Vitamin D?

Looking for something to read?   I suggest that you Google for:

vitamin d flu

Among the many web pages that search will find for you is this one:

http://blogs.healthfreedomalliance.org/blog/2009/04/27/epidemic-flu-vitamin-d/

A few years ago when I read a paper that looked an awful lot like that one, there were a lot fewer pages on the web about vitamin D and the flu.  I dug around at the time in search of support for that guy's data point and found instead reports of vitamin D having little effect on health except in the case of extreme deficiency.   Reminded me of the flurry of reports of people swearing that vitamin C and Zinc could protect you against the common cold a few years ago.   Now there are so many pages about vitamin D to prevent swine flu that its hard to find anything that weighs in against it.   Dr. John J. Cannell of the "Vitamin D Council" seems to be to vitamin D as Linus Pauling was to vitamin C.  You can even watch Dr. Cannell on YouTube.   Here is another YouTube video preaching Dr. Cannell's message for him.

Picture copied, without explicit permission, from http://www.selftanningqueen.com/?p=850

Is the science in favor of your keeping your vitamin D level high?   I don't know.   But the anecdotes of warding off flu in the prison certainly appeal to my sense - they sound right.   Bummer that he couldn't show statistical significance in the observation.   Nevertheless, vitamin D tablets are inexpensive and have a long shelf life, so I've been making a point of taking a 1000 IU tablet each day for quite a while now.

Now if only there weren't those reports in early 2009 about not finding any good coming from taking a daily multi-vitamin.

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/09/study-finds-no-benefit-from-daily-multivitamin/

I really want to believe.

Speaking of believing, there sure are a lot of web pages with conspiracy theories about FEMA and the Federal government in general.   The swine flu, I found web pages suggesting, is a man-made weapon.   And all I was looking for was that article about warding off flu in prison by handing out regular doses of vitamin D.

Your tax dollars at work:

Indianna concentration camp

500,000 plastic coffins

But that's getting off the topic of vitamin D.

Drew