This new study has concluded that one key part of the immune system, the ability of vitamin D to regulate anti-bactericidal proteins, is so important that is has been conserved through almost 60 million years of evolution and is shared only by primates, including humans – but no other known animal species.

The fact that this vitamin-D mediated immune response has been retained through millions of years of evolutionary selection, and is still found in species ranging from squirrel monkeys to baboons and humans, suggests that it must be critical to their survival, researchers say.

Even though the "cathelicidin antimicrobial peptide" has several different biological activities in addition to killing pathogens, it's not clear which one, or combination of them, makes vitamin D so essential to its regulation.

The research also provides further evidence of the biological importance of adequate levels of vitamin D in humans and other primates, even as some studies and experts suggest that more than 50 percent of the children and adults in the U.S. are deficient in "the sunshine vitamin."

"The existence and importance of this part of our immune response makes it clear that humans and other primates need to maintain sufficient levels of vitamin D," said Adrian Gombart, an associate professor of biochemistry and a principal investigator with the Linus Pauling Institute at Oregon State University.

In a new study in the journal BMC Genomics, researchers from OSU and the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center describe the presence of a genetic element that's specific to primates and involved in the innate immune response. They found it not only in humans and their more recent primate ancestors, such as chimpanzees, but also primates that split off on the evolutionary tree tens of millions of years ago, such as old world and new world primates.

The genetic material – called an Alu short interspersed element – is part of what used to be thought of as "junk DNA" and makes up more than 90 percent of the human genome. That genetic material, however, is now understood to often play important roles in regulating and "turning on" the expression of other genes.

In this case, the genetic element is believed to play a major role in the proper function of the "innate" immune system in primates – an ancient, first line of defense against bacteria, viruses and other pathogens, in which the body recognizes something that probably doesn't belong there, even though the specific pathogen may never have been encountered before.

"Many people are familiar with the role of our adaptive immune system, which is what happens when we mount a defense against a new invader and then retain antibodies and immunity in the future," Gombart said. "That's what makes a vaccine work. But also very important is the innate immune system, the almost immediate reaction your body has, for instance, when you get a cut or a skin infection."

In primates, this action of "turning on" an optimal response to microbial attack only works properly in the presence of adequate vitamin D, which is actually a type of hormone that circulates in the blood and signals to cells through a receptor. Vitamin D is produced in large amounts as a result of sun exposure, and is available in much smaller amounts from dietary sources.

Vitamin D prevents the "adaptive" immune response from over-reacting and reduces inflammation, and appears to suppress the immune response. However, the function of the new genetic element this research explored allows vitamin D to boost the innate immune response by turning on an antimicrobial protein. The overall effect may help to prevent the immune system from overreacting.

"It's essential that we have both an innate immune response that provides an immediate and front line of defense, but we also have protection against an overreaction by the immune system, which is what you see in sepsis and some autoimmune or degenerative diseases," Gombart said. "This is a very delicate balancing act, and without sufficient levels of vitamin D you may not have an optimal response with either aspect of the immune system."

After years of research, scientists are continuing to find new roles that vitamin D plays in the human body. It can regulate the actions of genes that are important to bone health, calcium uptake, and inhibition of cell growth. It helps regulate cell differentiation and, of course, immune function.

"The antimicrobial peptide that we're studying seems to be involved not just in killing bacteria, but has other biological roles," Gombart said. "It recruits other immune cells and sort of sounds the alarm that something is wrong. It helps promote development of blood vessels, cell growth and healing of wounds. And it seems to have important roles in barrier tissues such as skin and the digestive system. Vitamin D is very important for the health of the skin and digestive system, and putting the cathelicidin antimicrobial peptide gene under its regulation may be important in this function."

Any one, or some combination of those biological roles may be why vitamin D-mediated regulation of the antimicrobial peptide has been conserved in every primate species ever examined for its presence, researchers said, and did not disappear long ago through evolutionary variation and mutation. The evolution of primates into many different families and hundreds of species has been carefully tracked through genetic, molecular sequence and fossil studies, but the presence of this regulatory element in primates is still largely the same as it's been for more than 50 million years.

The evolutionary survival of this genetic element and the placement of the cathelicidin antimicrobial peptide gene under the regulation of the vitamin D pathway "may enable suppression of inflammation while potentiating innate immunity, thus maximizing the overall immune response to a pathogen and minimizing damage to the host," the researchers wrote in their conclusion.

Vitamin D deficiency is an issue of growing concern among many scientists, due to changing lifestyle or cultural trends in which many people around the world get less sun exposure and often inadequate dietary levels of the vitamin. It's a special problem with the elderly, which often have reduced exposure to sunlight and less ability to produce vitamin D in their skin – and at least partly as a result, are more susceptible to bone fractures, chronic inflammation and infectious disease.

Without vitamin D, you’re a sitting duck

What this study reveals is that without sufficient levels of vitamin D circulating in your blood, you’re a ripe, juicy target for influenza (H1N1 or otherwise). If you lack vitamin D, your immune system can’t “activate” to do its job. That’s why people who are deficient in vitamin D so frequently get winter colds.

But people who are high in vitamin D have the nutritional power to activate their immune system so that it can respond to invading pathogens. Crucially, vitamin D also manages to balance immune response and prevent inflammation — the leading cause of death in the 1918 influenza pandemic.

So not only does vitamin D protect you from the initial infection; it also prevents your body from over-reacting and killing you with inflammation (which typically gets expressed as bacterial pneumonia, an infection of the lungs).

Smart people today are doing two things:

1) Saying NO to vaccines.
2) Saying YES to vitamin D.

If you take vitamin D, you don’t need a vaccine!

Why no vitamin D advice?

The research supporting vitamin D’s ability to halt influenza is overwhelming. And yet the vaccine industry (and the doctors who push vaccines) don’t want you to know about vitamin D. Why is that?

It’s because if people knew the truth about vitamin D, the vaccine industry would collapse. Who needs a vaccine if you’re got a powered-up immune system to do the job automatically? Plus, your immune system is natural, while vaccines are completely unnatural injections of toxic chemicals that are increasingly being linked to not just autism, but seizures, brain damage and death.

Why risk a vaccine when vitamin D is so remarkably safe?

You’ll need at least 4000 IU a day just to prevent deficiency, according to many nutrition experts. Some people I know take 8000 IU a day. I personally don’t take any vitamin D but I get at least 30 minutes of sunlight every day near the equator (which is a unique geographical situation, I understand, that not everybody can replicate).

Our national “health” officials (if you can call them that) are making a crucial mistake with the swine flu. Instead of ordering more vaccines, they should be recommending vitamin D supplements to the population. For less than the cost of the vaccines, we could provide vitamin D supplementation to every man, woman and child in America. We would not only end the swine flu pandemic, we would also see cancer rates plummet!

Perhaps that’s why our health authorities don’t dare recommend vitamin D — the financial impact on the cancer industry would just be too great. The vaccine makers would lose billions, and the cancer industry could lose tens of billions. Diabetes rates would fall, depression would fade away in many people, kidney function would improve and a long list of other diseases would be prevented or reversed following adequate vitamin D intake.

Vitamin D is the answer to our national health care problems. Just one nutrient, if distributed freely to everyone, could probably slash our national health care costs by one-third within five years, I believe.

And yet they dare not mention it. “It’s not approved by the FDA,” they say. So the CDC won’t mention it. The WHO won’t recommend it. The FDA pretends it doesn’t exist, and the doctors aren’t allowed to prescribe it.

Here it is — vitamin D — the great CURE for influenza. It’s here right now. It’s cheap, it’s safe, and it’s available. Yet it’s being utterly ignored.

Let me go on the record to state the obvious: There is an agenda under way to keep the American people deficient in vitamin D and ignorant about its healing properties. This is a conscious, planned scheme that seeks to keep the people disinformed while pumping them full of vaccines, chemotherapy and prescription drugs instead of teaching them the simple nutritional cures that exist right now.

Mark my words: With the swine flu or any future pandemic, the populations suffering the highest death rates will be those with the highest rates of vitamin D deficiency. And the vaccine? It offers no protection compared to the power of the vitamin D.

The laws of biochemistry cannot be suspended by FDA bureaucrats

To any doctor or health authority who scoffs at the notion of vitamin D being far more useful than vaccines, ask them this question: If vitamin D has no purpose in human health, then why have the immune system genes that are specifically activated by vitamin D persisted in the genome (which is now the human genome) for more than sixty million years?

Why is the human immune system programmed to use vitamin D to activate itself?

Why does human skin generate vitamin D in response to sun exposure?

To hear mind-numbed doctors answer it, this is all just coincidence! There is no specific reason that vitamin D genes exist at all!

But it gets even more bizarre: According to the FDA, vitamin D has no beneficial biological effects in the human body! It’s true: The FDA says that any substance that has a beneficial (therapeutic) effect in the human body must be a DRUG, not a nutrient. And vitamin D has never been approved as a drug. Therefore, it is inert.

Do you follow that? Vitamin D has no benefit to the human body because the FDA says so. How’s that for bureaucratic arrogance? It’s like saying gravity doesn’t apply in our world because we haven’t yet “approved” the laws of physics. But one step off a high ledge reveals, indeed, that the laws of gravity are still in effect, and so are the laws of biochemistry.

You need vitamin D, not a vaccine

Your body doesn’t need a vaccine to combat the swine flu (or seasonal flu, for that matter). What it needs is vitamin D, restful sleep, adequate hydration with clean water, and good nutrition. These things make the vaccine obsolete.

They’re safe, affordable, natural and readily available. You don’t have to wait in line to get vitamin D, and you don’t need a doctor’s prescription. There’s no needle involved, and there’s no risk of you suffering a seizure or permanent brain damage, either.

With sufficient levels of vitamin D in your blood, your immune system will do its job to protect you from swine flu, bird flu, human flu or even the pandemic infectious nonsense being spread around by the CDC, FDA and WHO. Your immune system has all the technology it needs right now to keep you alive from almost any widely-circulating microorganism… as long as it has the biochemical tools (like vitamin D) to “activate” its adaptive response.

Do you realize that without a functioning immune system, you would have been killed by microorganisms a thousand times over by now? Your immune system saves your life every day, quietly, behind the scenes. It is the reason you’re breathing right now as you read this article. Receiving a vaccine injection is the ultimate insult to your own body because it admits that you have no faith in the very same immune system that has already saved your life countless times.

Don’t put your faith in chemical injections. Believe in your immune system — and give it the nutritional tools it needs to keep on saving your life.

Additional resources for this story include:
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_relea…

Source: Natural News

This Cold and Flu Kit is Guaranteed to keep any cold and flu away, and get rid of your cold within one day and your flu within two days, or your money back. $29.00