2006: ‘The Year of Vitamin D’

~ Dec. 20, 2006

KELOWNA, British Columbia (Dec. 20) – Energized by a wave of breakthrough research, a surge of media attention and two major international conferences on Canadian soil in the past 12 months, Canada’s Vitamin D Society has declared 2006 “The Year of Vitamin D.”

“Vitamin D stepped into the limelight in a big way in 2006 and this is only the beginning,” said Joseph Levy, executive director of the Vitamin D Society, launched in 2006 to bolster Vitamin D awareness and fund continued research. “More than 97 percent of Canadians are Vitamin D deficient at some point in the year, and the public health ramifications of Vitamin D deficiency now appear to be enormous.”

Vitamin D – long known only as the body’s catalyst for proper calcium absorption – is now known to play a key part in cell growth regulation in the body – a recent discovery which explains how researchers in the past five years have quantified the vitamin’s role in the prevention of 17 forms of cancer as well as heart disease, multiple sclerosis, osteoporosis and several other disorders.

Research in 2006 brought the Vitamin D picture into focus more than ever. Consider, in the past 12 months:

• The North American Conference on UV, Vitamin D and Health, which convened in Toronto March 8, assembled leading Vitamin D Scientists in front of an audience of worldwide public health agencies.

• The Thirteenth Workshop of Vitamin D convened April 8-12 in Victoria, BC, with universal consensus that Vitamin D deficiency is a worldwide problem and that Vitamin D recommendations need to be increased significantly.

• The Canadian Cancer Society in May joined the American Cancer Society in recognizing that Vitamin D deficiency is a problem and that humans need some non-burning sun exposure to their skin in order to produce Vitamin D naturally.

“There are so many little lotteries where Vitamin D is winning, confirming it is a big win for public health,” Dr. Reinhold Vieth, professor in the departments of Nutritional Sciences and Laboratory Medicine at the University of Toronto, told CTV in an October interview – one of many stories in the Canadian press on Vitamin D in 2006. Vieth – a scientific advisor to the Vitamin D Society – has long been a proponent of increasing Vitamin D recommendations.
Canadians especially are at risk for Vitamin D deficiency because of the country’s relatively weak sunshine most of the year and the fact that Vitamin D is rare in diet, occurring naturally only in fatty fish. A synthetic form of the vitamin is supplemented into milk.

The Vitamin D Society recommends asking your doctor for an annual blood test to check your Vitamin D levels. For more information on Vitamin D visit www.vitaminDsociety.org, www.vitaminDcouncil.com and www.Direct-ms.org.

For More Information: Contact Vitamin D Society Executive Director Joseph Levy at jlevy@vitaminDsociety.org.