You’ve probably heard all of your life that vitamin D builds strong bones. That’s certainly true, but recent research shows that vitamin D has an even bigger role in many aspects of our health. One role that many people and even doctors are just now becoming aware of is the impact the “sunshine vitamin” has on lowering our risk of developing cancer.
As a powerful regulator of cell reproduction, vitamin D-3, the most effective form of vitamin D, plays a major part in preventing cancers and controlling the growth and spread of existing cancers.
In the 1970s and ’80s, the medical establishment, led by dermatologists, sounded an alarm over the rising number of deadly malignant melanomas in the United States, but when doctors convinced people to protect themselves from the sun, cases of melanoma actually rose in significant numbers. Medical experts blamed the increase on the fact that people were spending more time in the sun because they felt that sunblock creams protected them. Only later did research reveal that the sun’s UVA rays, which most sunblocks did not affect, were just as carcinogenic as UVB rays.
Although this is important, they still may be missing the boat. When sun strikes our skin, the penetrating UVB rays trigger biochemical reactions in the deeper cells that generate huge amounts of vitamin D. As little as 30 minutes in the sun can generate up to 50,000 international units (IU) of vitamin D.
We now know that vitamin D is a powerful inhibitor of cancer development and growth. So by making people vitamin D deficient with their medical wisdom to avoid sun exposure, they inadvertently increased people’s risk of developing all forms of skin cancer, including the deadly malignant melanoma.
Although vitamin D is known to inhibit some of the worst cancers, such as breast and colon, the most dramatic effect on cancers is with the deadly glioblastoma multiforme, the most common primary brain tumor and the form that has stricken Ted Kennedy.
The mortality is around 90 percent, and most die within one to two years of diagnosis despite aggressive conventional treatment.
In a Phase II trial, researchers found that high dose vitamin D-3 produced a dramatic regression of the tumor and complete clinical remission in 27 percent of cases that lasted as long as four to seven years, far beyond the expected survival with conventional aggressive treatments.
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