Sixty million years of evolution says vitamin D may save your life from swine flu

Tuesday, October 13, 2009 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: vitamin D, health news, Natural News

(NaturalNews) People still don't get it: Vitamin D is the "miracle nutrient" that activates your immune system to defend you against invading microorganisms -- including seasonal flu and swine flu. Two months ago, an important study was published by researchers at Oregon State University. This study reveals something startling: Vitamin D is so crucial to the functioning of your immune system that the ability of vitamin D to boost immune function and destroy invading microorganisms has been conserved in the genome for over 60 million years of evolution.

As this press release from Oregon State University (http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-...) explains:

The fact that this vitamin-D mediated immune response has been retained through millions of years of evolutionary selection, and is still found in species ranging from squirrel monkeys to baboons and humans, suggests that it must be critical to their survival, researchers say.

"The existence and importance of this part of our immune response makes it clear that humans and other primates need to maintain sufficient levels of vitamin D," said Adrian Gombart, an associate professor of biochemistry and a principal investigator with the Linus Pauling Institute at Oregon State University.

The announcement goes on to explain:

In primates, this action of "turning on" an optimal response to microbial attack only works properly in the presence of adequate vitamin D, which is actually a type of hormone that circulates in the blood and signals to cells through a receptor. Vitamin D is produced in large amounts as a result of sun exposure, and is available in much smaller amounts from dietary sources.

Vitamin D prevents the "adaptive" immune response from over-reacting and reduces inflammation, and appears to suppress the immune response. However, the function of the new genetic element this research explored allows vitamin D to boost the innate immune response by turning on an antimicrobial protein. The overall effect may help to prevent the immune system from overreacting.

Without vitamin D, you're a sitting duck

What this study reveals is that without sufficient levels of vitamin D circulating in your blood, you're a ripe, juicy target for influenza (H1N1 or otherwise). If you lack vitamin D, your immune system can't "activate" to do its job. That's why people who are deficient in vitamin D so frequently get winter colds.

But people who are high in vitamin D have the nutritional power to activate their immune system so that it can respond to invading pathogens. Crucially, vitamin D also manages to balance immune response and prevent inflammation -- the leading cause of death in the 1918 influenza pandemic.

So not only does vitamin D protect you from the initial infection; it also prevents your body from over-reacting and killing you with inflammation (which typically gets expressed as bacterial pneumonia, an infection of the lungs).

Smart people today are doing two things:

1) Saying NO to vaccines.
2) Saying YES to vitamin D.

If you take vitamin D, you don't need a vaccine!

Sources for vitamin D

Where can you get vitamin D? There's some vitamin D naturally present in fish oils and marine omega-3 oils, but the two most abundant sources are:

1) Sunlight
2) Vitamin D supplements

You can get sunlight for free by exposing your skin to the sun. You can get vitamin D supplements at www.Vitacost.com or just about any vitamin retailer (local or online).

Vitamin D is easy to get. Your body actually manufactures it when you're exposed to the sun.

Why no vitamin D advice?

The research supporting vitamin D's ability to halt influenza is overwhelming. And yet the vaccine industry (and the doctors who push vaccines) don't want you to know about vitamin D. Why is that?

It's because if people knew the truth about vitamin D, the vaccine industry would collapse. Who needs a vaccine if you're got a powered-up immune system to do the job automatically? Plus, your immune system is natural, while vaccines are completely unnatural injections of toxic chemicals that are increasingly being linked to not just autism, but seizures, brain damage and death.

Why risk a vaccine when vitamin D is so remarkably safe?

You'll need at least 4000 IU a day just to prevent deficiency, according to many nutrition experts. Some people I know take 8000 IU a day. I personally don't take any vitamin D but I get at least 30 minutes of sunlight every day near the equator (which is a unique geographical situation, I understand, that not everybody can replicate).

Our national "health" officials (if you can call them that) are making a crucial mistake with the swine flu. Instead of ordering more vaccines, they should be recommending vitamin D supplements to the population. For less than the cost of the vaccines, we could provide vitamin D supplementation to every man, woman and child in America. We would not only end the swine flu pandemic, we would also see cancer rates plummet!

Perhaps that's why our health authorities don't dare recommend vitamin D -- the financial impact on the cancer industry would just be too great. The vaccine makers would lose billions, and the cancer industry could lose tens of billions. Diabetes rates would fall, depression would fade away in many people, kidney function would improve and a long list of other diseases would be prevented or reversed following adequate vitamin D intake.

Vitamin D is the answer to our national health care problems. Just one nutrient, if distributed freely to everyone, could probably slash our national health care costs by one-third within five years, I believe.

And yet they dare not mention it. "It's not approved by the FDA," they say. So the CDC won't mention it. The WHO won't recommend it. The FDA pretends it doesn't exist, and the doctors aren't allowed to prescribe it.

Here it is -- vitamin D -- the great CURE for influenza. It's here right now. It's cheap, it's safe, and it's available. Yet it's being utterly ignored.

Let me go on the record to state the obvious: There is an agenda under way to keep the American people deficient in vitamin D and ignorant about its healing properties. This is a conscious, planned scheme that seeks to keep the people disinformed while pumping them full of vaccines, chemotherapy and prescription drugs instead of teaching them the simple nutritional cures that exist right now.

Mark my words: With the swine flu or any future pandemic, the populations suffering the highest death rates will be those with the highest rates of vitamin D deficiency. And the vaccine? It offers no protection compared to the power of the vitamin D.

The laws of biochemistry cannot be suspended by FDA bureaucrats

To any doctor or health authority who scoffs at the notion of vitamin D being far more useful than vaccines, ask them this question: If vitamin D has no purpose in human health, then why have the immune system genes that are specifically activated by vitamin D persisted in the genome (which is now the human genome) for more than sixty million years?

Why is the human immune system programmed to use vitamin D to activate itself?

Why does human skin generate vitamin D in response to sun exposure?

To hear mind-numbed doctors answer it, this is all just coincidence! There is no specific reason that vitamin D genes exist at all!

But it gets even more bizarre: According to the FDA, vitamin D has no beneficial biological effects in the human body! It's true: The FDA says that any substance that has a beneficial (therapeutic) effect in the human body must be a DRUG, not a nutrient. And vitamin D has never been approved as a drug. Therefore, it is inert.

Do you follow that? Vitamin D has no benefit to the human body because the FDA says so. How's that for bureaucratic arrogance? It's like saying gravity doesn't apply in our world because we haven't yet "approved" the laws of physics. But one step off a high ledge reveals, indeed, that the laws of gravity are still in effect, and so are the laws of biochemistry.

You need vitamin D, not a vaccine

Your body doesn't need a vaccine to combat the swine flu (or seasonal flu, for that matter). What it needs is vitamin D, restful sleep, adequate hydration with clean water, and good nutrition. These things make the vaccine obsolete.

They're safe, affordable, natural and readily available. You don't have to wait in line to get vitamin D, and you don't need a doctor's prescription. There's no needle involved, and there's no risk of you suffering a seizure or permanent brain damage, either.

With sufficient levels of vitamin D in your blood, your immune system will do its job to protect you from swine flu, bird flu, human flu or even the pandemic infectious nonsense being spread around by the CDC, FDA and WHO. Your immune system has all the technology it needs right now to keep you alive from almost any widely-circulating microorganism... as long as it has the biochemical tools (like vitamin D) to "activate" its adaptive response.

Do you realize that without a functioning immune system, you would have been killed by microorganisms a thousand times over by now? Your immune system saves your life every day, quietly, behind the scenes. It is the reason you're breathing right now as you read this article. Receiving a vaccine injection is the ultimate insult to your own body because it admits that you have no faith in the very same immune system that has already saved your life countless times.

Don't put your faith in chemical injections. Believe in your immune system -- and give it the nutritional tools it needs to keep on saving your life.

Additional resources for this story include:
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-...