I have interviewed many of the leading experts in the vitamin D world and it is clear that Dr. Heaney has earned the respect of all of them.  He is greatly admired in that arena as a leader and pioneer; as someone who has and continues to push the envelope, and applies practical knowledge to reduce human suffering.

If you’re a regular reader of this newsletter, or read medical news in the conventional media, you may have noticed that newly discovered benefits of the “sunshine vitamin” are published on a regular basis these days.

What Makes Vitamin D so Special?

First, it’s important to realize that vitamin D is not “just a vitamin,” but rather the only known substrate for a potent, pleiotropic (meaning it produces multiple effects), repair and maintenance seco-steroid hormone that serves multiple gene-regulatory functions in your body.

As Dr. Heaney so vividly explains here, each cell in your body has its own DNA library that contains information needed to deal with virtually every kind of stimulus it may encounter, and the master key to enter this library is activated vitamin D.  

For example, memory ductile cells in the breast need vitamin D to access DNA that enables the response to estrogen.

So naturally, without sufficient amounts of vitamin D, your cells cannot access their DNA libraries and their functions are thereby impaired.  

This is why vitamin D functions in so many different tissues, and affects such a large number of different diseases and health conditions. So far, scientists have found about 3,000 genes that are upregulated by vitamin D.

 

Receptors that respond to the vitamin have been found in almost every type of human cell, from your brain to your bones. And researchers keep finding health benefits from vitamin D in virtually every area they look.

Vitamin D Deficiency May Radically Hamper Your Overall Health

 

Just one example of an important gene that vitamin D up-regulates is your ability to fight infections, including the flu. It produces over 200 anti microbial peptides, the most important of which is cathelicidin, a naturally occurring broad-spectrum antibiotic.

Optimizing your vitamin D levels can also help you to prevent as many as 16 different types of cancer including pancreatic, lung, breast, ovarian, prostate, and colon cancers.

But perhaps most important to note is that vitamin D can lower your risk of dying from any cause, according to a new European meta-analysis published in the Archives of Internal Medicine in 2007.

Another group of researchers have calculated that simply increasing levels of vitamin D3 could prevent diseases that claim nearly 1 million lives throughout the world each year, as the widespread vitamin D deficiency seen today is now thought to fuel an astonishingly diverse array of common chronic diseases.