THE VITAMIN D SCAM?

By Shane Ellison M. Sc.

The People's Chemist

May 18, 2010

NewsWithViews.com

Vitamin D hype has everyone swallowing the “sunshine vitamin” like Oprah swallows fat loss scams. Scared of cancer? Eat vitamin D. Can’t get into your skinny jeans? Eat vitamin D. Got diabetes? Eat vitamin D. Tired of your wife yelling at you for watching too much Celebrity Apprentice? Eat vitamin D.

Nobody is immune from “D” hype. Famed nutrition gurus from around the world have been pushing vitamin D on the masses. Thankfully, I’m not a nutrition guy. The thought of spreading wishy-washy advice with a cute trendy smile makes me nauseous. I enjoy solitude, research and more solitude. So much that I don’t even carry my cell phone, just a bad attitude. And that’s why I’m a chemist, because I enjoy sleuthing for real answers behind the hype, especially when it comes to “pills.”

The Wonders of Sunshine

In the early 1930’s, some dude (a pharmaceutical shill) learned that as sun rays beamed down to earth at light speed – 670,616,629 miles per hour – our skin produced a family of hormones known as secosteroids in response. I call these “sunshine hormones.”

Using state of the art chemistry methods, dozens of these sunshine hormones have been identified and more are being characterized every day. Nobody is sure how many there are, or how they interact. But one thing is for certain; they work in orchestra-like unison to activate a host of positive actions in the body. There is no one single player as we have been led to believe.

Sunshine hormones make you happy by giving rise to feel-good compounds in the brain, which partly explains why so many retired folks flock to Florida. They also activate the expression of over 900 genes, which help control things like bone density, blood sugar, inflammation and much, much more.

Truth be said, nobody knows the entire scope of benefits associated with sunshine hormones. Nor do we fully understand how they interact. But we do know that our skin understands that too much of them can be toxic. Fortunately, the body has a clever way of preventing the overdose.

After about 20 minutes in the sun, the friction created by the bombardment of sunshine blasting the skin creates heat, which in turn, shatters the creation of excess sunshine hormones in the skin, thereby making it impossible for us to produce too much of a good thing.




Profiting from Sunshine

In the 1930’s, seeing great profit potential in sunshine hormones, Big Pharma went to work manufacturing a copy cat. In that pursuit, they narrowed the scope of our sunshine hormones and postulated that it was a single isolate that was responsible for the vast, biological benefits of sunshine. At the same time, they disregarded the unique balance and protection mechanism built by the body to guard against toxicity. Once successful in designing their “Franken-chemical,” they launched a campaign to systematically contaminate our vitamin and food supply with it and make billions.

Turning Sunshine into a Drug

Today, Big Pharma cartels BASF and Hoffman La Roche are the largest manufacturers of the synthetic hormone isolate. To get the masses to swallow it, they erroneously named it “The Sunshine Vitamin,” AKA vitamin D. Consumers, stimulated by ads, couldn’t wait to start choking it down, so much that old ladies bragged about taking the “drug disguised as a vitamin” to their hairdressers. In reality though, it’s as close to being a sunshine hormone as a tootsie roll is to being chocolate, or a porno is to having sex. I’m not the only one pointing out this fact.

“Vitamin D is not really a vitamin,” wrote scientists for the New England Journal of Medicine. For something to be a vitamin, it should provide the body with an essential nutrient that it cannot make on its own, but requires for survival.

Since synthetic vitamin D is a drug, foreign to the body, and not required for survival, it’s technically a fraud – an impostor posing as a vitamin. It has “vitamin like” activity, which initially tricks the body into thinking the host of associated co-hormones is present. But this biological ruse proves to be devastating to the body over time.

Before the vitamin D scam was fed to consumers, the deadly “D” was fed to rodents as a means of eradicating the pesky creatures. In their report, “The Endocrine System,” the University of Colorado, reminds us, "Ingestion of milligram quantities of vitamin D over periods of weeks or months can be severely toxic to humans and animals. In fact, baits laced with vitamin D are used very effectively as rodenticides [rat poison]." This is in stark contrast to naturally produced sunshine vitamins, and it isn’t hard to understand.

Once swallowed, the copycat hormone bypasses our innate protective mechanisms and throws hormonal balance out of whack. This “plugs” the body with calcium and induces calcification, which leads to heart failure, kidney damage, and more. Since it’s a “cumulative poison,” people who take the recommended dose every day as vitamin D are saturating their fatty tissues, and at the same time, offsetting their God-given hormonal intelligence. Anyone eating and drinking foods “fortified” with vitamin D are at serious risk. Nutrition guru Dr. Gary Null learned this the hard way.

After sucking down his “Power Meal” loaded with the vitamin D supplement, New York Daily News reported that Dr. Null was hit with "excruciating fatigue" that left him urinating blood and unable to walk. Upon checking into the hospital, Null was told that he could have died from his synthetic vitamin D (rodenticide) “overdose” - like suicide in slow motion. Null is suing his manufacturer for putting too much vitamin D in his products. He misses the point though: There is no safe dose.




Synthetic vitamin D is poisonous in any amount due to its ability to get crammed into fat cells and accumulate over periods of months (compared to 20 minutes when naturally produced), thereby disrupting hormone balance.

Nobody has ever been poisoned by naturally produced sunshine hormones.

Scientific Trickery

Promotion for the drug disguised as a vitamin is “business as usual” for the drug, food, and vitamin industries: They work together to instill fear and confusion designed to blur the lines between synthetic and natural. And they’ve done it with a “deficiency hypothesis” that has everyone regurgitating their “25-hydroxy vitamin D” levels in an attempt to avoid rickets, infection, cancer and even a bad haircut, so it seems. But it’s as weak as my PC laptop battery (I’m buying a Mac soon). Ever wonder who defines our “ideal levels?” (See Big Pharma cartels above.)

To date, only statistical associations are used to support the deficiency hypothesis, not causal ones. This is akin to saying that since everyone who died of a heart attack today had a coffeemaker in their home, the likely culprit is Mr. Coffee. It’s simplistic at best and outright stupid at worst, especially when this rationale is used to give it to babies as “vitamin D supplement drops.” But there are others…

The “rickets rationale” for supporting the use of synthetic vitamin D is the most frustrating. It purports that “vitamin D” cured the paralyzing disease, which is prima facie evidence of its healing qualities. Not true. The plethora of “sunshine hormones” produced by the skin, and those found naturally in cod liver oil, cured rickets, not vitamin D pills made in the stinky labs of Big Pharma. Purveyors of this myth have the Big Pharma marketing noose firmly around their neck, and probably don’t even know it.

If the rickets rationale didn’t win you over, the “cancer cure con” probably did. You’ve seen it plastered on the headlines of every paper in the U.S and even on well known, natural health websites: Vitamin D fights cancer. The redundancy itself should be your first clue that “something fishy” is going on. The anti-cancer statements come direct from short term trials performed by “advisors” to Big Pharma and published in the top nutrition journals! Worse, the trials only show a small statistical association of low cancer rates among vitamin D users over about a 5 year period. This is plain silly.

Cancer takes more than 5 years to develop. Even heavy smokers can survive 5 years without a cancer diagnosis, but we know cigarettes are a real threat. Thus, any study on cancer lasting five years has very little value. This same scheme was used by the cigarette industry to erroneously thwart off the cancer claims in the early 1970’s. Now it’s being used to pretend vitamin D staves off cancer. It’s a con, and long term vitamin D studies (which are being ignored) show just the opposite (just like they did with cigarettes, of course).

Those who eat vitamin D show significantly increased cancer rates at ten years. It’s not surprising because inflammation (via our immune system) fights cancer, and the Franken-chemical inadvertently lowers this “good” inflammation, thereby putting users at risk.

A massive campaign designed to make people fear the sun has been unleashed, driving people to hide indoors and consume the dangerous “D” in record numbers.

Ironically, the sun was previously known as Apollo, the God of Medicine. And yet, consumers go to great lengths to avoid it thanks to the propaganda. It’s their loss. As written about in my book, Over-The Counter Natural Cures, responsible sun exposure (minus the sun block) and the subsequent release of sunshine hormones has proven to directly ward off cancer, as well as a number of other serial killers like obesity and type II diabetes.

Vitamin D pills have never been proven to offer such vast benefits…

And if you can’t get adequate sunlight for whatever reason, Mother Nature produces “sunshine hormones” that won’t accidentally put you on a hospital gurney. Salmon, mackerel, sardines, beef/chicken liver, eggs, and select non-fortified cod liver oils are all smart choices for the “solar challenged.”

Combined, statistical associations and short term trial results used to promote dangerous D are nothing more than scientific trickery mastered by the same industry that pushed deadly HRT (hormone replacement therapy) drugs, Vioxx, and mercury laden vaccines on unsuspecting victims. The same tricks are now being used to make a dirty buck off the natural health trend sweeping America.

In conclusion, I’m sounding the alarm that a slow vitamin D poisoning is happening worldwide. Vitamin D supplements and fortified foods are attacking the body from numerous sources, where it’s behaving like the rat poison it is. You choose, sunshine or vitamin D pills (D2, D3 or otherwise)?

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Highlighting the Vitamin D pill controversy, The New York Times recently wrote that “The excitement about their health potential is still far ahead of the science.” Amen. As long as excitement remains ahead of common sense and science, I’ll take chocolate over a Tootsie Roll, and sit under the sun – probably drinking tequila – over swallowing dangerous D. Nothing like the real thing.