1. The most important of these is that it encourages the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to advocate and provide funding for a system to educate health-care providers and practitioners as well as public health professionals and others, including patient advocates and community health workers, about the benefits of adequate levels of vitamin D.
2. It also advocates that the APHA have a representative on the 2010 panel for Dietary Guidelines for Americans who will speak about ways to improve vitamin D intake.
3. It recommends that Congress appropriate funding to conduct research into the many populations of our country in order to find specific vitamin D intakes that are associated with a reduced risk of chronic diseases.
4. It very importantly recommends that the Food and Drug Administration add vitamin D to the list of required nutrients that appears on the Nutrition Facts Panel that is required on all foods in the US marketplace.
5. The last and very important part of the “Action Statements” is that it urges the Department of Health and Human Services and the USDA to begin a campaign that will be pointed at the general public and based on the current scientific data without waiting for further publications.

You can read the complete set of action statements at this website:

www.apha.org

It’s very exciting to see such an important organization as the APHA come out so strongly in support of having all Americans normalize their vitamin D levels. As you know from my book this is been one of my missions as well.

When I finished writing my book, I knew that it was just the beginning. The Internet can keep us up to date on the latest findings on a daily basis, whereas a book once published is fixed until a new edition comes out.

I encourage you to sign up for the RSS feeds that will be connected with this blog. The book just recently went to press and already new information has come out in the medical literature. I will be updating this information to keep you informed on how this most powerful vitamin-hormone can keep you your family, friends and loved ones in a better state of health.

Give me your feedback and we will be in dialog.

I am delighted to tell you that the American Public Health Association has now put their policy statement regarding vitamin D on their website. (See link below)

I have carefully reviewed this groundbreaking document and would like to review it for you in a series of blog posts of which this is the first.

The title of the document is “A Call for Education and Research into Vitamin D deficiency/insufficiency”. The first part of the document defines vitamin D deficiency and insufficiency in exactly the way I defined it in The Vitamin D Revolution. They state that it is estimated that 30 to 40% of children and 40 to 50% of all adults in the United States are at risk of vitamin D deficiency. They also state, as I did in my book, it is estimated that worldwide there are one billion people at risk for vitamin D deficiency. They target the four populations in the United States who are at the highest risk for vitamin D deficiency (1) women of childbearing age; (2) breast-fed infants not receiving vitamin D supplementation; (3) people with dark skin including a large percent of African-Americans and Mexican-American adolescents and adults; and (4) elderly people.

The article then reviews scientific facts about vitamin D and its role in our metabolism, as well as the sources for getting vitamin D. It goes on to talk about the consequences of vitamin D deficiency and supplementing with vitamin D. They point out as I do that a simple blood test is all that is required to determine a person’s vitamin D level. They reiterate that the normal range is 30 to 100 ng per milliliter, not the old standard where 20 ng per milliliter was considered normal. They have, as I do in my book a section on excessive vitamin D, commenting, as I do, that it is very rare to have intoxication with vitamin D. And they specifically say that there is need for more research.

It is so exciting to me to see the American Public Health Association putting its full weight behind the scientific knowledge that is so solidly in the medical literature, with the goal of improving the health of the entire American population.

The next part of the document goes into the American Public Health Association’s action statements in regard to vitamin D and will be continued in my next blog post.

Reference

www.apha.org