In this video, Dr. Patrick McCullough reviews a paper by Shirvani et al. on the effects of 600, 4000, or 10,000 IU of vitamin D per day on gene function within white blood cells and how many genes were affected at each dose.
What does this mean, or what happens when genes are turned on or off?
Genes contain DNA sequences that make proteins – they are a blueprint for building something, and they must be deciphered.
Vitamin D acts as a ‘key’ to unlock DNA, and to turn the genes on or off. Genes contain “vitamin D response elements” that allow vitamin D to induce their genetic response. There are at least 2776 unique binding sites for vitamin D within our human genome. This implies that vitamin D controls at least that many genes, likely many more.
Our cells need access to enough vitamin D from the blood [as 25(OH)D] to be able to pull it in, convert it into its active form, and utilize it on demand.
The question becomes – how much vitamin D do we need to make sure all those vitamin D-dependent genes are happy?
Shirvani et al. showed that many more genes were turned on at a dose of 10,000 IU per day – what would 20,000 or 30,000 IU per day have done? This is more research that needs to be done…