Did you know it’s illegal for salons to advertise that tanning beds are a great way to raise vitamin D? Of course, they can’t advertise that because of the increased risk of skin cancer from those tanning beds. You might be surprised at my take on this, I’m gonna use the story of my dad to tell you why those Vitamin D supplements might not be doing what you think they’re doing in his mid seventies. My dad’s health problems seemed to rise dramatically a few years prior. He had the markers of health, strong muscles, strong bones, high vitamin D, and normal kidneys and brain function.
As his health started to decline, so did his markers of vitamin D as seen by his blood test. The sicker he got, the lower his vitamin D went. It went from the mid fifties down to the forties, thirties, and then into the teens.
And I as a prescribing physician, helped him get the highest replacement of vitamin D possible. We wrote prescriptions for 50,000 units for him to take to replace his vitamin D. Yet test after test showed his vitamin D never got out of the twenties even with the highest amount of supplements I could offer him. So what was going on? I’m giving him the best prescriptions. They’re FDA approved. So it wasn’t that the supplement company was wrong. The problem actually was almost a self perpetuating illness that could have been improved by increased vitamin D levels.
But you needed to be able to absorb the vitamin D to give him those benefits. It was a vicious, awful cycle. I could easily link this low vitamin D level in his labs to several of the health problems he was suffering with. His mental health was poor, his kidney function was failing.
His white blood cells were doing an awful job of defending his body from brain to lungs to bones. His health was poor as a result of vitamin D. You see, vitamin D has the power to impact different cells differently. As vitamin D travels throughout the body, it acts like a hormone crossing into the cells and then communicating through the mitochondria into your nucleus. That messaging system inside each nucleus produces proteins unique to those cells.
That’s why the link of low vitamin D seems to correlate in multiple areas of medicine. This chart does a great job of showing what’s the difference of someone who has a vitamin D of 25 versus one that’s much more robust near 50. So when comparing patients who had a vitamin D of 25 with those who had a vitamin D much higher, we can see that all cause cancers were 35% less likely when the vitamin D was 38 instead of 25.
Take breast cancer, there was actually a 30% reduction if your vitamin D went from 25 to 34 when comparing those two populations. But look what happens when you got that vitamin D to 50, there was an 83% reduction in those people having breast cancer. As you look at the rest of the chart, you can see that as patients across different disease processes like type one diabetes, multiple sclerosis, heart attacks in men and fractures or falls in women, this process was all a less likely problem when they kept their vitamin D above 34.
So let’s go back to my dad. As his health was declining, his ability to absorb nutrients was terrible. In fact, you could call it leaky gut, but it was that increased permeability throughout his gut that even if he absorbed some of that vitamin D, he was leaking out just as much.
The route to improve his vitamin D through absorption was failing even at the highest doses. After months of failing to raise his vitamin DI finally threw caution to the wind and said, dad, I need you to go to a tanning bed. My dad lives in a really small town. There’s only one tanning bed in the town. So I called the lady who ran the salon and asked her to look. Can you see, does your tanning bed have just UVA bulbs or do you have UVA plus UVB bulbs? Most tanning salons use UVA bulbs and it gives you a quick tan, which is what they’re selling you.
But UVB bulbs deliver the sun rays that are known for activating the circulating fat in your body. That becomes vitamin D when the two of those meet. So I told my dad, I don’t want you getting a sunburn, so I want you to start with three minutes in that tanning bed.
And as a butt white farmer from South Dakota, he really did have a slight pinkness. After three minutes each week, he would go for a few more minutes, and by the time we got to that fourth week, he could now tolerate eight minutes each time He went to the tanning bed and we had him going a couple times a week. It was after 30 days that we measured his vitamin D. Again, remembering no supplements were given just the tanning bed. And now his vitamin D was 83. His doctor said, you’re overdosing on vitamin D.
I said, dad, you’re finally therapeutic. So what does that mean for most of my patients? Or you? Should I stop giving them supplements and send them all to the tanning bed? No, that’s not what I’m saying. I am saying that you shouldn’t guess that your vitamin D is doing what you think it’s doing. You should prove it. This is a very reproducible test that you can do at your own home, prick your finger, put your blood supply on that sponge and send it into the lab. This allows us to measure your vitamin D and you shouldn’t go six months between testing.
You should test every month until you get your vitamin D at a minimum of 50. So in my practice, if my patients are spiraling with health problems and have a vitamin D in the teens, we still use supplements, but I do send them to a tanning bed. If you’re like the rest of us with a vitamin D somewhere in the thirties and probably taking a minimal 400 international units a day, well I boost that up to at least 5,000 international units of vitamin DA day and then retest every month until you get a vitamin D in the right range. It really matters. So the key to that is you must test know your vitamin D number.
Source: Dr. Boz [Annette Bosworth, MD]
