Nov-03-2009
Believe it or not, the vitamin D you receive from the rays of the sun may possibly facilitate in enhancing the response of your immune system to every variety of flu viruses, together with H1N1. According to a researcher in the United States, using vitamin D dietary supplements is likely to shield you from the H1N1 virus.
William Grant, the founder of the Sunlight, Nutrition and Health Research Center in California, assets that vitamin D combats the general seasonal influenza as well as H1N1 in many different manners. Basically, researches undertaken during the last few years have established that vitamin D assists you to defend against the flu by backing up the reaction of your immune system towards viruses.
In fact, a research conducted on African-American women in the post-menopausal stage and who were suffering from vitamin D insufficiency established that women who received 2,000 IU of vitamin D daily faced less than 90 per cent risk of being affected by the seasonal flu compared to women who were given placebo.
While scientists are yet to undertake any examinations in a random arrangement on H1N1, William Grant said that the studies conducted thus far demonstrate that vitamin D will also prove to be effective in thwarting the spread of this virus. According to him, H1N1 is basically dependent on certain seasons and the five groups that are known to have more hostile consequences from H1N1 are all identified as suffering from insufficiency of vitamin D. These five groups include aboriginal people, pregnant women, people suffering from type II diabetes, obese people as well as children having neurological diseases.
Well the moot question is how one makes out that he or she is suffering from dearth of vitamin D. To be precise, if you reside in Canada, you are certain to be suffering from vitamin D deficiency during the winter months. According to William Grant, who is funded by the vitamin D Society in Canada and Bio-Tech Pharmacal, a pharmaceutical firm in the United States that manufactures vitamin D dietary enhancements, asserts that one cannot obtain enough of vitamin D from sunlight during the winter months. "It's just impossible," he says. Hence, Grant suggests that in order to make up for the deficiency of this variety of vitamin, one should take a dietary supplement of 1,000 IUs of vitamin D or more daily. In case you are residing in Canada and have not been taking vitamin D for quite some time, you need to take huge measures of this type of vitamin daily - probably 10,000 IUs of vitamin D daily for a number of days and then decrease the intake to around 2,000 IUs or 4,000 IUs of vitamin D every day as may be required during the season when people contract the flu most. It may be noted here that as per the daily dosage recommendations of the Canadian Cancer Society, the majority of vitamin D supplements available in the market are tablets containing 1,000 IU of the vitamin.
Even as the Health Canada is presently assessing the health advantages of taking vitamin D dietary enhancements, the organization suggests that people belonging to the age group between one and fifty years ought to take a daily dosage of 200 IU of this vitamin. Health Canada recommends that this can be achieved by drinking at least two glasses of 500 ml of milk. People aged over 50 years are advised to take 400 IUs of vitamin D daily, but they should never exceed a dosage of 2,000 IUs on a single day. However, William Grant disagrees with these recommendations saying that this is hardly enough to make any distinction to your immune system. Grant says, "Taking 400 IUs of vitamin D supplements does not make any difference." Substantiating his view, the researcher asserts that if an individual is out in the sun throughout the day during the summer months in Canada, he or she will receive a minimum of 10,000 IUs of vitamin D every day.
If all these discussion and Grant's views baffle you, you should talk to your physician. Get their recommendations for your particular case and also think about having the intensity of vitamin D in your system examined.
