Vitamin D not so good for you

A Murdoch academic has played a key role in the breakthrough finding that vitamin D might not be so good for the human body as currently believed.

It’s a big shift in medicine, and potentially just as significant as Professor Barry Marshall's discovery of bacteria causing stomach ulcers.

Struggling to take in what this means

Medical doctors are struggling to take in the implications of the find: US authorities encourage the addition of the vitamin to food and cereals.

Professor Trevor Marshall's paper was published in the prestigious Autoimmunity Reviews in February.

“What we have found is that the reason Vitamin D levels are so low in people with chronic diseases, including the autoimmune diseases, is because the body's metabolism is regulating them at this low level,” Professor Marshall said.

Vitamin D isn’t what we thought it was

Vitamin D is not actually a vitamin at all: it is a secosteroid key to the expression of over 913 genes which are key to many functions of the body, including the immune system.

A decade ago microbiologists were generally confident that most of the bacterial species capable of persisting in or on humans had been identified, but in the past few years this confidence has been shaken.

Advances in molecular genetic sequencing have revealed the presence of a vast human microbiota, much of which defies detection by culture-based methods.

D supplements can cause interference

Professor Marshall's work shows that supplements of vitamin D3, the recommended form for supplements, can interfere with vitamin D's ability to react with the vitamin D receptor, altering the genetic expression of the vitamin.

He says the concerns underscore the danger in recommending use of a substance when the exact manner in which it works to ameliorate disease is not fully understood.

Rates of chronic disease increasing with supplement use

“By most measures, rates of chronic diseases that ought to be reduced by such supplementation continue to escalate,” Professor Marshall aid.

“It's possible the statistical analyses and studies on which food additive recommendations are based are misleading, and a reassessment may be warranted.”

This is potentially more important than Barry Marshall's discovery that bacteria caused stomach ulcers, he added.

“Barry and I both studied at UWA and Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital in the early 1980s: he in medicine, me in bioengineering.

“Barry went on to show that bacteria cause ulcers, and we have now shown that bacteria also cause chronic diseases, including multiple sclerosis.

“The science is more complex today, but the discoveries are otherwise eerily similar.”