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Showing posts with label Vitamin D3 could save your life. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Vitamin D3 could save your life. Show all posts

Tuesday, 18 September 2012

Vitamin D3 could save your life, pretty much.

http://hepatitiscresearchandnewsupdates.blogspot.co.nz/2012/09/d-livering-message-importance-of.html#.UFoZ4bJlTzw

What we have here is the full-text of a very good review paper on vitamin D and liver disease, including chronic Hep C, on the Hepatitis C Research and News blog.
The review is from the latest Journal of Hepatology.
This is good stuff, very thorough, and lacking the usual "vitamin D can be toxic, so you should be too scared to take our advice" hand-wringing that usually weakens the message when it trickles down to the Hep C community through the usual suspects.
All the fat-soluble vitamins are critical for surviving viral hepatitis, especially retinol, D3 and K2 (sourcing extra vitamin E in the diet is less important if the dietary fats are relatively saturated, but tocopherols and tocotrienols may be useful as part of an antioxidant regime). Selenium - a mineral needed to prevent peroxidation of fats - and carotenoids, which require fats for absorption, are also protective factors, but carotenoids are not a substitute for retinol.

See Plasma Selenium Levels and Risk of Hepatocellular Carcinoma among Men with Chronic Hepatitis Virus Infection for some population data on selenium, retinol and carotenoids. Although tocopherol - vitamin E - made no impression in these stats, the best dietary sources of tocopherol are exactly the oils high in linoleic acid - vegetable omega 6 - that promote liver fibrosis; so there may yet be a protective effect of tocopherol that is cancelled out by the context of the foods that are supplying it in this study. Vitamin E is necessary for maximizing the conversion of carotenoids to retinol. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0891584900002963
Vitamin K2: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17541221