What do you mean it’s a hormone? It literally has vitamin in the name. I know, stay with me. A vitamin is something that is essential for normal nutrition, is required in small amounts in the diet but, and this is the important part, cannot be synthesized by the body.
Think back to 1840s London, or use the word Dickensian if you want to prove you took that English class once, remember Tiny Tim in a Christmas Carol? He wore leg braces most likely because he had rickets. He also most probably had TB too, but that is for another story time. Ricketts is a lack of the actually-a-hormone- vitamin D, that has a distinct effect on bone growth and bone strength, and the Dickensian cure for that was leg braces. Tiny Tim had a poor father, lived in a northern latitude that was, at the time, choked with smog from this new thing called coal fired everything so he had a poor sporadic diet and rarely saw the sun.
If he had only seen the sun, he might have been alright because we humans are photosynthetic creatures of a sort in that our vitamin D is made when ultraviolet light photolyzes a provitamin D (a form of cholesterol which is in the steroid family of lipid compounds called D1) into a pre-vitamin D that then goes to the liver where some enzymes further refine it and then it ultimately makes it to the kidney where it achieves its form of vitamin D3 or cholecalciferol.
Vitamin D3 does influence bone density via its role in calcium regulation but has effects on parathyroid hormone secretion, cell proliferation and cellular differentiation, promotes insulin secretion. While all of this is great, none of this, exactly, is why we added vitamin D3 to our Support System VZ herbal capsules.
There is no conclusive evidence that supplementation with vitamin D3 can protect you from infection. There is some good data that suggests that it has an antiviral effect, but mostly what is known is that low levels of vitamin D3 correlate to worse outcomes during infection. So having healthy levels of D3 might not prevent infection, but patients with low levels of D3 tended to have worse health outcomes as a result of an infection.
All in all, given the many things that Vitamin D3 can do for you, it is prudent to make sure that you have enough through supplementation which is why we added it to this formulation.
D3 has many profound effects throughout the body but it is not a miracle and cannot prevent infections. What we do know is that there are a lot of things within our control that can prevent infection and they are: Socially distancing, hand washing, and when you can’t socially distance, please wear a mask. These behaviors can have a profound effect on infection rates for most community spread infections, but given how well D3 can help the immune system perform at its best, you can bet I will be regularly be taking Support System VZ throughout this cold and flu season.
