Dr. Joe DeStefano of Urgent Care 24/7 is here to discuss vitamin D.

Let's talk about all the things it impacts through its action. As a pro hormone, it impacts your sex hormones. It impacts your insulin resistance. If your vitamin D is low, it makes you have more insulin resistance, you make more insulin, you get hungrier, you gain weight, you gain weight that diffuses your vitamin D, your vitamin D gets worse, you can kind of imagine how this proceeds from there. Vitamin D fine tunes your immune system, it's what we would call more of an immunomodulator. So if you do not have enough vitamin D, you have a problem keeping your immune system. Vitamin D is an immune modulator. It keeps your immune system, and the lines on the road keep your immune system fighting when it should fight, not fighting what it should fight.

This is where vitamin D deficiency gets interesting. Low vitamin D is associated with increased incidences of different autoimmune diseases. Then you get into the whole causation versus correlation argument. But one way you solve that argument is to look taken out compounding factors, and seeing that when you control for compounding factors, vitamin D deficiency is still a major contributor. So people with low vitamin D have higher incidences of rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, multiple sclerosis. Low vitamin D, increases your chance of different cancers, prostate cancer, breast colon in oncology. Many protocols now depend on the oncologist to ensure that the vitamin D levels are healthy, healthy, and have been 60 or 60 to 80.

So that the body's own immune immune system helped fight the cancer. Of course, vitamin D is a huge issue in COVID-19, and bacterial upper respiratory infections and other viral respiratory infections, vitamin D deficient individuals have the worst courses with influenza with COVID-19. With any number of respiratory infections, vitamin D deficiency worsens asthma. There are correlations that when people have low vitamin D levels, their asthma is much more active. So vitamin D is important. The medical industrial complex has taken the view that we're just everyone taking a supplement. Everyone takes 1000 international units a day, and everybody will have a healthy healthy level. No reasons to check levels, etc.

This frankly makes no sense. A vitamin D level is inexpensive to run. The best test is your your store a vitamin D, which is your 25 hydroxy vitamin D. We can do that test very affordably at Urgent Care 247, it is part of our primary health care plan. You really just can't tell how much vitamin D level you need without checking it. For example, someone with very olive skin such as myself, I need 10,000 units three times a week to maintain a vitamin D level of about 60. Somebody's very fair, and if they're getting enough sunlight with 1000 units a day. And then there's also an issue: if you have fair skin, you have an increased risk of melanoma and skin cancer. So can you tell somebody, "Oh just take 1000 units of vitamin D a day and get sunlight?" Well, not when you're thinking about the whole patient.

Dr. DeStefano knows that some people are more comfortable with what natural foods they can eat to get vitamin D, free-range chickens, but free-range cages because the chicken is not out in the sun, they are not producing vitamin D. They're not putting into their egg yolks. Plus for many reasons. Free range chickens are better. In a holistic fashion, cold-water fish are packed in oil, so tuna fish, salmon, those are good sources of vitamin D. Interestingly enough, mushrooms, Dr. DeStefano tells people that if you struggle with vitamin D, eat mushrooms literally on everything. Mushrooms are a good source of dietary vitamin D. The other reason he encourages levels to be checked about three times a year is because your vitamin D requirement dietary supplement will change depending on how much sun you're getting at what latitude during what time of the year.

There is GI absorption at play here. So somebody may have some type of malabsorption syndrome that makes it harder for them to absorb vitamin D that's all need a higher level of supplementation to maintain a high healthy vitamin D level. So you know vitamin D is important to health, autoimmune cancer prevention, and survival of COVID-19. Harvard has done studies, and multiple centers have done studies now that your vitamin D level alone can protect and can predict your mortality from COVID-19. You can look at the studies and read them.

Recently, a noted epidemiologic epidemiologist has done a talk on this. He studied all the cases that came through his hospital, and vitamin D level of 60 or better gives you the best survival for COVID-19. The best thing is know your vitamin D level. Thank you for having this chat with us today.

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