Vitamin D, A Miracle Drug?

From Medpundit, the Vitamin D Connection.

In June, U.S. researchers will announce the first direct link between cancer prevention and the "sunshine vitamin".  First she quotes from a Globe and Mail story that costs $5 to read, so I'm going along with her excerpt.

A four-year clinical trial involving 1,200 women found those taking the vitamin had about a 60-per-cent reduction in cancer incidence, compared with those who didn't take it, a drop so large — twice the impact on cancer attributed to smoking — it almost looks like a typographical error.
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One of the researchers who made the discovery, professor of medicine Robert Heaney of Creighton University in Nebraska, says vitamin D deficiency is showing up in so many illnesses besides cancer that nearly all disease figures in Canada and the U.S. will need to be re-evaluated. "We don't really know what the status of chronic disease is in the North American population," he said, "until we normalize vitamin D status."

Medpundit says

We'll need to see the numbers to know how jaw dropping that 60 percent reduction is. However, here's some food thought. Cholesterol is the building block for Vitamin D. And what have we been preaching - and doing - to patients even more emphatically than sun avoidance? Lowering cholesterols to very low levels.

That's probably why my doctor insists I take vitamin D along with my 10 mg dose of Zocor.