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March 23, 2018 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
01:06:39
Interview with Dr. John Cannell from the Vitamin D Council
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All right, welcome everyone.
This is Mike Adams, the Health Ranger with NaturalNews.com, reporting today on Vitamin D. And I have a guest joining me today, someone you probably have heard of.
He's the Executive Director of the Vitamin D Council.
His name is Dr.
John Connell, and he's here to teach us more about Vitamin D. Dr.
Connell, thanks for joining us today.
Mike, thanks for having me.
It's great to have you on.
Your organization has...
You've been really looking hard at the research on vitamin D for many years, and you paid special attention to this new breaking news from the Institute of Medicine and the alteration of the daily vitamin D recommendations.
Can you give our audience a brief of what's going on?
Well, what went on is a group of approximately 15 scientists, respected scientists in their fields.
There were only, I think, two people with significant vitamin D scientific publications, but they reviewed what they thought was the most relevant literature and ended up tripling the recommendations for healthy adults.
And probably more importantly, they doubled the upper limit for adults.
The upper limit means, according to them...
That's the amount that you can take without being under a doctor's care, without any concern of any kind of ill effects.
And the upper limits are now 4,000 units a day for an adult, 3,000 units a day for teenagers, 2,000 units a day for children, and 1,000 units a day for infants.
I think I got that right.
I don't have it right in front of me.
So that's actually good news.
It's good news because what they're saying is this is amounts you can take without any fear of anything.
And if people would just do that, it would be a great benefit.
But at the same time, I think you're about to go into this, but they're not recommending people take that much.
No, that's right.
That's the problem.
They basically, in spite of 13 years of additional research, they basically looked at vitamin D research and they said, well...
We're going to stick with bone again like we did 13 years ago.
We're going to make recommendations based upon osteomalacia, osteoporosis, and rickets.
And they did look some...
I was very gratified, for example, that they spent almost a page and a half of their report talking about nothing but autism and vitamin D. I was very happy to see that, although I was dismayed to see.
At the same time, they spent not even a sentence on schizophrenia and vitamin D. And there's actually more literature to support the role of vitamin D deficiency causing schizophrenia than there is...
I believe that That actually maternal and early childhood vitamin D deficiency are the major cause of both of those mental disorders.
But it was heartening for me to see them take my theory up for such a lengthy period of time.
But the recommendations they make are just, they make no sense.
Think about it, for example.
They say a pregnant woman, even if you're 300 pounds, they say a pregnant woman needs 600 units a day.
That's going to be fine for her and her infant.
However, the second that an infant is born, The mother still needs 600, and the baby now needs 400.
So the pair needs 1,000 units a day the second after they're born, but only 600 units a day the second before the baby's born.
Now, that's not rocket science.
I mean, that's just common sense.
That doesn't make any sense.
In their report, did they talk at all about prenatal nutrition and vitamin D? They did.
They didn't come out as strongly as the American Academy of Pediatrics did.
And I didn't see that they referenced the American Academy of Pediatrics, their recommendations from about a year ago, where they recommended that all obstetricians and anybody caring for pregnant women should get a vitamin D level and make sure that...
That the person is not vitamin D deficient.
So I didn't see that recommendation in the report, that all pregnant women get a test.
But I did see something in the report that was very upsetting, and that was the idea that a level of 20 nanograms per milliliter is sufficient, is adequate.
We'll do all the stuff.
It just doesn't make any sense at all.
I don't know what level you recommend, but I've heard ranges from 50 to 70 nanograms per deciliter as a typical range.
What do you recommend?
We have recommended the same amount for the last seven years.
Eight years when we started, we recommended 2,000 units a day.
But for the last seven years, we've recommended adults take 5,000 units a day, enough to get your blood level around 50.
If you're otherwise healthy.
And there's good physiological reasoning behind that.
If your blood level is, let's say, 30, you're not storing any of the parent compound for future use.
And if you're not storing any of it, That indicates that you have what's called substrate starvation.
That is, if you're not storing any of it, your body's using it up.
So if you're taking, let's say, 2,000 units a day and your level is 30, and there's no vitamin D detectable in your blood, you can detect 25-OHD and that's 30, but there's no vitamin D detectable in your body.
That means that your body is taking the vitamin D that you make, turning it all into 25-OHD, and sending it all into tissues where it's all used up.
There's none left over.
So if you have no detectable cholecalciferol, vitamin D3 levels in your blood, and 98% of Americans do not have any, that indicates that your body is starved for it.
And instead of storing it like it should in times of plenty, It is using it all up immediately.
But if you get your level up to 50, virtually everybody then has detectable levels of vitamin D, not just 25 OHD, but actually vitamin D, and that means there's some in your muscles and tissues.
It's supposed to be stored in your muscles and tissues because when we migrated 75,000 years ago from equatorial Africa to the more extremes of latitude, people had to store the vitamin D in their muscle and fat tissue for the winter.
Levels of 50, we consider those fairly conservative.
It's not like we're recommending levels of 80, 90, or 100, unless you have a disease in which vitamin D may have some beneficial effect.
I have to say this very conservatively because it's true.
The only way that you'll know whether vitamin D has a beneficial effect on a disease or condition is when enough randomized controlled trials show that it does.
But there are – let's take colds and flu.
I mean influenza.
There are now three randomized controlled trials.
One is a combination of a number of studies that show that it appears that vitamin D doesn't, in fact, prevent influenza A at any rate and reduces the episodes of colds and flu.
And we know that There are not enough studies.
There should be more.
We need more, but it's what we have.
Three out of four studies show that it works.
Well, what's really remarkable about vitamin D, it seems, is how many different conditions it helps prevent or to help people heal more quickly.
I mean, you mentioned schizophrenia, autism.
We already know, of course, about all the bone conditions.
But, of course, there's the cancer question.
I wanted to ask you about that.
Many other conditions as well, kidney and arthritis.
For example, it's been linked, I believe, even to diabetes.
Right.
Or deficiency has.
But the question is, I mean, this is the question on everybody's mind.
If there's so much evidence, and there seems to be more coming out every day, why was the Institute of Medicine, first of all, so slow?
I mean, over 15 years behind the science on adjusting the levels of vitamin D, and why is it still dragging its feet and not recommending sufficient levels For people to really get healthy and prevent disease.
They view it as a drug.
And then they say, what we have right now, even though we live like cavemen, and we never leave our caves, whether it be our car or our house or our job in our office building.
Even though we never leave our house and we live cavemen existence.
Actually, cavemen never live like this.
They wear out in the sun a lot more than modern men.
So, as we lived this modern existence, they looked and said, well, here are the blood levels that modern man has, so they must be okay.
That was their reasoning.
Their reasoning, by the way, was 20 must be good, because if we use 30 or use 40, it implies everybody in the country is deficient.
And their reasoning was, that can't be true, therefore 20 must be okay.
Wow, that's crazy.
That was part of their reasoning, and it's...
Just failure to understand the extent of this tragedy that's happened.
Now, you hit on something really important.
If I was me listening to me now for the first time, I wouldn't believe what I was saying.
And the reason I wouldn't believe what I was saying is because I would say, listen.
Dr.
Cannell's implying this is a panacea.
He's mentioned autism.
He's mentioned schizophrenia.
And then there's stuff about cancer and heart disease and bone and mood and diabetes and all these things.
It's not possible, I would say, if I was listening to me.
It's not possible that one thing can do all this.
This is ridiculous.
Yeah, it's a reasonable, critical question.
Right, and it's just crucial that people understand how vitamin D works so that they can understand how it can be involved in so many different things.
Vitamin D has as many mechanisms of action as genes it regulates.
Vitamin D works in a really primitive way.
Right now, everybody listening to this has their genome is working.
They have genes in every tissues of their body.
They have their genetic code.
That genetic code is being used right now to make things that you need, to reduce things that you don't need as much of, etc., through a system of DNA and RNA and protein transcription.
But those genes need to be told what to do.
There's about 20,000 genes in the human genome, maybe 22,000.
And about 5% of the human genome, some people estimate maybe as much as 10%, Of the human genome is regulated directly by vitamin D. That is, you have at least a thousand genes in your body right now as you're listening to me, Waiting to be told what to do because the only thing, their vitamin D sensitive genes, their vitamin D regulates them.
They're sitting there with a vitamin D receptor waiting to be told whether we should upregulate this protein or downregulate.
That is, should we increase the amount or decrease the amount that this gene does?
And they're waiting for that information on a second by second basis.
And for up to perhaps as much as one-tenth of the human genome, they have a vitamin D receptor on them, and that's what triggers these genes to either be suppressed or to be more activated.
That's why it can be involved in so many different things.
Well, this explains why vitamin D is so powerful in supporting the immune response.
I mean, we've even seen, for example, even in studies that showed seasonal flu vaccines to be somewhat effective, whether or not you agree or disagree with that conclusion, underneath it all, I remember the data revealing that it was only effective, the vaccines only worked on those who had higher vitamin D levels.
Right.
Well, that's right.
This whole question of vaccines, and there's a whole, you know, groups of people who never saw an iron lung in their life.
I watched my brother struggle to breathe in an iron lung because of polio.
And then that was in the 50s.
And I remember that, one of the reasons I became a doctor.
And I remember seeing children with measles and dying from measles.
I remember that, and I've seen people die from influenza.
So I am not an opponent of vaccines.
A proper vaccine, if it works properly, does just one thing, a simple thing.
It increases the intelligence of the adaptive immune system, the antibodies that are there.
What has not been tested and not been studied, in my opinion, is what's happening to some children where they get these enormous number of vaccines all in one day.
And there is evidence that the effectiveness of a vaccine depends upon the immune response it generates.
So I'm very concerned about vitamin D deficient children getting these vaccines because I think if they were vitamin D sufficient, They wouldn't have any kind of reaction to them, except perhaps a hypersensitivity reaction, which is extremely rare.
But we're vaccinating hundreds of thousands of children every year or more that are profoundly vitamin D deficient, and their immune system doesn't know what to do with this information.
Well, what's really interesting about that is that part of the reason they're being vaccinated is to prevent seasonal colds and flu.
Obviously, if they had sufficient levels of vitamin D, from the studies I've seen, you would have far fewer cases of colds and flu anyway.
Vitamin D beats the vaccines in the outcomes.
Well, it appears to.
It's never had a head-to-head test.
And I doubt the flu industry.
And when I talk about the medical-industrial complex, I'm part of it.
I'm not speaking of it in a derogatory way.
Dwight Eisenhower was the first to warn us about the military-industrial complex.
It just exists.
It's a fact.
There's an alternative medical industrial complex.
If you go to any alternative medical conference, you'll see there's an industry that's sprung up around it.
So it's much smaller with alternative medicine.
I like to think of myself, by the way, as complementary.
I like to take what's the best of both.
It's not one or the other to me.
Sure.
You know, people, and I understand, especially with the vaccines with autism, and I understand these parents, their kids appear to be normal until around 12 to 18 months, and then they develop these symptoms of autism, and that's around the time they get their 12 and 18 month booster shots, 15 month shots, so I understand why they would think that.
Another thing happens at that time.
A tragedy happens.
Now, Mike, when I was growing up, my mother breastfed me for a while and then put me on formula.
And then when she couldn't avoid the formula, then she put me on cow's milk.
All of those things have vitamin D, except the breast milk.
Breast milk doesn't have many.
It had more back then, but now, you see kids, even breastfed infants are put on formula.
Now, breast milk has no vitamin D in it.
Well, because the mom's deficient, that's what you're...
Yeah, but 99% of the breast milk in the United States has virtually no vitamin D in it, because 99% of the mom's vitamin D deficient.
In fact, to me, I remember thinking this in medical school, Mike.
I said, okay...
How is it possible that breast milk does not have adequate doses of vitamin D in it?
How can that be possible?
What was the human supposed to do when we were evolving?
Have a baby and then put the baby out in the field?
Some sunshine?
It makes sense.
This baby is going to be like our closest simian relatives.
The baby is very quiet and is nursing and is getting everything it needs from breast milk.
Yes.
And it could get everything it needs from breast milk, except there's not enough vitamin D in the mother's blood.
But one thing happens, when you go to the mall the next time, not that I go very often, but occasionally I have to, and you go to the mall, you look at what these toddlers are weaned on, and you ask yourself, okay, how much vitamin D are they getting?
They went from formula, which has a significant amount of vitamin D in it per Per body weight of the kid.
Unlike the generation or two before them, who went from formula to cow's milk, this generation is going from formula to juice.
Oh, healthy juice, 100% juice, natural juice.
Terrible.
As far as I'm concerned, a junk food, a fruit juice.
It has no vitamin D in it.
And when does that change occur?
So when do these young children lose all their vitamin D? Because you know it's child abuse to take them out in the sun, right?
So they lose their only source of vitamin D around 12 months and then they have no source and their vitamin D plummets at the same time they're getting all these immunizations.
So, you know, what's causing what?
But it's clear to me that a whole generation of toddlers now are being weaned on something that has zero vitamin D in it.
If you're a mother and you have a child of any age, ask yourself, how is my child getting his or her vitamin D? Yeah, that's a really good observation that you've just described and excellent points you raise because, you know, vitamin D, from everything that probably our listeners already know, is a very...
It doesn't take a lot of intervention to boost your vitamin D levels.
It doesn't take an injection, a prescription.
It doesn't take much of an alteration in your daily habits.
I mean, it's easy to get vitamin D from multiple sources if people just take steps to do it.
Yes.
And it's cheap.
Yes, it's free.
It's free.
All you need is some sunshine, although we're in the vitamin D winter now.
I went to a...
I went to my daughter's play, my third grader's play at school, and it was outside, and even around 12 o'clock, my shadow was significantly longer than I was.
That's kind of the rule of thumb.
When you go outside, if your shadow is shorter than you are, you can make vitamin D. You can.
That is, if the sun hits your skin without any clothes covering it and without any sunblock.
But if your shadow is much longer than you are, the longer your shadow is, when it gets to be longer than you are, you're making less and less vitamin D. And to where now, even at solar noon in New York today, December 10th.
If you go outside on solar noon in New York, your shadow is significantly longer than you are.
There's a vitamin D winter that's now extending down in the United States as far south as Atlanta and even where I live in San Luis Obispo.
And even in places like Los Angeles and northern Florida, the The interval where you can make vitamin D right on an hour or two on each side of solar noon, depending upon your latitude, it's still not anything like the summer.
Many people think that they take a walk in the evening and they're getting all the vitamin D they need.
No, they're not getting any.
That's why you can have a tan.
And not have any vitamin D because tanning is UVA and that penetrates the atmosphere all the time.
There's light though.
UVA penetrates.
But the UVB is...
UVB is fickle too, Mike.
It's not like a...
You should think of it like a ping pong ball and not like an array of light like we used to, even though it is a ray of light.
But when it gets through the ozone in the atmosphere and it does that when the sun is high enough up in the sky to directly penetrate the atmosphere instead of at an angle...
Then it will bounce.
It will hit a building and it will bounce off of that.
It will hit some sand.
Even if it's cloudy, it will bounce back up to the bottom layer of the clouds and then bounce down again.
So in the summer, when the sun is up high, even if you're in the shade at the beach or under an umbrella, you're still getting vitamin D because UVB is just bouncing around everywhere when you're outside.
I see.
Which also explains why if it's a shallow angle in the winter with a long shadow and so on, the UVB rays are going to bounce and be deflected away from you before they even get to you.
They just don't get through.
I've often thought, Dr.
Cannell, that one of the most important potential future breakthroughs in medicine, in medical technology, would be a fingertip vitamin D real-time sensor.
You slap it on your finger like an oxygen meter, and it just gives you a reading right there.
Maybe if we were in the Star Trek future, we could have that.
I've got to ask you, why doesn't something like that exist?
Is anybody working on anything like that?
And do you think that would be important?
Yeah, it does exist.
I think it's called SolarTech is the name of the company.
And there's five or six companies that make inexpensive UVB meters.
So instead of putting it on your finger, you just hold it up in the sun and you can see how much UVB is getting through.
What I mean is, I'm talking about a device that actually measures circulating vitamin D levels.
It can diagnose deficiency.
Oh, that would be great.
Yeah, I mean, it'd be great if you could have something that you could just...
Patients would come in the office, you just put it on and you know exactly what their levels are because...
One of the problems with knowing about vitamin D deficiency is knowing what your level is, what your vitamin D level is, and then that involves blood tests and doctor's visits.
One thing, if I could plug for the Vitamin D Council, because it's a major source of income for this, it's a non-profit.
We'd like your donations, too.
Anybody who knows someone who would like to support the Vitamin D Council, just Google Vitamin D Council and you'll see a way to donate.
But We've also come up with a really neat thing, an in-home blood test.
You don't have to go to your doctor.
You just pay for it on the website.
It's $65, and they send you a kit, and they send you a little thing, like a spring-loaded thing, and you get a little blood on your fingertip, and you get some blood on the blotter paper, and you send it back in, and you get your vitamin D blood test done in about a week.
And some people are being charged $150, $200, not including the doctor's office, for their vitamin D test.
And you also get the right test.
Some doctors still order the activated vitamin D levels, which are useless to determine vitamin D deficiency.
It's like measuring fumes in a carburetor to see whether the gas tank is full or empty.
It makes no sense.
Okay, yeah.
I'm glad you mentioned that.
I'm familiar with these tests.
In fact, I recently sent one off to get my own levels checked.
And for those listening, your website is vitamindcouncil.org.
And remember, folks, council is spelled C-O-U-N-C-I-L dot org.
So vitamindcouncil.org.
All right.
Do you think that we might have a technology breakthrough someday and someone could invent a real-time detector?
I have no doubt it will happen.
I think you should patent that.
We have lots of questions.
I mean, scientifically, it's really not known very well.
Some people think it's known very well, but let me give you a good example.
Twenty years ago, a paper was published in Nature that indicated that a significant amount of vitamin D was made inside the skin, not on top of the skin.
Since that paper, everyone has assumed that it doesn't matter about the oils on your skin.
But I dug up a paper from 1938 or something.
And this guy just did a really simple study.
He had rabbits.
And he just took some teenagers and he put them outside and let them exercise in the sun.
And then he scraped the area on his chest with like a spatula, you know, where most of the sebum is made in the human body, right in the front, top, upper part of the chest.
And he gave that to the rachetic rabbits and it cured the rickets very quickly.
Interesting.
Yeah, he proved that vitamin D in humans, some, at least some, is made on the surface of the skin.
We know that when you take vitamin D and just as a topical, if you open the powder up and put it in some coconut oil and rub it on it, the vitamin D is absorbed through the skin.
I don't recommend that route because no one knows exactly how much is absorbed and you're not clear with dosage.
So we know that some vitamin D is made in the skin and some is made on the surface of the skin.
What we don't know is what effect...
This obsession Americans have with washing soap.
When I was growing up, I was told all the time, in Europe they're barbaric because they only take a shower once a week.
I know people that take a shower twice a day.
Think about it.
What they're doing is, God created this oil.
It's called sebum.
It's human oil.
And what we do is we wash all that off, throw it away down the drain, and then put on the oil that the cosmetic firms tell us.
Does that make any sense?
Not at all.
It doesn't to me at all.
You can wash the dirt and grease off with plain water.
You just don't need to lather up all this soap.
I brought this up because it may be one of the reasons modern vitamin D levels are so low.
It's because of this obsession we have with soap.
Well, I wanted to ask you about that, and I've never bought into this whole big lathering thing.
To me, those are obviously television commercials designed to sell more soap, and that's about it.
Actually, I don't even shower every day either, so I'm interested to see what my vitamin D levels are going to be.
Me too.
I don't know if you saw that about a year and a half ago in the London newspapers.
They had an experiment.
One woman was not to shampoo her hair for six months and the other shampooed her hair two or three times a week.
And they showed before and after six months pictures.
And the woman who didn't shampoo for six months had this beautiful, full, rich hair.
It was very interesting, but it doesn't matter to withstand this onslaught of advertising.
In fact, it was the cosmetic industry that really got us to list the sun as a carcinogen.
Back in the 60s, the cosmetic industry, you know, back in the 60s, women would put their face on when they went outside, but they often would go without makeup otherwise.
So the cosmetic firm, they wanted something women would apply all the time.
Get up in the morning, first thing, you know, you put it on.
And to do that, they had to have something in it that they could claim a health benefit.
We're going to protect their skin from the sun.
So it was the cosmetic industries who are still, to this date, the major funders of dermatology departments in the United States.
So at the University of North Carolina where I went to school, if you look at the grants that the professors of dermatology have there, there would be a significant amount of grants from cosmetic firms to study this whole issue.
So they got the dermatologist, and the dermatologist started beating their drums in the 80s about how dangerous the sun was.
And mothers started avoiding the sun.
Pregnant women started avoiding the sun.
The children were not allowed to play outside.
And then, of course, along came Nintendo, right?
And then along came child abuse, which mothers were terrified that all the children were being abused, that they wouldn't want to let them out of their sight.
So Nintendo is the perfect, or what do they call it, Xbox, whatever.
It's the perfect solution.
Your child's not outside, so the sexual predator can't get them.
They're out of the sun, so they can't get skin cancer, and they're out of your hair because they're sitting in front of a TV for 24 hours pushing these buttons, playing these games.
It's one of the most fascinating sociological things you can see is go to a neighborhood, a community neighborhood where you know there's lots of children.
Go there on Saturday at 12 o'clock or 1 o'clock.
The kids are not out there playing hopscotch and softball and stuff and running around.
They're inside playing.
I've noticed that when I grew up and I grew up in the 70s.
I walked home from school every day.
I played in the dirt.
I got sunshine and so on.
Today, the science keeps coming out.
For example, inhaling microbes from the dirt has been shown to enhance the intelligence of mice.
The actual intelligence.
They can go through the mazes better.
Inhaling or ingesting?
Actually, inhaling.
Wow.
Yeah, it's really fascinating.
I can send you a link to that research.
I believe you, because if you look at animals, they eat food from the dirt all the time.
All the simian relatives eat food with dirt from it, but we think it's really healthy to clean absolutely every bit of dirt off of that.
If you're around lots of cats and dogs, you can get a number of helmet infections from that, but otherwise it...
Yeah, well, this is a point that I wanted to get your comments on, which is that it seems like over the last several decades, we have become a society that suffers from indoors disease.
You've alluded to that.
I mean, now we work under artificial lights.
We don't allow our children to touch anything in the natural world anymore because it might be dangerous.
I see parents waiting at bus stops with their air-conditioned cars and they whisk their children right off the buses and into the cars and drive home.
It's like the kid has never touched the real world.
What's going on here?
That's what you say.
Part of it is this idea that human existence can be improved if we keep...
The viruses away, the bacteria away, the dirt away, the sunshine away.
If we go out and find the carcinogens and the viruses and the bacteria and the fungus and destroy them, we can live an antiseptic life.
My viewpoint is really quite different.
I look...
To guidance from what must have been happening to our genome for two million years in equatorial Africa.
We were eating bugs off the ground.
You know, bugs are probably really good food.
You know, they've got a lot of things in them.
You know, you can look at chimpanzees and get some idea in the wild of what our existence would be like.
And I'm much more concerned about the human's ability through its innate and adaptive immune system to fight off chimpanzees.
I mean, I used to play with mercury when I was a kid.
I have the same memory.
I'd break one of those thermometers and it was really neat to see a metal roll around and you'd take your fingers and roll it around.
I mean, how much mercury did I get?
But there's a system your body has of getting rid of heavy metals and it can be overwhelmed.
But this idea that humans would be better off if there was not one molecule of mercury, lead, or anything in their environment, that that would lead to health, that's ridiculous.
The body has ways of getting rid of it unless you overwhelm it, like lead, for example, lead in base, in paint, and the children eating it.
Now, that's an example of your system.
They can't get rid of it.
Actually, since it's mainly an inner-city disease, lead poisoning from lead-based paint, vitamin D, by the way, is one of the ways that you get rid of heavy metals because it acts as a chelating agent through other proteins to help withdraw it, a glutathione.
I didn't know that.
The thiol scavengers all are upregulated by vitamin D. Yeah, very interesting.
It's very important that your immune systems be smart and strong to deal with the things that you handle, that you're supposed to.
You mentioned the adaptation of humans and I wanted to ask you about this and mention a point very quickly on that about sunshine and vitamin D in the human body because I've often said that if you take the two predominant theories of human origins, one being, let's say, evolution of the species, adaptation, and...
Another being the creationist point of view.
In both of those points of view, sunshine has to be good for you because under evolution and adaptation, our ancestors were obviously outside.
They were obviously subjected to bacteria and viruses and so on.
Under the creation point of view, they say man is created in the image of God.
Would God be living under fluorescent lights?
I don't get it.
Yeah, exactly.
And what's one of the ways you can know God?
Because if you look her in the face, she will blind you.
That's right.
And another way you can know God is that when she goes away, life starts to ebb, as in the fall.
And when she comes back, life comes up again.
When she goes away at night, people go to sleep.
But when she comes up in the daytime, they're awake and alert.
I mean, if you're looking for an objective scientific criteria for God, the sun has got to be way up on the list, which is one of the reasons I wrote a poem to the sun god.
And as you probably know, humans, the first god that humans ever worshipped in virtually every society we've looked at is the sun, and for good reason.
Yes, yes.
Yeah, that's interesting.
I didn't probably want to go that far in the conversation, but you're right.
I mean, you know, Amun-Ra, the Egyptian, that was the Egyptian sun god, and many people would say that some of the stories from the Bible are metaphors for seasonal changes in sunlight, as you alluded to.
Yeah, you know, I was raised a Catholic, and so what religion and beliefs one has is their own business, although I occasionally refer to God in my writings, although...
To me, God and nature, since I'm a zoologist by training, my whole viewpoint of life is through natural selection and why one thing works and doesn't, what could be the possible advantage to this or that, but nature and God to me are synonymous, and when I use those terms, I use them interchangeably.
Let me ask you back about the Institute of Medicine.
I want to know if you could verify this or not.
I understand that the Vitamin D Council, of which you are the Executive Director, is trying to attain some documents from the Institute of Medicine.
Yes.
To their credit, what the Institute of Medicine's Food and Nutrition Board did is, after they'd written their Their report, they sent it to 12 vitamin D experts to get their opinion on the report, and they then printed the report, but they decided to make the experts' opinions classified.
Really?
Well, they refused to release them.
So first blush, our plan was to obtain these reports and make them public.
And, you know, freedom of information law is real clear.
I mean, this was a federally funded study.
I mean, they got grant money from a bunch of different sources, but it looked to me like 90% of it came from the federal government.
But we got requests.
The Vitamin D Council has a number of professors associated with it.
And they said that if I got these letters, and I mean these reports, and I publicized them, that those vitamin D experts would never get another grant in their life.
Really?
Yeah.
So our board of directors canceled that idea because some of the people that rendered their reports, they rendered them honestly, and they rendered them with the understanding that it's not going to hurt them in the future So it's probably safe to say that somewhere in those reports there are some very critical comments from some of these experts.
I know through the grapevine the basis of some of the complaints.
One of the first was racism.
This food and nutrition board, they knew that whites have twice as much vitamin D in their blood than African Americans do.
They knew that a black pregnant woman has half as much vitamin D in her uterus as does a white pregnant woman.
These are all facts.
They ignored it.
They said that if you're a pregnant woman, 600 units is fine.
It doesn't matter whether you're black or white.
And that's absolute, if you think about it, I mean, you're starting with half as much in an African-American because of the dark, because of the melanin in the skin.
The melanin acts like a, it's a wonderful sunblock, perfect.
We're perfect in Africa, but it's not perfect.
Sure.
So that was one of the basic things.
Yeah.
How the board responded to that, I don't know.
But I think they just didn't want to go there.
And I think that's cowardly because it's got to be gone to because vitamin D deficiency is much more frequent and much more severe no matter how you measure it in the African-American and white community.
Well, I'm actually glad to hear that someone raised that concern, even if it's not going to be made public.
I thought I was the only one calling the Institute of Medicine racist, but I guess I'm not.
That was a good thing.
And then, by the way, the other thing you think of, what's the food where 90% of Americans get their supplemental vitamin D from food?
Well, that's milk.
Yes, and what's the one food that African Americans can't consume?
Right, exactly.
Lactose intolerance.
I know that sounds like a conspiracy, but if the Ku Klux Klan wanted to give a recommendation on supplementing a food with vitamin D, they'd have chosen milk.
But it's not a conspiracy.
It's incompetence.
As I get older, all the things I used to think were conspiracies when I was young, as I've gotten older, I know they're all now due to incompetence, not conspiracy.
Cheese.
You could put vitamin D in cheese.
African Americans consume cheese at the same rate as whites do.
You could put it in cereal grain products.
You could fortify.
So there could be this base level of fortification.
That was the second major criticism that the vitamin D experts had.
There were not any good recommendations to increase food fortification for vitamin D. Then the third were the ones you can imagine that the doses they recommend are inadequate to maintain, even to maintain bone health.
Right, right.
Well, it seems like if there were ever a case for fortification, it would certainly be vitamin D. I mean, you know, iodines and salt, everybody knows that.
There's a little bit of vitamin D in milk, but even that is a very small amount.
And besides, more and more people are moving away from cow...
Sure.
Which can be fortified.
There's no way.
Sure.
So the manufacturers.
And one of the things the Vitamin D Council would like to do if we could ever get funding.
See, I was sure that if I worked my heart out with this idea and I got the publicity that the Vitamin D Council has gotten and I've educated people and I got 45,000 people on our newsletter list, I was sure that if I did that, that we would people on our newsletter list, I was sure that if I did Somebody somewhere along the line would say, okay, this Vitamin D Council is doing some good.
I see that.
Here's some grants.
And we applied for grants.
We got turned down.
But I was hoping somebody would come out of the woodwork and say, take this under their wing and say, I'm going to help these guys out.
And Now, we're trying to move to get our own office.
Right now, our office is in a room in my house, and I'd like to get a part-time secretary.
So again, if you're feeling generous, go to the Vitamin D Council's website.
You can Google Vitamin D, and we're usually in the top...
Three or four people, if you just Google Vitamin D, but you can make a donation and we'd certainly appreciate it.
So I've been somewhat disappointed in how the Vitamin D Council has been unable to do all the things we'd like to do because of lack of funding.
But one of the easy things you can do is to write to juice manufacturers and say, listen, just to...
You don't put vitamin D in your juice and children are drinking it and they're depending upon it.
It's amazing what a certified letter will do.
And we've done a number of certified letters.
We did registered letters to all the prenatal vitamin manufacturers about a year ago.
And we just said, listen, this is what the American Academy of Pediatrics just came out.
They just came out and said, verbatim.
in prenatal vitamins is not adequate.
Yeah.
And you're only putting 400 units in your prenatal vitamin and here's a registered letter so that you know, that I know, and that the court in the future can know that you're doing this anyway.
You could increase it to 2,000 units.
You could safely increase it on your own without any guidance because the government says, now the government says 4,000.
So any prenatal manufacturer, if they wanted to, could put 4,000 units of vitamin D into their prenatal vitamins.
That would help a lot, Mike.
Sure, yeah.
I think we could do something on this, Dr.
Cannell.
I mean, your Vitamin D Council could spearhead this, and our nonprofit Consumer Wellness Center could help sponsor it or publicize it, and we could have a big letter-writing campaign.
I bet you...
I bet you we could generate, I mean, through our readers and their support, probably 50 or 100,000 letters going out to various companies if we organize them.
Yeah, that'd be great.
I would love to do that.
The thing I would like to be done, autism is the thing that's closest to my mind.
And think of these fetuses that are developing right now.
In vitamin D deficient wombs, it's going to affect their entire life.
So vitamin D deficiency during pregnancy and early childhood and autism, I think, is one of the first things in asthma.
There's three A epidemics, epidemics of the A's in children, true epidemics.
They started in the 80s.
They are asthma, autism, and autoimmune disorders.
Our children are sick at rates that they have never been sick before.
Ever.
It's just tragic.
And it all started with the sunblock and the sunshine and the dermatologist.
History will show that worse medical advice has never been given than the advice that the American Medical Association gave in 1988 when advised to always avoid the sun.
And they said it doesn't matter.
It won't affect vitamin D levels if you always avoid the sun.
That's just ridiculous.
They gave that advice.
They haven't rescinded that advice.
They need to rescind it.
The Council on Scientific Affairs of the American Medical Association could also look at this whole issue.
They may be more likely to render a more reasonable opinion, but...
There's so much that could be done.
If I just had a part-time administrative assistant to help me, I could do so much more.
Luckily, I'm now able to retire.
I'm not going to mention the brand or anything, but I now have lent my name to a vitamin D product that has all the cofactors vitamin D needs in it to work properly.
But I'm not going to mention the name.
I don't think it's proper.
But that has allowed me to now retire.
So I'm going to be working on vitamin D full-time starting January 1st instead of only half-time.
So I'm really excited about it.
Well, that's really great news, and about the AMA, don't even get me started on the AMA. Well, hey, I'm a member of the AMA, or at least I'm a delinquent member of the AMA, but I'm only a member to try to change it from within.
You're a member until they hear this interview.
But, I mean, I've got to ask you, how can you see this going on and not think that there's a conspiracy against vitamin D education?
Yeah, because if you owned, let's say Mike Adams, you took a different path in your life, and you had started a company that made vaccines for measles.
And you were now, you're 70 years old.
You're not 40 or however old you are.
You saw what measles did.
You saw the ravages that measles did to children.
You saw how many died, et cetera.
And you started a vaccine company to vaccinate against measles.
And science showed that the measles vaccine was, in fact, effective.
And you now have 500 employees, and you have a publicly listed company, and you're the CEO and the major stockholder.
Now, what would you do?
Well, I'm a little different from most people.
I know, I know.
The typical person would definitely defend that company.
So it's not because they're evil.
It's not because they're sitting there conspiring.
First of all, they don't believe it.
Yeah, I think that's the point.
They don't believe it.
They just don't believe it's true or possible.
And in 10 years, they still won't believe it.
But what does it take?
What it takes is one person to one person.
See, what happens when you take vitamin D is if you take the right dose, especially if you make sure you're not magnesium deficient or zinc deficient, and the majority of Americans have magnesium and zinc intakes that are less than even the government says they should have.
If those things are treated, you feel better.
Let me read something.
I haven't published this in the newsletter yet.
I just got this email.
I won't say her name.
Dear Dr.
Cannell, it's been about a year since you published my son's autism case in your newsletter.
Again, I won't say the name.
During this holiday season, I wanted to take a minute to thank you for saving my son from the grips of autism.
He has been taking 3,000 to 5,000 units of vitamin D daily during the past year.
3,000 in the summer, 5,000 starting in October.
And has probably had the best year of his life.
He is five and a half years old and thriving in kindergarten.
He goes to school happy, shoulder to shoulder with his peers in all regards.
It is a delight and a joy at home.
Gone is our agony and despair over flapping, anxiety, sensory issues, obsessive thoughts, socially avoiding behaviors, and so on.
You help me when no one else could or would, and I will be grateful to you for the rest of my life.
You help me more than any specialist I waited months to see.
I cannot thank you enough for the time you took in answering my email message.
I cannot thank you enough for the work that you are doing.
The darkest days of the year is just around the corner, and our sun is holding steady and strong thanks to you.
Those questions, I mean, when I get a letter like that, it just frightens my day.
At the same time, I get depressed because I know that if I just had some help, I could do so much more.
But what will happen is that this woman will tell somebody.
And that personal testimony is so strong.
And when it comes from somebody you knew.
And so somebody somewhere else will know about this and will see this child and will have known this child and will know it.
And that's how it's spreading, Mike.
And there's nothing the government can do about it.
There's nothing they can do about it.
When it gets to a conspiracy stage, and I think, by the way, it will.
I think that...
Although most people, I think most humans, if they had that vaccine company, that measles vaccine company, most humans eventually, if they had to choose between just losing their entire company, going to court because of the stockholders, firing 500 people, or denigrating vitamin D, I think that the average person would eventually denigrate vitamin D to save their financial interest.
I think you're right.
It hasn't come there yet, but it eventually will.
There's a battle coming down the line.
I don't know if I'll be alive to see it, but we have to realize that this is going to be a battle in the future because vitamin D will put at risk a number of companies in the medical industrial complex.
Oh, yes.
Indeed.
And again, I don't say that in a derogatory way.
It's a fact.
It's just a fact.
There is a medical industrial complex.
Well, you allude to an important point, which is that vitamin D deficiency...
Is the root cause of a very large number of degenerative health conditions?
There's evidence to suspect that it may be involved.
I would like to be conservative in this.
There's enough evidence to show that being vitamin D deficient is probably not wise.
Okay.
But interestingly, on that point, the reason that we can't complete that sentence and say it's definitive is precisely because the funding isn't being provided to really...
To nail down the answers on this.
And we've got to ask why.
Well, funding has increased.
Vitamin D is a hot topic.
There's lots of people, like these 12 I spoke about, that are going to continue to get funded, I hoped, because I hope nobody does release their letters because they're good scientists.
And so, yes, they're getting funded.
Vitamin D is a hot topic.
Every month I read a paper by somebody who's never written on vitamin D before in their life.
It's their first time.
So that means all these young scientists are going into it, too.
And it's a growing community, the vitamin D scientists.
So they're unhappy with this report as well.
Well, that's good to hear.
Yes, they are.
But it's almost odd that you find researchers and physicians from conventional medicine now discovering...
The truth about vitamin D, or at least what appears to be strong evidence in that direction, and they must be asking themselves, well, wait a minute, how come I wasn't taught this before?
When I get frustrated or feel sorry for myself because it's eight years and I don't seem like I've accomplished what I wanted to, you know, on a mass basis, I think it's Professor Cedric Garland at the University of California, San Diego.
In 1980, He was at Johns Hopkins and he saw a map and the light bulb went off in his head and he knew that vitamin D would prevent a significant amount of colon cancer.
Oh, that was the regional map of colon cancer.
He knew that in 1980.
That was 30 years ago.
And he's still been waiting.
Yes.
So, you know, can you imagine if I'm frustrated with eight years of waiting, he's got 30 years of waiting.
You know, this is one of those things that, to me, I mean, again, I'm not a vitamin D researcher, but when you put the pieces of the puzzle together, it makes instant sense that, of course, human beings were designed to be under the sun, and if our bodies manufacture this vitamin, and all of our organs, well, not all of them, but a lot of them have receptors, and you mentioned a significant portion of our...
Human genome is activated by vitamin D. It only makes sense that deficiency would mess up the biological machine.
Especially when you think of, okay, the genes that we have and the genes that humans had 10,000 years ago are basically identical.
You've seen that where 99% of the genes between a chimpanzee and a human are identical.
That's incredible.
So this genome that's functioning right now, and everybody who's listening, these genes are actively working.
It's not something that's sitting there.
It's actively working to keep you alive.
Those genes were formed through 2 million years of evolution in Africa.
I mean, that's the way the science seems to point.
Now, all of a sudden, in a microsecond in terms of evolutionary time, We have labeled the sun evil, we put on sunblock, we've stayed out of the cars, and we've gone inside.
We have yet to see the effects of sunblock, sun avoidance, and Nintendo.
Our societies are going to be staggering.
With the amount of burden, the burden of these illnesses.
It's not started to level off yet.
It's staggering.
Well, it seems like this is on the scale of something like the Roman Empire building its aqueducts out of toxic heavy metals.
I think you're right about it being an error.
E-R-A. I guess the Food and Nutrition Board thinks it's an error.
People will remember these 40 or 50 years that are coming up as the vitamin D era.
Then there will be pre-vitamin A and post-vitamin D. So people get a streptococcal infection in their skin, skin-eating bacteria.
And before vitamin D, that killed people very rapidly.
After vitamin D, it became very, very uncommon to have that because, of course, the antimicrobial peptides in the skin that protect the skin as a barrier to outside egress We're all upregulated by vitamin D. If you don't have enough vitamin D, your body's not making enough antibiotics for your skin.
So see that?
See that pre- and post-antibiotic, I mean that pre- and post-vitamin D era, what's it like?
All of the epidemiology of disease, we have no idea.
What the heart attack rate is, the incidence of myocardial infarction for men in their 60s is.
What we know, you know what we know?
We know what the myocardial infarction incident rate is for 60-year-old vitamin D deficient men.
Exactly.
But, you know, there are more than several dozen studies now.
I mean, the mechanisms are clearly outlined for cardiovascular disease.
Vitamin D is a major player.
Major player.
Yeah, you make an important point.
I've mentioned this before, too, which is that a lot of, well, for example, clinical trials that are being conducted today, just for anything, whether it's vitamins or pharmaceuticals or whatever, these clinical trials tend to have, as both their control and their randomized placebo groups, all vitamin D deficient people.
Right.
Yes, that's right.
They were.
So you're running a medical system on a population that's not even healthy to begin with.
And that's not going to tell us how to make healthy people stay healthy.
Right.
Yeah, that's right.
It's the pre-antibiotic and the post-antibiotic.
This will be more dramatic than that.
There's a pre-anesthesia era, the post-anesthesia era.
There's a pre-antiseptic era.
This will be more dramatic than any of those.
This is just incredible.
All right.
We're coming up on an hour here, and I just want to give out your web address one more time for those listening.
We're talking with Dr. John Connell, the executive director of the Vitamin D Council.
The web address is vitamindcouncil.org, and that'll be on your screen on the video version of this.
All right.
And as we wrap this up, Dr.
Cannell, because I want to respect your time here, can you give us an indication of what is your organization focused on for 2011, and how can we be part of that effort?
One thing that you can do that helped me is to go to the website and make a donation request.
As soon as you can.
You know, whatever you can afford.
And secondly, is to keep your eye out.
Maybe somebody listening knows somebody who's got some real money.
And if we had some...
We're willing to enter into agreements where something like 90% of the money will go directly to the kind of program that the donor wants, whether it be vitamin D in autism or vitamin D in asthma, whatever their interests are, public relations programs, letter-writing campaigns, etc., etc.
We have some administrative overheads because now we have a comptroller.
I'm just not going to be depositing the donations for $10 that we have and going to the bank and getting it.
So our accountant is now our comptroller, which is actually a step, a big step we've taken in the nonprofit field because there's just no possibility of any hanky-panky with the money that's sent in.
And unfortunately, though, it's only about $2,000 or $3,000, maybe $4,000 a month.
So we have to still do other things to raise money, like the ZRT in-home blood test, which is another thing that's very helpful.
And then some vitamin companies, Biotech, Pharmacal, and some others have been supporting us for a long time.
But sometimes I dream about what I could do if I had a serious...
A serious public relations firm that could get to the people.
Think about a hearing about autism and vitamin D in the house.
All you have to do is get one or two house members to get interested in this.
Have a hearing about it.
They wouldn't have to subpoena all the child psychiatrists and all the researchers from the NIH. Then you could get so much done and so much scientific interest in vitamin D and autism that way.
Or you could have this investigated.
You could have a house panel investigate this Institute of Medicine.
I mean, there's so much that can be done in that way.
It involves people action, but it involves also lots of organizational and thinking about it kind of...
So that's what you can do.
If you can do anything, give us a donation.
A lot of it comes down to funding and, you know, you look at organizations like the American Cancer Society, which has been called the wealthiest non-profit in the world.
And, you know, gosh, what's their budget?
It's huge.
It's probably in the hundreds of millions a year, I'm just guessing.
But, you know, think about what someone like you could do with, let's say, just half a million a year or a million a year.
Oh, I can't.
I mean, that...
Gives me fantasies I can't live with.
What we could do, my goodness, we could do a lot.
Oh my goodness.
Well, maybe we can help make some connections between you and others who really care about this.
Because, I mean, if you think about this, folks, and I'm speaking to the listening audience here, you know, it costs a fortune.
It's bankrupting our country.
This is my opinion.
It's bankrupting our country to treat degenerative disease.
You know, cancer, diabetes, heart disease, depression, psychiatric disorders, kidney disorders, you name it.
It is bankrupting our nation.
And so much of this seems to be preventable for pennies.
I know.
Pennies in the womb.
Yeah, I kept thinking if people would send me one-tenth of the money they've saved, if you go on a proper dose of vitamin D and combine it with some sunshine in the summer, which I recommend, if you do that, the amount of medical bills that you'll save, if you just send me one-tenth of what you save because of that, we'd be all set.
Yeah.
Well, it's like they say in ancient China, they used to have a system where you paid the physician when you were well and not sick.
That would change everything, wouldn't it?
Maybe we could have a system like that.
Well, I want to thank you very much for joining me and taking the time to talk with us, Dr.
Cano.
Anytime, Mike.
I really have enjoyed this.
It's great.
When I talk to somebody about vitamin D, I know you know a lot about it.
I enjoy it a lot more.
I read your stuff.
You're giving some great advice.
Keep it up.
Well, hey, thank you.
And likewise, let's talk next time about maybe what we can do to help the African-American community.
Because when I did that video on Sunshine and Vitamin D, it was the African-American community that really jumped on it and got excited and invited me on their radio shows and so on.
You know, the community is concerned and they know that there's something wrong.
They know that they're not being given the whole story of what they need to be healthy.
And we need to talk about that and maybe...
Maybe figure out something in that area, I think.
I don't know.
We don't have time to talk about it, but about five years ago when we had a different president and a different attorney general, the Vitamin D Council filed a document with them basically claiming that the current supplementation through milk violates the rights of a protected set that is African Americans.
But as you can imagine, the Bush administration did nothing about it.
Yeah, well, okay.
We'll explore some ideas on the next topic, but definitely something's got to be done to get the information out there.
Okay, Mike.
My pleasure.
Thanks a lot.
Yeah, thank you, Dr.
Canel.
Good to talk with you, and take care.
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