Expert Discussion with Jerry Hickey, Ph.: Vitamin D
Written By Jerry Hickey, Ph.
Vitamin D
Jerry Hickey is a pharmacist and radio personality and fills the esteemed role of Scientific Director and President of Invite Health. He has spent his professional life analyzing nutritional information and medical studies with the aim of creating the highest quality and most natural nutraceuticals for user’s maximum health benefits. Here, Jerry speaks about the benefits of Vitamin D…
A study of 165,000 in England shows that as you gain fat, you lose Vitamin D. A 10% increase in weight causes a 4% drop in Vitamin D. That’s from PLOS One Medicine, an open-access journal. We’ve known this for a long time. When you gain weight, your Vitamin D goes down and when you gain weight, your testosterone goes down. There’s no doubt about it.†
The Women’s Health Initiative is the largest randomized double-blind placebo-controlled clinical trial looking at calcium and Vitamin D. It involved over 36,000 older, postmenopausal women. It was done right here in the United States. The women were randomly given 1000 mg of calcium and 400 units of Vitamin D3 or they were given placebo for seven years on average, and 41% of participants didn't take it. So, it didn't help them. In the 59% of the women who actually took their calcium and their Vitamin D, they found that the supplements helped support their bone heath.†
"If you're low in vitamin D, if less vitamin D is floating around in your bloodstream, there's less of a chance of these immune cells encountering vitamin D and they're not going to get activated."
Vitamin D can help support your body’s immune response. There are cells that fight all kinds of germs. They're called gammadelta t-cells. These cells have to be activated by vitamin D. If you lack vitamin D, they might not encounter the germs. The percent of chance encountering it drops and they won't be activated. We actually call that “innervations” in biochemistry. Activation of cells is called “innervations”. So anyway, your gammadelta; if the flu comes into your body or pneumoniae goes into your lungs or you start to catch a cold, there's all kinds of signals transmitted throughout the immune system, throughout your body and your lungs and your nose and your sinuses and your prostate and your blood vessels, everywhere, and they in turn activate gammadelta t-cells. Gammadelta t-cells reach out with an antenna and have to touch vitamin D to be activated. It's kind of like vitamin D is their battery. If they cannot touch vitamin D, they won't get activated. Therefore, if you're low in vitamin D, if less vitamin D is floating around in your bloodstream, in your plasma, the clear fluid in your bloodstream, there's less of a chance of these immune cells encountering vitamin D and they're not going to get activated.†
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