the miracle vitamin
The picture of modern health?
Go out and get some sun this weekend. It’s good for you:
… research into vitamin D is suggesting both a plausible answer to this medical puzzle and a heretical notion: that cancers and other disorders in rich countries aren’t caused mainly by pollutants but by a vitamin deficiency known to be less acute or even non-existent in poor nations.
Those trying to brand contaminants as the key factor behind cancer in the West are “looking for a bogeyman that doesn’t exist,” argues Reinhold Vieth, professor at the Department of Nutritional Sciences at the University of Toronto and one of the world’s top vitamin D experts. Instead, he says, the critical factor “is more likely a lack of vitamin D.”
…
But perhaps the biggest bombshell about vitamin D’s effects is about to go off. In June, U.S. researchers will announce the first direct link between cancer prevention and the sunshine vitamin. Their results are nothing short of astounding.
A four-year clinical trial involving 1,200 women found those taking the vitamin had about a 60-per-cent reduction in cancer incidence, compared with those who didn’t take it, a drop so large — twice the impact on cancer attributed to smoking — it almost looks like a typographical error.
I’ll be right back, I’m gonna go chug a gallon of vitamin D milk.
10 minutes of sun a day at a minimum. If you lay out by the pool, wait 10 minutes or so before applying the sunscreen. And milk is good, but the vitamin D in it is fortified and thus not providing the same level of benefit as from the sun.
At least that’s what I got from listening to a podcast from a Princeton University lecture on my iPod the other day.
Yeah, I heard the same, though it was 15 minutes a day. Apparently time from house to car to office to car to house, doesn’t provide enough. Glass in cars filters sunlight (or should). Go for a walk, but take your sunglasses. Full sun in the eyes is no good!
oh HOLY CRAP that is disgusting!