In a paper published in the August issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Norman identifies vitamin D’s potential for contributions to good health in the adaptive and innate immune systems, the secretion and regulation of insulin by the pancreas, the heart and blood pressure regulation, muscle strength and brain activity. In addition, access to adequate amounts of vitamin D is believed to be beneficial towards reducing the risk of cancer.
Norman also lists 36 organ tissues in the body whose cells respond biologically to vitamin D. The list includes bone marrow, breast, colon, intestine, kidney, lung, prostate, retina, skin, stomach and the uterus.
That’s from ScienceDirect, a site I despise because even though they post useful summaries of peer reviewed research, they don’t offer Bibtex summaries, links to the research, or even PubMed abstracts. All they have is a bibliographic nugget of their own lame summary. Who the fuck is this for? Junior high kids doing book reports? I mailed them once bitching about this and they gave some retarded non-response. Fucktards.
Anyway. If you haven’t looked into it you probably don’t know how much Vitamin D is produced by sunlight on skin, vs. how much you take in via dietary means. The former number is thousands of IU from even a brief exposure; the latter is very very little. What this means is that if you live in northern lattitudes, don’t sunbathe or work shirtless outside, and don’t take a supplement, then you’re vitamin-D deficient. So knock it off. Vitamin D is cheap and, contrary to what some people say, is almost impossible to OD on in its D3 form unless you down a whole bottle at once.