The UltraMind Solution (38 page)

Score one point for each box you checked.

What vitamin deficiency affects over half of the population, is almost never diagnosed, and has been linked to depression, dementia, many cancers, autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis and fibromyalgia, high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, chronic muscle pain, and bone loss?

What vitamin is almost totally absent from our food supply? What vitamin do we need up to twenty-five times more of than the government recommends
for us to be healthy? What vitamin is the hidden cause of so much suffering that is so easy to treat?

If you guessed vitamin D, you are correct.

For the last fifteen years of my practice, my focus has been to discover what the body needs to function optimally. And I have become more interested in the role of specific nutrients as the years have passed. In the past five years I have tested almost every patient in my practice for vitamin D deficiency, and I am shocked by what I see. I am also amazed by what happens when their vitamin D status reaches an optimal level.

Each nutrient has its role, but vitamin D deficiency is a major epidemic that is under the radar of most doctors and public health officials. It has been linked to depression, dementia, an increased risk of death, and even autism. Consider the following:

In one study of elderly patients the average level of vitamin D was 18 ng/ml (nanograms per milliliter) when normal is between 50 and 80. Almost 60 percent of them were under 20 ng/ml. Those with the lowest vitamin D levels had the most depression and the worst performance on objective tests for dementia and cognitive function.
⁴⁸

We know that vitamin D levels drop precipitously in winter, that this is associated with seasonal affective disorder, and that giving vitamin D supplements can prevent this.
⁴⁹

New insights into brain development in the womb link vitamin D deficiency with autism. Vitamin D is necessary for the normal development of the brain and reduces brain inflammation that is characteristic in autism.
⁵⁰

A review in the
The Archives of Internal Medicine
of all randomized trials on vitamin D supplementation found a reduction in death of 7 percent from all causes.
⁵¹
This should have been headline news, and would have been if it was a drug.

Most doctors think that if you don’t have rickets you don’t have vitamin D deficiency. They couldn’t be more wrong. The real question is not how
little
we need not to get rickets (400 IU a day), but how much we need to be optimally healthy and how much we were designed to have (approximately 5,000 to 10,000 IU a day).

We are not living in the environment in which we were designed to thrive. People who live in northern climates no longer eat a diet of fatty wild fish like mackerel and herring and cod liver oil—which are among the few natural dietary sources of vitamin D.

For the rest of us, the key is sunlight. Most of us live and work indoors, but 80 to 100 percent of our vitamin D requirement comes from our exposure to sunlight. And concerns about skin cancer encourage use of sunblock, which stops 97 percent of the skin’s production of vitamin D. Use of sunscreen, dark skin color, increase in latitude, changes in seasonal sun exposure, aging, and wearing clothes that cover most of our body all affect our risk of vitamin D deficiency.

Newer research by Dr. Michael Holick,
⁵²
a vitamin D pioneer and professor of medicine, physiology, and dermatology at Boston University School of Medicine, recommends intakes of up to 2,000 IU a day,
⁵³
or enough to keep blood levels of 25-hydroxy vitamin D at between 40 to 60 ng/ml. Lifeguards have levels of over 100 ng/ml without toxicity.

So supplementation is essential unless we are spending all our time at the beach, eating thirty ounces of wild salmon a day, or downing ten tablespoons of cod liver oil a day! The exact amount needed to get your blood levels to the optimal range (50 to 80 ng/ml) will vary depending on your age, genetics, how far north you live, how much time you spend in the sun, and even the time of the year.

We are scared into thinking that high doses are toxic, but one study of healthy young men receiving 10,000 IU of vitamin D for twenty weeks showed no toxicity (I wouldn’t try that, though, without a doctor’s supervision).

Here is a story of one of my patients to show just how powerful supplementing with vitamin D can be.