All across the country researchers such as Dr. Reinhold Vieth are telling people to supplement with levels of vitamin D up to four times as high as the current RDA, or 2000 IUs a day. A friend attending medical school at UCLA told me yesterday that he and his fellow students have been taught to ignore the RDA requirement for vitamin D and tell their future patients to take at least 1000 IUs of the secosteroid. The Canadian Cancer Society (CCS) announced its recommendation that Canadians consider taking 1000 mg of vitamin D daily in the fall and winter, and have refused to suspend the recommendation pending a review. Why is the substance being promoted in this manner at such high levels? Largely because vitamin D proponents are confident that the substance decreases the incidence of cardiovascular disease.

In fact, in the health section of yesterday’s Chicago Tribune, Nova Scotia epidemiologist Dr. Louise Parker touted vitamin D as the “new aspirin” because of its perceived ability to benefit people with heart conditions.

If these researchers are correct then the incidence of heart disease should certainly be going down, correct? After all, researchers like Vieth have been praising the benefits of extra vitamin D for nearly a decade now. In fact, younger adults and the baby boomers, those generations most exposed to the hullabaloo the media has created during recent years over the “Sunshine Vitamin” should be the ones least likely to develop cardiovascular disease since they have surely increased their vitamin D intake as directed…..right?

Then how would you explain the following: researchers at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota and the University of British Columbia in Vancouver just published, in the Archives of Internal Medicine, the results of a study showing that autopsies of many adults who died young due to unnatural causes already had clogged arteries. Their conclusion - heart disease is on the upswing.

Mayo’s Cynthia Leibson and colleagues found that previous declines in the grade of coronary artery disease ended after 1995 and began to climb after 2000 – around the exact time that scientists started promoting extra levels of vitamin D.

The team studied autopsy reports from younger people in Olmsted County, Minnesota, who died between 1981 and 2004 from accidents, suicide and murder. They found that 8.2 percent of 425 people aged 16 to 64 had high-grade cardiovascular disease and 83 percent had the beginnings of coronary artery disease.

“What they observed was a bit shocking,” said S. Jay Olshansky of the University of Illinois at Chicago, who wrote an editorial on the research, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

“It is the most definitive evidence I’ve seen suggesting that today’s younger and middle-aged generations may be heading for an increase in their risks of heart disease,” he said.

Does this make any sense? Please, could someone let me know when will the benefits of all this extra vitamin D appear?

Of course it’s painfully obvious to those familiar with the work of biomedical researcher Trevor Marshall that they never will. Cardiovascular disease is caused by bacteria, and the only reason researchers note a “benefit” among heart disease patients taking high doses of “vitamin” D is because the secosteroid slows the activity of the innate immune system. This causes a decrease in the inflammatory molecules the immune system secretes in response to bacterial death - leading to a temporary drop in a patient’s level of inflammation. Meanwhile the pathogens spread like wildfire; the end result being the compromised arteries observed in the young people in the Archives study.

Wake up vitamin D “experts”! Your claims about “vitamin” D and heart disease make no sense in the face of data which shows that cardiovascular disease is on the rise during the exact same time period in which so many members of the medical community are pushing high levels of the secosteroid. How much higher will rates of heart disease have to soar before anyone with common sense realizes that your claims can’t possibly be right?