Raising awareness so you and your family can avoid the dire health risks of vitamin D deficiency. All modern humans are tropically adapted mammals but many live above the 35th latitude where their technology, rather than their biology, has been used to adapt to the temperate and arctic conditions not encountered by their tropical ancestors. While this has been the case with ambient temperature where cold stress and hypothermia were immediately recognized and dealt with 40,000 years ago with clothing, fire, and shelters, there was another far more subtle stress that went unrecognized until the last 60 years. That stress at high latitudes was toxically low levels of UVB radiation, the component of sunlight that promotes the natural synthesis of vitamin D in skin exposed to it. "Vitamin" D is a hormone, not a vitamin, and its function is to promote (up-regulate) the activity, the production of proteins, of 3,000 genes out of a total of approximately 22,000. As a consequence, vitamin D deficiency causes the insufficient production of up to 3,000 proteins. This can slow down, corrupt, disrupt, or prevent an even larger number of chemical processes in which these proteins participate. When vitamin D deficiency is chronic, which is the case for more than a billion people now living above the 35th latitude, a wide array of pathologies of development, immune response, and other diseases develop. The manifestations of this high latitude sickness include more than 17 forms of cancer including breast, colon, prostate, and blood cancers, autism, all of the common autoimmune diseases, infertility, compromised immune systems, an array of skeletal and muscular diseases, type II diabetes, cognitive impairment, dementia and Alzheimer's disease, and many others. The deficient subcutaneous production of vitamin D cannot be corrected by diet as few foods other than oily fish contain it. So, humans who live at high latitudes must take a daily supplement to prevent the manifestatio
About the Author: The author received a Ph.D. in Anthropology from The University of Michigan in 1977 with a concentration in physical anthropology and is currently a Professor of Anthropology at Temple University. His specialty is unraveling and explaining complex theoretical issues related to the human condition. He lives in North Wales, Pennsylvania, with his wife Ada and daughter Hannah and has three grown sons, Aaron, David, and Benjamin, and five grandchildren, Lauren, Jeffrey, Megan, Adam, and Joshua.