Charlie Rose moderated another Brain Series with top Scientists in Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel at Columbia. http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/10929
Also present was the 91 year old Brenda Milner who made the break-through in treating parietal epilepsy. I was disappointed that she did not mention that those who have this disease often experiences being God or talking to God. Some Republicans?
In any case Professor Scott Small studies at Columbia which came very late in the session when Kandel asked Small to talk a little about his latest break-through! He was reluctant to talk about it, but he did reveal that he thinks that old age late onset Alzheimer's is a synaptic disease as I have often said which attacks a different adjacent part of the Parietal section of the brain than the gene based early onset attacks a cortical section of the brain.
It was Kandel who made made the stupid comment that Alzheimer's involves hundreds of genes! He also repeated the comment that exercise and intellectual thinking was necessary to prevent late-onset Alzheimer's. Brenda Milner with a bright smile who at 91 is sharp as a tack, said she never exercises.
What got me out off my seat was the last comment by Scott Small. He said that early studies indicate that late onset Alzheimer's Disease is due to insulin and sugar, probably high fructose Corn Sugar which results in the production of LDL-2, the deadly low density lipoproteins leading to heart disease and probably Alzheimer's. Normally the protein that so many scientists have condemned as causing Alzheimer's is needed for good health. Only when there is an excess is where the problem lies.
I am still thinking and reading about this implication based on a link generously supplied to me by Geraldine Perry who runs a great website http://www.TheHealthAdvantage.com . Don't forget the The in the address. Just health Advantage will take you to another website.
I will write a blog next week. There is still much to read!
These doubts about the miracle regarding vitamin D are not unusual because it normally takes 17 years for half of the doctors to apply a well proven treatment mode. One habit many intelligent people have adopted is that with so much uncertainty in everything, why not rely on the old tried and true. But the widespread use of sunscreens stopped us from making vitamin D in our skin because it blocked UVA so the old theories are obsolete.
Well, science and medicine advances and the reasons we came to believe that so little vitamin D was good for us is that we are enamored with experts. I am always skeptical, even with Nobel Prize winners in Economics. We got Milton Friedman, Becker, and Greenspan in the mess we are in today.
I was quite shocked that my doctors have agreed with me without having to twist their arms, once I gave them the facts. I guess I am lucky picking very good doctors by challenging them in my first encounter and see how the react. One doctor in New Jersey threw me out of the office after I questioned his conclusions about a treatment. He was once the head of the Medical Society in New Jersey! Politicians often make poor doctors.
My primary care doctor did not think early in 2009 that President Obama will be able to pass healthcare. I was more optimistic because of his past ability to convince right Wing Republicans at the Harvard Review to vote for him for head of the Harvard Review! He even convinced a staunch conservative Professor whose book he reviewed to give him a position teaching Constitutional Law in the Free Market School in Chicago!
Bill Moyers showed how to talk to liberals who hate the Healthcare Bill, one at The Nation magazine, Nichols, and the other at Harvard. He just simply asked them what is good about the bill? Both were eating out of Bill's hand by the end of the session!
One advantage I think I had over many very Ph.D. bright scientists and engineers from Ivy League Schools is that I had more common sense and think intuitively to solve almost every problem I have in science and in life, being careful to gather enough information to make full use of my intuitive abilities.
Two intuitive Economists, Paul Krugman and Joseph Stieglitz Nobel Prize winners in Economics are unusual because they have both common sense and an intuitive mind. they have common sense and think very well intuitively. I suspect many Nobel Prize winners are able to think intuitively, but don't admit that.
The Chicago Economists including Obama's advisor tend to think in how many of us think. We select what supports our beliefs in all we read, hear, and see and reject and forget contrary arguments, no matter how good. I know this so I try to fight hard to give the opposite side of Tracks a serious consideration. I read serious conservative books and magazines and columnist such as David Brooks.
Powerful Intuitive Thinking: Most scientists who made huge breakthroughs in science and other endeavors such as Gladwell got their theory intuitively by being able to correlate disparate information which often seem contradictory to just a logical mind. Einstein was a powerful intuitive thinker.
In contrast, most Americans do poorly in gut intuitive thinking based on very little information in their brain which was illustrated in the book Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, who has come up with "obvious" correlations once he has announced them. He was describing an expert in painting forgeries who knew immediately that a painting was a fake, but did not know how he came to that conclusion which unfortunately Gladwell emphasizes this later in the book.
Most readers missed this key point including book reviewers who really don't read very much of the book they review except for reviewers like Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times and Washington Post's Michael Dirda and Ron Charles. She has wonderful reviews on fiction, but her conservatism shows when she reviews political books.
I started becoming interested in vitamin D when I became aware that our body can produce up to 22,000 IU of Vitamin D in our skin by just 15-30 minutes in the sun about 3-4 years ago and started following the medical and scientific literature. I was simply shocked that practically no publications were available. I guess no one was interested in studying the effects of cheap vitamin D, especially Big Pharma and Academics who gets funding from the government only which had been cut drastically by George W. Bush.
Bush also stopped the importation of a French Sunscreen long approved and used in Europe and Canada. I could not convince my fellow researchers not to use sunscreen in their skin formulations, but I failed. Everyone uses sunscreen now in skin cream, most without UVA protection.
I knew then that UVA, the longer wavelength UV radiation from the sun gets through the surface skin and activates melanin or tanning element. Although very few want to say it or studied it, melanoma results from the mutation of melanin to cause melanoma. Finally in November 2006, Bush allowed the French product into the USA because American companies has produced an adequate substitute UVA. But the three good ones are not the ones that most Americans are using. Google ABC news and Sunscreens. When I looked after I saw the program on ABC, the corporate press/media ignored the implication. I am sure McCain was using the popular sunscreens which led to recurrent melanoma on his face. Maybe someone or his doctor let him know the best sunscreens to use with UVA protection.
At Brigham Young University in Utah, scientists have started a double blind study which will take decades, I assume, to complete. What has been done so far are studies of many people who get diseases and check their vitamin D use. A sophisticated statistical analysis taking into account contrary factors to make all patients as alike as possible. I do not know if they looked at the correlation between the heavy use of UVB sunscreens on general health.
I read in the 1980s when heavy use of sunscreens started in places like sunny Australia. Melanoma mushroomed including Sweden! The smart Swedish scientists assumed it was the sunscreen use.
The Australians scientists where some of the first to start correlating Melanoma to sunscreens. Australian has lots of Irish which were exiled there by the British Empire a couple of years ago. Those who used no sunscreens except a shirt and a hat in one province had very low melanoma rates while a province with heavy sunscreen use cholecalciferol (pronounced koh·luh·kal·sif·uh·rawl) in the skin is the single most important fact every person should know about vitamin D—a fact that has profound implications for the natural human condition.Technically not a "vitamin," vitamin D is in a class by itself. Its metabolic product, calcitriol, is actually a secosteroid hormone that targets over 2000 genes (about 10% of the human genome) in the human body. Current research has implicated vitamin D deficiency as a major factor in the pathology of at least 17 varieties of cancer as well as heart disease, stroke, hypertension, autoimmune diseases, diabetes, depression, chronic pain, osteoarthritis, osteoporosis, muscle weakness, muscle wasting, birth defects, periodontal disease, and more. Vitamin D's influence on key biological functions vital to one's health and well-being mandates that vitamin D no longer be ignored by the health care industry nor by individuals striving to achieve and maintain a greater state of health.
If well adults and adolescents regularly avoid sunlight exposure, research indicates a necessity to supplement with at least 5,000 units (IU) of vitamin D daily. To obtain this amount from milk one would need to consume 50 glasses. With a multivitamin more than 10 tablets would be necessary. Neither is advisable.The skin produces approximately 10,000 IU vitamin D in response 20–30 minutes summer sun exposure—50 times more than the US government's recommendation of 200 IU per day!
HOW TO GET ENOUGH VITAMIN D
There are 3 ways for adults to insure adequate levels of vitamin D:
- regularly receive midday sun exposure in the late spring, summer, and early fall, exposing as much of the skin as possible (being careful to never burn).
- regularly use a sun bed (avoiding sunburn) during the colder months.
- take 5,000 IU per day for 2–3 months, then obtain a 25-hydroxyvitamin D test. Adjust your dosage so that blood levels are between 50–80 ng/mL (or 125–200 nM/L) year-round.
VITAMIN D'S CO-FACTORS
Vitamin D has co-factors that the body needs in order to utilize vitamin D properly. They are:
- magnesium
- zinc
- vitamin K2
- boron
- genestein
- a tiny amount of vitamin A
Magnesium is the most important of these co-factors. In fact, it is common for rising vitamin D levels to exacerbate an underlying magnesium deficiency. If one is having problems supplementing with vitamin D, a magnesium deficiency could be the reason why.
PARTICIPATE IN OUR VITAMIN D TESTING STUDY!
As I said in our last newsletter, the Vitamin D Council is attempting to compare vitamin D blood test results of Quest and LabCorp. We are willing to pay your costs, up to $100.00, once we get copies of both tests results, drawn on the same day, and your receipts.
To participate, you need to find a doctor or clinic in your area that uses Quest and call your doctor and arrange for a 25-hydroxy-vitamin D blood test done by Quest. This will cost anywhere from $50 to $150 dollars.
In the meantime, you will need to arrange to have your blood tested by LabCorp the same day. Thus, you will be having your blood drawn twice on the same day, one sample sent to Quest and the other sample sent to LabCorp.
The easiest and cheapest way to arrange for the LabCorp test is through Life Extension Foundation, who emailed me to help the Council out with this study. Just call 1-800-544-4440 and let the operator know you are ordering this test in conjunction with the Vitamin D Council study. The price will be $35.25 for the LabCorp 25(OH)D test through Life Extension; this price is only for those participating in this study.
This will be an ongoing study in which those interested may participate anytime within the next year, beginning in March 2010.
Correction by Jim Kawakami: Reference left for the Vitamin D Council which the Understanding of Vitamin D was taken from. http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/
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