If You’re NOT Supplementing with THIS Vitamin on a Daily Basis at THIS Amount …You Need to Start NOW!
I am hard pressed to name a single vitamin that has consistently shown to be able to decrease all-cause mortality as well as cardiovascular and cancer mortality as Vitamin D-3 (cholecalciferol). The studies depicting these benefits continue to accrue.
At this point in time, I recommend that everyone supplement at least 2000-5000 IU per day of vitamin D-3, with the goal being that when you have your physician check your vitamin D levels after a few months of supplementation, they be in the 40-60 ng/ml range.
If they are not in this range, double the amount of vitamin D you’re taking daily and have your levels checked again in 4-5 months. Some people, even with additional daily D-3 supplementation, do not easily increase their vitamin D-3 levels. If upon having them tested the second time, your levels did not increase very much (despite having doubled your daily dose), discuss this with your doctor.
Discuss this with your physician and you may have to take as much as 50,000 IU of vitamin D-3 a day (or more) to get up to 40-60 ng/ml. I know that going to your doctor’s office or a lab can be inconvenient but it is so worth it to decrease your risk of death from all causes as well as specifically from heart disease and cancer!
Here’s a brief summary of just two of the several studies that reported these vitamin D-3 benefits. 1.) Published in the prestigious British Medical Journal, 2014, Jun 17, a meta-analysis (a study that compiles and evaluates the reported data from multiple studies on a given topic) of both European and U.S. published studies found that: 0f the 26,000 participants (age 50-79) reported on, in all of the included studies, those who had the lowest vitamin D levels had a RR (relative risk) of 1.57 (an RR of 1 is neutral) for both all-cause mortality and cardiovascular mortality and a similar RR for cancer related mortality in those who previously had cancer. 2.) A second study published in April, 2013 in the American Journal Of Clinical Nutrition also reported decreasing vitamin D levels were inversely related to all-cause, cardiovascular, cancer and respiratory mortality rates.
Links to abstracts of these studies are below. For those of you who are interested, vitamin D levels can be reported as ng/ml (which is the denomination we referred to above) or nanomoles/Litre. To convert ng/ml into nmoles/liter multiply the ng/ml by 2.5. Vitamin D-3 in 5000 iu soft gels is relatively inexpensive and all of you reading this article should strongly consider supplementing this powerfully healthy vitamin today.
Links to Studies:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23446902
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24938302
To the Best of Health,
Curt Hendrix, M.S. C.C.N. C.N.S.
