This really bad ‘recommendation’ could put your health in serious jeopardy

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force says its job is to give the “latest evidence-based research” to doctors so they can make better decisions.

But what they’re saying about vitamin D sounds like it’s straight out of Looney Tunes.

The task force just issued its “final recommendation” about having your vitamin D level checked. It said that doctors don’t need to worry about this anymore, and checking it isn’t really doing anything to protect our health!

“We really need more research,” said the lead author of the USPSTF report.

To see how crazy that “advice” is, consider the fact that doctors are finding deficiencies in this vitamin to be almost epidemic. Some studies show that up to 85 percent of us have low D levels, and screening for a vitamin D deficiency has almost become routine in good medical care.

Now some doctors are jumping on the USPSTF bandwagon and writing articles calling vitamin D a “health fad,” one with no “definitive evidence” that it give us any “potential benefits.”

That’s why this “official” recommendation to doctors from the USPSTF may turn out to be very dangerous for all of us.

But since keeping your levels of D up are so important, just how can checking it hurt?

It can’t, said the task force. In fact, it said that the “harms” of treating a D deficiency are “small to none.” In other words, taking a vitamin D supplement is very, very safe (unlike taking most drugs).

So what is their problem?

Well…ask yourself what would happen if everyone had good levels of vitamin D.

Drug profits would go down, way down. And that’s because the health of Americans would go way up.

Just about all doctors will tell you that low levels of D can be really bad for you. Even the media, which get most things wrong related to health, know this.

A vitamin D deficiency can cause an “increased risk for death from heart disease, cancer, cognitive impairment in older adults and severe asthma in kids.”

And that wasn’t from some alternative doctor you’ll find on QuackWatch. No, that was from the extremely mainstream CBS News. And that’s pretty much what we hear from most experts on the topic.

But here’s the most ridiculous part of this whole thing — and it came straight from a publication for doctors trying to explain the task force decision.

There’s been a tripling in health care visits due to vitamin D deficiencies. That was discovered by looking at diagnosis codes — those are the numbers used for insurance billing. And yes, there’s an insurance code for vitamin D deficiency.

Probably because of that, testing for it has skyrocketed. Yet, that’s something this task force wants to stop.

It gave the ridiculous reason that routine testing will end up costing “billions of dollars” for the lab work and the treatment — which is nothing more than taking a vitamin D supplement! (Apparently this isn’t the same task force behind the mammogram recommendations…)

Now if there’s any supplement that’s cheaper to buy than vitamin D, I don’t know what it is. So its logic is nothing more than Big Pharma hype packaged up to look like it’s coming from an “independent body” of researchers.

As I said before, most of us are deficient in vitamin D. Now, for some people, the best way to get your daily dose is from direct sunlight. Just 10 minutes a day is said to be sufficient during the summer months.

But during the winter, over half of the country is out of luck where D from sunshine is concerned.

So taking a vitamin D-3 supplement is definitely an excellent way to keep your levels high. For most people, 800-1,000 IUs daily is considered the right amount.

And it won’t cost you billions of dollars, either.

Sources:
“Vitamin D tests aren’t needed for everyone, federal panel says” Nancy Shute, November 24, 2014, NPR, npr.org