Dr. Boz [Annette Bosworth, MD] - Illegal Vitamin D Advice

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 going to 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-70s, 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 kidney and brain function. As his health started to decline, so did his markers of vitamin D, as seen by his blood tests. The sicker he got, the lower his vitamin D went. It went from the mid-50s down to the 40s, 30s, and then into the teens. As a prescribing physician, I 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 20s, even with the highest amount of supplements I could offer him. So what was going on? I was giving him the best prescriptions, which were FDA approved, so it wasn't that the supplement company was wrong. The problem was almost a self-perpetuating illness that could have been improved by increased vitamin D levels, but he needed to be able to absorb the vitamin D to get 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, and 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 low 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 between low vitamin D and multiple areas of medicine seems to correlate.

This chart does a great job of showing the difference between someone who has a vitamin D of 25 and one who is much more robust, near 50. When comparing patients who had a vitamin D of 25 with those who had a much higher vitamin D, 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 across different disease processes, like type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis, heart attacks in men, and fractures or falls in women, these problems were all less likely when patients kept their vitamin D above 34.

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, meaning increased permeability throughout his gut, so even if he absorbed some of that vitamin D, he was leaking it 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 D, I 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 with only one tanning bed, so I called the lady who ran the salon and asked her, "Does your tanning bed have just UVA bulbs, or do you have UVA plus UVB bulbs?" Most tanning salons use UVA bulbs, which give you a quick tan, which is what they're selling you. But UVB bulbs deliver the sunrays known for activating the circulating fat in your body that becomes vitamin D when the two 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." As a bit of a 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 fourth week he could tolerate eight minutes each time. We had him going a couple of times a week. After 30 days, we measured his vitamin D again, remembering that no supplements were given, just the tanning bed, and now his vitamin D was 83. His doctor said, "You're overdoing it on vitamin D." I said, "Dad, you're finally therapeutic."

So what does that mean for most of my patients? 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 you can do at your own home: prick your finger, put your blood on that sponge, and send it into the lab. This allows us to measure your vitamin D. You shouldn't go six months between testing. You should test every month until your vitamin D reaches a minimum of 50. 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 30s and probably taking a minimal 400 international units a day, I boost that up to at least 5,000 international units of vitamin D a day and then retest every month until you reach the right range. It really matters. The key is that you must test and know your vitamin D number. Click here if you want to order that home kit for yourself.