Thursday, June 21, 2007

More news about the sunshine vitamin. It's free!

Who would have known, the sun is a life-renewing force. It makes vitamin D, and in the process it literally changes the health of the cells in the organism. Vitamin D gets rid of the odd cell. It gets rid of cancerous cells and it makes them self-destruct. What a neat concept. It reads like science fiction but is actually true. Research has shown that vitamin D promotes apoptosis. Like poof! and the bad cells are gone. The one organ that foils the scheme is the kidney. The kidney is really vital for the manufacture of the potent vitamin D metabolite calcitriol. And if your kidney has a defect in which it can't make calcitriol, the person gets osteomalacia or in a child rickets. The whole thing is actually very complicated. But still it all starts with the sun. Now once the kidney has made calcitriol, this hormone has to get to the intestines to empower the receptors to absorb calcium. What I didn't know until recently is that the receptors are only functional when they have zinc. They are zinc-finger proteins. I just read that zinc deficiency can cause rickets in monkeys, and it is assumed that it affects humans the same way. Interesting!!! Thanks to the internet, I found connections I would never have found otherwise.


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