Vitamin D and Influenza

Vitamin D, if you have enough in your blood, stops influenza. Can it really be that simple ?

I blog'd about Swine Flu (H1N1) recently and came to the conclusion that the present outbreak is not a big worry. At least not a big worry compared to osteoporosis or something big of that nature. However come the Fall, after Swine Flu has had the chance to mutate while infecting the southern hemisphere during their Winter the situation might be very different. 6 months on Swine Flu might have turned into something to really worry about.



The solution to avoiding flu might be just to fool your body in believing that it's always Summer. Look at this chart showing Vitamin D concentrations in the blood through the year. This particular study followed a group of 45 year old Brit's to see what happened to their Vitamin D concentration. As you can see, even in Summer, Vitamin D was barely adequate (30 ng/ml is about as low as you'd want to go and 50 ng/ml is much better) and in Winter badly low. So this group of people were ripe candidates to get colds and flu.

I've blog'd about Vitamin D enough:

• Vitamin D
  
• Vitamin D - babies, children teenagers
• Vitamin D - from sunshine or food
• Vitamin D - get an accurate test

So when I came across On the epidemiology of influenza which links flu to Vitamin D, I thought I'd struck gold. This paper links low Vitamin D levels to the spread of flu of all kinds. This is part of the conclusions:
"Compelling epidemiological evidence indicates vitamin D deficiency is the "seasonal stimulus" [22]. Furthermore, recent evidence confirms that lower respiratory tract infections are more frequent, sometimes dramatically so, in those with low 25(OH)D levels [90-92]. Very recently, articles in mainstream medical journals have emphasized the compelling reasons to promptly diagnose and adequately treat vitamin D deficiency, deficiencies that may be the rule, rather than the exception, at least during flu season [40,41]. Regardless of vitamin D's effects on innate immunity, activated vitamin D is a pluripotent pleiotropic seco-steroid with as many mechanisms of action as the 1,000 human genes it regulates [93]. Evidence continues to accumulate of vitamin D's involvement in a breathtaking array of human disease and death. [40,41]"

The Vitamin D Council has more scientific papers than you could possibly read before this Fall's flu season. So the quick answer is take at least 1,000 IU's of Vitamin D every day and that should just be enough to have your bodies mechanisms to fight infections like colds and flu, fully primed and eager to fight off invaders.