Vitamin D3

What are the benefits of Vitamin D3?. Are their natural alternatives to avoid getting a flu shot? Vitamin D plays a big part in helping your body stay healthy. Taking high doses of Vitamin D, aids in lessening the impact when you are exposed to the flu or when you start getting symptoms.

There have been many published articles supporting this idea. Preventing osteoporosis and supporting healthy bones is another benefit of having optimal vitamin D levels in your body. Great BONUS!

My family started taking Vitamin D3 in the winter of 2008. That same winter, my son broke his kneecap snowboarding. He had a very speedy recovery. The attending orthopedic doctor attributed the fast recovery to the vitamin D3 therapy we had started months earlier.

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Will Vitamin D help prevent a “cytokine storm”?
Does it matter what kind of Vitamin D I take?
Read What Other Visitors Have Said

What are the experts saying about
Swine Flu and Vitamin D3?

Dr. J. J. Cannell

Take a few minutes to watch the video by Dr. J.J. Cannell on his recent findings about Vitamin D3 and the Swine Flu.

The following information is taken from Dr. J. J. Cannell's
Epidemic influenza and Vitamin D

"In 1981, R. Edgar Hope-Simpson proposed that a 'seasonal stimulus' intimately associated with solar radiation explained the remarkable seasonality of epidemic influenza.

Solar radiation triggers robust seasonal vitamin D production in the skin; vitamin D deficiency is common in the winter, and activated vitamin D, 1,25(OH) D, a steroid hormone, has profound effects on human immunity. 1,25(OH) D acts as an immune system modulator, preventing excessive expression of inflammatory cytokines and increasing the ` oxidative burst ' potential of macrophages.

Perhaps most importantly, it dramatically stimulates the expression of potent anti-microbial peptides, which exist in neutrophils, monocytes, natural killer cells, and in epithelial cells lining the respiratory tract where they play a major role in protecting the lung from infection.

Volunteers inoculated with live attenuated influenza virus are more likely to develop fever and serological evidence of an immune response in the winter. Vitamin D deficiency predisposes children to respiratory infections.

Ultraviolet radiation (either from artificial sources or from sunlight) reduces the incidence of viral respiratory infections, as does cod liver oil (which contains vitamin D). An interventional study showed that vitamin D reduces the incidence of respiratory infections in children. We conclude that vitamin D, or lack of it, may be Hope-Simpson's 'seasonal stimulus'."

Herbalist Paul Bergner

Herbalist Paul Bergner discusses the importance of vitamin D for improving immunity during the coming flu season.

Dr. Scott Isaacs

Dr. Scott Isaacs, ND, D.C. in an article titled,
Help Prevent Swine Flu with Vitamin D said,

“The most discussed natural method of preventing the swine flu this year is vitamin D, supplementation.

Vitamin D is often found in food in doses that are laughably low compared with what our body needs. Certain coldwater fish are the only significant dietary source of vitamin D.

The best source of vitamin D is the sun. Light-skinned individuals can produce up to 20,000 IUs of vitamin D merely by spending 15 minutes in direct sunlight, while one cup of fortified milk provides only 100 IUs of vitamin D.

The recommended daily allowance of vitamin D is 200 IUs for adults, 400 IUs for children - but this is only to prevent bone diseases like rickets and osteomalacia, not to optimize immune function.

There is significant evidence nowadays linking low vitamin D levels in the body to low immunity. Indeed, some health care professionals and scientists - myself included - consider the lack of sunlight exposure in the winter months (and the resultant lack of vitamin D absorption) a significant reason why colds and the flu are so prevalent at this time.

It is a good idea to get your vitamin D levels checked right now. They should be above 50 ng/mL. If you are an adult and your vitamin D levels are low, start high-dose supplementation of 5,000 IUs per day, then check again in 3 months. Or get plenty of sunshine- at least 15 minutes of direct sunlight on as much skin as possible every day.”

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Will Vitamin D help prevent a “cytokine storm”?

Excerpts taken from: Epidemic Influenza and Vitamin D By Dr. J. J. Cannell

Click here for the latest Flu/Cold/SARS News
(SARS = Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome)

In early April of 2005, after a particularly rainy spring, an influenza epidemic (epi: upon, demic: people) exploded through the maximum-security hospital for the criminally insane where I have worked for the last ten years. It was not the pandemic (pan: all, demic: people) we all fear, just an epidemic.

The world is waiting and governments are preparing for the next pandemic. A severe influenza pandemic will kill many more Americans than died in the World Trade Centers, the Iraq war, the Vietnam War, and Hurricane Katrina combined, perhaps a million people in the USA alone. Such a disaster would tear the fabric of American society. Our entire country might resemble the Superdome or Bourbon Street after Hurricane Katrina.

It's only a question of when a pandemic will come, not if it will come. Influenza A pandemics come every 30 years or so, severe ones every hundred years or so. The last pandemic, the Hong Kong flu, occurred in 1968 - killing 34,000 Americans.

In 1918, the Great Flu Epidemic killed more than 500,000 Americans. So many millions died in other countries, they couldn't bury the bodies.

Young healthy adults, in the prime of their lives in the morning, drowning in their own inflammation by noon, grossly discolored by sunset, were dead at midnight. Their body’s own broad-spectrum natural antibiotics, called antimicrobial peptides, seemed nowhere to be found. An overwhelming immune response to the influenza virus - white blood cells releasing large amounts of inflammatory agents called cytokines and chemokines into the lungs of the doomed - resulted in millions of deaths in 1918. (referred to as a “cytokine storm”)

1918, when medical scientists did autopsies on some of the fifty million people who died during the 1918 flu pandemic, they were amazed to find destroyed respiratory tracts; sometimes these inflammatory cytokines had triggered the complete destruction of the normal epithelial cells lining the respiratory tract. It was as if the flu victims had been attacked and killed by their own immune systems. This is the severe inflammatory reaction that vitamin D has recently been found to prevent.

I subsequently did what physicians have done for centuries. I experimented, first on myself and then on my family, trying different doses of vitamin D to see if it has any effects on viral respiratory infections.

After that, as the word spread, several of my medical colleagues experimented on themselves by taking three-day courses of pharmacological doses (2,000 units per kilogram per day) of vitamin D at the first sign of the flu.

I also asked numerous colleagues and friends who were taking physiological doses of vitamin D (5,000 units per day in the winter and less, or none, in the summer) if they ever got colds or the flu, and, if so, how severe the infections were.

I became convinced that physiological doses of vitamin D reduce the incidence of viral respiratory infections and that pharmacological doses significantly ameliorate the symptoms of some viral respiratory infections if taken early in the course of the illness.

Epidemiology and Infection, recently published our paper. "We proposed that annual fluctuations in vitamin D levels explain the seasonality of influenza. The periodic seasonal fluctuations in 25-hydroxy-vitamin D levels, which cause recurrent and predictable wintertime vitamin D deficiency, predispose human populations to influenza epidemics.

We raised the possibility that influenza is a symptom of vitamin D deficiency in the same way that an unusual form of pneumonia (pneumocystis carinii) is a symptom of AIDS. That is, we theorized that George Bernard Shaw was right when he said, "the characteristic microbe of a disease might be a symptom instead of a cause."

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Does it matter what
kind of Vitamin D I take?

As you can see, much research and attention has been given to this topic. There are hundreds of sources and sites that offer different kinds of vitamin D at varying prices. Through my studies I have concluded that there are certain criteria for selecting a good vitamin D.

First - you need to take a vitamin D3 because it is more effective. You’d need to take double amounts of a D2 to get the same results as Vitamin D3.

Second - since the levels of Vitamin D3, are suggested to be about 2,000 IUs for a child and 5,000 IUs for an adult, I want to have one that is at least 2,000 IUs a dose.

That being said, I also find that there are varying qualities of vitamin D3. I recently did a presentation at a medical wellness center that runs blood tests for vitamin D levels.I asked them about what kind they recommended to those with deficient levels of vitamin D. They have what we’ve been looking for, a “tested and tried” vitamin D3 that the body can absorb. No guess work!

It is 2,000 IUs a drop and comes in an emulsion form which is readily absorbed. We can offer you this vitamin D3 at an affordable price.

One ounce is approximately 450 drops. Each drop is 2,000 IUs of Vitamin D3.

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Note: These statements have not been reviewed by the Food & Drug Administration. These products are not intended to prevent, diagnose, treat, or cure any disease.

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