Moving Vitamin D Research into Practice - Video and transcript - Baggerly - Oct 2021

Transcript of 1 hour video interview
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Transcript of 1 hour video interview

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Breast Cancer - CDC
Preterm: March of Dimes

0:00:05.6 Chris Goethel: (Academy for Human Medicine, Germany) Alright, welcome to another like talk today, and today it's going to be in English and actually, I'm very excited to have a woman from the, Yes Today. And actually, since we talked a lot about Vitamin D, in terms of the general aspects during the last presentations and the last basic parts. Today, it's about moving from signs into the public to really implement everything, and today we have... I'm very delighted because it's a special guest today, since... I think when I heard from Carole Baggerly the first time... First of all, welcome, [chuckle] and I'm really happy to have you here. When I heard from you the first time, I was so excited because many people do the research, and they're doing so much and they study, and it takes such a long time to really establish it, so that it gets into the minds of the people who really apply it. And what you did, I mean, that's amazing. Basically, the shortcut and really were engaged and did so much great work during the last years. So, I'm very excited and very grateful that you took the time to share with us in Germany, and I'm very, looking forward to what we're going to talk about, so welcome again, Carole Baggerly.

0:01:34.3 Carole Baggerly: Thank you very much. We have done a lot. And it all got started in 2005 when I had breast cancer. And actually, what I had then that I remember was breast cancer treatment, and when people talk about being a breast cancer survivor, I say, "I'm a breast cancer treatment survivor." It so motivated me to find a better way and the better way I had no answer to it at the time, but why did I need a better way... Excuse me. I had a stage three cancer tumor in my breast, and I had a mastectomy, I had radiation, I had chemo, and it was all, in my words, cruel to my body, it just... This wasn't necessary, there had to be a better way.

0:02:30.6 Goethel: Yeah.

0:02:32.5 Baggerly: And so, after that treatment, I went on a search for what's a better way. My background is in physics and mathematics, not in public health, so I obviously had a lot to learn. And for the next two years, I mostly sat in front of my computer trying to figure out what happens with breast cancer, where does it come from, what else could be a better way and then almost... I can't quite call it accidental because I think those are the kind of things that are meant to be. In 2007, two years after the breast cancer encounter, I had an appointment with my family practice physician, and she had some lab tests and she says, "Carole, you have Osteopenia." And I say, What's that?" And she says, she explained, and then she said, "You might be vitamin D deficient." And I said, "What's that?" I didn't know anything about vitamin D at the time, and she says, "Well here, take this." Anyway, so I started on vitamin D and I went back home to my office and I logged into my computer like I did every day to look up breast cancer and how to prevent it or do something different, and it took me two hours. Guys, it took me two whole hours before I canted Vitamin D and cancer.

0:03:57.2 Baggerly: And then, that very day, February in 2007, I saw a paper that had just been published by Cedric Garland right here in San Diego at UCSD, showing that breast cancer could be reduced by at least 50%. 50% in incidents, if you got your vitamin D serum level up to about 60 nanograms per milliliter. I read the paper, I literally had tears running down my face and the total disbelief, which is like, "This can't be true." And I have some friends in the academic road, and I called up one of them and I said, "Is he a flake?" I mean, really now, to be able to do this? And she said, "Carole, he's not only not a flake, he's been doing this for 20 years, and he's very discouraged because nobody is listening." I said, "I'm listening." And I'd already retired from a prior marketing position with a company that I started, an aerospace company with my son. And so, needless to say, I had a little bit of time and I said, "Well, I'll find out what needs to be done." And very shortly thereafter, I met one of the key leaders of the whole vitamin D world, Dr. Anthony Norman, and we took off.

0:05:21.4 Baggerly: So the rest of it is really what I have to share with you now, is what has happened as a result of it. And I would like to walk through the presentation with you more to give a little bit of structure to the beautiful things that everyone has done, all people all over the world, literally. And certainly all the scientists in helping us figure out how to move forward. In terms of the outlines or the headlines you see on this, it's claiming the joy of your health today. Why, how... Enjoy the success for you. I'm tired of being afraid of being sick, and everybody I know is as well, and yet we don't need to be afraid of being sick, especially when we focus on health. The thing that is enabling this beautifully is the whole digital health revolution, what we have seen, which everybody has seen all over the world, this is not unique to the United States, which is the digital media for all things, is well in advancing one sense of the...

0:06:32.5 Baggerly: The rules and regulations for what to do with it. But what we've been able to do with our projects with the GrassrootsHealth projects and with the action in particular, is we are now using it as a major tool to get the word out and to help people and the people that are enrolled in our project... Now over 15,000 people all over the world.

0:06:56.4 Baggerly: Alright, this isn't just the US. Certainly it is Germany, it is France, it is all the UK, but it's Northern countries. And we'll talk more about that. This other comment that's on here, your patient will see you now, is actually the title of a book that was just released very recently, saying it's changing. We don't expect to be told what to do anymore. We need counselors or consultants, as it were. That it's already here. So what we need to do now is to organize it and make it easier for all of us to do. So thank you all for listening to this part. I really appreciate it.

0:07:38.0 Goethel: Thank you.

0:07:40.2 Baggerly: You bet. I assert that vitamin D is actually leading the health revolution. We know so much about it, and we have been able to take advantage of that. And furthermore, it's something that's available to almost everybody, whether it's from the sunshine or whether it's in a supplement variety or some other kind of, like. It's there and it's available. Whereas there are so many things that are inconsistent, meaning like a little bit of this drug or a little bit of that health recommendation. There's nothing big enough to be able to say, "Here's how to do it, and here's how to do it well." Vitamin D on the other hand is enormous. What we have here are several bullet points I'd like to hit, which is what my presentation is really about. How to take charge of your health. We are constantly being told that, "Well, you need to take care of it." Well, how? With what tools? I know almost nobody who's not prepared to take charge of their health, but they don't have the tools to do it with.

0:08:46.7 Baggerly: And the tools include computers, they include data, they include education. And those are the things that GrassrootsHealth has worked very hard on in the last 13 years to develop and test to make sure that they work. What's the future role of randomized trials? For those of you in the science field, you may go, "What?" Well, that's what I want you to say. What? What's the role of large population trials, which is of the type that we are running... Field trials for over a decade.

0:09:21.8 Baggerly: The interesting thing is that in my encounters with people that we're working with that are running randomized trials, and we are doing a complementary or at the same time kind of population trial, like the type 1 diabetes project we're doing, it allows the researcher who's dealing with the randomized trial to focus on safety and some key biological things, which the field trial will not. And so it's a marvelous way to help the randomized trial world kind of, scope down massive projects and get much better results by being able to do the kind of things that only they can do. And we can take what are the expected things out into the field and do thousands of people.

0:10:12.4 Baggerly: In addition, we are working on tools for individuals. You and me, researchers, groups, health consultants. All of these people need special tools and new tools actually, to be able to do this. We have a coaching module which allows those people who have a certification as health coaches to be able to say, "Here's what I want dear you, individual to do." And they can document it within the system. And the individual can use it to keep track of how they're doing. So it's not just words, it's actions, it's education, and it's measuring.

0:10:53.3 Baggerly: The last one will probably be new to most of you. We're at a point where I'm suggesting that there be established an international committee to define the data interchange standards for nutrient research. That's a mouthful. But let me explain a little bit there. One of the biggest challenges that the whole industry is running into now is that there's so much conflicting results with the various RCTs that are coming out.

0:11:23.9 Baggerly: And much of it is a result of methodology. Much of it is a result of, you track this and I track that. You can't compare them, and yet they do anyway. The other thing is that there is a great deal of advantage some times to having worked in different industries and learned a lot from them. One, I worked, as I mentioned, in the aerospace industry, and electronics and then generally in manufacturing.

0:11:56.7 Baggerly: And one of the things that happened was there was established in 1979... It sounds forever ago... The American National Standards Institute, X12 Committee for Data Interchange Standards, establishing from business to business. This was an enormous step allowing the big businesses, for the most part, to be able to send electronically to their thousands of suppliers, some data electronically as to by paper.

0:12:36.1 Baggerly: The other thing that it allowed with us, we had and still do have a company which has an intermediate software/ service bureau operation. They could send it to us and then we get the data and the people that received it from us would get the same way of looking at the data, whether it was from Boeing, or from Lockheed, or from TRW. Wherever it came from. Because of our ability to translate that into a common way of looking at it. That's kind of like, almost like the printing thing and it made things so much simpler.

0:13:17.9 Baggerly: What we need to do now as an industry with this health area is to establish a committee, which is really how it's done, to define what do we need to transmit to other researchers to other people, and how do we do it, especially with business-to-business type communications. So that's... It's really important. I wanted to talk about benefits and the different kind of things we know about vitamin D and how we cannot sit back and keep letting these things happen because there haven't been 5 million randomized trials. These are ready for action today, and in many cases, they are having that kind of action.

0:14:04.5 Baggerly: These are cases in the United States in 2018. Breast cancer, 266,120. And one of the things that is just absolutely frustrating to me personally is that the incidence rate has barely budged in the 13 years since I had cancer. Alright? It's barely budged. What has budged enormously is the lives saved after they've had cancer. So a lot of attention and money and time and drugs have gone into, After you have cancer, let me keep you alive, but close to zero dollars that I see going into prevention and look at what you could do.

0:14:50.9 Baggerly: It costs $21 billion a year just in the US, and the benefit could be close to $15 billion. Plus, in this case, 180,000 women would not get it. Why are we waiting? We have to get off the idea that a randomized trial is the only way to go, especially when you have nutrients like vitamin D that can help you prevent something.

0:15:22.5 Baggerly: Type 1 diabetes is also enormous, especially it's also expensive. If you look at $360,000 each, compared to the $80,000 for breast cancer, Type 1 diabetes is a lifelong situation for most people. And yet, if you look at the prevention aspect and treating it and, or taking care of the antibodies early and making sure the young person or whomever is being initially diagnosed gets vitamin D and the Omega-3s, you can save a very large proportion. I put in a modest 50%, but I think it's much bigger than that.

0:16:05.8 Baggerly: Preterm births. You'll see more about this. There are 380,000 a year babies that are born prematurely, and they obviously cost themselves their lives and everything a tremendous amount. And over here, again, I estimated very mildly, 190,000 or 50% in our experiment or our work with the Medical University of South Carolina, it's much bigger than that. Atrial fibrillation, I am assuming that almost everyone in this audience knows that health is a very personal item for everybody. This was a life saver for my husband. And I had no idea that it was so, in one sense, simple. He and I have both been very healthy almost all our lives, and all of a sudden, he heard an... Had these attacks, which the doctor called AFib. This is a growing number every single year in the United States. And I had the extremely good fortune of meeting up with a physician who said, "I can stop it with magnesium." I said, "What?" And back to my earlier comment with Dr. Garland which is like, "Is he a flake?" At any rate, he worked with that particular physician and greatly increased his magnesium intake along with some potassium. And certainly, he's already taking Vitamin D. And then over two years, he has never had a recurrence of the atrial fibrillation.

0:17:42.5 Goethel: Oh. I'm so happy to hear that.

0:17:43.1 Baggerly: It is enormous. But it happens everywhere. And what I see in the United States is AFib clinics are now being set up all over the place, because they have so many conditions. It's like Vitamin D to me. We don't understand how our bodies have been built to operate. The Vitamin D is from the sunshine. We became inside a couple hundred years ago. Well, I'm sorry, but that's just not long enough for the body to adapt and to essentially evolve to being inside away from the sun. We have a lot of work to do in order to get ourselves healthy.

0:18:25.0 Baggerly: This is back again to the preterm birth. So I wanted to show you that here. This was the first publication where they analyzed the results of the vitamin D, and they published a paper saying in the treatment... With the vitamin D, there really wasn't a difference between the treatment group at 4000 International Units a day and the control group at 400 IU a day. I'll show you more in a graphic way why that would be once you start thinking about the difference in how you calculate serum levels and dosage. But that's what... And I didn't believe it. Back again to backgrounds and math and whatever. One of the things you look at is, what were you averaging? What were you doing? And is there a difference if you don't do it that way? And if you measure by serum level, which really is the relevant measure for almost all nutrients that I know about, which is what effect does it have inside your body that you can measure as opposed to the pill that goes in a door, look at that. That was a 57% lower incidence of preterm births. That's it. Same data. Exactly the same data. And this led in my work with doctors Wagner and Hollis at the Medical University to help me more with preventing breast cancer. And I'll share some more of that.

0:19:58.5 Baggerly: This is another cancer versus serum level. This was a study done by Dr. Joan Lappe and Robert Heaney at our Creighton University. And again. This is like versus serum level, not intake. And at the point in time that they published the paper for this, they... The journals, the journals... Very name journals were stuck in the mud, they still are, on "I'm sorry, but our rules say we have to publish by dosage, not by serum level." And the dosage wasn't different enough to show any effect whatsoever. But at any rate, it was fully a 71% reduction in cancer risk for 40 versus 20 nanograms per milliliters. So just going from here, and there are a lot of people at this level getting up to 40; you can see how those are very tightly done there.

0:20:58.5 Baggerly: And again, this was published in 2015? How long do we have to wait? Another one, breast cancer back again to one of my favorite. We actually made a difference. The Lappe trial or the Creighton trial that I was talking about had to be redone, believe it or not, and they spent over a million dollars redoing it with the right designated outcomes to meet the journal's requirements, and they still didn't show a significant difference by intake. But if they used it by serum level and, there's a big "and" here, the amount of vitamin D given to those women was not big enough to get them up to the level that our group normally has, our GrassrootsHealth cohort, of above 40 nanograms per milliliter, almost none of the Lappe cohort had people down here, and we have lots, because they know that's where they need to be.

0:22:06.7 Goethel: Yeah.

0:22:07.0 Baggerly: At any rate, there's this a pooled analysis of the clinical trial information and the GrassrootsHealth people who were women of that particular age, so forth and so on, so there's 5000 people there. Look at this number, 82% lower rate. Doesn't that just kinda say it's time to do something? And this is our appeal to all individuals. Again, the medical professions have a hard time with this at this point, I don't know why yet. But regardless, the individuals do not. And even the significant kinda things like a p-value; the norm, so to speak, is supposed to be 0.05, this was 0.006. But you could just look at the dots here; every single one of those is a case. And by the time you even get to 50 nanograms per milliliter, they're very few. Alright. It works. It's time. Unfortunately, we can't predict at this point in time who is going to benefit from it, but we have a very, very significantly lower rate, and that was a paper that was published. Back again to ethnicity, and why do we have such a challenge? This data is very relevant, because people are still saying it's all a socioeconomic thing, and we would challenge that and say, "No, it's not." As a matter of fact, if you take a look at the race or ethnicity, from Black women, White, Hispanic, Asian, other, and overall, right? The green up here at the top represents those women that are in the 40 to 60 nanograms per milliliter range, or the 100 to 150 nanomoles per liter.

0:24:04.4 Baggerly: The thing that is significant there worldwide; this isn't just a US population, this is worldwide, very few dark-skinned women get out in the sun. Again, we've been trained over the last couple of decades to stay out of the sun because it's dangerous. Well, yes, if you stay out too long without any covering, you can get burned, and if you burn, you do have a problem. But actually, those people who spend more time in the sun and not burn, alright, have fewer cases even of skin cancer than those people who stay inside all the time. But please note, the Black women, there's only this tiny little bitty fraction of them, and I think it's 2%, are at least at 40. And if you go to the white women, more are, because of their skin color, receiving more rays from the sun and being able to transcribe it into vitamin D. This is a given with skin color, and it has nothing to do with socioeconomics. This was a 40-60% reduction in pre-term births with nothing but vitamin D, alright? There was no new treatment offered here. There was no new anything other than the role that GrassrootsHealth played here. We ran a project for two years at the Medical University of South Carolina to help them, and I think we had... If you count these as close to 4000 women here, that's a lot of people that are affected, alright?

0:25:49.4 Baggerly: And when they first came in for their first OB visit, they were to get a vitamin D test, and they were given a free bottle of vitamin D capsules that had 5000 international units each by their OB or by their physicians, alright? And the target was to get your serum level to at least 40 to 60; the target was not how much to take. And they came back into the office three months later on their standard visit. And if they weren't there, they used a calculator or whatever in order to... "What do I take in order to get there?" So again, the target was to get the serum level up to at least 40 nanograms per milliliter. This first black line up here at the top is the randomized trial that doctors Wagner and Hollis ran. And it showed, actually, a greater thing here, and these two, the blue and the green, actually represent the in-house. Everybody does that kind of thing, and a little bit lower there. But regardless, that's very likely an effect of the lack of individual control, and it's much more like a population study. But it was a change in standard of care, and it was beautiful. I mean, it happened.

0:27:11.1 Baggerly: This is the preterm birth rate, where their initial 25-OHD level was 40 nanograms per milliliter. And three months later it was still less than 40 nanograms per milliliter. But then by their birth time, they got it up to that. So the reduction in risk even there was 60%. It's not too late. The ideal time for any person to get their vitamin D level up is now. For pregnancy, to be able to get it up to during the pre-conception time is even better. And those women that walk into getting pregnant after they're there also have an almost zero risk of having a child with asthma. So there's just so much that the sunshine/vitamin D can do for us.

0:28:04.7 Baggerly: We're in this area of time frame of our lives right now whether we have this pandemic with COVID. Again, everybody that comes in with a low vitamin D level has a much greater risk than those that don't. This particular study just showed the decrease in the reduction in risk and the reduction in severity of the disease if they would get their serum levels up to about 50 nanograms per milliliter. Look at that. It's so simple. It really is simple. This, also better clinical outcomes, same thing with the serum level status. It's just better almost no matter what outcome you pick. 84% fewer in terms of unconsciousness. There aren't that many there to start with. But you don't wanna be that way, and you also don't want to have fewer... Have more deaths. And on this particular study, it showed 50/50... Excuse me, 55% fewer deaths. That's at least half the people that are dying from COVID don't have to die.

0:29:18.2 Baggerly: This, again, is back to some of the COVID studies. Even to get it to start with, there's a 53%, and this was at levels above 55 versus 20 nanograms per milliliter. This is a very simple one, which is just above 30 nanograms per milliliter or less than 30. It really didn't go any higher than that. And there was a 52% lower risk of hospitalization. Think of the cost savings and time and fear. My husband was in the hospital recently, not with COVID and not with AFib, totally different situation. He fell down. And never in our 50-plus years of marriage have I been apart from him for a full over a week, and I was scared to death. And he was too. We don't need that. We don't need that. We don't need the emotional distress nor the distress of the financial part within the hospitals. Death due to COVID. Look at that 90%.

0:30:30.3 Baggerly: I just wanted to show you all these beautiful people that I've had the opportunity to work with over the years. I mentioned Dr. Norman. Unfortunately, he passed away a couple of years ago. But he was really a major leader in the whole vitamin D movement. Dr. Garland I still work with in breast cancer, especially. Beautiful, perfect epidemiologist and Dr. Edd [0:30:55.4] ?? His co-worker with that. And Dr. Ryan Hovis from Canada. With this, I have gained a tremendous amount of knowledge from the laboratory and the processing of what goes on within the body. And certainly Dr. [0:31:13.3] ?? many people know with his great work with vitamin D and new things. Dr. Grant has helped us immensely. He runs an organization called SUNARC. Dr. Heaney and Dr. Lappe from Creighton University. Dr. Heaney passed away in 2016, and we had the pleasure of having him as a research director for four years. A beautiful person who knew exactly what needed to be looked at with nutrient trials versus drug trials. Dr. Willet we have talked with many times about how to structure things. And these are the MUSC Medical University of South Carolina crew Dr. Wagner in the NICU and Dr. Hollis and Dr. Newman. So we have many others. We have a total of 48, many of who might be listening, and I appreciate all.

0:32:09.2 Baggerly: This was our very first attempt out to the general public. And actually, it ended up being probably one of the most popular documents to go out to physicians. There are literally thousands of copies of this and some updated ones out in the world. Its title is Disease Incidence Prevention by Serum Vitamin D Level. And all of these conditions here are published papers. And one of the things that I found when I first read through these papers was there wasn't a common start and end point of compared to what, meaning, there was a reduction in risk or whatever. Well, if you have a reduction, you have to have a starting point. And so we made a normalization pointer common part at that point in time of 25 nanograms per milliliter. We have since changed it to 20 because that's where the Institute of Medicine said was enough. So we wanted to compare what is it like to do 20. So the current research or research we've done since they did that has always been in reference to 20. And that goes back to the breast cancer of the 80% reduction. Okay? At any rate, this shows the serum 25-OHD in nanograms per milliliter. This is the recommended level.

0:33:35.3 Baggerly: My husband, Dr. Leo Baggerly and I traveled literally the world for about a year talking with all the key scientists to say what should it be? We already knew that it needed to be the serum level, not the intake. And this again, we have on our website showing the list of the 48 plus scientists that have now signed up to say that's where it ought to be. Another thing that isn't on here, but I think is key is there was a research, two research papers that I'm aware of, published about where does the 40 to 60 come from? And there's lots of evidence about it, but if you take a picture of the native populations in Africa who are black, who were also outside all the time doing their work, they still exist. That is the range of their serum levels without taking any supplements at all. So it's a very safe level, it's a very healthy level and it's a very normal level for the majority of people.

0:34:38.3 Baggerly: The 20 nanograms per milliliter, you get to prevent 99% of rickets. That is the only condition we know of at this point in time where we can really say 20 nanograms per milliliter or 50 nanomoles per liter is enough. 72% of falls at 30 nanograms per milliliter are prevented cancer, 77% plus and there's been a lot more studies since then. Type one diabetes, enormous. This is a plot we did of a study that we published back in 2014. Again folks, I'm really telling you what we already know and have known for years and one of the beauties about what we're doing since we have such a large cohort is we aren't finding anything that says tomorrow what we do with our latest group is different than what we said before. It's more fine tuned, but it's definitely never been the reverse of what we've been able to show before.

0:35:47.2 Baggerly: This was pain level versus serum level. One of our major things that we do with our software and my data, my answers system that people are able to use, we show them where they are. My data, my answers, what do you do? One of the biggest calls I got always was, "Thank you Carole for doing this." And I said, "Well, I'm always happy to be thanked, but what are you thanking me for?" And I would get answers like, I've had pain for decades and it's never gone away and this getting my serum level up has greatly reduced it. So that's obviously very, very, very exciting. This shows a scale that the individuals would say that they had. What is your current pain rating based on serum level? And overall there's only in one sense of 12% reduction, but that's enough to affect people greatly by getting up that and on an individual's chart, they will see, like let's say that they are at 20 to 29 nanograms per milliliter, they will be a big dot here saying, "Here's where you are." And then you can look at that chart and see is there anything else maybe I could do based on this rest of this population? On the other hand, I still have a pain level that's high and I'm already at 77, 79 nanograms per milliliter, probably not taking more vitamin D. There are other things to look at.

0:37:22.7 Baggerly: Colds and flu. I think we all know this one, and this hasn't changed either over the decades we've been doing this. A reduction in colds, but a much more significant reduction in flus. The incidence thereof with a higher vitamin D level. Broken bones, one of the issues that the industry, the vitamin D thing has learned has been how do you take the vitamin D when you're taking it as a supplement? There have been some very significant research projects done where the participants in the project as an RCT would get one enormous dose a year, one. And they actually had more falls than fewer falls. If you take a very, very large what's called a bolus dose very infrequently, you are totally bypassing just logically. You don't even have to think about the chemistry. If our bodies normally would get all of our vitamin D from the sunshine, you don't go out in the sun for one setting all of a year in order to do anything.

0:38:44.1 Baggerly: You go out daily or frequently anyway. And it's always more than once a week unless you're sick with something else. So think about all the processes that that vitamin D goes through as it enters the skin. What happens then? What happens next? What happens next? What happens next? That is just beginning to be recognized by a number of the biologists and the chemists that work with this. There's much more even than just the serum level and there's much more than just getting that dose in. So if you're in this case of doing something, please, take a little bit extra when you start, if you wanna ramp up how fast you get to that. But once a year, once a month, and even once a week we think is way too infrequent.

0:39:35.0 Baggerly: In-take in toxicity, this is actually a pretty old publication, but it's still very valid. We have observed no toxicity in the project and reported. And we have people that are on a regular, much higher dose, this is another thing, what have we learned? A lot of people take higher doses and get their serum levels up a lot higher as well as their PTH is really what's tracked by a protocol called the Coimbra Protocol. Around the world, there are many, many, many vitamin D projects going on that are much more expansive than what we have in the United States. And the norm there is for everybody there to at least take 10,000 IU a day, which is even listed within our status as the no-observed-adverse-event-level. So... And that helps them with that, but they also take other supplements or other nutrients as well.

0:40:38.0 Baggerly: This is a copy of a more recent chart, but our very first publication was a dose response level. And this is so important because it's why we can't prescribe... No doctor can prescribe, "Hey, everybody needs to take this to get there," alright? Take a look for a minute at the 4,000 IU. And this is... Every single dot on this thing is somebody taking 4000 IU a day. The lowest score or the lowest serum level would be 20 nanograms per milliliter, or thereabouts... And/or as I mentioned, 15 nanomoles per liter, the highest is closer to 120-140 or 315 nanomoles per liter.

0:41:28.4 Baggerly: If you walked in the door tomorrow and said, "Carole, I'm gonna take 4000IU", I'd say, "Fine." Wouldn't argue with you. Where would that get me? I would have to say I don't know. I don't have a clue. Where you end up on this is very clearly a function of weight because the Vitamin D goes to every place in your body, so that's there, but it's also... And I will show you this, which is absolutely beautiful, it's also a function of how much time you spend outdoors, but what other nutrients are you getting, whether it's in your food or through other supplements. It's not a one thing.

0:42:06.2 Baggerly: This is a chart made from exactly that same thing, which is like if I started out at 20 nanograms per milliliter and I wanted to get to 40, how much would I take? Again, on an average, 5000 IU a day would get 90% of the population to that level. Again, if you weighed a 150 pounds, we chose one weight, in order to just give you an estimate of what it takes. This is a mind blower. This is where we have actually had the opportunity in the last couple of years to start tracking other measurements and other nutrients that people are taking.

0:42:49.7 Baggerly: We do the vitamin D and we've added a magnesium test as well, and people are taking many, many different kinds of magnesium supplements, and vitamin K2. Vitamin K2, we do not currently have a measure for it, per se where we can test it. That's easy enough to do at home, but it's a very significant nutrient. And this group has got about 2900 people in it. What I want you to look at here is the yellow line, which is people that say they're taking everything, vitamin D, magnesium and K2, and this darker line down here which says they're taking vitamin D, but that's it. Please look at where they hit that 40 nanograms per milliliter, assume that that's the target. The orange line hits it way over here and the dark line over here, hits it over here, so they have a very significant intake change in order to get to that level, as well as of course, time. This is very significant because this shows very clearly that there is a big difference, a big difference, in what else you're taking in, whether or not we know the biological actions right now, we know something is happening and it's not negative.

0:44:10.8 Baggerly: The other thing that's very interesting to us, and back again to... We already are working with a select group of people, with some people who can read a computer instructions and follow them and do all of this and who know something about vitamin D or they don't enroll in the project. Okay. I want... I totally acknowledge that. Look at how close many of these are to that 40 nanograms per milliliter already. Alright, they're already very close and if you follow this back to where, where would it hit zero, they are already getting probably 3000-4000 IU or more of vitamin D a day from other sources, whether that be food or sunshine or whatever, but it's very significant. But isn't that exciting?

0:45:01.1 Baggerly: I think it's enormously exciting to finally see magnesium has this effect on this particular thing here, and they really must be interacting in a biological way. What does it take? I wanted to show you this because scientifically-wise there's got to be a flow of things in terms of our process, and in one sense, the process here is no different than any other scientific process. To move research into practice you've got to have the science. We chose to go work with many scientists to find out what do we need to do, what's the serum level and all of that, and we consult with many of them on a regular basis about what's new today, because today may show something different than tomorrow. The results that have been published, that continue to be published, we'd look at, to add that, to all of it.

0:45:53.8 Baggerly: The guides, how do I get there? What do I need to do? What is the next step? So we publish all of that participation, solicitation of people to join the project is ongoing, and it's not just ongoing one time, but somebody might take a test today to see what it is and give us the data, and six months later, we wouldn't hear from them and nine months later, we wouldn't hear from them, so there's this ongoing effort to engage them with information, with reminders, all of those things that say that you care about them, which we very, very much do.

0:46:37.6 Baggerly: Education is distinct from that, although education is certainly there, but with the [0:46:43.8] ?? EDUMUSC project, the pre-term growth project, we did everything from providing continuing education courses for the physicians and staff to little burbs with just one little picture once a week to say, "Did you know", kind of things. It doesn't have to be massive education courses, just a reminder with some factual data, that it really is there, and certainly for all of our users and participants we're doing that all the time. One of our most popular education ongoing things is what...

0:47:20.2 Baggerly: The value of the sun, and that is a very popular thing because people want to be in the sun and they want to be in the sun safely and that's really very easy to do and it helps their health. The analysis is done by us, by our bio-statistician by ongoing work with the researchers that we work with, again, we have researchers on our staff too. So it's not just out there per se but we do that all the time, when we publish those papers. And then taking action really is, in one sense, what do you do next, you know this about breast cancer, you know this about pre-term birth, what do you do next? And this again, is turning out to be much bigger in terms of effort and involvement with many other people than we've had looked for, but in short, all of those things are steps that we do, and we need help from everyone in order to do it, because again, we're not a stand-alone thing, we really are working very beautifully with the public around the world as well as the scientists. Here is my summary on what do we do next. Number one, measure the right things, and at the right time, I clicked develop standards because that's really important at this point in time, back again to that Data Interchange standards, which is like whether you measure the vitamin D level of an individual or whether they measure it in the morning or at noon.

0:48:57.5 Baggerly: The Vitamin D reading can be different by as much as 20%. Our bodies really do have that circadian rhythm in them and it shows up, and I do not think that we knew that before. There's a lot of things that we don't know. Create new technologies. Right now, the blood spot test is what we use, and we're looking for the day that a brilliant person or company develop something that... And whether it's a blood spot or whether it's one of those devices which you press into your arm, which they do have now, where you can do a vitamin D reading right away, that's the technology, and we're ready for that. New educational methods to match the audiences how do you educate or get anybody involved who's a scientist is certainly personal and it's certainly academic, but it's different than the pregnant woman that's coming in the door. There are different actions they need to take, and we need to pay attention to that. These structures and benefits for professionals. Far too many professionals that I have talked with are actually penalized from reducing the number of people in the hospital because it cuts back on the income that the hospital gets. I understand the motivation from the hospital's side, on the other hand, that measurement system needs to change.

0:50:26.1 Goethel: Absolutely.

0:50:29.4 Baggerly: Analyze and demonstrate results. Well, we got good luck with this, here's what the pre-term birth rate was, here's what it costs, and we show what the results were, next thing, we amend the methodology in order to go forward. So right now, they're really missing, that I would like you all to consider is participating in some kind of project where a person or a group, is assigned to develop some cohesive standards that say, Here's what this data is that needs to be collected by data element. I'm not talking generic things, if you're doing business to business and science to science communications. You're gonna start talking about every single data element, whether it's mandatory, conditional or optional when you talk about the various and sundry units of measure. And that would help stabilize the kind of data that we get out from all of the RCTs, whether they're on drugs or nutrients, and it would get us a long way to being able to use immediacy of what we have right now, so claim the joy of your health and everybody, you know this day it's yours. Thank you.

0:51:53.7 Goethel: Thank you, thank you so much. I mean, that was amazing. That was a firework of information, and it's just so great to see.

0:52:01.1 Baggerly: Thank you.

0:52:02.3 Goethel: What is able if one takes and the action and implements it. And that like every single action counts then we can make a difference and it's so great to see that. I think many people might ask like right now, how can I participate, like so which ways are there to participate either as a person or maybe also as a company. So for example, if someone who has a company of many employees, how can the private person and also the other people get involved within...

0:52:35.5 Baggerly: Thanks for asking. We do both of those, and they're very straight forward as an individual, all the individual needs to do no matter where they are, in the world is to log on to GrassrootsHealth.net and sign on for one of the projects. Now, you will get a test kit or a set of kits because you can get vitamin D but you could also get a magnesium test or an omega 3 test, and you can create a set of things that you wanna get which getting the test is part of the research project, it's not a test operation per-se, meaning like we don't sell the test. What we are providing is the test in order to participate in the project, that you'll get those sent to you, and we have the IRB and a legal approval to sell them any place. Literally in the world. And so they go and you get that and you then proceed to answer the questionnaire online and take the test, send it in and then you get the results back. It's a little slow on the results now infact, due to this covid thing, but back again, with companies, we have a number of companies who said, Oh, I wanna provide this for my employees, and what they do generally.

0:53:53.6 Baggerly: I mean, they're different kind of options, and we're happy to work with companies to do anything they wish. As a lot of them provide their employees coupons to use. Kinda like prepaid coupons or they will buy 10, 20, 105,000 enrolments into the project and provide information out to all of their employees about here's what can be the enrollment process for you. And the other part of that is, depending upon the size of the employer, it also could greatly help and impact their... In the United States anyway, the amount of money that they have to pay for healthcare insurance because they are making their people healthier overall kind of thing. So we have all kinds of ways, the simplest two things or the simplest one is individuals, and the second is, send me, you got my email right here, send me an email saying I have this situation, what do I do? And we'll come back with a custom solution for you.

0:55:00.6 Goethel: Amazing. Okay. Thank you so much. And... Also in terms of like companies, the one thing is like the healthcare insurance, the other thing is like the productivity, as you describe like just take the point in terms of like reduced pain, and I know there's a lot of more... A lot more going on there, like people just feel healthier and therefore they can just work better it's just like one of... Like so many tools which can be applied and it's just like costing nearly nothing so why wait.

0:55:35.8 Baggerly: And we love that, and we believe that, and that's back again to claiming the joy of your health, which is if it's as simple as testing and taking action on some basic nutrients such as certainly vitamin D and magnesium and the omega 3s, it's like let's get on with it.

0:56:00.5 Goethel: So just to clarify and verify, to get it, like understood better even more, so if I wanna participate basically I can sign up, and so do I have to pay it like a fee to get the testing kit and...

0:56:10.2 Baggerly: Yes, yes, yes, exactly.

0:56:14.4 Goethel: Do I get the vitamin D and the supplement I get on my own so that I can basically take the supplements or like also evaluate like the starting point and also where I keep going. So how does it work like over one year or two years, how often do I measure? Can you tell a little bit more about that?

0:56:32.7 Baggerly: Surely, you definitely... Your enrollment fee, let's just stick with just vitamin D for the moment because it's easier to do that. For Vitamin D, you log on and you say, I wanna participate in this project, and the fee our for vitamin D testing the first time is 79 US dollars, and there can be a shipping charge based on where you live attached to that, and that gets shipped to you generally within a day, and at the same time, or you can wait until you get the kit, it depends on you, you can fill in the questionnaire, which will take you at least 15 or so minutes because you gotta look up what am I really doing right now, and we want the particulars we don't want just, Yes, I'm taking vitamin C. Well, how much, What brand, that kind of thing.

0:57:25.1 Baggerly: That we do that, and then if we weren't in the COVID era, which is trying to get people's D-levels up in a hurry, you would test each six months until your D-level is at least in that 40 to 60 range, and then once a year, with the COVID thing, we have a special project going on right now, which is like test and get your results in the meantime, if you wanna get your D level up in a hurry, you definitely wanna make sure you're there because the faster you're up, the faster you make sure, your immune system is working, and there is actually a calculator on site for you to use very easily at any time, saying I'm 25 and I wanna be 25 nanograms per milliliter or... And I wanna be at a 50.

0:58:14.0 Baggerly: What do I do to get there? And again, it depends on your weight and other things, but even if you just put in your weight and the 25 and the 50, it will come back and say, start here, and if you want to do it rapidly, it will give you an IRB-approved amount to take for X number of days, three, four, five days, and then we'll get down to about a more normal intake level in order to get you there, so all of that has been figured out by the researchers and our staff and has been submitted to the IRB and approved for a rapid rise kind of function. So it's there.

0:58:57.1 Goethel: Awesome, and also like the other projects as well, so like the same way if I had done... Only one to go for vitamin D, but also Omega 3 or magnesium and I think there is also another, like the immune boost project where it's like if more, so everything just on the website, so they're like plenty of possibilities to participate on a degree, how far they wanna give?

0:59:18.3 Baggerly: Yes.

0:59:20.4 Goethel: Awesome. And actually, every single person helps to get more data and basically...

0:59:26.2 Baggerly: Absolutely.

0:59:26.7 Goethel: 100%

0:59:27.6 Baggerly: More data, more health and more awareness, and we're looking at one of the big values right now is, I'm absolutely delighted to find so many people that we talk to know something about vitamin D these days and they didn't know about it two years ago, and they certainly didn't know about it 10 years ago, so spread the word is helping other people be healthy as well.

0:59:54.3 Goethel: Awesome. Carole, thank you so much again. It was a pleasure to talk to you, to listen to you, and I think it's really amazing what you've done so far, and I believe that there's going to come much more and everybody can participate, so everybody who is listening, sign up and be aware, share it, so that other people get aware of it too, because we can make a difference and we can make it now, and everybody can help. So...

1:00:19.2 Baggerly: Thank you. I appreciate it.

1:00:19.3 Goethel: Thank you so much.