With flu season in full swing here in the United States, you need to be aware that your vitamin D levels play a direct role in your risk of getting the flu.
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By: JMertlich,
1/18/2009
With flu season in full swing here in the United States, you need to be aware that your vitamin D levels play a direct role in your risk of getting the flu.
The vitamin D levels in your blood fall to their lowest point during flu season, which generally coincide with low-sunlight seasons. Less than optimal vitamin D levels will significantly impair your immune response and make you far more susceptible to contracting colds, influenza, and other respiratory infections.
Dr. John Cannell and colleagues introduced the hypothesis that influenza is merely a symptom of vitamin D deficiency in their paper Epidemic Influenza and Vitamin D, published in the journal Epidemiology and Infection two years ago, which adds even more weight to this latest research in the Virology Journal.
Unfortunately, conventional medicine’s answer to preventing the flu is not to increase vitamin D levels, but rather to encourage, or even mandate, flu shots. What they don’t tell you is that flu shots, at best don’t work, and at worst, can make your health worse.
New Studies Show Flu Shots Don’t Even Work
A recent study published in the October issue of the Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine found that vaccinating young children against the flu had no impact on flu-related hospitalizations or doctor visits during two recent flu seasons.
Additionally, no studies have conclusively proven that flu shots prevent flu-related deaths among the elderly, even though this is one of the key groups to which they’re pushed.
Yet despite these findings, physicians like Dr. Danuta Skowronski, epidemiologist at the B.C. Centre for Disease Control, keep insisting that the benefits of the flu vaccine outweigh the risks for most people.
I wholeheartedly disagree.
If you actually weigh the benefits found by these studies (no apparent benefits) against the reported risks (fever, malaise, the flu, allergic reactions and Guillain-Barré syndrome, just to name a few), you’d have to employ some fairly odd math to come to that conclusion.
In the CBC News article above, a man who contracted Guillain-Barré syndrome and was paralyzed for almost five months after receiving his flu shot wants to warn others of the risks inherent in this widely pushed vaccine.
Guillain-Barré syndrome is an autoimmune disease that attacks your nervous system – similar to muscular sclerosis. The B.C. Centre for Disease Control estimate your chances of developing that particular disease from the flu shot as one in a million. However, if you get it, the consequences can be severe.
Research Shows Optimal Vitamin D Levels Protect You From the Flu, Naturally
In the United States, the late winter average vitamin D is only about 15-18 ng/ml, which is considered a very serious deficiency state. It’s estimated that over 95 percent of U.S. senior citizens may be deficient, along with 85 percent of the American public. No wonder the flu runs rampant each year.
Remarkably, researchers have found that 2,000 IU of vitamin D per day abolished the seasonality of influenza!
Please note that this is far higher than the recommended daily allowance (RDA) spouted by public health agencies like the American Academy of Pediatrics, which just announced that they’re doubling the RDA of vitamin D for children to 400 IU. This new guidance still falls absurdly short of what’s needed to keep kids healthy, especially during flu season.
In order to prevent the flu, children need 2,000 IU a day of vitamin D, while adults need anywhere between 4,000 to 5,000 IU per day. The key is to make sure you monitor your vitamin D levels by blood testing, to make sure your levels are therapeutic and not toxic.
For more information about safe sun exposure and tanning, vitamin D testing, and the recommended forms of supplementation when sufficient sunlight is not available, please see my article Test Values and Treatment for Vitamin D Deficiency, which includes recent, and vital, updates.
Vitamin D Can Also TREAT the Flu!
If you are taking the above doses of vitamin D the odds of you getting the flu are very remote. However, if you do come down with the flu, keep in mind that you can also use vitamin D therapeutically to TREAT the flu.
The therapeutic dose of vitamin D is 2,000 units per kilogram of body weight (one pound is 0.45 kg). The dose would be taken once a day for three days. (This could be a very large dose if you are very heavy – as high as 2-300,000 units per day).
This is the dose that Dr. John Cannell, founder of the Vitamin D Council, has been using very successfully for a number of years.
If you start this program early on in the illness, it should be able to completely wipe out the flu in short order.
Another useful supplement you could try, should you come down with a case of the flu, is olive leaf extract, which you can find in most any health food store. Olive leaf extract has been found to be a potent broad-spectrum antiviral agent, active against all viruses tested, including numerous strains of influenza and para-influenza viruses.
Back in 2005, The Federal Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) recommended that all children between 6 months and 5 years old receive flu shots each year. Now they have expanded their guidelines to include children up to 18 years, which means everyone except those between the ages of 19-49, who are in good health, are urged to get a flu shot.
It should come as no surprise to find out that a majority of the ACIP members who came up with these guidelines have financial ties to the vaccine industry, and stand to gain personally for every additional person getting a yearly injection. It’s actually the only explanation that makes any sense for recommendations as insane as these.
Three Reasons to Reconsider Flu Shots
There are three major reasons why this government push to vaccinate 84 percent of the U.S. population with a yearly flu vaccine is so incomprehensible:
1. The majority of flu shots contain 25 micrograms of mercury; an amount considered unsafe for anyone weighing less than 550 pounds! And which groups are most sensitive to the neurological damage that has been associated with mercury? Infants, children, and the elderly.
2. No studies have conclusively proven that flu shots prevent flu-related deaths among the elderly, yet this is one of the key groups to which they’re pushed.
3. If you get a flu shot, you can still get the flu (or flu-like symptoms). This is because it only protects against certain strains, and it’s anyone’s guess which flu viruses will be in your area.
So why would you take a flu shot – EVERY YEAR -- that has NEVER been proven to be effective, that can give you the very illness you’re trying to prevent, and has potential long-term side effects that are far worse than the flu itself?
The powers that be have done an excellent job of instilling fear into the population so they believe that they must get a shot to stay healthy, but the simple reality is it’s doing you more harm than good.
And, even if the flu vaccine could effectively prevent the flu, there have been several examples in past years where government health officials have chosen the incorrect influenza strains for that year’s vaccine. In 2004, the National Vaccine Information Center described how CDC officials told everyone to line up for a flu shot that didn't even contain the influenza strain causing most of the flu that year.
Two-Thirds of This Year’s Flu Vaccines Contain a Full-Dose of Mercury
According to Dr. Donald Miller, MD, two-thirds of this year’s flu vaccines contain 25 micrograms of thimerosal. Thimerosal is 49 percent mercury by weight.
Each dose of these flu vaccines contains more than 250 times the Environmental Protection Agency’s safety limit for mercury.
By now, most people are well aware that children and fetuses are most at risk of damage from this neurotoxin, as their brains are still developing. Yet the CDC still recommends that children over 6 months, and pregnant women, receive the flu vaccine each year.
In addition to mercury, flu vaccines also contain other toxic or hazardous ingredients like:
Formaldehyde -- a known cancer-causing agent
Aluminum -- a neurotoxin that has been linked to Alzheimer’s disease
Triton X-100 -- a detergent
Phenol (carbolic acid)
Ethylene glycol (antifreeze)
Various antibiotics: neomycin, streptomycin, gentamicin – which can cause allergic reactions in some people
The Evidence Against Flu Vaccines
For those of you who are still unconvinced, know that there’s plenty of scientific evidence available to back up the recommendation to avoid flu vaccines – if nothing else, then for the simple reason that they don’t work, and don’t offer any real benefit to offset their inherent health risks. For example:
A brand new study published in the October issue of the Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine found that vaccinating young children against the flu had no impact on flu-related hospitalizations or doctor visits during two recent flu seasons. The researchers concluded that "significant influenza vaccine effectiveness could not be demonstrated for any season, age, or setting" examined.
A study published in the Lancet just two months ago found that influenza vaccination was NOT associated with a reduced risk of pneumonia in older people. This supports a study done five years ago, published in The New England Journal of Medicine.
Research published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine last month also confirms that there has been no decrease in deaths from influenza and pneumonia, despite the fact that vaccination coverage among the elderly has increased from 15 percent in 1980 to 65 percent now.
Last year, researchers with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and the National Institutes of Health published this conclusion in the Lancet Infectious Diseases: “We conclude that frailty selection bias and use of non-specific endpoints such as all-cause mortality have led cohort studies to greatly exaggerate vaccine benefits.”
A large-scale, systematic review of 51 studies, published in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews in 2006, found no evidence that the flu vaccine is any more effective than a placebo in children. The studies involved 260,000 children, age 6 to 23 months.
Might Influenza be Little More Than a Symptom of Vitamin D Deficiency?
Vitamin D, “the sunshine vitamin,” may very well be one of the most beneficial vitamins there is for disease prevention. Unfortunately it’s also one of the vitamins that a vast majority of people across the world are deficient in due to lack of regular exposure to sunshine.
Published in the journal Epidemiology and Infection in 2006, the hypothesis presented by Dr. John Cannell and colleagues in the paper Epidemic Influenza and Vitamin D actually makes a lot of sense.
They raise the possibility that influenza is a symptom of vitamin D deficiency!
The vitamin D formed when your skin is exposed to sunlight regulates the expression of more than 2,000 genes throughout your body, including ones that influence your immune system to attack and destroy bacteria and viruses. Hence, being overwhelmed by the “flu bug” could signal that your vitamin D levels are too low, allowing the flu virus to overtake your immune system.
How to Prepare For Flu Season Without Getting a Flu Shot
I often find that some of the simplest explanations are the truest, and this sounds about as simple as it gets. And, getting appropriate amounts of sunshine (or taking a vitamin D supplement when you can’t get healthy amounts of sun exposure) is one of my KEY preventive strategies against the cold and flu, as it has such a strengthening effect on your immune system.
Interestingly, last week the American Academy of Pediatrics doubled its recommended dose of vitamin D. Unfortunately this is still a woefully inadequate recommendation as the dose should be TEN times larger. Rather than going from 200 to 400 units per day, it should have increased to about 2,000 units per day.
For most of you reading this it is “vitamin D winter,” which means there simply isn’t enough sunshine to make significant amounts of vitamin D, so you will need to use a tanning bed or take oral supplements.
Although supplements are clearly inferior to sunlight or safe tanning beds, I am becoming more convinced of the value of vitamin D supplements as they are less potentially toxic than my initial impression, and they are certainly more convenient and less expensive than a tanning bed.
For those in the winter with no or very limited exposure to sunshine, 4,000-5,000 units per day would seem appropriate for most adults. If you are very heavy you may need to double that dose, and for children the dose can be half that.
The key though is to make sure you monitor your vitamin D levels by blood testing, to make sure your levels are therapeutic and not toxic.
I advocate getting your vitamin D levels tested regularly, but as I reported recently, you now need to beware of where you’re getting your test done. For an in-depth explanation of what you MUST know before you get tested, please read my updated article Test Values and Treatment for Vitamin D Deficiency.
You can also use vitamin D therapeutically to TREAT the flu. But please understand that if you are taking the above doses of vitamin D the odds of you getting the flu are VERY remote. The dose of vitamin D you can use would be 2,000 units per kilogram of body weight (one pound is 0.45 kg). The dose would be taken once a day for three days.
This could be a very large dose if you were very heavy (2-300,000 units per day) This is the dose that Dr. John Cannell, founder of the Vitamin D Council, has been using very successfully for a number of years.
I have not received a flu shot nor had the flu in over 20 years. Here are the other “secrets” I use to keep the flu (and other illnesses) at bay:
Eat right for your nutritional type, including avoiding sugar
Eliminate sugar from your diet
Eat garlic regularly
Consume a high-quality krill oil daily
Exercise
Get adequate sleep
Address emotional stress
Wash your hands regularly (but not excessively)
Another useful supplement you could try, should you come down with a case of the flu, is olive leaf extract, which you can find in most any health food store.
Olive leaf extract has been found to be a potent broad-spectrum antiviral agent, active against all viruses tested, including numerous strains of influenza and para-influenza viruses.