A fat-soluble vitamin, Vitamin D is naturally present in very few foods, added to others and is usually made available as a dietary supplement. Many of us do not know its importance in healthy living. <.p>
Apart from the aforesaid, it is also produced endogenously when ultraviolet rays from sunlight strike the skin and trigger vitamin D synthesis. Vitamin D produced from sun exposure, food, and supplements is biologically inert and must therefor undergo two hydroxylations in the body for activation and effective. The first occurs in the liver which converts vitamin D to 25-hydroxyvitamin D, also known as calcidiol while the second occurs primarily in the kidney and forms the physiologically active 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D, also known as calcitriol.
What exactly does Vitamin D do in our body, you may ask. Essential for promoting calcium absorption in the gut and maintaining adequate serum calcium and phosphate concentrations, it is to enable normal mineralization of bone and prevent hypocalcemic tetany. It is also needed for bone growth and bone remodeling by osteoblasts and osteoclasts. Lacking in or without sufficient vitamin D, bones can become the target of many old-age related problems. Bones become thin, brittle, or misshapen while Vitamin D sufficiency prevents rickets in children and osteomalacia in adults. Together with calcium, vitamin D also helps protect older adults from osteoporosis.
Its other roles in human health include modulation of neuromuscular and immune function and reduction of inflammation. Many genes encoding proteins that regulate cell proliferation, differentiation, and apoptosis are being modulated in part by vitamin D.
Lacking in Vitamin D has become the center of attention of many scientists today in finding the initial causes and development of cancer. Current scientific model seem to assume that a genetic mutation begins the genesis of a malignancy. Could this assumption be wrong and disputed? Could scientists at the Moores Cancer Center at the University of California (UC) in San Diego unlock some other possibility?
In its online reporting in the current Annals of Epidemiology, a host of research suggests cancer develops when cells lose the ability to stick together in a healthy and normal way, and the key factor to this initial triggering of a malignancy could well be a lack of vitamin D. Researchers have documented that with enough vitamin D present, cells adhere to one another in tissue and act as normal, mature epithelial cells. However, should there be a deficiency of vitamin D, cells can lose this stick-to-each other quality as well as their identity as differentiated cells; resulting in their reversion to a dangerous stem cell-like state and become cancerous.
How is this possible? Vitamin D may halt the first stage of the cancer process by re-establishing intercellular junctions in malignancies having an intact vitamin D receptor. Vitamin D rich-diet and supplements (2,000 IU/day) tend to restore appropriate levels of vitamin D in the prevention of cancer development. Thus, the “cure” for cancer already exists.
