Using Vitamin D to Prevent the Flu and Colds

Vitamin D is so important to people, it was designed so people could get lots of it from sunlight, even if they do not eat any food. Originally all humans lived in Africa where the sunlight is very bright. Colds and the flu can be avoided if your immune system is strong enough.

In the late 1800s most children in North America and Europe had a terrible bone disease that is known as rickets. The medical doctors told people that their children need to be in the sunlight more. This helped a lot. In 1922 while looking for a cure for rickets, they discovered vitamin D. Rickets was due to a lack of vitamin D.

Children in Africa and South America did not have a problem with this since the sunlight is much brighter there since they are closer to the equator. Many people are still not getting enough vitamin D since they are living too far from the equator, are not outside enough or they are using sunscreen. Sunscreen blocks out 95% of the vitamin D producing UV-B light.

People do not take enough vitamin D from supplements to duplicate what they would get from the sunlight. The high numbers scare them. 40,000 IU of vitamin D is the same as 1 milligram (mg) of vitamin D!

The rate of cancer, autism and type 1 diabetes gets higher as people live further from the equator. Vitamin D helps the body to get rid of toxins that is associated with autism and cancer. Also Joe Prendergast M.D. says that enough vitamin D can increase immune system strength 3 to 5 times. He is an endocrinologist and vitamin D is a hormone. If your immune system is strong enough, you will not get colds orthe flu. I have not had the cold or flu in over 15 years.

Andrew Weil M.D. says "Increasing the amount of vitamin D in the body can prevent or help treat a remarkable number of ailments, from obesity to arthritis, from high blood pressure to back pain, from diabetes to muscle cramps, from upper respiratory tract infections to infectious disease, and from fibromyalgia to cancers of the breast, colon, pancreas, prostate and ovaries." [Colds and the flu are upper respiratory tract infections.]

In Finland they did a study where 10,000 plus newborn babies were given 2,000 IU daily of vitamin D for a year and they were followed for many years as told about in The Lancet. The results were that this reduced the type 1 diabetes by 80%. Now if pregnant mothers also got enough vitamin D then this rate of prevention would be even higher. They have found that the fetus and baby need enough vitamin D. If they do not get it, they can get type 1 diabetes.

Moores Cancer Center proposes that cancer is a vitamin D deficiency. Studies have shown that if people get enough vitamin D that it would significantly reduce cancer rates. One group says that the amount of vitamin D required to do this is "lifeguard levels." This is referring to how much vitamin D a person would get being out in the sunlight all day.

Psychology Today has an article saying that the increase in rates of depression is due to people getting less vitamin D from using sunscreen. So people are paying money to buy sunscreen that causes them to be depressed. Of course this generates tens of billions of dollars for pharmaceutical companies. Sunscreen is classified as a drug.

The body cannot create vitamins by definition. According to PubMed vitamin D is actually a neurosteroid hormone. It is extremely important to many different functions in the body. Many years ago people would buy lizards as pets since they looked similar to dinosaurs. But when they fell they would break their back. To help them with this vitamin D deficiency, they created sunlamps to put in the cages.

Gorillas, monkeys and apes also need enough vitamin D. Most primates, except humans, live in the tropics or sub-tropics. The only place in the United States that is an a sub-tropic area is Hawaii. They have the longest living people in all 50 states.