How much vitamin D do you really need? A lot more than you need just to prevent rickets, says cardiologist Donald Miller.
... Early in the 20th century an investigator found that cod liver oil could prevent rickets in puppies. The nutritional factor in the oil that promotes skeletal calcium deposition was named "vitamin D," alphabetically after already-named vitamins A, B, and C. Rickets was thought to be another vitamin-deficiency disease, and the curative agent, a steroid hormone, was mislabeled a "vitamin."
Now, a century later, a wealth of evidence suggests that rickets, its most florid manifestation, is the tip of a vitamin D insufficiency/deficiency iceberg. A lack of Vitamin D can also trigger infections (influenza and tuberculosis), autoimmune diseases (multiple sclerosis, Type 1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, and inflammatory bowel disease), cardiovascular disease, and cancer. Practitioners of conventional medicine (i.e., most MDs) are just beginning to appreciate the true impact of vitamin D deficiency. In 1990, medical journals published less than 20 reviews and editorials on vitamin D. Last year they published more than 300 reviews and editorials on this vitamin/hormone. This year, on July 19, 2007, even the New England Journal of Medicine, the bellwether of pharmaceutically-oriented conventional medicine in the U.S., published a review on vitamin D that addresses its role in autoimmune diseases, infections, cardiovascular disease, and cancer (N Engl J Med 2007;357:266–281). Read more
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