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Lack of Sunlight Could Lead To Early Death
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Members of this community may want to venture out of the basement more often, because Dr. Harald Dobnig and his team have found that vitamin D deficiency leads to increased mortality. These results still hold when they take into account such factors as exercise and heart disease. Low vitamin D status has 'other significant negative effects in terms of incidence of cancer, stroke, sudden cardiac death and death of heart failure,' Dr. Dobnig said. The evidence of ill effects from low vitamin D 'is just becoming overwhelming at this point.' Vitamin D3 is usually produced by exposure to the UV-B in sunlight, but in high latitudes, especially in the fall and winter, insufficient UV-B gets through the atmosphere to produce enough vitamin D3, even with hours of exposure. The researchers are recommending that people at risk for deficiency take 800 IU of vitamin D3 daily. Just don't go overboard — as a fat-soluble vitamin, D3 is more capable of causing adverse effects at unnaturally high dosages. The human body tops out at producing about 10,000 IU per day." According to the Wikipedia entry linked above, the D2 (ergocalciferol) version -- available as a vegan product -- works approximately as well to supply humans with their needed vitamin D.
.. since pollution decreases sunlight penetration, whereas down south we have cleaner air and a lovely big ozone hole.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
This is EASY, people. It's not like they don't sell UVB 2% up to 10% daylight CPF screw in light bulbs at any decent pet store that carries reptiles.
It would be nice to know the proper balance between too much and not enough. Given the fact that too much will cause cancer and an equally alarming rate.
We'll all going to die!
This is just for my health
Lack of vitamin C will give you scurvy!
:D
Seriously, you only have to go to northern sweden/norway to see this in action. You'll find a combination of zombies and nutcases!
I suspect similar results in canda and russia
Lack of causes . But be careful cause excess of causes
I have this uneasy feeling that sooner or later, we're all going to die.
Loose lips lose spit.
and outside one may get onto these creatures, they call them women, strangely they all wear clothes and behave differently than in documentaries that we like to watch between coding sessions.
For all you basement people if you're like me and have a lack of D3 then take some meds. I my case its not because I don't go out (I do.. but not much) but due to some rare disease.
Time to add another UV tube to my growing collection of case mods.
If this were true, then Vampires would die young. But they're immortal. Thus this theory holds no water.
I should like, totally do science for a living.
Low levels of vitamin D have been implicated in the susceptibility and severity of attack in patients who have auto-immune diseases. Multiple Sclerosis and Rheumatoid Arthritis are two of the diseases that seem to show a link. Coversely, patients suffering from Sarcoidosis ( another auto-immune disease ) where the body produces too much vitamin D, may benefit from staying out of the sun and cutting vitamin D out of their diet.
you should live a healthy life if you don't want to die early.
does vitamin d in milk contain the same sub-elements as that found in UV? If not, would milk be a viable alternative to UV exposure at all?
Trying to install linux on my microwave, but keep getting a kernel panic...
I could make money from this....
1) Show article to constantly rained upon and miserably wet Irish population
2) Go catch some fish (Vit D) and sell it
3) Profit!!!!
4) Get rained on
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines
There's plenty enough light coming through even in winter. It's just that you usually don't really get exposed to much of it while sitting in a frickin' cubicle during the decidedly short days in winter.
I do not trust studies that tell me I have to take stuff to be healthy. Going out an hour a day is enough to produce enough vitamin D. We need so little of it to properly function. The true problem lies in the fact that we just are either too lazy to get out or have built our society around a schedule that doesn't allow for it.
This dude, in my opinion, is in the pockets of the pharmaceutic industry, trying to sell us more stupid medicine we don't really need.
This is gonna be an inconvenience when mankind decides to clog the skies to prevent environmentally friendly intelligent machines from getting their energy from the sun!
Dawkins Revisited: A person is shit's way of making more shit -- Steve Barnett, anthropologist.
The article acknowledges its own shortcomings: Vitamin D levels could possibly be used as a measurement of sunlight exposure in people not taking supplements and not conscientiously eating the proper foods. So when someone's chronically ill or massively overweight and doesn't go outside to exercise, their vitamin D levels will be decreased. Those people already have an increased 8 year mortality regardless of how much vitamin D they consume or have in their diet. It's like the studies "linking" coffee to lung cancer years ago: once it was realized that lots of people smoke when they drink coffee, those studies looked ridiculous. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confounding_variable
Well, that would explain the lower population number in Norway, for instance, where Wikipedia says that they are only 4.7 millions inhabitants in such a beautiful country.
If your vitamin D level gets down during winter and you catch a rainy summer, you're doomed!
deathmatch and early death, or exercising and long life... the choice is clear *starts up HL2*
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Haha! You guys may well be screwed, but us ginger-haired folks are sorted: we've evolved in such a manner that we produce our own vitamin D...
http://xkcd.com/313/
I always stand in the sun when I smoke. Do I break even?
Is it just me or is there a suspiciously low volume of comments so far for this particular topic.....methinks we /. readers should get out more and risk the blinding light. Recently I installed a bank of sun lamps emitting the D3 production wavelength over a beach lounger in a sandpit located pretty much right next to my scourge of an office chair, that are programed to flip on when I visit a beach in Second Life. I switch chairs (I know, I know....but I have to actually move my body for this step), strip to my Copacabana banana-hanger, lather-up any translucent body parts, grab my wireless lotion-proof keyboard and I'm livin' longer baby! A bunch of old monitors (hooded....it really is pretty bright) arrayed around me keeps the babes in view....but they still never seem to talk to me and I can't figure out why... And my boss is pissed about all the sand, "blah blah you track it everywhere around the CO blah-blah blah it's getting into the switches and Litespan multiplexers blah blah". Ok I must take your leave and head over to the virtual beach now, since the really freaky-hot avatars are roaming about at this hour...
Neckbeards have been linked to throat cancer.
Time to shave, you lazy bastards.
By the way, you smell like old hot dog water.
Last I checked the mortality rate was 100%
...I guess mom was right.
Disclaimer: IAAJD (I am a junior doctor) but this is NOT medical advice. Please consult your physician for your specific situation.
Vitamin D supplements come in two forms: ergocalciferol and cholecalciferol. Studies suggest that cholecalciferol (vitamin D3) increases serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25-OH-D) more efficiently than does ergocalciferol (vitamin D2). Milk in the United States has been fortified with vitamin D3 (the natural form made through sunlight) since the 1940. This was mandated and reduced the incidence rate of juvenile rickets by 85% in the United States.
Calcitriol is the most active metabolite of vitamin D. It can frequently cause hypercalcemia and/or hypercalciuria, necessitating close monitoring and adjustment of calcium intake and calcitriol dose. Therefore, it isn't recommended that calcitriol be given for vitamin D supplementation in osteoporosis. However, calcitriol or other vitamin D analogs are an important component of therapy for secondary hyperparathyroidism in chronic kidney disease.
Now to the meat and potatoes of this post. The intake at which the dose of vitamin D becomes toxic is not clear. In 1997, the National Academy of Sciences defined the Safe Upper Limit for vitamin D as 2000 IU/day. Newer data however indicate that higher doses are safe at least over a several-month period. Doses as high as 10,000 IU per day for up to five months were not associated with toxicity. It is important to inquire about additional dietary supplements (some of which contain vitamin D) that patients may be taking before prescribing extra vitamin D. Excessive vitamin D, especially combined with calcium supplementation may cause hypercalcemia, hypercalciuria, and kidney stones.
So be careful and only take the amounts listed on your supplement bottles and inquire with your doctor before starting anything. We have a mentality here in the United States that more is better. When it comes to the human body moderation is key.
As a side note, I also don't really understand the significance of Vitamin D's fat solubility making it any more or less dangerous in higher dosages.
Vitamin D is produced by the skin in response to certain wavelengths of ultraviolet light, and as such is not a true vitamin (since vitamins are substances we can't naturally produce -- it's a hormone). Vitamin D is also found in certain fats (e.g. cod-liver oil).
This basic form of Vitamin D gets processed by the liver into an second form (25-hydroxyvitamin D3), and then by the kidneys into the active form 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D3, which tells your body how much calcium to draw out of your food. If you don't have enough calcium in your diet, but enough Vitamin D, the body can even draw the calcium out of your bones. Calcium is also required for the correct transmission of brain signals, so too little vitamin D can also lead to seizures.
To veer back to the OP's question: whether the synthetic vitamin D additive to milk products (as opposed to the vitamin D we used to create in foods in the 1920's and 1930's using mecury lamp ultraviolet radiation) is Vitamin D or Vitamin D3 is pretty much irrelevant for our body, but I believe it is the latter, yes.
Aside: Did you know we can cure cancer with Vitamin D? Sadly, the dosis required is lethal to humans... they're working on it.
Antiquis temporibus, nati tibi similes in rupibus ventosissimis exponebantur ad necem.
You will prise my warm AMD only from my cold dead fingers! How dare anyone suggest I get out more.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
Sun...light?
Now you're just making stuff up!
I used to believe you, Slashdot. But now you're all 'sun' this, and 'outside' that, like all those other nutbags! Screw you guys! Go ahead, go outside, see if I care! Maybe you'll get eaten by one of those 'wild animal' things you people are always going on about. Like a..uh..what was it...beer? Bar? Oh, right... A bear! Maybe you'll get eaten by a bear! It'd serve you right!
This post was brought to you by the latter hours of a horrible caffeine bender which failed to see anything accomplished. Enjoy!
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
Do correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to remember that the problem with lipophilic substances is that they can lead to poisoning easier because they tend to accumulate in the fatty tissues of the body and cannot be excreted easily; an excess of water soluble vitamins on the other hand would be flushed out the next time you urinate. :)
Disclaimer: I'm not even a little bit of a doctor, so this might be completely wrong or misremembered...
-- Language is a virus from outer space.
My MD said it's nothing to worry about because I'll usually make the saving throw for death from vitamin deficiency due to my high stamina as an ogre.
Err, wait that was my DM...
Still, he does play a Cleric.
scientists try to scare us about global warming, but nature has a way to balance things out, we don't have to do anything to fight global warming:
with hotter temperatures, vampires get more sun, thus dying off. with less vampires to prey on pirates, pirate numbers explode, thus lowering global temperatures. with global temperatures down, vampires get less sun, rebound in population, and begin keeping piurate populations in check again
see the beauty and wonder of the natural world?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If this is true, what do they do about inmate populations in jails and prisons? Incarcerated persons often get no direct sunlight exposure. It will be interesting to see if changes are made.
Moderation in All Things... Especially Moderation - gurutc
If you are not aware of the work of Weston Price into nutrition and the effects of following the dangerous path we currently walk as a society you should be! His book is available from the Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation.
As for Vitamin D, try eating shrimp (and other sea foods) and the organ meats of animals (liver, kidney, etc. which were all commonly eaten in the recent past). These are the best sources, and they are available all year round.
The links between criminality and nutrition are absolutely fascinating. Things are not as they are meant to be. Things we call food are often no such thing.
My local grocery was completely out of decent-sized capsules of the stuff in the last few days.
[citation needed] please! I'm auburn too. :)
how is babby formed?
I am posting this from my backyard. Laptop + Wi-Fi FTW.
Here be signatures
You will prise my warm AMD only from my cold dead fingers! How dare anyone suggest I get out more.
Your terms are acceptable !That's odd, I was always under the impression that the mortality rate was 100%.
If Pastafarianism's prediction about the correlation between pirates and climate is true, then why didn't global temperatures take a nose-dive in the fourth quarter of 1999 when the original Napster hit the Internet?
"Children, though, as also being seen with increasingly low levels of Vitamin D--probably having a lot to do with parents insisting children not play outside due to safety issues"
I would wager that videogames and TV are the primary reason. Kids just don't play outside as much anymore even in safe areas. It's a shame.
So programmers will be dying younger, because they don't get enough sunlight.
And there will be fewer to begin with, because 20% fewer students are pursuing IT-related degrees.
Yet demand is going up. Therefore: More money for those intrepid few of us who survive!
I'm a perfectly adapted vitamin D producing machine.
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
I'm from Essex. They behave exactly like that.
Dealing with lawyers would be a lot less tedious if they all looked like Casey Novak.
This is why milk is fortefied with vitamin D. 1 cup of milk has 45% of your RDI. 1 bowl of cereal / day is all you need.
.
The best way is to look at the median lifespan - the age to which 50% of people reached or to look at life expectancy at age 20. Life expectancy at 20 didn't reach the 60's till the last century. There were certainly some lucky people who survived to age 70 or 80, but that was the exception rather than the rule. However the biggest gains in life expectancy in the modern era weren't because of level 1 trauma centers and ICUs. The big improvements were due to things like public sanitation, improved nutrition, vaccinations, refrigeration, and simple prenatal and antenatal care.
There's no evidence to suggest people died earlier 5,000 or 50,000 years ago -- and there's strong counter evidence for that during historical periods of the last 3-5k years. Um. No. The life expectancy at birth in the Bronze age, Upper Paleolithic, and Neolithic was all 33 years or less. If you assume a 30% infant mortality it still doesn't average out to approach modern life expectancy. And until the early 20th century, the average life expectancy at birth didn't cross 40. That's not even cutting edge research, that's textbook/encyclopedia data. However if you have some citations supporting your argument, please provide them..
Hobbes was right: life in the state of nature is "nasty, brutish and short".
The hydrophilic substances will happily circulate in the blood stream and excess will be flushed out by the kidneys. That's why, when you read closely the composition of most vitamin supplements, they advertise quantities as stupidly excessive as 3'000% the daily recommendation or Vitamin C (which is hydrophilic). Most of the excess will simply get peed out.
Lipophilic substances, if not handled properly (binds to blood transporter - like albumin or substance specific transporter - and processed in liver - which will convert them into soluble substances) tend to accumulate wherever there's fat :
skin, nerves, CNS, also in organs : inside the liver, inside the kidney (but get stuck in the basal membrane instead of getting flushed out), etc...
The fact that Vitamin D seem to be tolerated at high concentration despite being rather hydrophobic is probably due to the fact that this is a naturally occurring substance and the body has ways to deal with it anyway.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
It wouldn't be stamina. It would be your fortitude save. Your stamina is actually your constitution.
or elemental calcium unless it is artificially fortified.
However, in the US at least milk is a great source of antibiotics, bacteria (from puss) and all manner of hormones that the cows are regularly pumped with.
Now, enjoy your cereal and coffee.
By the way, vitamin D is not "found in UV light", it is produced by the human cells when exposed to UV light.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
"the therapy was an absolute success, the patient however didn't make it" :D
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
Actually all the studies that address "too much" involved sever sunburns in teen years.
There is no peer reviewed study that suggests normal exposure to sun imposes a high mortality.
Yet the press, over-reacting as usual, have scared people out of the sun and created a sunscreen industry overnight by failing to actually read the studies that were done.
I don't normally defend Big Media, but in this case they were reading press releases from the dermatologists, whom I suspect had previously bought a number pof shares in that industry.The reporters were acting in good faith on the authority of doctors.
Aside from that, I'm in total agreement.
You can't take the sky from me...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Good news, /. readers! It turns out we're going to die sooner that everyone else, so we can all get our brains transferred into computers and rule over the puny humans.
"Let's face it, it's a good story. Accuracy would kill it."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Are your friend. Yay imperfect UV shielding!
Given enough hydrogen, just about anything is possible.
Where do I get to mod this (+/-) 5 Tirade?
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
At first I heard that "sunscreen increases cancer risk" from an unreliabel source (but it was on the internet, so it had to be true!) but I then did my own searches.
Indeed it seems that there is a /slight/ correlation between sunscreen use. There is no solid explanation as of yet, but there are two basic theories:
So it seems sunscreen is at best called a "sunburn inhibitor" as that is all it really does. Current recommendations are to limit exposure, wear hats, and develop a tan without sunscreen and without burning.
But there is one thing for sure: use sunglasses. UV light speeds cataract formation. Cataracts are a normal part of the aging process, so if you live long enough you'll get them. But you can slow the development with UV protective glasses.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Pictures... Please.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
I was just coming to post exactly the same thing.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
...Seriously
Dr. Hibbert: "So you can see you have every disease, and a few we've never really seen. They've reached a sort of symbiance and are balanced in such a way that it isn't affecting you. ha ha ha."
Mr. Burns: "So what you're saying is i'm invincible?"
Dr. Hibbert: "Oh dear God no, the slightest breeze could kill y..."
Mr. Burns: "Invincible..."
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
I'm fucked then. 5 minutes of sunlight a day will be the death of me.
But too much sunlight causes cancer! Early death methnkzizbest.
Good website for Vitamin D info:
http://vitamindcouncil.org/
in summer, of course.
in antalya, mediterranean coast, southwestern turkey, it gets 40 degrees celsius in shadow, and 99% humid in the summer.
Read radical news here
I'm guessing that the 10 minute prescription is assuming that you are white and you live in middle United States during the summer. You might have to increase that by 10 times if under less favorable conditions.
Actually, we have better statistics than that. Say, from the Egyptians, we have plenty of records left of when someone died. You know, plaques, inscriptions, etc. So you have a somewhat random sample, and the ages at which they died.
So you can sorta plot a gauss curve, albeit one with a massive spike in the first 3 years, due to the infant mortality that you mention. But the more interesting part is what happens when you look past that spike, at the peak of the proper gauss curve. That's basically the age where, if you survived those infant years, you'd have a 50%-50% chance to be dead anyway.
And for the Old Kingdom period (i.e., a bit over 4000 years ago) that peak was in the 30's for men and in the 20's for women. By the New Kingdom (a bit over 3000 years ago), it had progressed to 40's and respectively 30's.
So, yes, they did live less. Seriously. Yes, there was massive infant mortality, but, no, you can't dismiss everything based on just that.
Yes, like with anything statistical, there were exceptions in both directions. There were the occasional guys who lived very long lives, but they were the exceptions, not the rule. They also tended to be the rather rich guys.
And I think one funny thing that may have helped confuse people about life expectancy back then, is the egyptian expression that someone lived to 110 years old. It's funny because it's just a metaphor. In their numerology, 110 was the perfect number, and they believed it to be also the absolute maximum someone can live, if they led a perfect life. So "he lived to 110", was basically just a way to say, "he lived a perfect life." Meaning typically that he was really well liked guy in the community. In practice most of those were dead in their 30's and 40's.
Basically it's just as much a metaphor as when we say that someone was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, or jumped the shark, or put his foot in his mouth, or the like. We don't mean it literally, and it's silly to build biological explanation based on it.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Getting enough vitamin D is especially more important for people with darker skin who live in the north, then it is for whites.
I wish these articles would put more emphasis on this aspect.
...vitamin D deficiency leads to increased mortality. Greater than 100%!?WoD, there is no fortitude save, and it would be your Stamina as Physical Resistance Trait. Though it makes me wonder why an Changeling would be reading /. and gaining Banality.
That is why you need to drink your milk, children.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
I regularly visit an all-inclusive resort in Cuba, and drink mojitos to massage vitamin D into my system...
Yeah, "milk," sure.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
... even moderation!
> As a side note, I also don't really understand the significance of Vitamin D's fat solubility making it any more or less dangerous in higher dosages.
Water-soluble vitamins just get peed out at the end of the day, per my understanding, while fat-soluble vitamins stick around longer, so it's easier for them to build up in the body. They're both still potentially dangerous in high doses, though, which is why I said they're "more" prone to it.
Maybe that wasn't the best way to explain it, but I only really included that factoid so that people don't go thinking that because they work the night shift, they really need to load up on vitamin D, because more isn't always better, just like you said.
- I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property
So is this "sunlight" thing a new calendar plugin for thunderbird?
Socrates was executed in his 70s.
The way MS progresses in different people, it can mean that years pass before any significant disability occurs. In the most common form, Relapsing-Remitting (RR), the relapses are like getting real old real quick, with long periods of relative normality in-between. I thought that the portrayal of MS on "The West Wing" was pretty good: it only rarely got in Prez. Bartlett's way, though he had a dramatic relapse on that last trip to China.
I've known I have MS for about 2-1/2 years now, though it was probably bubbling under for at least 5 years before that. Apart from one relapse so far, when I turned in to a grumpy old man for a week and had to work from home, the best word to describe it is "annoying". I've been fortunate with the timing, since I got in on a trial of an oral MS drug (no injections!), and that wheelchair is looking a long, long way off. 8)
(this is not a
You mean... I could die TWICE? :O
...that would be clot-blooded!
...Lorenzo / I'm into kinky crustaceans. I just discovered internet praWn.
So what... you die before noon?
http://www.derm.med.ed.ac.uk/06_teaching/redhairgen.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_hair#Evolution http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/001371.html
http://xkcd.com/313/
its real humidity measurement. evaporation is at high levels here.
Read radical news here
So, without a complete understanding of how Vitamin D,25 and it's metabolites like D,1,25 work, or how the behavior of either might be modified by disease, but merely a statistical correlation they jump to the post hoc propter hoc fallacy. They haven't any way from this result to show whether the low VitD was a preliminary symptom or a cause of the problem. Since high levels of VitD are known to be immunosuppressive, it is also a big leap to say it's either preventative or curative of anything.
I note that they did not try to force down D,25 levels (likely the only ones they measured), nor watched the long term effects of high dose D,25 supplementation. Without these kinds of studies, they really are way out on a limb to make any causation comments.
Here's study showing that disease (in this case TB) can down-regulate the amount of VitaminD in the body (making low VitD a symptom, not a cause). Davies PD, Brown RC, Woodhead JS: Serum concentrations of vitamin D metabolites in untreated tuberculosis. Thorax. 1985 Mar;40(3):187-90.