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I like to study in the morning after I do my PACE workout. It’s quiet, and the sun I get on my back patio here in South Florida is warm and pleasant early in the morning. It feels like my own personal bottle of vitamin D shining down on my skin. I thought about that yesterday in particular as I was reading up on the newest research on Alzheimer’s disease and how I can help my patients and their spouses. I get a lot of patients who come to me saying their mother or husband has the disease, and what can I do to help them? As I was browsing one database, I came across a new study in the prestigious journal Neurology. Researchers from Exeter University in England and the University of Michigan followed 1658 people who were healthy when the study started, with no dementia or Alzheimer’s. Of the 141 people who developed dementia or Alzheimer’s, they found a shocking 225% greater risk for people who got the least vitamin D.1 If you’ve been receiving my letters to you for a while now, you’ve read a lot about vitamin D for its role in health. It prevents 17 different kinds of cancers, and helps you build strong bones so you can avoid osteoporosis. Vitamin D also lowers inflammation, improves mood, boosts your immune system, lowers your risk of heart disease, and helps prevent diabetes. And here we have another piece of evidence that staying out of the sun – our main source of vitamin D – is contributing to many of the diseases that are the most prevalent today. People with Crohn’s disease, osteoporosis, prostate cancer, breast cancer and those who have heart attacks are also overwhelmingly short on vitamin D. Problem is, if you don’t live in South Florida or another very sunny place, it’s going to be tough to get all the vitamin D you need for optimal health just from sunlight. A study done in the city of Calgary – one of the sunniest places in Canada – almost every person measured had a vitamin D deficiency … 97 percent of them! It prompted Canadian authorities to encourage more vitamin D intake.2 In the study I mentioned earlier, the group of people that had the least occurrence of Alzheimer’s had a blood level much higher than what mainstream medicine recommends. The current national guideline that says minimum blood serum should be 20 ng/ml, which would mean getting 600 IU a day. The people who avoided Alzheimer’s got much more vitamin D. So how do you get enough vitamin D to help prevent diseases like Alzheimer’s? I still recommend you go outside for 20 minutes in full sunlight every day if you can. Take a walk for 20 minutes or do some exercise. Sit on a bench and read the morning paper. Or sit outside and read or study for a bit, like I do. I also recommend you stay away from commercial sunblocks. They can have toxic ingredients that may increase your risk of cancer … plus they stop you from making vitamin D from sunlight. If you can’t get outside, or if you live someplace that doesn’t have enough sun, you can do something to boost your vitamin D that I learned years ago but I haven’t talked about a whole lot. You already know that your skin makes vitamin D in response to sunlight shining on it. But what you may not know is that mushrooms, even after they’re picked, can do the same trick. In fact, a few years ago I enjoyed reading the book Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World by mycologist Paul Stamets. He knows so much about mushrooms and health that he’s now an advisor at the Program of Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona Medical School. I already knew mushrooms are the only vegetable with vitamin D. But Stamets did a study where he picked shiitake mushrooms that had been grown indoors and placed them gills-up in the sunlight for six hours. Their vitamin D content shot up from around 110 IU of vitamin D per 100 grams to a pretty remarkable 46,000 IU.3 That means all you have to do is eat around 10 grams of sun-dried mushrooms to get at least the 5,000 IU a day I recommend. For cancer and Alzheimer’s prevention and brain health, try to get at least 10,000 IU (1 IU is equal to 40 micrograms). Drying and storing the mushrooms is pretty easy to do.
The mushrooms should be good for at least a year. Then you can do like I do and eat a few mushrooms to get a good start on the vitamin D you’ll need for the day. To Your Good Health, 1. Littlejohns T, Henley W, Lang I, et al. “Vitamin D and the risk of dementia and Alzheimer disease.” Neurology August 6, 2014. Epub ahead of print.
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