Vitamin D May Help Prevent Onset of Arthritis and MS

[Guest guest]

Here's an article which says that Vitamin D supplements are actually MORE desirable than getting Vit D from food. Curiously there is no mention of the fact that one of the best sources of Vit D is from sunlight. ( A while back we had a discussion of the many desirable aspects of getting enough light through the retina and going outside even on dark cloudy wintry days.)

If anyone has the actual study which is pointed out below, please post. Thanks in advance:

Vitamin D May Help Prevent Onset of Arthritis and MS

" Vitamin D, which the body makes when exposed to sunlight, may help prevent multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis, two studies suggest. The findings may help explain why the two autoimmune diseases

are more common in northern climes, where sunlight is often scarce, the researchers said.

In a study in today's issue of Neurology, the researchers found that women who take multivitamins containing vitamin D are 40 percent less likely to develop multiple sclerosis than women who do not take supplements.

Kassandra Munger of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston and her

team looked at two studies of 187,000 nurses that followed what the women eat and do in their lives and then chronicled their health. Over a 20-year period, 173 developed MS.

The nurses with the highest intake of vitamin D from supplements -- 400 IU or more a day -- were 40 percent less likely to develop MS than those who used no supplements. Those who got vitamin D only from food such as fortified milk did not lower their risk.

A second study, published in the journal Arthritis & Rheumatism, showed that

vitamin D may prevent rheumatoid arthritis. In the 11-year study of 29,368

women ages 55 to 69, 152 women developed rheumatoid arthritis, and women

whose diets were highest in vitamin D had the lowest occurrence of the disease, the researchers found. Again, supplements seemed to be a better source than food, they reported. "