Save Your Life with the Dynamic Duo D3 and K2: How to Be pH Balanced in an Unbalanced World

Chapter One

Your Best Defense

The single best defense against all disease—including pandemics—is to have the most well-armored and strongest immune system you can possibly maintain. There are numerous positive contributors to your healthy immunity, but let’s take a deeper look at, specifically, D3 and K2.

Vitamin D is Not a Vitamin!

First of all, let’s clear up the misnomer of calling D a vitamin. It’s not a vitamin. It’s a steroid hormone that controls or affects thousands of genes that are employed in remodeling your tissues, and in sustaining your immune system for optimum health.

So, why is vitamin D called vitamin D? Because, simply, it was discovered after vitamin C. Simple facts are sometimes the strangest. And it was believed at that time to be a nutrient derived from food, not made in the body. And so, its name remains to this day vitamin D. In humans, the most important compounds in this group are vitamin D3, known as cholecalciferol, and vitamin D2, ergocalciferol.

What, then, is a Vitamin?

Vitamins are organic compounds that are required in our diet because our bodies cannot make them.

Children of the Sun

However, our bodies can and do make the steroid hormone D3 when the sun hits our skin. Amazing, yes?

It wasn’t until the following interesting turn of events that it was realized that vitamin D is not a vitamin. In the early 1900s, dogs that lived strictly indoors developed rickets. But eventually, it was noted that dogs raised outside did not develop rickets, and thus did not need the supplement.

Then came the profound aha! that bodies produced the steroid hormone that had come to be known as Vitamin D, on their own when exposed to sunlight—or, for that matter, when exposed to artificial UV light.

The Concept of Vitamins

The idea of vitamins was formulated by Casimir Funk in 1912, a brilliant Polish biochemist who originated the concept of ‘vital amines,’ i.e., vitamins, present in food and required for health and even survival. 

Casimir Funk, with his professional peer, Harry Dubin, created the first vitamin supplement, which they named Oscodal. Derived from cod liver oil, it contained vitamins A and D. Dr. Funk’s comprehension of ‘life-giving amines’ was absolutely revolutionary in 1912—and has subsequently changed the world!

The Wonders of D3

Although there was an understanding that sunlight and artificial UV light not only prevented but cured rickets, and although Casimir Funk developed a vitamin A and D pill, it wasn’t until 1932 that Dr. Askew (cool name!) and Dr. Windaus isolated vitamin D2 from a UV irradiated mixture of ergosterol (a steroid on the cell membranes of fungi)—a plant-based form of vitamin D.

And Vitamin D3 – an animal-based form of vitamin D, was not specifically identified until 1937 by Dr. Windaus and Dr. Bock, when they isolated 7-dehydrocholesterol in hog skin. Hey, you can’t make this stuff up. Well, I could, but the facts are more entertaining.

"Daily supplementation with vitamin D results

in less severe respiratory infections and less

antibiotic use in a susceptible population."

The BMJ (British Medical Journal)

Steroid Superfamily

Vitamin D belongs to the superfamily of steroid/thyroid hormone receptors. As mentioned, vitamin D3 is the natural form of vitamin D in your skin when it’s exposed to UV irradiation of 7-dehydrocholesterol—the compound in skin that enables us to manufacture D3.

Cholecalciferol (D3) is converted in the liver to calcifediol, then further converted to calcitriol by the kidneys. Calcitriol circulates as a hormone in your blood, with the life-thriving duties of:

•  Regulating the concentration of calcium, magnesium, and phosphate

•  Promoting the healthy growth and remodeling of your bones

•  Supporting neuromuscular and immune functions

•  Regulating cell growth

•  Reducing inflammation

This active vitamin D metabolite, calcitriol, binds to the vitamin D receptor in the nuclei of target cells, which allows it to modulate the gene activity of the proteins involved in calcium absorption in the intestine.

Vitamin D receptors maintain skeletal calcium balance with the assistance of the parathyroid hormone, which sustains serum calcium levels. The Vitamin D receptors thus maintain the calcitonin in your bones, intestines, and kidneys, and the calcium and phosphorus levels in your blood, while preserving bone content by, as mentioned, promoting calcium absorption in the intestines, and bone resorption.

Vitamin D receptors also regulate cell proliferation and differentiation, along with having a vital and complex role in supporting the immune system.

Vitamin D receptors are found in your white blood cells, including:

•  Monocytes, which influence the process of adaptive immunity

•  Activated T cells—lymphocytes in the thymus gland playing a significant role in immune response

•  B cells—a part of the adaptive immune system that secretes antibodies and cytokines and presents antigens.

Cytokines act through cell surface receptors, modulating the balance between humoral (body fluids), and cell immune responses.

Furthermore, Vitamin D is directly related to muscle strength, mass, and function.

"As more and more Vitamin D facts are being

discovered in research, Vitamin D therapy is

found to be imperative to our good health,

essential for everything from bone health, to

colds and flu, to heart disease, to anti-aging,

to many types of cancer."

Kerry Knox, R.N.

Relative to sun exposure, diet is a poor source of vitamin D, providing only 40–400 IU per food serving, whereas whole-body UVB exposure for 30 min for a light-skinned person during the summer months will produce upwards of 20,000 IU of vitamin D.

However, UVB exposure and vitamin D production through the skin are reduced with increased skin pigmentation, age, use of sunscreen, and environmental factors such as winter season, high latitude, pollution, cloud cover, and ozone levels.

For instance, sun exposure during most of the winter at latitudes above 33° North (Atlanta, GA, U.S.; Casablanca, Morocco) and