Note that the study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine makes absolutely no causal relationship between depression and osteoporosis. It only points out a correlation. Leaping to the conclusion that one disease actually causes another disease is a common error of intellectually challanged journalists who have no understanding of basic logic or the difference between causation and correlation. The truth is that many news reports that claim one disease "causes" another are blatantly wrong: Most of these correlated diseases simple have a common root cause.

Depression and osteoporosis share a common cause: Chronic vitamin D deficiency. A lack of vitamin D in your body will make you depressed. It will also cause your bones to become brittle, leading to a diagnosis of osteoporosis. Vitamin D, you see, is necessary for the body to successfully use calcium, and if you don't have sufficient levels of vitamin D in your body, you can take all the calcium you want and you'll never boost bone mineral density.

The vast majority of Americans (and Canadians and Brits, for that matter) are chronically deficient in vitamin D. Estimates range anywhere from 60 percent to 75 percent of the population, depending on whom you ask and which geographic region you're talking about. People who live closer to the equator (in Southern U.S. states, for example, or parts of Australia) get more sunlight and therefore have lower rates of vitamin D deficiency. People who live in rainy climates where clouds block the sun most of the year have much higher rates of vitamin D deficiency.

Vitamin D deficiency also strongly promotes breast cancer, prostate cancer and other cancers. And wouldn't you know it: Breast cancer rates are lowest in Southern U.S. states. Depression rates, at the same time, are highest in Seattle and similar places where clouds block out the sun.

To say that depression "causes" osteoporosis is remarkably ignorant. It's a mistake that a seventh-grade science student might make on a school paper, but I would hope that adult medical research and news reporters would at least be intelligent enough to get past this simple logic error. Saying that depression "causes" osteoporosis is as silly as claiming that depression causes cancer, or that osteoporosis causes cancer. All three of these have the same common cause.

There is a great reluctance in both conventional medicine and the mainstream media (which is largely funded by drug ads, after all) to admit that a nutrient has any importance whatsoever in the prevention of disease. Modern medicine likes to pretend that nutrition has absolutely no role in human health; that diseases are largely a matter of luck; and that only expensive pharmaceuticals (not nutrients) can prevent or treat any disease.

The idea that a nutrient like vitamin D — available free of charge from sunlight — might actually prevent depression, osteoporosis and cancer all at the same time is downright horrifying to conventional medicine. How would doctors, hospitals and drug companies handle the loss of tens of millions of revenue-generating patients if people suddenly learned the truth about vitamin D and started preventing all three of these diseases at home, without a prescription, and without paying any fees whatsoever?

Conventional medicine doesn't like to admit that sunlight has any healing powers whatsoever. In fact, it goes out of its way to try to scare people into avoiding the sun, claiming the sun actually causes cancer, and that everybody should wear sunscreen all the time — a product that almost always contains numerous chemicals that actually do promote cancer!

Conventional medical researchers are almost always funded by commercial interests, too, meaning they're not really interested in looking for free of natural cures for disease. They're looking for a way to scare the public into getting more disease "screenings," taking more pills and submitting to more invasive medical tests so that patients can be diagnosed and then "treated" with high-profit prescription drugs. It's all about recruiting patients into their profitable medical scam where diseases are never prevented or cured but managed with a lifetime of extremely expensive pharmaceuticals.

To tell people the truth about vitamin D would cost Big Pharma billions of dollars in lost profits from treating all the diseases caused by vitamin D deficiency. This reporting about the link between depression and osteoporosis brings up several important concerns:

1. The medical community is incapable of identifying the common nutritional causes behind correlated diseases, even when those causes should be obvious.

2. The mainstream media is incapable of accurate scientific reporting on the nutritional causes of disease.

3. Both mainstream journalists and medical researchers remain nutritionally ignorant.

4. The public is being routinely misled by the mainstream media on health issues.

Now, based on this reporting, you're going to have women suffering from osteoporosis who run out and get on antidepressants, thinking that the SSRI drugs will reverse their osteoporosis.

Understand: This is exactly what Big Pharma wants to accomplish with this news! The whole point of this exercise in junk science, lousy reporting and astonishing nutritional ignorance is to get more women to take more drugs. It's really as simple as that.

In order to accomplish that, they have to get the medical researchers, the mainstream media and members of the public to all play along and pretend that vitamin D has nothing to do with these diseases. They also have to get everybody to pretend that antidepressant drugs are a treatment for osteoporosis — an idea that's utter nonsense and, in fact, may be the exact opposite of what's really true. Notice, for example, that the women in the study showing the lowest bone density were already on antidepressant drugs. So why didn't the mainstream media report, "Antidepressant Drugs Cause Osteoporosis?"

The answer, of course, is because that would hurt drug sales. So instead, they report, "Depression Causes Osteoporosis" and somewhere in the story they repeat the quote from the researchers claiming that taking antidepressant drugs might actually reverse osteoporosis!

Conventional medical researchers around the world are scratching their heads over new research published in the Archives of Internal Medicine that shows a strong correlation between depression and osteoporosis. Amazingly, none of them apparently have the presence of mind to consider the simple, common cause behind both conditions: Chronic vitamin D deficiency.

Full Article: Depression, Osteoporosis Correlation Misreported by Junk Science Media, Ill-Informed Health Researchers

vitamin D recommendation to 2,000 IU per day, especially during the fall and winter—and year-round if you don’t get much sun exposure. Some people, however, require much larger doses to bring their blood levels up to normal.

As our readers know vitamin D is naturally synthesized by the body during exposure of the skin to sunlight. As little as 30 minutes a day of sun on the face and hands for darker-skinned people and 15 minutes for lighter-skinned people can cause the body to synthesise all the vitamin D required for regular needs. Most people, however, don't receive adequate sunlight, or they block sunlight by using sunscreen, depriving their bodies of the ultraviolet radiation necessary to produce vitamin D. Recent research shows that 92 percent of black babies and 66 percent of white babies born in the United States are now born in a state of vitamin D deficiency.

http://www.NewsTarget.com/022104.html

These amazing effects were achieved on what many nutritionists consider to be a low dose of vitamin D. Exposure to sunlight, which creates even more vitamin D in the body, was not tested or considered, and the quality of the calcium supplements was likely not as high as it could have been. In addition to that it was in all likelihood calcium carbonate and not high-grade calcium malate, aspartate or similar forms. This means that if you take high-quality calcium supplements and get lots of natural sunlight exposure or take premium vitamin D supplements like the one's you get from fish oil, you could easily have a greater reduction than the 77 percent reduction recorded in this study.

One of the reasons you see far more health issues in the winter is a lack of exposure to sunlight, which may lead to low vitamin D levels unless you supplement as we have discussed in the past. The most recent studies indicate the ideal level of vitamin D is far higher than the 400 IU DV/RDA.

Cutting-edge scientists recommend 700 IU to 2,000 IU per day. Vitamin D is now considered safe up to 10,000 IU per day. Make sure you take a good multi-vitamin with at least 700 IU of vitamin D or take a 1,000 IU to 2,000 IU vitamin D supplement with your multi-vitamin.

There was a meta-analysis published in the 2007 edition of the journal Pain. Authors reviewed seventeen randomized controlled trials looking at the effects of omega-3 fatty acids in regard to relieving joint pain. It was ascertained that supplementation with omega-3 fatty acids for three or four months reduced reported joint pain intensity, minutes of morning stiffness, number of painful and/or tender joints along with reducing consumption of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory medication.

There was yet another study of the benefits of fish oil published in the May 2007 American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. In it, overweight volunteers with poor blood pressure and cholesterol health were randomly assigned to receive fish oil, fish oil and exercise, sunflower oil or sunflower oil and exercise. Subjects consumed 6 grams of tuna per day, equivalent to about 1.9 grams of omega-3 fatty acids. Other subjects consumed 6 grams of sunflower oil a day. The exercise groups walked three days a week for 45 minutes. It was found that those in the fish oil supplemented group had healthier triglyceride and HDL cholesterol levels, as well as healthier function of the inner lining of the arterial walls. Both fish oil and exercise independently reduced body fat.

Another interesting study was published in the Archives of Internal Medicine involved over 25,000 adults between ages 35 and 65 who were followed for over ten years up to 2005. During that time, 844 developed poor blood sugar health. Those with the highest cereal fiber intake had a reduced incidence of developing increased blood sugar by 28%. Magnesium intake showed no effect in the study. However, a meta-analysis involving nine clinical trials on fiber intake and eight on magnesium intake showed a 33% reduction in the risk of developing poor blood sugar health with highest cereal fiber intake. The meta-analysis also linked high magnesium intake to a 23% reduction in developing poor blood sugar health. Interestingly enough, fruit and vegetable fiber content did not appear to have any effect.

. The elderly are much more likely to die from heart attacks in the winter than in the summer.

. Flu disappears after the longest day of the year (summer solstice).

. Flu is more common in the tropics during the rainy season.

. Ingesting cod liver oil (one of the richest food sources of vitamin D) reduces viral respiratory infections.

. Children exposed to sunlight are less likely to get colds.

. Russian researchers discovered that UVB sunlamps reduced colds and flu in schoolchildren and factory workers, by producing vitamin D in the skin.

. The elderly who live in countries like Norway that have high vitamin D consumption are less likely to die in the winter.

. Children with vitamin D deficiency (resulting in rickets) suffer from frequent respiratory infections.

. Physicians who have given high doses of vitamin D to children who were constantly sick from colds and flu found the children were suddenly free from infection.

. Dark-skinned individuals, with their lower vitamin D levels, are more likely to die from influenza and pneumonia than lighter-skinned people are.

Now for Some appalling Vitamin D Deficiency Statistics:

32% of doctors and med school students are vitamin D deficient.
• 40% of the U.S. population is vitamin D deficient.
• 42% of African American women of childbearing age are deficient in vitamin D.
• 48% of young girls (9-11 years old) are vitamin D deficient.
• Up to 60% of all hospital patients are vitamin D deficient.
• 76% of pregnant mothers are severely vitamin D deficient, causing widespread vitamin D deficiencies in their unborn children, which predisposes them to type 1 diabetes, arthritis, multiple sclerosis and schizophrenia later in life. 81% of the children born to these mothers were deficient.
• Up to 80% of nursing home patients are vitamin D deficient.

Diseases and Conditions Caused by Vitamin D Deficiency:

• Osteoporosis is commonly caused by a lack of vitamin D, which greatly impairs calcium absorption.
• Sufficient vitamin D prevents prostate cancer, breast cancer, ovarian cancer, depression, colon cancer and schizophrenia.
• "Rickets" is the name of a bone-wasting disease caused by vitamin D deficiency.
• Vitamin D deficiency may exacerbate type 2 diabetes and impair insulin production in the pancreas.
• Obesity impairs vitamin D utilization in the body, meaning obese people need twice as much vitamin D.
• Vitamin D is used around the world to treat Psoriasis.
• Vitamin D deficiency causes schizophrenia.
• Seasonal Affective Disorder is caused by a melatonin imbalance initiated by lack of exposure to sunlight.
• Chronic vitamin D deficiency is often misdiagnosed as fibromyalgia because its symptoms are so similar: muscle weakness, aches and pains.
• Your risk of developing serious diseases like diabetes and cancer is reduced 50% – 80% through simple, sensible exposure to natural sunlight 2-3 times each week.
• Infants who receive vitamin D supplementation (2000 units daily) have an 80% reduced risk of developing type 1 diabetes over the next twenty years.

On the issue of sunlight exposure, incidentally, as it turns out that super antioxidants greatly boost your body’s ability to handle sunlight without burning. Astaxanthin is one of the most potent natural sunscreens available and can allow you to stay under the sun twice as long without burning. Other powerful antioxidants with this ability include the superfruits like Acai, Pomegranates and blueberries.