Vitamin D & Breast Cancer 50% - 70% risk reductions - authoritative must watch videos

[R.B.]

HI All

For those who do not visit the nutrition pages there is some fundamentally important very serious research into vitamin D and breast cancer which makes exceptionally compelling watching; it suggests that higher levels of vitamin D in the circulation significantly reduces the risk of breast cancer occurrence by 50 - 70% and maybe more in some groups. It is also slightly depressing that this information is taking so long to get a wider audience.

Video clip added Carole Baggerly explains . . .

(Carole is motivated by her personal experience with breast cancer and treatment; as very intelligently passionately powerfully explained starting at 1.58 in the link below. It will hopefully grab your attention (-: )


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQ-qekFoi-o (Also linked in the Vitamin D thread)


(Apologies for the changes - I am trying to find the most effective way of communicating this issue)


There is a very serious evidence based vitamin D thread on the nutrition page; http://her2support.org/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=43711 it contains links to three 'must watch' videos containing compelling evidence as to the importance of vitamin D as a factor in the prevention of development of breast cancer.

Large segments of the population in the northern USA and Europe are vitamin D deficient, and the problem is growing round the world due to changing lifestyles.

The issue of vitamin D deficiency is especially relevant to those with darker skins who effectively have built in sunscreen, which can be highly efficient, and so greatly reduces the ability to make vitamin D on exposure of the skin to sunshine; research suggests they are at particular risk.

The lecture by Professor Holick on vitamin D generally is a must watch and maybe the place to start as it is very understandable and watchable; http://www.uctv.tv/search-details.aspx?showID=15773 he is funny acerbic impassioned and a great communicator. He is a very determined clearly highly intelligent independently minded long time campaigner and respected researcher into Vitamin D, who has battled on despite being ignored and belittled by a wider medical establishment, and at last the issue of vitamin D is now gaining traction in the wider medical world.

I would also highly recommend you watch the following highly thought provoking video lectures specifically on vitamin D and breast cancer by researchers in the field selected from a series of vitamin D lectures on Grassroots health.

Dr JoEllen Welsh https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAts...e_gdata_player
Dr Cedric Garland https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=by-M...e_gdata_player
Dr David Feldman https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2A9...e_gdata_player

From http://www.grassrootshealth.net/videos.

Do be put of by the 'science', with a little persistence they are 'understandable' even some of the detail is a bit technical.

The lecture by Dr Feldman inculdes the important observation that Vitamin D is a potential aromatase inhibitor. He points out that it blocks prostaglandin activity. One of the main downstream products of Omega 6 are prostaglandins; prostaglandins control aromatase activity and cancer growth and proliferation. So as pointed out in the Omega 6 thread ultimately Omega 6 intake is unavoidably a crucial factor in hormone production, cancer growth and proliferation, because crucially the body cannot make Omega 6 it must be obtained in the diet; so how much Omega 6 we have in our bodies, and so in our cells, and so the settings for the amount of prostaglandins we can make, is ultimately in our control through our diet choices.



There are four further videos at the start of the thread.

You will get different explanations from different researchers because the nature of research is that it is so complex that people end up looking at fairly narrow fields, and tend to explain results based on their own research perspectives: it is all the more impressive that there are a raft of mechanisms by which vitamin D may impact on cancer, and that is the nature of the complexity of the body in that almost every mechanism in someway directly or indirectly links to everything else - things are rarely simple in biology.

Excess vitamin D from supplementation has its own risks which are arguably increased by other deficiencies.

The general view is that the fat soluble vitamins A D K E work in synergy. Vitamin K in its various forms is reported as being very important to the control of calcification and bone deposition. Vitamin K is a whole other issue. It comes in various forms. K1 is found in leafy green vegetables. Other forms are produced by fermentation including in the human gut, but many of us have poor gut health and compromised gut bacteria, and reports suggest many are deficient in vitamin K. Vegetable oils contains vitamin K1 but the processing of the oils tends to turn it into a form that is not bio-active and may instead of helping end up as a system blocker. Food sources of the forms other than K1 are limited. . . Research into vitamin K and cancer is very limited but there intriguing suggestions it may have a role as an anticancer agent as in a review called the Anti Cancer Effects of Vitamin K the PDF of which can be found on line. Another paper found those with higher levels of K2 may be associated with reduced incidence and mortality http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/91/5/1348.full ; it is a shame more research has not been done - maybe we are back to the issue of the difficulty in funding research were there is no patentable product in the immediate offing. Things are rarely simple.

There is no question that the causes of disease including cancer are multi-factoral and research suggests that correcting deficiencies, of any one of them, may significantly reduce the risk of occurrence; arguably correcting all of them would greatly reduce the risk of many diseases including cancers. This is borne out in the reports of then doctors in the 1930s 40s and 50s that cancers were very rare in all populations that did not eat refined western foods, no matter what they ate as long as it was their traditional diet and so nutrient dense (even if calorie poor). So cancers were rare in Inuit, African agriculturalists, pastoralists, hunter gathers like the Aborigines . . .