of a matter of compliance and convenience. You can do either.

OK to take 50,000 IU weekly

0:31:00.4 Moss I see. So people are taking a big, massive, or a very large dose, 50,000. There's no danger in that?

0:31:06.9 Grant Well, take it once a week.

0:31:08.8 Moss Even so there's no danger?

0:31:11.6 Grant No danger. You can process about 25,000 IU per day. I mean, that's about what you can make in the sun. So the body is up to producing. And if you haven't been taking vitamin D and you wanna up your 25-hydroxy vitamin D level what you should be taking is over a period of a week or two, 100,000, 200,000, 300,000 IU of vitamin D3, and then drop off to maybe 5,000 IU per day after that, otherwise you're gonna take several months to get your level up to the 50, 60, 70 IU per nanograms per milliliter.

0:31:45.5 Moss So you say take a hundred to 300 IU per day for how long?

0:31:50.9 Grant No no no no. Take 50,000 a day. Or 50,000 say two or three times a week. So you're getting 150,000 a week. And so you do that for two weeks, so you've got 300,000 IU. You can then that'll then boost rapidly your 25-hydroxy Vitamin D. And there's no adverse. I mean, there have been a finding that if you take a 300,000 IU and then do nothing more, you might have increased risk of falls and fractures, but they don't understand why. And it could be because all of a sudden you're more energetic and you're walking more and falling, but. In terms of hypercalcemia, which is the biggest risk factor from overdosing on vitamin D. There's a story about a vitamin mineral guru who found out about vitamin D and told his manufacturer, put a thousand IU per day in my scoop. Well, the manufacturer confused micrograms and milligrams and put a million IU per day.

0:32:46.6 Moss I remember this.

One person accidently took 1,000,000 IU daily for a while and got to 900 ng

0:32:47.6 Grant He got to 900 nanograms per milliliter. And, and he was, he had bloody feet and couldn't think straight, Michael Holick got involved, tested things, found out what the story was helped him reduce his, he got down to 400 nanograms per milliliter His hypercalcemia went away. So this thing, it turns out that the Institute of medicine was worried about these U-shaped curves between 25-hydroxy Vitamin D and health outcome. But what I showed was that many of these observational studies had enrolled people who just started supplementing with vitamin D shortly before entering the trial and the observational study. And they probably were told by the doctor, you have osteoporosis start taking vitamin D. And so they, they went from, they should have been categorized as maybe 20 nanograms. They were categorized as 70 nanograms. And then they developed cancer two years later because they had lower levels beforehand. None of the vitamin D supplementation studies that go up to 5,000, 10,000 IU per day, none of them show you shape relationship. It's only these observational studies where you get control for when you just start taking supplements.

0:34:01.0 Moss Right. And also, you know, it's the same problem with doing randomized trials with nutritional factors, like happened with the vitamin C the Linus Pauling, the Mayo clinic study of vitamin C, where they found that there was elevated levels of vitamin C in the people who were not receiving the vitamin C laughter So, you know you have a real problem when you're using an over the counter and you're studying it. This is also what happened with the, with Laetrile at the Mayo, same people at the Mayo clinic that when people enter a study, no matter what it is, and they're randomized, let's say they wanna study pistachio nuts and see if they're beneficial for heart disease. Well, now you've got the idea implanted in your head that probably they wouldn't be doing the study if pistachio nuts weren't good for heart disease.

RCT participants tend to supplement with the drug being tested

0:34:55.1 Moss So the people who are in the study, who are being randomized don't wanna run the risk that they're not gonna get the benefit. So they start eating pistachio nuts, I mean, just making up an example, but there's many, many examples of this. So, you know, it's, there's a kind of a fetishism about randomized control trials and look at all the studies that Walter Willett has done. And most of what our knowledge is about the health effects of different foods and the effect on cancer, don't come from randomized trials, they come from people's recollection of what they ate. So I think, there are various ways that clinical trials can be either have built in mistakes and prejudices, or can be deliberately manipulated to come up with a result that people might want. And I can't help, but feel that, you know, it's kind of, it's a, this is sort of the epitome of the two edged sword in the sense that if you come up with something that's really cheap, that's really of benefit to people in the health field. Well, you're going up against incredibly powerful and wealthy sources that wanna compete in the same space that you are talking about.

0:36:15.3 Grant Right. So the cancer industry is what 100 billion, 120 billion, 130 billion a year.

0:36:20.3 Moss At least. Yeah.

Suspect getting people to 60-70 ng level would eliminate $50 billion of US Cancer treatments

0:36:21.2 Grant And I just was just doing a quick calculation this morning. And with the results from the grassroots health, it looks like half of the cancer rates could be reduced by bringing people up to 60, 70 nanograms per milliliter, that could wipe fifty billion dollars off the industry. And of course, they're not gonna stand by idly and say, oh yes, let's prevent cancer.

0:36:40.9 Moss Right. Well, I mean, you know, you have forces in the society that want to prevent cancer, want to, if only for the reason that you could greatly reduce, I mean, not to mention the human suffering, but, you know, from a, a purely material point of view, you can greatly reduce the cost of healthcare. But then what people don't understand is that there is this countervailing force, which is we call big pharma, which basically makes their money off of more illness. I mean and so if you've got a drug like Kymriah, which is $475,000 for one infusion chuckle, which is sort of the record at the moment, and with the side effects, they figure that the cost of treating a patient with that infusion it's CAR-T cell therapy would be about a million and a half dollars and then you are talking about something that will come to five or $10. It's no contest. Everybody should love this treatment but on the other hand, we see paradoxically that every obstacle imaginable is put in the way of treatments like this.

Disinformation Playbook

See VitaminDWiki The problems with healthcare in the U.S., following the disinformation playbook – Grant Dec 2017
0:37:52.9 Grant Yeah. And I wrote an article published at Orthomolecular medicine news service in 2018 about the, how big pharma uses the disinformation playbook, just like lung smoking, tobacco and sugar and et cetera, et cetera did. And for example, they they've, Michael Holick is actually the world's best known vitamin D expert. And there was a hit piece on him in the New York times, a couple years ago and they'll publish these fake studies, like these clinical trials that weren't done right. They'll put their people in the head of the food and drug administration, NIH and CDC, et cetera, et cetera. It's just sad.

0:38:33.8 Moss Yeah. A lot of people, I think it's, it'll be eye opening to them to hear this interview, because I mean, you are a person of, you know, incredible accomplishments and you're dealing only with the highest level of other researchers who like the Garlands and Holick, and of course, Bruce Ames, whom I interviewed many, many years ago, but you know, one of the top biologists in the country, Walter Willard is the godfather of nutritional studies. So you're definitely in there with the people who are the most prestigious people in the country, I would say in terms of their research, their medical research. And yet, you know, you're still in a way, it hasn't been at all embraced or endorsed by the mainstream. And I don't hear, I don't see the danger in this, with that one exception of the prostate thing, but prostate cancer, isn't so scary unless it's of the aggressive variety.

0:39:35.6 Moss I mean, it's still a bit, it's still a bit scary having gone through it myself, but you know, logically rationally, we know that there's a huge difference between a prostate cancer that can be... That you probably die with rather than of, and something that could really, you know, get outta hand and kill you. So if it decreases the risk of dying from prostate cancer, that's the most important thing, and I'm not sure, and I just can't help, but feel that there's some glitch[ chuckle in that, in the way that that study was done, I don't know. I don't know enough about it to be able to say, but it sounds like it's a pretty, pretty sure bet that people should be increasing their vitamin D intake and their vitamin D levels. So that they'd be in the optimum range. I mean, that seems so obvious.

0:40:29.4 Grant Yes. And as opposed to pharmaceutical drugs, vitamin D has mainly health benefits. Reduced risk of diabetes, respiratory infections, autoimmune diseases, falls and fractures, dementia et cetera, et cetera.

0:40:43.3 Moss Right. And the cost is ridiculously low. So it's got everything going for it. So I guess this is a word to the wise people who are listening to this podcast should take this to heart and look into this some more. And what's your website?

0:41:03.5 Grant Sunarc.org. S-U-N-A-R-C. O-R-G.

0:41:06.9 Moss Okay, great. And then they could find out about the, your sponsor. You said, wanna tell, say that again about who your sponsor is?

0:41:14.3 Grant Yes. That's Bio-Tech Pharmacal in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

0:41:18.9 Moss Okay. Very good. Well, thank you so much, Bill. It's just been a great pleasure. And I'm so glad that we've connected up again after, after so many years, we're talking to William B. Grant PhD, the director of Sunlight, Nutrition and Health Research Center in San Francisco. And, his website is as he said, www.sunarc.org, S-U-N-A-R-C.0-R-G So for The Moss Report, this is Ralph Moss.

0:41:54.6 S1: Thank you for listening to The Moss Report, visit our website at themossreport.com and subscribe to hear more discussion of cancer treatment options, alternative research, and more. For more information about Dr. Moss and his work, including scheduling phone consultations, go to mossreports.com.

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Review of the video by Grassroots Health - Oct 2023

• One of the studies shared on breast cancer mortality concluded that the vitamin D level of breast cancer patients accounted for 97% of the variance in mortality outcomes – meaning the vitamin D level made almost all the difference. (2014 study)

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