Vitamin D Deficiency Behind Many Western Cancers? 478
twilight30 wrote us with a link to an article in the Globe and Mail. If further study bears out the findings, new research into the causative agents behind disease and cancer may have a drastic impact on the health of citizens in Canada and the US. According to a four-year clinical trial, there's a direct link between cancer and Vitamin D deficiency. "[The] trial involving 1,200 women, and found those taking the vitamin had about a 60-per-cent reduction in cancer incidence, compared with those who didn't take it, a drop so large — twice the impact on cancer attributed to smoking — it almost looks like a typographical error. And in an era of pricey medical advances, the reduction seems even more remarkable because it was achieved with an over-the-counter supplement costing pennies a day. One of the researchers who made the discovery, professor of medicine Robert Heaney of Creighton University in Nebraska, says vitamin D deficiency is showing up in so many illnesses besides cancer that nearly all disease figures in Canada and the U.S. will need to be re-evaluated. 'We don't really know what the status of chronic disease is in the North American population,' he said, 'until we normalize vitamin D status.'"
now the counter argument... ? (Score:3, Insightful)
So typical.
Is this as big as I think it is? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not so confusing. (Score:4, Insightful)
Life is about balance.
Re:now the counter argument... ? (Score:3, Insightful)
Less Cancer Among those who Buy Supplements? (Score:2, Insightful)
Vitamin D deficiency? Life style! (Score:5, Insightful)
Vitamin D For Gaijin (Score:2, Insightful)
When I lived in the states, I was in Oklahoma and probably ate two or three bowls of cereal a day. Lots of milk. I am a cereal fanatic. As far as getting my vitamin d intake up, all the cereal coupled with the rest of the food I ate, the sunlight in Oklahoma, and being a cracker, I think I was probably okay.
Since coming to Japan, I get less sunlight for a variety of reasons and my dairy consumption has plummetted to near zero. If I get vitamin D fortified food, it's the half-and-half creamer in my coffee. At first when I read the article I was mildly alarmed for Japan since we eat almost no diary food over here, and I'm not sure if anything is vitamin d fortified, but then I read up on dietary sources of vitamin d and noticed that fish is generally a very good one.
I thought I was doing okay with the curry-rice, eggs, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, Wendies, and the karatama-don (fried chicken, egg, rice). I think I'm going to pay attention to what's keeping the locals alive and start taking more trips to the sushi shop instead of Wendies as well as replacing the chicken in my curry with squid and whatever other fish I can get to survive being simmered for an hour.
In the end it means more green tea at the sushi shop and fewer big-double-curry-cheeseburgers, so I guess it's better for me in a lot of ways to get over some of the diet changes. I've been here for months and will be here for more, so I should be getting used to things by now.
Re:now the counter argument... ? (Score:3, Insightful)
Specifically, this vitamin D hypothesis has data backing it up (60% is a startlingly high number, but this will have to be replicated), as well as making sense on other levels (vitamin D levels have been dropping for various reasons stated in TFA). So this hypothesis is certainly one to watch.
Re:60% reduction in risk? (Score:4, Insightful)
All you did was list reasons why you're skeptical of the results, yet you haven't read the paper. Granted they are plausible reasons, someone who is capable of excercising this kind of critique could do the world a favor by reading the article to either confirm or address their skepticism and then posting their final interpretation of the article.
This post is like reading intial lab notes. I don't care what you're hunch is now if you can follow through on the data (do several hundred more experiments in the lab) and come to something more conclusive. The paper isn't a state secret. Read it.
Re:now the counter argument... ? (Score:2, Insightful)
i personally take 4000IU a day, due to several reaserch papers i've read pointing to this being a more appropiate dossage for healthy bone, joint and blood maintanance
Really Bad Taste (Score:3, Insightful)
Cancer patients in the hospital doing "Got Milk?" public service announcements?
Nudist colonies advertising the health benefits of their lifestyle?
Advertisements for anti-cancer tanning beds?
Some research paper by two male med students doing a paper on cancer in nudist lifestylers?
Spam email selling vitamin D pills at only twice the cost of c14li5? sponsored by 3400 people in the US and Russia
Advertisements for GM milk that has twice the cancer curative properties of normal milk? sponsored by Monsanto
A study linking cancer and baby formula vs. mother's milk? sponsored by Gerber
Research that shows the George Forman iGrill retains more vitamin D than any other meat preparation method?
ok.... I'm going to stop now
Re:now the counter argument... ? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd say this is pretty strong evidence for the GP's point. Sure, there will be variations among races at the same latitude, I wouldn't be surprised if some equatorial people were darker than others. But I would also be surprised if there wasn't a STRONG correlation between latitude and skin color. It would seem really, really unlikely that this was "caused by genetic variation of a few settlers." Yeah, the light colored setters just randomly happened to move north, and the darker people stayed south. Sure.
And people weren't in northern europe long enough for evolution to have played a role? OK then how about China? Northern Chinese are very light-skinned, I know this from experience. And surprise, surprise - southern Chinese are alot darker. And don't you think that a 60% greater chance of disease due to vitamin D deficiency would be a strong evolutionary pressure? Strong enough to act over relatively short time periods on the evolutionary scale perhaps?
Anyway, if your evidence for this evolutionary biologists' "dismissal" of skin color's correlation to latitude is one book, that's pretty weak. Of course, it's still more evidence than I can submit.
Re:Go outdoors for a few minutes (Score:5, Insightful)
Up until one or maybe two hundred years ago, this worked fine. Only the wealthy could afford to gorge themselves to dangerous levels of obesity. Today, for maybe $6, I can go to Burger King and get a Whopper, fries (King Size) and a Coke (King Size). According to BK's own meal-builder nutrition info, this meal has 1660 calories (650 from fat), 72 grams of fat, and 117g total sugars. And I didn't even put cheese on that Whopper. (And no Vitamin D as far as I can tell.) This is theoretically one out of three meals, supposedly totaling 2000 calories. In all likelihood, it's more like hald the day's calories than most. Meanwhile, the average modern American doesn't burn nearly as many calories Mr. Caveman did, since we survive by sitting in cubicles instead of hunting and gathering. Clearly, our ability to feed ourselves has improved to the point where the foods we naturally crave due to things coded in our genes thousands of years ago are actually harming us. For all the exotic things we can now eat because of technology, our range of nutrients sucks.
So it's hard to diet because as far as your body knows, that triple fudge brownie might be the the calories you burn not freezing to death tonight. And since you're body's so preoccupied with this now baseless fear of starvation, it forgets to make you want to eat things like broccoli or spinach, which our ancestors were probably eating to pass the time until some meat wandered close enough to kill. Call it evolutionary sabotage- what we needed before is not what we need now, and if we can't stay on top of those changes, we tend to die.
Re:now the counter argument... ? (Score:2, Insightful)
A single 400 iu tablet (which you can buy at any pharmacy OTC) of vitamin D can prevent rickets for more than 2 months. How can you possibly think that you know better than the whole medical profession here?
Re:now the counter argument... ? (Score:4, Insightful)
What's to gain by naysaying this study? (Score:3, Insightful)
You'd think the study was telling us that battery acid cures cancer, rather than some natural substance that everybody agrees is necessary to live.
So what if milk producers funded the study-- they did some work, it seems legit, and they're advocating a substance we NEED TO LIVE ANYWAY, and which could POSSIBLY KEEP YOU FROM GETTING CANCER.
Protect yourself. Read the wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_D [wikipedia.org]
Add fish oil and yogurt to your diet, and then, my dear geeky friend, take your ass outside for just a little bit each day. Walk around the block or something. It won't hurt you unless you get hit by a bus, and it MIGHT KEEP YOU FROM GETTING CANCER.
Re:Huh? Do You Know How Inuit Live? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:now the counter argument... ? (Score:3, Insightful)
As far as I know, no one has died or gotten sick from an overdose of vitamin D that was generated from UV exposure.
Re:60% reduction in risk? (Score:4, Insightful)
I see where you're going with that. The more obvious things tend to be the ones discovered first. It's not a hard and fast rule because it's quite possible for everyone to miss something obvious for a long time (due to groupthink or just chance), but it is a good rule of thumb.
On the other hand, there's another possible explanation for why this was not discovered in the 1970's when all the other big factors were being discovered: if a variable doesn't change much, it's harder to notice what happens when it does change. The push to wear high-SPF sunscreen didn't occur until after the 1970's and neither did the warnings to stay out of the sun. So it seems possible that the reason this phenomenon wasn't discovered in the 1970's was that it didn't exist in the 1970's. I'm not saying that the (supposed) causal link between vitamin D deficiency and cancer didn't exist; what I am saying is that vitamin D deficiency may have been uncommon enough that the causal link didn't matter because it wasn't being "triggered".
Of course, I'm postulating something about how common vitamin D deficiency is now versus 30-ish years ago, and I don't really have any data to say that difference actually exists, so my whole argument may be BS. Not only that, vitamin D deficiency would have to have been rare enough not just to be uncommon but to actually reduce the effects down near the noise level.
Re:now the counter argument... ? (Score:3, Insightful)
Vitamin D is not all about the sun (Score:1, Insightful)
Reductionism, that is when science tries to focus on one element and not on a more broad range of elements, to make an analysis. It plagues our society and can lead to false statements.
A few questions come to mind: What were the patients diets in this study like before and after the study? What changes did they make? What population did they use? Why vitamin D? Was vitamin D chosen to study only its effects, or was the study more broad to begin with? What other aliments of the patients were bettered or relieved from the diet change?
In the U.S., the drug companies and the food industry take studies like these and contort the results to create sales. Many scientists and researchers are "funded" by the food and drug industries which makes the results more one sided. Money is favored instead of well being of the public. Before you rush out and buy vitamin D, add some vegetables and fruits to your diet, then sit in the sun for fifteen minutes every three days(or five minutes a day), thats all the vitamin D your body needs.
Not magic (Score:4, Insightful)
Nor that you could predict the latitude where some ethnic groups lives, down to 1 precision, based only on skin colour.
What the parent says is that *there seems* to be some variation of skin colour which may follow some pattern which can be put in relationship with some factor like sunlight exposure. Like always with nature, there are never "nevers" or "always". Only "tendencies" and even if there's so much variation between skin colours, you can't deny that paler complexion are a little bit more frequent in region with less sunlight exposure.
Amazon natives MAY be a lot less dark than other people living in the equator, they ARE STILL a little bit more tanned than Swedish people.
Also the whole point of the original poster was to say that this tendency of distribution could be partly caused by the fact that on one hand, too much sunlight kills because UV are cancerigens, and not enough kills too because of Vitamin D deficiency. Thus people will tend to have skin colours grossly adapted to the region where they originate from even if there's a lot of variation (partly due to the fact that all this is recent history and there hasn't been enough time for selection to discriminate more strongly, in fact given the local climate variation and the degree of additional modulable protection produced by clothes it's not necessary that skin colour needs more adaptation for regions).
As a side note, in practical medicine, we do see, for example, occurence of some problems such as osteoporosis (brittle bones due to deficiency in vitamin D) happening with a higher frequency in women originating from northern Africa (skin "somewhat tuned" for high sun exposure by recent evolution, but hiding under too much clothes for religious reasons and not getting enough sun to produce vitamin D) than with european women (wear also a lot of clothes for cold / sunburn protection, but the light that gets through paler skin is a little bit more for Vitamin D synthesis).
But on the other hand both gets way much more sun than people in Denmark. Or northern China. Or Siberia.
And happen to be, on the average, darker than those people, even if there's variation than can't be only explained by the amount of sun exposure alone.
Re:Please explain. (Score:3, Insightful)