Vitamin D-ilemma
Posted: Monday, January 07, 2008 5:33 PM by Barbara Raab
By Robert Bazell, NBC News chief science correspondent
For many years, doctors and scientists thought that the key role Vitamin D plays in the body is strengthening bones. And that’s true. But in the past few decades evidence has accumulated the Vitamin D is critical for almost every cell in the body. Today we report on evidence from the highly respected Framingham Heart study showing that the 28% of people who had the lowest levels of Vitamin D in their bodies had a 60% higher risk of developing a heart attack or stroke over a five-year period.
That is a big deal. It was the Framingham study that nailed the roles of cholesterol, blood pressure, lack of exercise and the other well known risk factors for heart disease. Other recent studies have found that Vitamin D can reduce the risk of breast cancer, colon cancer, and many other common serious diseases.
The problem with reporting on the health benefits of Vitamin D is that nature’s way of giving it to us is exposure to the sun. You can also get it from food and from supplements but few people consume enough. The Framingham study found that only 10% of the adults they studied had the recommend amount of Vitamin D in their bodies. But tell people to go out in the sun a bit and you run up against the American Academy of Dermatology which has been very successful with its efforts to get Americans OUT of the sun to reduce the risk of skin cancer.
What is the right amount of sun? There is no one-size-fits-all answer. It depends on a person’s skin color, location on the earth, genetic history and the time of year. Staying out long enough to get a sun burn is dangerous and never a good idea. A big problem also is that many sunscreens block out the UV-B rays that make the Vitamin D while allowing in more UV-A that increases the cancer risk.
That is one of the reasons why the other study we covered today by researchers in Norway and the Brookhaven National Laboratories in the United States concluded that on the whole moderate sun exposure is good and should be encouraged.
But when it comes to health messages, all too often doctors do not want to give and people do not want to hear guidance that is not simple encouragement or prohibition
