Vitamin D3-Much More Effective in Preventing Flu (and Colds) Than Vaccine

By Jeff T Bowles | Amazon Best Selling Science Author

I have just discovered a fantastic tool for anyone interested in how high dose Vitamin D3 affects various diseases and conditions. It is the review section of my best-selling book on vitamin D3 (in the world) which was published 6 years ago. The amazon site for this book now has 720+ reviews which are primarily self-reports of the results of high dose Vitamin D3 experiments. It is basically a database unlike any other. You can simply type in a condition into the search box and usually something relevant and amazing will pop up. Because very few research studies are performed with high doses of D3, this is completely unique and invaluable resource.

I was asked to write an article about how Vitamin D3 prevents the flu and colds, so I decided to use the review database as an example By searching the word “cold” in the review search box for the book (here is US Amazon link>> https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005FCKN2S)

There are many comments like these.

“I increased my intake to 50000 units a day now for two more months. My family in that time frame has caught colds and the flu but I have been free of illness. My energy level also has been up. I have even lost a few pounds”

“I am 70 and had chronic sinus/bronchitis problems four times a year on average. The last three years I added D3 which was the only thing I managed to take regularly. Have not had one problem since and no colds or flu either. Everyone else is coughing and hacking around me and getting sick. Not me!”

“I put myself on 26000 iu of D3/day-I cured my bone spurs in 9 months, also lost 30 pounds (230 to 200) without even trying Also I used to get the cold/flu every year, this year it seems to have taken a vacation.”

“I upped that to 5,000. My soft teeth seemed to harden, were resistant to cavities, which I’ve been prone to since age 9. I stopped getting colds. I started telling friends and relatives.”

“I’d already been taking fairly high dose D3 (I haven’t had a cold or flu since I started 2 plus years ago)”

“I can tell the difference if I take less than 25,000 IU’s a day. My values doubled from too low to strong in four months. Be sure to also take Vitamin K, as he suggests. I also don’t catch colds, as I did in the past.”

“Come the beginning of winter, we suffered constant colds and flu’s. Not this winter! Not a single sniffle since we all started D3 and K2. We’d tried heaps of supplements and probiotics prior to this, but nothing works as well as this combination. One of my sons is at kindy, and all parents know how horrible kindy colds are. But no cols flu’s or anything else since we started these supplements”

“no longer needed statins. I put this down to D3 & K2 plus remaining active. My advice is read books like this and make up your own mind. Oh one other thing I haven’t had a cold or flu for 18 months either. Cheers. Hugh Algie”

“Had been taking 5,000 daily but caught a sinus cold that wasn’t going away. Update: 10-8-15. Decided a sinus cold lingering a little too long from late last week. Upped my D3 from 5-10,000 to 20,000 on 10-7. Energy thru the roof and sinus cold 85% better 1st day of increase. Morning Day 2 sinus clear.”

I personally have not had a cold or the flu in the last 17 years! Seriously. I can site only one exception, while traveling with my father in 2012 we both started coming down with a cough, and it felt like it was quickly trying to spread to our heads, you know the feeling. Following the advice of Dr JJ Cannell of the Vitamin D Council, we both took 50,000 IU of Vitamin D3 for 3 days, and that was it. We continued to have just a little cough for a day or so and then nothing. I knew from the initial feeling, and my history of colds from before I took D3, that we both dodged a serious cold! And that, is the only time I have been sick for the last 17 years! And I wasn’t even sick! Even while others around me have acquired terrible colds from time to time. Prior to that I might get a serious cold once every year or two going all the way back to my childhood.

What’s the secret? 17 years ago was when I started taking higher doses of Vitamin D3 than recommended by the doctors. I started off at 4,000 IU of D3 per day to overcome aches and pains in my shoulders. It didn’t really dawn on me that the 4000 iu a day was also keeping me from getting colds until maybe six or seven years into it-I guess I thought I had just been lucky.

Now this might sound like an anecdotal fairy tale to you at the moment, but after hearing similar stories all the time from my readers-It is no fluke. Scientists will likely dismiss these reports as “anecdotal”. They use the term anecdotal disparagingly as if anything anecdotal should be ignored as a coincidence. But what is a study of 1,000 people other than just a collection of 1,000 anecdotes?

Even at smaller doses in various studies, Vitamin D3 has been shown to protect against colds, flu, and respiratory infections. A major study was conducted, which was published in the British Medical Journal. According to Dr. Adrian Martineau, lead researcher and Queen Mary University of London clinical professor of respiratory infection and immunity, the study showed that vitamin D supplements reduced the risk of respiratory infection in half in individuals with the lowest levels of vitamin D and lowered the infections about 10 percent in individuals with higher vitamin D levels.

The results are based on the analysis of raw data from 25 clinical trials involving 11,000 participants from 14 countries, which include the US, UK, Canada, Australia, Italy, Belgium, India, Afghanistan, and Japan. The study was conducted from 21 institutions worldwide and received funding from the National Institute for Health Research. (Keep in mind most of these studies use very small amounts of Vitamin D3 often 1,000 IU’s per day or less.)

Respiratory infections have been the leading cause of mortality and morbidity worldwide. It is revealed that upper respiratory infections such as flu and colds are the most common reasons for GP visits and days leave from work. Pneumonia and other acute lower respiratory infections may be less common, but still caused more than a million deaths in 2013 worldwide.

According to Dr. Mercola’s analysis of 25 various studies about the flu, vaccines, and Vitamin D3, he concluded that “Among those with severe vitamin D deficiency at baseline, the NNT was 4. In other words, if you’re vitamin D deficient to begin with, vitamin D supplementation is 10 times more effective than the flu vaccine.” (NNT means number needed to treat to prevent one case of flu, for the vaccine it was 40, for Vitamin D3 it was just 4).

One interesting fact that adds weight to the Vitamin D3-cold and flu connection is this: When do people tend to be more likely to get colds? In the winter right? This has been explained by the science community as being caused by people staying indoors more, and coming into much closer contact which allows the cold or flu to more easily spread. Now knowing what we know about Vitamin D3 and the flu, the correct theory is more likely that our Vitamin D3 levels are lower in the winter due to lack of sun, and this is why winter is known as the cold and flu season. It might be more instructive to refer to winter as the Vitamin D3 deficiency season.

Jeff T Bowles: Being the author of the best-selling book on Vitamin D3 in the world, and given the topic of the book was the miraculous results of my one year experiment of taking HIGH DOSES of vitamin D3, puts me in the unique position of being the sounding board for many hundreds if not a few thousands of others who have embarked on their own high dose vitamin d3 experiment. Nobody on planet earth has this amount of unusual and exciting knowledge, and I will be sharing it with you in this series of 100 short articles describing a disease and some sort of amazing result achieved with high dose D3 therapy.

Sincerely Jeff T. Bowles