I just looked on the bottle of my multi-vitamin that I take and it read 300 iu of vitamin D. I take it twice a day. I’m dead curious after reading an interesting article in the Globe and Mail (you can read it here) whether vitamin D helps ward off cancer.

If what the article says is true then to be honest I’m wondering why schools aren’t giving it to children. Also, where are the ads for vitamin D with all of the statistics and research data backing it up? I’ve heard a few stories on it but really, it hasn’t exactly hit the mainstream of something that will help you NOT get cancer. Why aren’t we devouring this? The article alludes to vitamin D helping avert other diseases as well.

It seems to me that someone is missing out on the marketing boat for vitamin D. The same premise behind marketing messages reaching someone 5 times (my associate Jaime has heard 9 times) before someone buys it. Hearing about vitamin D or talking about it… with me I can recall reading about it approximately 2 times and talking about it 2 times.

I wonder where you can get vitamin D in food? I’ve been so focused on a nutritional arsenal to battle the big C.

The following is one of the many insightful excerpts.

Radical conservatives

The Canadian Cancer Society is one of the more conservative health-advocacy agencies, but last year became the first major organization in the world to embrace the idea of large-scale, population-wide vitamin D supplementation to combat cancer. It started recommending that white adults take up to 1,000 IU daily in fall and winter, and non-whites, because of their higher susceptibility to vitamin D insufficiency at northern latitudes, take that amount year-round. (Canada doesn’t keep national illness statistics by race, so the degree to which non-whites are being affected by ailments linked to low vitamin D levels isn’t known.)

The Canadian Pediatric Society followed suit shortly after, calling for pregnant and breastfeeding women to take 2,000 IU daily, with a goal of preventing childhood diseases.

The Canadian Cancer Society’s decision came after years of monitoring the research. Vitamin D “kept coming up. It kept hitting the bar that reaches your attention,” says Heather Logan, the society’s director of cancer-control policy.

“It wasn’t one study and that was the end of the story. There were multiple research studies continued to be published in peer-reviewed journals.”