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Press release from John Jacob Cannell, MD, executive director of The Vitamin D Council
Dr. Bruce Hollis, of the Medical University Of South Carolina, discovered why so many black infants and their breastfeeding mothers are deficient in vitamin D.
In 2002 when the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) announced their disturbing finding that 10 times more Blacks were vitamin D deficient than Whites, few of the press took notice and the story was largely ignored.
Researchers have also long known that many neonates are deficient in vitamin D. For example, a 1997 French study showed that, several days after birth, 63.7 percent of the infants had low vitamin D levels. Using even stricter criteria, the researchers concluded 24 percent of the neonates were vitamin D deficient and those infants needed 1,000 IU of vitamin D per day to correct the problem.
Scientists have long known the rather surprising fact that nature's "perfect food," human breast milk, is a poor source of vitamin D. To our knowledge, the U.S. government has not sponsored any recent studies of the incidence of vitamin D deficiency in black American maternal pairs (a population that generally gets little sun). However, a study of a similar sun-avoiding population of breast-feeding infants and mothers in the United Arab Emirates found 61 percent of the mothers and 82 percent of the infants had hypovitaminosis D.
How could nature's "perfect food," breast milk, be deficient in vitamin D? Scientists have long known that human breast milk, unlike the breast milk of wild apes and chimps, is almost totally lacking in vitamin D. Was it an oversight of Nature? Perhaps humans were meant to expose their infants to the sun (and thus to predators) to synthesize vitamin D in the skin?
How could vitamin D be almost completely lacking in human breast milk? A recent review in Neuroscience shows that vitamin D is crucial to brain development, and that gestational vitamin D deficiency is likely to lead to altered brain development:
Furthermore, the bone calcium and mineral content (bone mineral density) of lactating human mothers decline dramatically during breast-feeding, a serious side effect that may leave the breast-feeding mothers at risk for osteomalacia immediately and osteoporosis in later life. Was this Nature's plan as well? For those of us who believe in Nature's wisdom, such explanations are hard to accept.
However, thanks to Dr. Bruce Hollis and Dr. Carol Wagner, we now know the answer. It was not Nature's mistake; it was, and is, the government's mistake. At the recent NIH conference on vitamin D, Dr. Hollis announced the soon-to-be published findings from his Biochemistry & Molecular Biology Laboratory at the Department of Pediatrics of the Medical University of South Carolina. Working with his colleague and co-author, Dr. Carol Wagner, Dr. Hollis essentially found that the reason most human breast milk is deficient in vitamin D is that most mothers are deficient in vitamin D!
Hollis and Wagner announced their lab has determined that lactating mothers need at least 3,600 IU a day of cholecalciferol (the natural form of vitamin D) to maintain their own and their infant's vitamin D levels. 2,000 IU was inadequate. Only when Hollis and Wagner gave lactating mothers 3,600 IU of cholecalciferol did the mother have enough vitamin D to maintain their own and their infant's blood levels. 3,600 IU of vitamin D is about 10 times what the federal government says lactating women should get and is almost twice what the federal government says may be toxic.
Hollis and Wagner's finding that lactating mothers need at least 3,600 IU of cholecalciferol a day to maintain adequate maternal and infant levels is almost identical to the very recent findings by Professor Robert Heaney and his colleagues. Heaney, of Creighton University Medical Center, who is a world-renowned expert on calcium and vitamin D, found normal adults need 10 times more vitamin D a day than the government recommends.
Almost as an aside, Hollis and Wagner announced that supplementation with 3,600 IU a day dramatically reduced the decline in the mother's bone mineral density, a decline thought by the medical establishment, before now, to be an unfortunate, but inevitable, result of breast-feeding.
Although we know of no vitamin D scientist in the nation who believes the government's current guidelines, the guidelines remain and the result is widespread vitamin D deficiencies in the American populace, especially among Blacks and very especially among black neonates. Furthermore, the government knows that vitamin D is crucial for neural development. Nevertheless, the government refuses to act. Why?
As I get older, I realize I have often suspected conspiracy. In the end, it was usually incompetence. I imagine, but cannot prove, the same is true now.
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