Getting your vitamin D naturally from safe sunshine exposure is one of the best things you can do for your health as it works like a drug to treat all sorts of conditions, from strengthening bones to slowing down cancer. But just how powerful is vitamin D?

Among other things, vitamin D increases your body's production of naturally occurring antibiotics, called antimicrobial peptides, that are produced throughout the body the cell walls of viruses and bacteria, including tuberculosis.

Based on Dr. Niels Finsen's Nobel Prize winning work on sunshine as a cure for tuberculosis of the skin more than a century ago, a good part of Dr. John Cannell's latest Vitamin D Newsletter describes experiments in the United States that demonstrated how irradiating blood created pharmacological amounts of vitamin D that work like a safe, natural antibiotic more than a half-century ago.

You haven't heard much about these studies since then for a good reason: The AMA took steps to refute the results (their tests found hemo-irradiation to be safe but ineffective). Irradiation treatments eventually found their way to Germany and, finally, Russia, where it remains a standard tool doctors use to treat severe infections.

But that didn't stop food manufacturers, however, from trying to "protect" us by irradiating milk and some commercial beef, a process that does far more harm than good.

The major point: Why do you need a supplement or a drug-based "cure" when you could get a safe and natural therapeutic dose of vitamin D -- based on hundreds of studies in the best of medical journals -- that works like an antibiotic straight from the sun? Drug companies don't have a monopoly -- meaning they don't make money -- on natural treatments like sunshine.

The Vitamin D Newsletter June-July 2006