.....It seems that everyone is talking about vitamin D these days. Well, not everyone exactly because neither of my sons has ever discussed vitamin D, at least not with me (but then they’re typical young men so they don’t talk about much of anything with their dad, besides sports, of course), so what I really mean is that everyone with any interest in health seems to be talking about vitamin D, the new poster boy for disease prevention.
.....But whenever everyone starts talking up some new idea or gadget or trend or person (as, for example, becoming more “green”, the Canuck’s chances of winning the Stanley Cup, or the health benefits of yoga or green tea) I get quite antsy because that invariably means that all those people are likely ignoring the potential negative consequences of their adopted new religion or messiah (hey, do you really want to be led into the promised land by David Suzuki, or heaven forbid, Al Gore?).
.....In other words, when the world seems to be coming to some sort of unanimity in praise of something, when it’s swept up in what the media like to call a “mania” (Trudeau, line dancing, carbon credits), most of us have simply stopped seeing the potential downsides of that entity or person, and if we move too quickly to adopt whatever or whomever is being hyped, some |
 |
of us – often, many of us - will d en up paying a much bigger price for the touted benefits than we ever thought we might pay.
.....And these days, that’s what, it seems to me, may be happening with vitamin D, a supplement that many experts are touting as the greatest potential benefit to our lives since the coming of Roberto Luongo (to be fair, nothing can ever come close to  matching the positive impact Saint Roberto has had on our lives, but vitamin D is touted by many as a close second). But as usual, .....I’m not nearly as convinced that vitamin D is as deserving of all this hype as some would have you believe.
To understand my angst, though, we need to discuss a bit about where vitamin D comes from and what it |
 |
.does. To begin, everyone agrees that in a perfect world, we would all be getting most of the vitamin D as our bodies need from exposure to the sun, which acts on a precursor of vitamin D that circulates in our skin and converts it into a more active form that our tissues can utilize.
.....The problem for so many people, though, especially those of us lucky enough to be living in some parts of BC, is that despite what we tell all our non-BC friends who visit us from time to time, the sun doesn’t shine on us nearly as much as we want to believe it does, especially in our “un-sunny” seasons of winter, spring, summer, and fall.
.....And even if we ever do get uninterrupted sunshine for 3 days in a row (Environment Canada is adamant that happens every 4 years or so but I remain a sceptic), many of us have so completely bought into those fervent sun-protection messages offered up every summer by the dermatologists that we don’t dare venture into the sun for more than a few minutes unless we’ve completely covered ourselves in sun-protective gear and creams which means that very many of us don’t even get the bare minimum of 15 daily minutes of sunshine we need to keep our vitamin D levels up (to be fair, dermatologists have to be firm in promoting anti-sun messages because they’re the unlucky folks who end up |
WHERE PEOPLE COME
FIRST
