A tale of two countries
Who's afraid of vitamin D? took home the gold at this year's National Magazine Awards for Health & Family journalism
The Winnipeg streets are silent and black when Joanne Bromilow gropes a weary hand to a glass of water and two turquoise pills on her bedside table. Before her feet hit the floor later that morning, she’ll have taken another kaleidoscopic handful with hues almost as intense and varied as her symptoms: orange ones for crippling fatigue, red ones for bowel and bladder control, and the turquoise for a pain so unremitting and ferocious the 60-year-old likens it to full transitional labour coming from the core of every bone in her body, every moment of her life. To doctors, Bromilow is one of the 75,000 Canadians in the grips of multiple sclerosis, or “multiple scarring,” where her own immune system gnaws away at the protective myelin coating surrounding her brain, nerves and spinal column, slowly killing her nervous system from within. To international observers, she’s just another case in a country with one of the highest MS rates in the world. To feisty Bromilow, she’s simply a woman looking forward to a lovely day on the prairie.
Half a world away in Sydney, Australia, Lynne Berson wakes up in the half-light of early dawn, pads her way to the kitchen to make her kids’ lunches while musing how spoiled she is to wake up every day to the sun rising over the Pacific. The 41-year-old slugs back her muesli and coffee, and carefully seals herself in a film of sunblock. Every so often, she absentmindedly brushes a fibrous and rubbery scar that snakes from her groin down her right thigh, stopping just short of her knee. Two years ago, after first hearing the terrifying words “malignant melanoma, level 4,” this was where surgeons removed a cancerous pulp of lymph nodes and a piece of flesh the size of her palm. As ugly as it is, the scar is now a part of Berson, and a constant reminder of how lucky she is to be alive.
An old miracle gets new life
Berson’s Australian home has the highest rate of skin cancer in the world. This statistic comes as no surprise for a predominantly pink-skinned population in a country where the sun’s intensity can split rock and sterilize rivers. What does come as a surprise to scientists is the fact that Australia also has some of the lowest rates for multiple sclerosis, particularly in its sunniest cities, where about half as many people contract MS as in Canada. Though it’s by a smaller margin, Australian women are also less likely to die from breast, cervical or ovarian cancer than their Canadian counterparts. While scientists are considering a flurry of genetic and environmental factors to explain the disparity, a growing number are pointing to the sun, and to a wallflower of a vitamin that faded into obscurity once it had straightened our children’s bones and seemingly eradicated rickets.
For a nutrient once thought to be old news, vitamin D is now making some big headlines. Over the past five years, concentrations well above the government-recommended daily dose have been touted to have the power to prevent an almost unbelievable array of diseases: rheumatoid arthritis, MS, cancer, influenza, chronic pain, and possibly even AIDS. Despite the sophomoric zeal of the claims, these findings aren’t coming from the guy wearing the Q-Ray bracelet and sandals at the health food store. Public health crusaders at the Harvard School of Public Health, McGill University, Boston University, Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital and the American Institute of Medicine have just begun to understand how and why our bodies were designed to synthesize vitamin D, and are mounting a campaign to convince government and industry to get more of the compound to a sun-starved North American population.
Their most imposing obstacles: a dearth of foods where vitamin D is naturally present, and a cautious and ponderous government machine that caps milk fortification and supplements at levels established in the ’60s — nowhere close to what the research suggests we need. The believers say we’ve barely begun to uncover the costs of North America’s silent epidemic of vitamin D deficiency, and they expect little help from industry to push something as un-patentable as a vitamin. After all, how much money can you make from something that falls from the sky?
