Is There a Link Between Vitamin D Deficiency and Breast Cancer?

If you’ve been remiss in checking your blood level of the Vitamin D hormone, I urge you to tune into a free webinar tomorrow to learn about the link between Vitamin D deficiency and an increased risk of premenopausal breast cancer. The webinar is sponsored by Grassroots Health, a non-profit organization dedicated to eradicating Vitamin D deficiencies through advocacy and education. It’s founder, Carole Baggerly, has stated that maintaining a Vitamin D serum level of between 40 and 60 ng/ml, would help prevent breast cancer, which strikes more than one million people every year. In fact, she says, there’s evidence that the Vitamin D hormone may help prevent 16 types of cancer!

See my previous blogpost about Grassroots Health and what led Ms. Baggerly to make Vitamin D awareness her life’s mission.

The speaker in tomorrow’s 30-minute webinar is Dr. Cedric Garland, University of California San Diego and Moores Cancer Center, who is a leading Vitamin D researcher. You can register for it here and send Dr. Garland a question in advance. If you can’t make it, you can listen to this and other webinar recordings by Vitamin D scientists on the Grassroots Health website at a later time.

Hopefully, after learning more about the importance of “the sunshine vitamin” you’ll be motivated to test your Vitamin D level. Grassroots Health makes it easy and economical to order a home test kit by enrolling in the D*Action Campaign, an international project to solve the Vitamin D deficiency epidemic. You can order a one-time test kit (see photo above) for $65, or you can become a sponsor of the campaign for $60 every six months for five years, which includes a home vitamin D test.

If you’re wondering how much Vitamin D is needed to achieve a level that Dr. Garland’s research shows would help prevent a wide range of diseases, see this video of his conversation with Carole Baggerly.

And, for additional reading, I found this book, The Vitamin D Cure by Dr. James Dowd, founder of the Michigan Arthritis Research Center, to be an excellent resource for information about Vitamin D.