Vitamin D found to boost health, if people get enough

Recommendations for increasing intake of the nutrient are under consideration and sometimes trigger controversy.

By Susan J. Landers, AMNews staff. April 5, 2004.

Washington -- Here comes the sun! And, in limited amounts, some say it could be all right -- at least in terms of an important nutrient it could help deliver to the body.

Physicians who favor some sun exposure aren't interested in tans. They are paying heed to findings that vitamin D, which is found in some foods but is made in abundance by our bodies after exposure to sunlight, can prevent many diseases.

These findings also could spur a change in the preventive messages about never going outside without sunscreen, especially for patients who rarely see the light of day, live in northern climes or have dark skins.

But such thinking also triggers controversy and even disdain from other physicians who have worked hard to communicate to patients that sun exposure is a dangerous link to skin cancer. They fear that linking sunlight to vitamin D's purported benefits will undermine these other communications.

Research is pointing to vitamin D as a possible cancer preventive, a boon to heart health and a potential player in preventing a host of autoimmune diseases, including type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis and arthritis. Deficiencies also were recently pegged as a possible culprit among people with persistent and nonspecific bone and muscle pain and the reason that more elderly women experience falls.

Thus, physicians such as Michael Holick, MD, PhD, a professor of medicine, physiology and biophysics at Boston University School of Medicine, advocate limited sun exposure. "It turns out that every cell in your body recognizes the active form of vitamin D. So you have to ask the question, 'Why would receptors for the active form of vitamin D be in your colon, breast, prostate, brain and immune cells?' "