Archive for April, 2010

Supplement Content and Purity

Thursday, April 29th, 2010

Health advocate Gary Null has provided an unintentional educational lesson for those of us using dietary supplements. Taking one of his own products, he developed vitamin D toxicity. As there have been only a few cases of vitamin D toxicity ever reported, there is an inevitably interesting story behind this announcement.

The story is that his supplement contained 1,000 TIMES the amount of vitamin D it was supposed to. Instead of taking 2,000 iu a day, he was taking 2,000,000 iu day after day for a month. Wow!


Also, a recent independent analysis of St John’s Wort products found that fully one half of those tested were either contaminated with heavy metals (lead, cadmium) or deficient in the active marker compounds essential to the herb’s effects. 12 years ago a similar study found that the majority of products sold as St John’s Wort at health food stores was not actually St John’s Wort.

Please use these as a reminder to make sure that you purchase good supplements that have been analyzed for purity and content. As you can see on my MVM bottles, look for USP certification on vitamins. Purchase the best quality herbs, processed by manufacturers who comply with Good Manufacturing Practices, tested for marker compounds as noted on the label and ideally confirmed by independent testing.


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Take That With a Grain of Salt Please

Monday, April 26th, 2010

You may have noticed that there is a campaign underway to get Americans to drop their salt intake. This has included discussion of measures as radical as creating a legal limit on salt (sodium) in processed food. Although there is a lot that is good about this, it can also create confusion. I have had patients suffer serious consequences from their attempt to follow public health advice about avoiding added salt.

Here is the problem. Processed food is packed with salt. Way too much in there for sure. People who eat the way humans should eat, avoiding all that processed food, do not consume so much salt. You are getting the idea now. When those very health conscious people, eating real, non-processed food, obediently drop their table salt, they learn why salt is an essential for humans and collecting it so much a part of human culture. Remember even Sam wanted it for his cooking kit in the Lord of the Rings. Orcs, trolls, evil wizards, fine; but not without salt.

So, if you eat much in the way of processed food knock off the salt, or better still knock off the processed food. If you don’t eat much processed food and don’t have high blood pressure, don’t worry about it. Some of us actually need to eat salty food to keep our blood pressure high enough.


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How Vitamin D Helps Asthma

Friday, April 16th, 2010

Although we have lots of evidence showing that vitamin D lowers the risk of many diseases, the lingering concern is that vitamin D levels might simply tell us who was healthier to begin with. In other words, healthy people go outside more often because they are healthy not the other way around.

With the passage of time and completion of the more demanding studies required to determine causation rather than association, vitamin D continues to look every bit as promising. Identifying physiologic pathways important in specific disease and influenced by vitamin D raise our confidence that the effects of D are real.

The latest such discoveries come from National Jewish Health in Denver, a famous center for asthma and allergy research. Studies they conducted of adults and children with asthma have shown that lower D levels are associated with worse asthma symptoms. Reaching further into the “how could that be” side, these studies have shown that vitamin D enhanced anti-inflammatory effects of certain immune cells and accentuated the effectiveness of steroids prescribed to treat asthma. One study found that a certain steroid was 10 times more effective when administered in conjunction with vitamin D.

Even if vitamin D only helped asthmatic patients by reducing their steroid dose, that would be great because, as the “heavy guns” of medical pharmacology, steroids have many nasty adverse effects and those effects are dose-related. However there is excellent cause to believe that D does much more and can help many asthmatics come off of medication entirely.


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