puberty vitamin d connection

The age on onset of onset of puberty has been falling historically, and probably for longer than has even been documented.  There are modern reasons as described here, also deeper reasons related to the decrease in activity of the pineal gland over millenia.  Bascially the pineal gland is producing less than optimal levels of melatonin.     Prepuberty is a valuable time of brain growth  before the big drop in melatonin levels which occurs at puberty. This is yet one more reason why later puberty might be better in general,. This Guardian article looks into the phenomena and gives one example of the statistics - the onset of puberty in girls has fallen by five years since 1920.

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2012/oct/21/puberty-adolescence-childhood-onset

There seem to be many factors.  Dr Mercola highlights some of them here, an interestingly vitamin D levels seem to be involved:

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2012/04/16/early-precocious-puberty.aspx

He mentions:
Avoiding Hormone-Disrupting Substances is Crucial for Children and Adults Alike
Vitamin D Also Linked to Early Puberty
What You Should Know About Obesity, Stress and Exercise

In this video he explains how in order to get the UVB rays we need to make vitamin D  in the skin, the sun needs to be at an angke of at least 50 degrees,  He goes on to describe how just getting UVA ad not UVB could be counterproductive.

At this website you can type in your location and the date and see the angle of the sun at hourly intervals during the day. It's a really interesting exercise.

http://www.sunearthtools.com/dp/tools/pos_sun.php

Add to this that so many of us spend so much tome indoors and it's highly likely we would benefit from more vitamin D.  Dr Mercola recommends 8000 units a day,  Traditionally in places such as British Isles, renown for it's low light and cloudy days, people acquired extra vitamin D in lanolin through handllng sheep and their wool.  To be honest I don't measure units f I am not getting plenty of middle of the day sun I take a few drops of our lanolin based vitamin D supplement.

Also of course, going back tot the melatonin issue, the increasing levels of ambient electromagnetic radiation further reduce melatonin levels.  This is because naturally melatonin is secreted more when it is dark and helps us sleep.  Although only visible rays are detected by the eyes, the rest of the electromagnetic spectrum reaches the pineal gland or third eye and it takes these as signals of daytime and reduces melatonin output.

Earthing, by sleeping on an earthing sheet and using an earthing mat when on computer helps counteract our electromagnetic exposure and increases melatonin levels.

vitamin d hormone of happiness and health

Vitamin D is a hormone which is essential for our health and happiness in many ways.
I decided to revamp a post I wrote on this subject: (http://foodforconsciousness.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/vitamin-d-happiness-hormone.html) three years ago on this subject as it's become clearer than ever how crucial this substance is.   Many years ago I noticed how often people on an entirely raw plant diet eventually had difficulty dealing with sweet fruit. I was intrigued by this phenomenon. In fact the same thing happened to me when I was on that path.  Once I started including raw dairy products my ability to deal with sweet fruit gradually came back.  It turns out that vitamin D is essential for the proper function of the insulin system which of course is needed to deal with the sugars in fruit.  And vitamin D in the form we need (D3)  can be very difficult to obtain on an entirely raw plant diet unless you spend much of your life out in the high sunshine or supplement very intelligently.

One of vitamin D's other roles is to activate the immune system: "with vitamin D in the bloodstream, T cells become "armed" and begin seeking out invaders that are then destroyed and carried out of the body"

http://www.naturalnews.com/028357_vitamin_D_deficiency.html 

Known as the sunshine vitamin, Vitamin D is also crucial for our sense of well-being and happiness.
We were designed to be happy and we were designed to be exposed to regular sunshine!  In order  for our skin to make vitamin D from sunshine the sun needs to be high enough for UVB radiation to reach us.  In Britain this only happens from about March until September, In other words, there is a 'vitamin D' winter if we live a long way from the equator and the length of this winter depends on the exact latitude.

In terms of getting vitamin D through food and supplements, vitamin D is fat soluble, and needs to be taken with fat in order to be properly absorbed.  Also to be considered is that there are two common types of vitamin D: Vitamin D3 (cholecalciferol) and Vitamin D2 (ergocalciferol). We need vitamin D3 rather than vitamin D2. We use an olive oil based vitamin D3 supplement which we find very effective and also free from unwanted additives.  We have this in addition to vitamin D rich foods such as raw milk, cheese, kefir and fish oil.  On top of all this I personally take sun showers (a sunshower is a booth where you receive UVB rays all over your skin, unfortunately not available in all towns, I go in Fab, Totnes, Devon) regularly through the winter and get out in the sunshine as much as I can in summer.  It's a good idea to wait for a few hours after sunbathing or sunshowering before bathing or showering as the skin produces a powdery substance after exposure to UVB rays that is then absorbed into the skin and converted to vitamin D by the body. I really do notice a difference from this amount of commitment to vitamin D intake.

http://www.naturalnews.com/027345_Vitamin_D_sun_exposure_blood.html

wonders of kefir

Milk kefir is one the major staples of our diet.  There are many wonderful things about it.  Not least is that it enables us to benefit, with digestive ease, from the goodness in raw dairy milk, including the crucial fat soluble vitamins D and K2 and also various B vitamins which are otherwise difficult to obtain in sufficient quantities from a plant sourced diet.  In high latitude countries such as Britain it is not possible to obtain vitamin D from sunlight for about half of the year due to the low altitude of the sun. 

Kefir transforms the milk of another mammal, for example a cow, so that the ratios of the amino acids are more suitable for humans.  In particular in increases the amount of tryptophan which it is very easy to be deficient in and is the precursor to serotonin.  The kefir culture also breaks down difficult to digest casein proteins into peptides and lactose, which is  a problem for many, into lactic acid.  Kefir is  the most powerful probiotic substance we know of, actively repopulating the gut with friendly bacteria. 

If you make your kefir with the milk from traditional A2 type cows such as Jersey cows, then all the better. This milk does not release a particular beta-casomorphine called BCM 7 which is responsible for some milk intolerance.  Jersey milk also contains more cream therefore more fat soluble vitamins.(more below).

We integrate noni powder into some of our kefir meals.  The xeronine in noni helps the tryptophan get through the intestinal walls more effectively.

Demonstrating kefir at Dutch Raw Food Festival:



at our workshop:



addendum on A1 and A2 milk:

"All proteins are long chains of amino acids. Beta casein is a chain 229 amino acids in length. Cows who produce this protein in their milk with a proline at number 67 are called A2 cows, and are the older breeds of cows (e.g. Jerseys, Asian and African cows). But some 5,000 years ago, a mutation occurred in this proline amino acid, converting it to histidine. Cows that have this mutated beta casein are called A1 cows, and include breeds like Holstein.

Proline has a strong bond to a small protein called BCM 7, which helps keep it from getting into the milk, so that essentially no BCM 7 is found in the urine, blood or GI tract of old-fashioned A2 cows. On the other hand, histidine, the mutated protein, only weakly holds on to BCM 7, so it is liberated in the GI tract of animals and humans who drink A1 cow milk."
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2009/07/09/the-devil-in-the-milk.aspx