Dr. Martin shares two more studies on the importance of vitamin D in today’s episode.
We know that vitamin D isn’t just for bones, and a new study is showing how vitamin D also plays a significant role in the development of muscle. Dr. Martin also discusses the connection between low levels of vitamin D and colorectal cancer.
TRANSCRIPT OF TODAY'S EPISODE
Announcer: You're listening to The Doctor Is In Podcast, brought to you by MartinClinic.com. During the episode, the doctors share a lot of information. As awesome as the info may be, it is not intended to diagnose, cure, treat, or prevent any disease. It's strictly for informational purposes.
Dr. Martin: Well, good morning everyone. How are you? And once again, welcome to another live this morning. Hope you're having a great start to your day. We appreciate you coming on with us and saying hello. And we'll have some couple of good topics this morning I want to talk about, so a couple of stories on vitamin D again. Here we go. Vitamin D for the win. Now couple of new studies came out, one of them on muscle. What connection is there between vitamin D and muscle? Isn't that interesting? Okay, so let's talk about that because what this study was saying that vitamin D has a significant role in muscle. Okay, okay.
Now two things. One, vitamin D is one of the most important biomarkers that you can have and when it comes to metabolic syndrome, vitamin D is a biomarker and I talked about this yesterday. When you have low levels of vitamin D, your all cause mortality goes up. It's just as simple as that. You are a human solar panel. We all know what vitamin D does for bones, but from your immune system to bones to cancer, we'll talk about that this morning to insulin and insulin resistance. Vitamin D is important. Now, here is probably one of the reasons that vitamin D is so important when it comes to your metabolic health, okay? How your body burns energy. Vitamin D is not just for bones, it's for muscles too. And here's the connection.
Remember, muscle is the most metabolically active tissue that you have. The more muscle you build, the more metabolically healthy you will be. Storage space for glycogen, storage space for unused energy. That's why it's important and we'll go into another reason in a minute as far as muscle goes. Okay, but let me just start with this. Vitamin D is essential for muscle. I guess muscle has solar panels too, and here's what the study said. When you have low levels of vitamin D, which is listen, over 80% of the population do not have optimized level of vitamin D, but when you have low levels of vitamin D, you get muscle damage. And they said, here's the reasons, because your battery packs within your muscles are called mitochondria. The mitochondria in your muscles are damaged when you don't have enough vitamin D, your battery packs.
Secondly, you're not producing as much ATP, okay? That's the fuel from those battery packs. Okay? You remember that from your high school chemistry or biology? ATP is fuel. Mitochondria, battery packs. Okay? Now where do you have the most battery packs? In your brain and in your heart and muscle. Okay, now listen, when you don't have enough vitamin D, here's what this study says. You get mitochondrial dysfunction, battery packs, dysfunction, you have a decrease in ATP plus you get oxidative damage to your muscle, oxidative damage to the muscle, and therefore you get muscle atrophy, sarcopenia, atrophy, sarcopenia with the low levels of vitamin D, therefore impaired muscle function. There's another reason to take vitamin D.
Now, I don't have to convince you of that. My audience knows that. Your best friends, your best friends is sun, steak and steel and they all affect your muscle. Obviously steel does, sun does and steak does. The best fuel that you can eat is steak, red meat, okay? That's the best fuel for your muscle. The best vitamin for your is vitamin D, solar panels on your muscles to avoid muscle atrophy, to increase your mitochondria and the energy that comes out of muscle, the ATP. Isn't that incredible? Is there anything that vitamin D doesn't help? Okay, now I'm going to combine this with another study so that we stay on muscle. Vitamin D is essential for muscle.
Now listen to this brand new study out of PubMed or that's where I read it. Resistant training in seniors. Resistant training in seniors. The benefits are incredible. Resistant training in seniors. I'm a senior. Here's what resistant training does in seniors and it doesn't take long. Oh, if we would just understand this, I got a special place in my heart for seniors because I am one. You think of those nursing homes or people that get older if a vitamin they ought to take other than obviously vitamin D and they never have enough of that, is vitamin E resistant training more than anything else. Here's what they found. Five things improved. Number one, hand grip. If you do resistant training, your hand grip gets stronger.
And guys, remember I said this in the past hand grip, they're talking about making it a vital sign now. There's actual talk of it. It probably will never happen, but it should. They're saying, look, if you can measure hand grip, which they can, that's a vital sign as we get older, no more strength hand grip, but resistant training within a few weeks will increase your hand grip strength. That is so important. It is a vital sign. Lower extremity strength. Where are your biggest muscles? Your legs and you get lower extremity strength with resistant training, okay? Balance. Oh, that's a key. Balance improves. That is a big issue with seniors. They lose their balance, they fall, they break a hip and then they're in deep doo doo.
Seniors fall and one of the reasons they fall is a lack of balance. You get older, but that proprioception, the muscles have a lot to do with that. This study is showing as you strengthen, your risk of falling goes down tremendously. Very, very important. Fourthly, your walking speed increases. Okay? I have to use an example because you guys have probably noticed. It has nothing to do with, I just want you to think, have you seen the president of the United States walk, Joe Biden? Little wee shuffle steps. Now, I don't know him, but I'm going to suggest a couple of things. One, he is low in vitamin D. Two, he needs to do muscle strengthening exercises, resistant training. It would help his gait. It would help him. Anyway, who am I? I'm just telling you what I observed. And I watch seniors, they walk gingerly and look, I love those people. I just want to help.
So first of all, I give them vitamin D and then I encourage them to get stronger. Get stronger. I don't care if you're 80 years old or 85 years old. Get stronger. You can get stronger. So hand grip, lower extremity strength, balance, important, walking speed increases within a few weeks, guys. Not within six months, within a few weeks all of these things get better. And the ability, here's the fifth one, the ability to climb stairs. Wow. Now a lot of seniors have degenerative joint. There are a lot of seniors are bone on bone when it comes to their joints, but when you compensate for that, muscles are tremendous in compensating for joint problems. Now it doesn't mean you are going to undo the joint problem, but they compensate, muscles.
I always tell, used to tell, my osteoporotic patients with osteoporosis, I said, you know what the best thing you can do? Oh, Dr. Martin, take calcium. No vitamin D, vitamin K2 because that will put the calcium in the right place. And muscle strengthening, you need to get strong. Your muscles are anchors into your bones. The stronger your muscle, the more they attach into the bone and the bone itself will strengthen. The bone quality will regenerate. That is a fact. And as I get older, I'm very concerned about that. I want to stay strong for lots of reasons. But hand grip, lower extremity strength, balance, walking speed, ability to climb stairs. Yeah, isn't that a tremendous study? Okay, now I should have had my props with me this morning. I wanted to show you, and if I could go back there just for a minute, I'd do it. I'd show you what I use even in my place. Just bands. Bands and lifts they're called, I think. I don't know what they're called. I use these, okay, see them. I dunno what they're called, but you can do pushups with it. They help you to do a pushup. Pushups are tremendous weight resistant strengthening. Okay? And I'll bring out my bands tomorrow and I'll show you, if I can remember.
Now, vitamin D, this was published in PubMed resistant training in seniors. The advantages increase hand grip strength, lower extremity strength, balance, walking speed, and the ability to climb stairs all improve in a short period of time. That's the takeaway. And vitamin D wins again for muscles. Okay? Vitamin D wins again for muscle. Now let me bring you another one on vitamin D since we're on the topic. This one is colorectal cancer and vitamin D. Okay, two things. Now before I mention the two things the studies showed, okay. Colorectal cancer used to be, okay, it's not anymore, but it used to be an old man's disease. Men primarily, older, primarily, cancer. Not anymore. Colorectal cancer is a very aggressive cancer and it is often deadly. But what's happening today is it's happening in young people much more than ever. And the numbers are staggering. Colorectal cancer.
Now two reasons for it or maybe more, but I want to give you a couple and then I'll tell you about this study. Why are we seeing so much colorectal cancer today? It can't be because we're not eating enough fiber because that's what the world would say. The world would say, well, if you have fiber, you're not going to get cancer. And two, if we would just cut our consumption of red meat, colorectal cancer would go down. You know what folks? Colorectal cancer is on its way up. It's like an epidemic. And the reason is because we've been listening to that foolishness for a long time. Colorectal cancer is a sugar cancer. And here we are today, consuming bucket loads of sugar a day. And you wonder why we're getting so much colorectal cancer.
We're eating more fiber than ever, do you know that? North Americans eat more fiber, you'd swear we're rabbits or cows living on salad? No, but guys, listen, we eat more than that than ever before. You know what we eat less of than ever before? Red meat. Red meat consumption is down somewhere around 40%. I was sitting beside a guy the other day in a restaurant and I heard him say to his friend, you know what, I need to cut down on red meat. And I felt like it was none of my business. He wasn't talking to me, but I felt like screaming. Hello? Why do you believe that nonsense? And I didn't hear the rest of the conversation. Might've been his doctor telling to do it because of cholesterol or colorectal cancer. I get a headache, guys. Colorectal cancer has never been so prevalent.
And the problem with it is that by the time they find it, it's usually metastatic in the sense that it is already spread and its favorite place to spread is to the liver and that's never good. So here's the study. The study found this, okay, listen to the study. Lower levels of vitamin D are a huge factor in colorectal cancer. Well, holy moly, here we go again. Low levels of vitamin D people are scared skinny of the sun. People don't supplement with vitamin D properly. They don't. And every day physicians discourage vitamin D because they don't know enough about it. They only think bones. And here's two things in medical school, okay? I can tell you two things about vitamin D in medical school it's good for bones. Two, it's bad because you can get toxic from vitamin D.
So they teach, yeah, it's all right. You don't need much bones, you don't need it from the sun. Take a little supplement of a thousand IU. They didn't even like a thousand IUs. That's max. They used to like about 200 international units. I know when I was in school, vitamin D, 200 international units, be careful it's a fat soluble vitamin and it can be toxic. I was taught that. I never believed it. I knew it wasn't true. It wasn't true then, they had bad math and the studies have been done, by the way. Now I'm not suggesting you do this, but you would have to take 50,000 IUs of vitamin D every day. By the way, in 20 minutes in the sun, you get 10,000 IUs, 20 minutes, and you don't have to be butt naked. But I mean your biggest solar panels are your arms and lakes, okay?
And don't put any oh, sunscreen. People they go the beach and they lather up. I said, would you give yourself at least 20 minutes before you put the cancer on. What? You're putting cancer on your skin? Even the FDA removed about 300 sunscreens because they were carcinogenic. I get a headache guys. I get a headache, a migraine when I see stupidity. Here's a study saying you don't want colorectal cancer, you need to have optimized levels of vitamin D. Hello? That's how important vitamin D is, okay? And here's what they said too. Okay? Even giving vitamin D with chemo helped the outcomes of colorectal cancer. This is medicine saying this because they're talking about chemo. You're taking chemo, and they said, when we gave patients vitamin D with chemo, the outcomes were better.
Now let me tell you, this is going to get buried so deep. You need to start a mine to find this. Vitamin D even helps with chemotherapy. Now, I'll tell you something. Here's what I've been saying for a long time, and I used to say it in my office. I don't care what medicine is decided to do with you if you have cancer, that's up to you. But for Pete's sakes, would you at least take vitamin D? Would you at least stop eating sugar? Would you make sure you're taking probiotics for Pete's sakes, my mother used to say that all the time. I haven't said it in a while. Oh, I get excited guys. I see this stuff on vitamin D and here we are today in 2024 and still today it's controversial. Why? There's a war on vitamin D. There's a war on sun, there's a war. And the vast majority of the people, they buy into it, they're duped. Don't be duped, okay? Don't be duped. For Pete's sakes, take vitamin D, okay? If you can get in the sun, even better.
Now if you're in the northern hemisphere, yeah, good luck with that for six months of the year, okay? You have to take vitamin D. You have to. There isn't a person in the universe that shouldn't be taking vitamin D, okay? Unless you live in Florida or Arizona or whatever, and the sun's out 300 and something days a year. And even then they don't do it. They're scared skinny. Oh, oh, I really get upset. Okay, colorectal cancer and vitamin D, muscles and vitamin D. Oh, okay guys, I got to relax and breathe. Okay, tomorrow, planning, afternoon session. Okay, Friday is what? Question and answer Friday. Okay, question and answer Friday. My friend, get strong, get strong. My friend, take vitamin D. You need it. Everybody needs it. You're a human solar panel. Okay, love you guys. Talk to you soon.
Announcer: You've reached the end of another Doctor Is In Podcast, with your hosts, Doctor Martin Junior and Senior. Be sure to catch our next episode and thanks for listening!