Participants:
Series Code: MH
Program Code: MH240010S
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00:01 There is power hidden in what I am about to eat,
00:04 the power of the sun. 00:05 Plants capture the sun's rays and translate it into a 00:09 stored form of energy that we call carbohydrates. 00:12 When we eat carbohydrates our body's convert it 00:15 and unleash the energy in the mitochondria. 00:17 Do you remember the mitochondria from our first episodes? 00:20 It's like the mitochondria reverse the whole process 00:24 they unpack the solar power and transform it into 00:27 electricity, life force, energy, and release it 00:32 inside of us. And what is sad is that so many of us are 00:36 avoiding the source of this energy whether it's from 00:38 the food we eat or sunlight. 00:41 Stay out of the sun, don't eat carbs, that's what we hear 00:44 and it's affecting us. Its changing our electro-magnetic 00:48 field. We've got failing energy, lower frequency and 00:51 it's time to change that. 01:11 The power of the sun enters into our body, 01:13 not only through the food we eat but also through our skin. 01:17 Sunshine hitting the skin is converted into a very 01:20 important substance we call Vitamin D, 01:23 in fact one of the ways we can measure 01:25 our sunshine deficiency is by testing 01:28 Vitamin D blood values. 01:29 Vitamin D plays an enormous role in keeping us healthy 01:32 and yet Vitamin D deficiency is reported to affect 01:36 one billion men, women, and children around the world. 01:41 Approximately 40% of Americans are Vitamin D deficient 01:45 and if we look at just our elderly population 01:49 61% are Vitamin D deficient. 01:52 One of the reasons for that is that the skin of a person 01:55 in their 70s produces roughly 25% of the Vitamin D3 produced 02:00 by a person in their 20's. 02:02 Don't think this is just a northern latitude problem, 02:06 60% of the Saudi Arabian population reportedly has 02:10 Vitamin D deficiency and over 80% adults in Pakistan, India, 02:15 and Bangladesh have insufficient D levels. 02:18 It's astounding, places like Turkey and Iran have 02:22 major insufficiency as well. If we're deficient in Vitamin D 02:26 then we are more susceptible to poor health, autoimmunity, 02:30 disease, death. We blame our disease on our genes 02:34 or virus but what about lack of sunshine? 02:37 There's still a lot of confusion on this topic 02:40 so I thought I'd ask is sunshine good or bad for us? 02:45 That's an easy question, it is amazingly good for you 02:48 in so many different ways. 02:50 Yes, sunshine is absolutely good for us but if we spend 02:53 too much time out there and get sunburn, that's bad. 02:57 Okay. We can increase our risk of cancer. 02:59 But, you know God gave us sunshine as the very best way 03:07 to build up Vitamin D in our systems. 03:10 Vitamin D is a very crucial vitamin, there are many benefits 03:15 of sunshine not related to Vitamin D but one of the 03:20 well-known benefits of the sunshine is the Vitamin D 03:23 that we get from it. And Vitamin D is actually more 03:28 like a hormone than a standard vitamin. 03:32 What's interesting about Vitamin D is that it turns on 03:37 literally 10% of our genes. 03:39 Now we have these receptors on our genes called VDR's 03:44 that stands for Vitamin D receptors and the Vitamin D 03:48 binds to the receptor and activates and turns on 03:51 the genes and these genes play a role in controlling inflammation 03:57 for example in preventing cancer cells from forming, 04:03 and all sorts of other things that are really important to us. 04:07 So you're saying Vitamin D kind of hits this receptor 04:10 and once it's in there it turns on the ability for 04:13 our bodies to produce all these wonderful compounds that will 04:17 help us prevent cancer. 04:18 Yes. In fact the oncologists are realizing this now 04:22 and so they are actually prescribing quite a bit of 04:25 Vitamin D for their patients for many types of cancer. 04:29 Wait a second, I grew up hearing how all my sun exposure would 04:34 cause cancer. I asked Dr. Quave to give us some idea of what 04:39 a good Vitamin D level is? Sure, and a lot of times it 04:43 depends upon the lab what levels are considered normal 04:47 and what levels are not considered normal but 04:49 generally speaking when a person is under 30ng/dL 04:56 that's considered insufficient Vitamin D and most cancers 05:00 occur between the levels of 10- 40, so you really want to 05:05 get your levels at least 40 and higher. 05:09 In pain management I usually shoot for at least 50 to 70 for 05:13 our Vitamin D levels because at that point you're getting the 05:18 maximum benefit from Vitamin D, you're getting the maximum 05:21 anti-inflammatory benefit, you're getting the maximum 05:24 anticancer benefit, you're getting the maximum 05:27 immune system benefit from the Vitamin D. 05:31 You know for example, like with breast cancer, 05:37 If you get their Vitamin D level up to 50 you can reduce the 05:42 instances of breast cancer by 83%. 05:45 That's incredible. Pretty amazing, right? 05:46 What else can I tell you about Vitamin D? 05:52 Well, Vitamin D for example decreases the ability of 05:58 the cancer cell to metastasize, Vitamin D also decreases 06:04 the cancer cells to proliferate and it even reduces the 06:10 ability of new blood vessels to grow into the tumor cells 06:14 thereby making it more difficult for the cancer 06:17 to grow and spread. 06:18 I know there is always a fear about like oh, what about cancer 06:22 skin cancer because people who are afraid of getting cancer 06:25 and dying. but there is actually a lot of research that shows 06:28 a lot of the benefits of sunshine will not only for 06:36 other health benefits but it actually reduces 06:39 your cancer risk. 06:40 But I had one patient probably about 15 years ago 06:44 that was coming from a nursing home and I was taking off 06:47 skin cancer three or four lesions about every three months 06:51 and I had heard this thing about Vitamin D and they said 06:56 that it might affect skin cancers especially 06:58 and if you think about it, we tell people to stay out of 07:03 the sun because it burns them okay? but sun is where you get 07:07 the Vitamin D so you got a conflict here, right? 07:11 This guy started taking his Vitamin D and after his level 07:18 got up to about 70, I saw him less and less 07:23 and I went for years without seeing him again. 07:27 He was getting no skin cancers and I was taking as I say 07:30 I was probably taking 12 skin lesions off a year on him 07:34 easily for years and so that's when I started seeing 07:38 maybe there's some other stuff going on here. 07:40 You know we have such an aversion because sun causes 07:46 cancer, skin cancer which no question, it can, 07:50 but are we...when you use sun screen you block the 07:56 production of Vitamin D. 07:57 So, we're often afraid that sunlight will trigger cancer 08:02 but the truth is that the sun actually can help prevent 08:07 cancer. In fact it might help prevent 30 dusk for each one 08:12 caused by skin cancer. 08:14 And there's a researcher Dr. Geo Vannucci from Harvard 08:19 that says... 08:32 So, I really need to rethink our perspective on sunlight. 08:38 and it's important for us to understand how beneficial 08:42 and important it is in so many different ways 08:44 even for anti-cancer benefits. 08:46 I first started measuring Vitamin D levels when I was 08:50 practicing in Guam and this was about 20 years ago 08:55 when I read a meta-analysis study from a Harvard physician 08:59 who showed that the levels of Vitamin D in your blood 09:04 correlated very strongly with your risk of future cancer. 09:08 Now this was based on the same data set used tobacco exposure 09:15 in risk of cancer, same data sets and so I was 09:20 like shocked at the time, I said well that's crazy... 09:23 He actually said that the study supported the fact that having 09:27 a low level of Vitamin D in your blood actually was a 09:31 greater risk factor for future cancer than if you smoke. 09:35 Now the study was not saying it was okay to smoke 09:39 we just need to realize the significance of Vitamin D 09:42 deficiency. 09:43 And I think because Vitamin D is part of the immune system 09:47 If vitamin D is low, your immune system is not working well. 09:49 You body's not able to identify what is the true foreign body, 09:54 foreign compound, the bad cell that's going bad 09:57 that's not breaking down like it should and what's a good cell? 10:00 I've always heard how sunlight causes cancer and yet 10:06 we're hearing how it can actually help us fight it. 10:08 One of the ways it helps us fight cancer is through 10:11 Its role in supporting the immune system. 10:13 And there's a receptor site for just about every cell in the 10:17 body for Vitamin D. 10:18 So Vitamin D does all kinds of things but the most important 10:22 thing it does is it regulates the immune system. 10:24 And so when I see a patient and their having all kinds of 10:30 problems, I want to know what their Vitamin D level is. 10:31 The thing that is so important about Vitamin D is it's not 10:34 really a vitamin, it's actually a hormone 10:37 and so it's really important for us to think about how Vitamin D 10:41 modulates the immune system and if we have low Vitamin D, 10:45 for whatever reason to me that means the immune system 10:50 in the body is really struggling it's using up all that Vitamin D 10:55 trying to modulate all the factors and the insults 10:58 that are happening in the body. 11:00 What does modulate mean? 11:02 What do we mean when we say that Vitamin D is modulating 11:06 the immune system? 11:07 So what Vitamin D does, it really helps to balance 11:11 the immune system, so if the immune system is hyper-reactive 11:15 it helps down-regulate it and bring it back down to a 11:19 even normal level. And so when I'm thinking about modulating 11:21 I'm thinking about your immune system is really low 11:25 it will help bring it back up to where it needs to be 11:27 if it's really high and over- reacting, it will help bring it 11:29 back down so modulates it so that it balances itself out. 11:33 In addition, we have these white blood cells that are part of our 11:38 non-specific defense called natural killer cells and 11:42 natural killer cells, their responsibility is for 11:44 killing virus', they kill cancer cells, and they are 11:51 activated by Vitamin D. 11:53 Vitamin D is critical for really all conditions. 11:58 it's important for diabetics, it's important for 12:01 heart patients, it's important for pretty much everybody 12:05 but it's also really important for minimizing our 12:09 personal risk for auto- immune disease. 12:12 And one of the best studies to showcase this fact 12:17 was over a 10-year study done in the nation of Finland 12:22 that has the highest rate per capita of Type I Diabetes 12:28 which is a very common unfortunately auto-immunity 12:34 where because of some infection or some toxic exposure 12:42 that child or young adult, could happen really at any age 12:47 usually in their early formative years will have an 12:52 auto-immune reaction against the beta cells of the pancreas 12:55 completely destroying them so now that they require 12:59 the insulin just to survive, just to control 13:01 their blood sugar, so that's a Type I diabetic which is 13:04 very different than the Type II diabetic. 13:08 This study, they said basically pregnant women and their infants 13:13 and children up to the age of 10 were to take an average 13:17 2,000 units of Vitamin D a day. So during pregnancy 13:21 and as soon as the baby is born taking 2,000 units a day 13:25 that's not too much, okay, and as indicated by that study 13:31 and they took that same amount 13:33 for the period of 10 years. Those individuals that did them 13:37 verses those that didn't had 80% of their risk of Type I 13:42 diabetes removed. In other words in the country 13:44 that has the highest rate of Type I diabetes 13:47 auto-immune condition, over 80% of that illness 13:51 was eradicated, prevented by just simply optimizing 13:58 Vitamin D blood levels in those infants and youngsters. 14:03 So we do know that Vitamin D and low Vitamin D is associated 14:08 with auto-immune disease and or worsening outcomes for 14:12 auto-immune disease and so I'm really thinking through 14:16 how all these pieces play together in the Vitamin D 14:19 as a modulator an immune modulator so when you have 14:22 auto-immune disease, Vitamin D is being used up trying to help 14:25 normalize the immune system response so you would expect 14:29 that you would need more Vitamin D to help the 14:32 immune system settle in and know what it's supposed to do 14:34 to modulate it. 14:35 You know, I don't think we realize how healing sunlight is, 14:39 that it is one of nature's doctors, Vitamin D is said 14:44 to affect all body tissue including the thyroid. 14:47 In fact Vitamin D insufficiency or deficiency is associated with 14:52 increased risk of reduced thyroid function and thyroid 14:56 immunity. Low levels of Vitamin D are linked with aggressiveness 15:01 of thyroid cancer too. 15:03 Vitamin D turns out to be a very important supplement 15:07 to consider for thyroid disorders since it's been found 15:10 to consistently help thyroid. 15:12 In fact, the lower the Vitamin D, the higher the chance 15:16 of thyroid disorder. 15:17 And the lower the Vitamin D, the higher the levels of 15:20 thyroid antibodies. 15:21 Think Hashimotos. 15:23 Perhaps nowhere more relevant than in auto-immune diseases 15:28 that I am involved with so the most common... 15:31 There are two common auto- immune diseases that 15:33 endocrinologists treat and that one would be auto-immune 15:36 thyroiditis, things like Hashimoto's thyroiditis 15:38 which often causes hypo- thyroidism or Graves' Disease 15:43 which is an auto-immune condition causing the thyroid 15:46 to be overactive. And then we treat Type I diabetes 15:49 which is also an auto-immune process where the beta cells 15:52 in the pancreas are under attack by the immune system 15:55 and killed off until where there is no more insulin production 15:58 from the pancreas leading to Type I diabetes. 16:01 We have more and more evidence that's accumulating that 16:06 Vitamin D is important for helping the immune system 16:11 to maintain itself in a balanced state. 16:14 Vitamin D is an anti- inflammatory, Vitamin D also 16:19 affects auto-immunity, if Vitamin D is low, your immune 16:23 system is not working well, your body's not able to 16:26 identify what is the true foreign body, foreign compound 16:30 the bad cell that is going bad that's not breaking down 16:33 like it should. 16:35 We need a good working balanced immune system 16:38 as we learned about in a previous program, 16:40 it can help us prevent auto- immunity, cancer, and help us 16:44 fight sickness such as Covid. 16:47 You know there was a study in Spain that showed that whenever 16:52 a person's Vitamin D level was over 30, no one died 16:59 from Covid in Spain, not a single person in the study. 17:02 A recent meta-analysis published in the Journal Nutrients 17:07 in October of 2021 showed that if you got Covid of the Delta 17:17 variety, the worse one that we've had so far, 17:19 okay, but your Vitamin D level was above 50 Nano grams per ml 17:27 that your risk of actually dying of that Covid experience 17:31 was near zero. That's good news, now I would never rely on 17:36 Vitamin D alone to protect me from any disease. 17:40 Okay, but that's a simple remedy that everybody should be taking 17:45 advantage of and that for most of us does require some 17:49 supplementation unless you're literally spending time in the 17:53 mid-day on a regular basis outside and you verify the 17:57 effectiveness of that with a blood test where your 18:00 blood levels are above 50. 18:02 Well, we knew that Vitamin D was important for the 18:05 immune system long before Covid came along that one on the 18:09 fascinating things that we learned about Vitamin D 18:11 was that if you had a Vitamin D level in you blood of probably 18:15 forty or higher, if you got Covid, your chance of dying 18:19 from Covid was dramatically less than if you had a 18:24 blood level of Vitamin D of less than 30 perhaps. 18:26 Cytokine storm it is a situation where the immune system 18:30 has lost control of itself, it's been tasked with 18:33 fighting this infection, fighting this virus, 18:36 quelling inflammation in the lungs and elsewhere. 18:39 But if the immune system doesn't have the proper system of 18:42 breaking or slowing itself down it may ramp up and overproduce 18:48 these chemicals called cytokines. 18:50 These are chemical messengers that the immune system cells 18:53 like lymphocytes produced and put out into the bloodstream 18:57 to affect other tissues. 18:58 The cytokines are harmful to tissue, they're part of the 19:01 way that the immune system uses to kill a cell that's infected 19:04 with the virus. In cytokine storm it turned out that 19:07 that process was just over abundant, over-exuberant 19:11 and as a result of cytokine storm, tissues in the lungs 19:15 and the blood vessels were being damaged by the body's 19:18 own reaction to the Covid virus infection, 19:21 adequate Vitamin D prevented that to a large degree. 19:25 They found that people that had Vitamin D levels that 19:28 are greater than 55 which is kind of toward the higher end 19:33 their survival rate from Covid is way higher. 19:36 Vitamin D level is directly correlated with thyroid 19:40 so if your Vitamin D level is low your thyroid level is low. 19:43 In fact, they will say in functional medicine that 19:47 if your Vitamin D level is below 70, your thyroid's not 19:50 working well, it's got to be above 70. 19:51 That's a metabolic endocrinologist okay, 19:56 or functional endocrinologist, if it's a cardiologist, 19:59 we have several metabolic cardiologists there, 20:03 that's what they call themselves, they say that the 20:05 heart doesn't work well below 80 for Vitamin D. 20:09 So, thyroid's directly correlated with Vitamin D level. 20:13 In the periphery, the T4 has to change to T3, that's the 20:18 active form, but to actually absorb it you have to have 20:22 Vitamin D to help absorb the thyroid at the cell level 20:26 that's why it has to be at a certain level. 20:28 You can have everything else done beautifully on your 20:31 thyroid panels but if your Vitamin D is low, 20:33 I'm not getting proper thyroid. 20:34 So you are saying that someone could be having symptoms 20:37 and think hmm, I think my thyroid is off and they 20:40 go to the doctor, they get their blood work and the doctor's like 20:42 nope, your thyroid's fine because your blood work 20:44 is great...Absolutely. But it still could be a thyroid 20:47 problem because maybe they are deficient in Vitamin D 20:50 and that thyroid is not reaching their cells. 20:52 That's correct, that's what they are telling us 20:53 and it seems to be playing out here in the office clinically. 20:58 So whereas with thyroid, the lower your Vitamin D, 21:02 the lower the thyroid. 21:04 With obesity, the lower the Vitamin D, the more obesity is. 21:09 it's just exactly inverse. 21:10 This sunshine vitamin is all over the place, 21:14 I hope that you are seeing just how valuable 21:17 it is to multiple parts of our health 21:20 including our heart health. 21:21 Vitamin D is an essential vitamin for our 21:29 cardiovascular health, there has been a lot of debate... 21:32 You know I remember 15/20 years ago I was in a fellowship 21:38 and they were just laughing about Vitamin D saying 21:41 you know, it's not important, this quack has given Vitamin D 21:45 it doesn't have nothing to do with the heart 21:48 and we know important Vitamin D is and very essential. 21:52 There was a study that was published in the Journal of 21:56 Investigative Dermatology in January 20 that found that the 22:02 nitric oxide that is stored... Remember that we talked about 22:05 the nitric oxide for the endothelial cells. 22:07 Well this nitric oxide that is stored in the top layer 22:11 of the skin reacts to sunlight and causes blood vessels 22:17 to widen and the oxide moves into the bloodstream, 22:21 that in turn lowers the blood pressure so Vitamin D 22:27 is essential. 22:29 Do you know what your Vitamin D level is? 22:31 It's important to know, remember we have Vitamin D receptors 22:35 on nearly every cell of the body so it makes sense 22:38 that it will impact a lot. 22:40 The people back in the 30's again they didn't have all these 22:44 labs to go by, they were going by how they felt 22:47 and sometimes that makes more sense than what we think 22:52 the lab test is telling us. 22:54 So it adds another dimension to medicine as to what 23:00 and how we treat them. In the 30's they were treating 23:04 rheumatoid arthritis with 200,000 International Units 23:09 of Vitamin D daily and curing it. 23:11 Now, it's not considered Kosher in medicine to talk about cures 23:17 but they were curing it. The problem is they had one 23:21 or two patients that came down with a liver problem 23:24 and because Vitamin D is a fat soluble compound 23:27 it goes through the liver and they decided that 23:30 it was Vitamin D that had ruined the liver. 23:33 No double-blind studies, this is all coming from case reports. 23:40 So you mind sharing just connecting the dots 23:44 how Vitamin D would improve rheumatoid arthritis? 23:48 As an interesting aside here, I had several patients where 23:52 we actually put them on Vitamin D at fairly high doses 23:54 because of various things and hopefully, my older sister will 23:59 forgive me, she was one of them because we have 24:01 rheumatoid arthritis in our family because we have 24:04 Scottish blood, Scottish blood has to do with those B vitamins 24:07 okay, if you are not absorbing the B vitamins you tend to have 24:10 more of these auto-immune problems. 24:11 At any rate, she had heard this lecture and she decided 24:16 that she was going to start taking Vitamin D 24:19 and so she started taking 50,000 International Units daily 24:25 and eight months later she was still on that dose, 24:29 her arthritis was totally gone, she was feeling wonderful 24:35 her husband who is an Orthopedist at Mayo Clinic 24:38 back east where they live said hey don't you think you 24:42 ought to test your level you know it is toxic, she tested it 24:46 and her level was 675. 24:48 Now I don't want to say everybody can do that, 24:51 she was feeling fantastic when I told her you can probably 24:55 back down now that you are up that high, 24:57 she didn't want to because she felt so good. 24:59 There are many benefits of sunshine not related to 25:02 Vitamin D but you know one of the well-known benefits 25:06 of sunshine is the Vitamin D that we get from it. 25:09 And Vitamin D is actually more like a hormone than 25:14 a standard vitamin and what's interesting about Vitamin D 25:19 is that it turns on literally 10% of our genes. 25:24 We have these receptors on our genes called VDR's 25:29 that stands for Vitamin D receptors and the Vitamin D 25:33 binds to the receptor and it activates and turns on 25:36 the genes, and these genes play a role in controlling 25:41 inflammation for example, in preventing cancer cells 25:46 from forming and all sorts of other things that are 25:51 really important to us. 25:52 Did you hear that? This is potentially 25:56 life-altering information. Insufficient Vitamin D 26:00 could be giving loose reign to the inflammatory gene 26:04 and it's running wild in our bodies. 26:06 To help us understand it, I asked him to say it again. 26:10 So, other ways that Vitamin D can be helpful specifically for 26:16 people with chronic pain are number one is, it reduces 26:20 inflammation, we actually have a gene that codes for 26:28 inflammation and there is a Vitamin D receptor 26:32 attached to that gene and if we don't have enough Vitamin D 26:36 the Vitamin D doesn't bind to that receptor and we have 26:41 uncontrolled inflammation. 26:43 So low Vitamin D can ramp up pain? 26:46 Yes, the descending pain pathway is actually what we call a 26:53 serotonergic pathway and when we're low in serotonin 26:58 we're unable to activate that pathway as well and 27:02 tone down the pain. 27:03 Sunshine is medicine, this is not to say that you shouldn't 27:07 listen to your Dermatologist, we need to think this through, 27:10 how can we have smart sun exposure? 27:12 There's a whole other aspect of sunlight that we will be 27:15 looking at in our next episode of Made For Health. 27:18 I hope you join us. |
Revised 2025-02-25