Although Vitamin D, the sunshine vitamin, gets little media attention, it is, surprisingly, a good tool in the fight against cancer.
Animal and epidemiological studies are suggesting that sufficient vitamin D may prevent or even treat many cancers such as lymphoma, colon, prostate, skin, and lung cancer.
Studies in animals have found that vitamin D can help kill off tumour cells, and epidemiological studies have also found that elderly people with low vitamin D appear to be more susceptible to cancers.
Black people with black pigments which absorb the ultraviolet rays thus reducing vitamin D synthesis, have more cancers, and people in the northern hemisphere, where there is less sunshine, have more cancers.
Even though vitamin D has not been clinically proven to be a cancer-fighter a dispute is unlikely, but there is likely to be a debate on the best way to access vitamin D and how much it is needed to have an anti-cancer effect.
The two easiest ways of getting Vitamin D are exposure to sunshine and eating a vitamin D rich diet. Too much sunshine may promote skin cancer and ordinary diets do not offer enough vitamin D.
Milk is usually fortified with vitamin D-2, which is not as good as D-3 which is best used by the body.
An excellent source for vitamin D is fish oil, particularly fish liver oil, but it is expensive and often not widely available, whereas sunshine is cheap and readily available.
Some experts believe that the risk of life-threatening skin cancer from sunshine exposure is lower, and although 570,000 cases of skin cancer are diagnosed each year in the U.S., only 7,770 are found to be deadly melanoma.
New research by <<>> professor Edward Giovannucci suggests that sunshine-induced vitamin D might prevent much more cancer cases than skin cancer cases caused by sunshine.
Too much vitamin D in the body can do more harm than good, and dietary vitamin D supplements can either offer you too little or too much vitamin D, also many vitamin D supplements come with other vitamins such as vitamin A which lessens the effect of vitamin D.
An added problem is that the only way to assess if your body has an adequate level of vitamin D supplementation is by a blood test, which is impractical on a frequent basis, and the recommended daily allowance is itself a subject of debate.