According to cancer prevention specialists, taking vitamin D3 daily appears to lower the risk of cancer by up to as much 50 percent.
The specialists at the Moores Cancer Center at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) Medical Center, say that 1,000 international units (IU) of vitamin D3 daily protects against colon, breast, and ovarian cancer.
The researchers are calling for prompt public health action to increase the intake of vitamin D3 as an inexpensive tool for prevention of diseases that claim millions of lives each year.
Previous studies by the same group, have shown the link between vitamin D deficiency and higher rates of colon cancer, and this new study also associates the same risks to breast and ovarian cancers.
Co-author Cedric F. Garland, a professor with UCSD's Moores Cancer Center and the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine at the UCSD School of Medicine, says a good example is breast cancer which will strike one in eight American women in their lifetime.
Though early detection using mammography reduces the mortality rates by about 20 percent, Garland says the use of vitamin D might prevent this cancer in the first place.
In conclusion the authors say that the high prevalence of vitamin D deficiency, combined with the discovery of increased risks of certain types of cancer in those who are deficient, suggests that the deficiency may account for several thousand premature deaths from colon, breast, ovarian and other cancers annually.
Of interest too is that the study discovered that those living in the northeastern United States, and individuals with higher skin pigmentation were at an increased risk of vitamin D deficiency.
This is because sunshine is needed for the human body to make vitamin D, and the increased skin pigmentation of African-Americans reduces their ability to synthesize vitamin D.
According to Garland African-American women who develop breast cancer are more likely to die from the disease than white women of the same age, and their survival rates are also worse for colon, prostate and ovarian cancers.