Pastor’s Nexus

Vitamin D deficiency has been linked to a rapidly expanding inventory of ailments–including heart disease , cancer and the common cold . A new discovery demonstrates how the vitamin plays a major role in keeping the body healthy in the first place, by allowing the immune system's T cells to start doing their jobs.  [More]

Source: “Another reason vitamin D is important: it gets T cells going”, Scientific American

The push to prevent skin cancer may have come with unintended consequences–impaired brain function because of a deficiency of vitamin D. The “sunshine vitamin” is synthesized in our skin when we are exposed to direct sunlight, but sunblock impedes this process. And although vitamin D is well known for promoting bone health and regulating vital calcium levels–hence its addition to milk–it does more than that. Scientists have now linked this fat-soluble nutrient’s hormonelike activity to a number of functions throughout the body, including the workings of the brain.

“We know there are receptors for vitamin D throughout the central nervous system and in the hippocampus,” said Robert J. Przybelski, a doctor and research scientist at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. “We also know vitamin D activates and deactivates enzymes in the brain and the cerebrospinal fluid that are involved in neurotransmitter synthesis and nerve growth.” In addition, animal and laboratory studies suggest vitamin D protects neurons and reduces inflammation.

[More]

Source: “Does Vitamin D Improve Brain Function?”, Scientific American

Scientific American Magazine: Cell Defenses and the Sunshine Vitamin: “It was called the sunshine cure, and in the early 20th century, before the era of antibiotics, it was the only effective therapy for tuberculosis known. No one knew why it worked, just that TB patients sent to rest in sunny locales were often restored to health. The same ‘treatment’ had been discovered in 1822 for another historic scourge, rickets–a deforming childhood condition caused by an inability to make hardened bone. Rickets had been on the rise in 18th- and 19th-century Europe, coinciding with industrialization and the movement of people from the countryside to the polluted cities, when a Warsaw doctor observed that the problem was relatively rare in rural Polish children. He began experimenting with city children and found that he could cure their rickets with exposure to sunshine alone.”