Vitamin D's Role in Fighting Cancer

Interviewer: We're here at the Cancer Control Convention.  Can you talk about the connection between Vitamin D and cancer?

Dr. Lucinda Messer: Absolutely.  I'm here to report the highly beneficial effects of having an optimal level of Vitamin D in your blood at all times, if you want to prevent cancer, and certainly once you have cancer.  Those levels, again, you want close to 100, maybe not much over.  You want to get checked regularly.  Somewhere between 80 and 120 is a dose that we know from research that helps control cancer cells.  Vitamin D controls cancer cells by apoptosis.  Apoptosis is self-cell destruction, self-suicide.  So when a cell becomes genetically unhealthy and differentiates, and turns into a mutant cell, a cancerous cell, then those cells, if you have optimal doses of Vitamin D, activated calcitriol in your blood stream, will commit suicide, or your body will help get rid of that cell, that unhealthy cell.  So very important that Vitamin D optimal levels will help control that.  Other things it does, another important aspect of Vitamin D is that it causes anti-angiogenesis.  Angiogenesis is when a tumor becomes big enough in your body, it starts developing little blood vessels.  It starts growing blood vessels, and the blood vessels go into your tissues to get the blood supply.  And that's how they live, and that's how they grow.  Well, Vitamin D in all it's glory helps stop the process.  It actually helps stop the blood vessel formation from the tumors.  It's considered a very strong, potent anti-angiogenic factor.  So that is one of it's most glorious things it does.  It's also been shown to halt tumor growth, if your levels are optimal.  That is the operative word.  You have to have optimal levels, and very few people do.  Even after years of reporting on it and talking about it, people don't quite understand that you have to have an optimal level of it.  So the tumor growth really got me.  I see it in my practice.  People start increasing their level of Vitamin D, and they go back to their oncologist.  I always work with oncologists.  We get CTs done, blood work done, and their tumors stop growing.  So, this is why I'm very in love with Vitamin D.  I'm still on the bandwagon researching it, and always use it in my practice.

Interviewer: And that type that you're talking about that can treat cancer, is that a kind that you can only get through a doctor?  Or is that just still an oral supplementation?

Dr. Lucinda Messer: When you take oral D3, if you take it in correct amounts, at certain times, with certain meals, by the way.  It's also a little bit picky because it doesn't want to be around magnesium or Vitamin A.  Even though those are synergistic co-factors, you just can't take them at the same time.  You also have to have enough fat in your diet, etc.  So, when you take enough Vitamin D, it goes through your liver and turns into 25-hydroxy-Vitamin D, and then it travels into the kidneys.  If you have good kidney function, it turns into 1,25-dihydroxy-Vitamin D.  So, 1,25, even though it's the activated version, still has to go into the receptor site to become this all powerful second story hormone called calcitriol.  So, it does have to go through a few pathways in your body to become that hormone.  But, the oral supplementation is the first step.  And again, you have to take it with food.  You have to take it usually with some sort of oily substance.  If you don't have any biliary problems, if you don't have any problem with digesting fats, it should get through.  It then travels to the liver, and then into the kidneys.  It will stop in the kidneys and help the kidneys out, if your kidneys are prioritizing it because you don't have enough.  But once you've had infiltrate, and once you've filled up your reservoir, and your tissues, and saturate all your fat cells, then your body can use it for the immune factors.