MAY 29, 2009 — A popular health activist wrote a column this week suggesting that the U.S. health care system could save trillions of dollars in the next decade if raising vitamin D blood levels were to become a priority.

“Health demographers guesstimate that if human populations in Northern Europe were to achieve adequate vitamin D3 levels (40 nanograms per milliliter of blood sample) this would save 17.7% in direct and indirect healthcare costs, saving hundreds of billions of dollars/Euros per year,” health columnist Bill Sardi wrote this week, citing a study published in the March 4 issue of Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology by vitamin D researcher Dr. William B. Grant of the Sunlight, Nutrition and Health Research Center.

Sardi continued, “If these Northern European statistics can be extrapolated to the United States, the U.S. would save about $4.4 trillion in healthcare costs over the next decade. Such an extrapolation cannot be cleanly made since Northern Europe exists in a less sunny climate where far less vitamin D is produced, particularly in winter months; however, vitamin D deficiency is widely reported even in sunny climates such as Florida. Repeated health warnings to avoid strong sun exposure caused Americans to stay out of the sun and to screen out solar radiation over the fear of skin cancer. Yet mortality from skin cancer is small next to the premature deaths caused by vitamin D shortages.”

According to Sardi, “Mass vitamin D supplementation would save about $1,346 per year in healthcare costs per person in the U.S., or over $4,000 a year for a family of three. Costs to provide 3,000 international units of daily supplemental vitamin D would be about $10/year per person.”

To read Sardi’s article, published for www.LewRockwell.com, click here.