The Other Side of Vitamin D Supplementation with Morley Robbins

Hi everybody, I'm Dr. Sandhya Moldovan, periodontist and nutritionist. Welcome to the Holistic Dentistry Podcast, the show that gives you the tips and tools to detoxify your mouth for a healthier body as we explore together the root cause of disease. Remember, you're not healthy until your mouth is healthy. So take care of it in the most natural way.

Welcome everyone to part two in my conversation with Morley Robbins, the author of Cure youe Fatigue. And it's very brilliant how he put copper in cure. Hint. Take your copper. And today we're going to be talking actually about vitamin D. And his recommendation might surprise you, so definitely stay tuned for what he has to say. Welcome Marley, to the second part of our conversation.

Delighted to be here and I can't wait for our discussion about this topic. One of my strategies as a researcher is to find really good articles and when I come across a really good article, I'll just call up the author and thank them. Oh, that's for their work. And I found a very important article about cholesterol written by a gentleman named Fred Kumarow. Well, I didn't know Fred Kumar was 98 years old when I called him up and I was in Chicago. He was downstate Illinois and he wanted me to come down and have lunch. He was still working 20 hours a week. At the age of 98, he was still working 20 hours a week in his lab at the University of Illinois. So I came down. What an honor to be with a legend like that. Well, he told a wonderful story as we're having grass fed burgers and homegrown tomatoes and his favorite chocolate milk. And he was a character. He's like 6, 3. He was still very vibrant even at the age of 98. I was in my 50s. I think he could have, he probably could have pinned me on the floor if he, if he wanted to. But in any event, he was invited in the early 80s to give a keynote address at a meeting, International Symposium on Vitamin D Supplementation. And he got up and he said, ladies and gentlemen, you did not supplement with vitamin D people. That message did not compute.

This is in the 50s.

No, this was in the 80s.

Oh, this was in the 80s already. Okay. Yes.

We had spent a decade, full decade of the seventies studying vitamin D supplementation in pigs and what it did to their physiology, which was cause heart disease.

Wow.

Yeah, there is a wow factor. And, and so he did, I think 15 different studies in that 10 year period.

Because the recommendation right now, morally, as you probably already know, all functional medicine, physicians are recommending vitamin D level in the blood around 60 to 80 nanograms per milliliter.

Absolutely.

Even when I tested, I was low in my 20s. I was 29, 30, somewhere around there. So I'm taking vitamin D on a regular basis, and that's kind of been the norm for us. Yes.

Well, let me finish real quick the story with Dr. Kumaro.

Yes.

He gets. Basically gets booed off the stage almost. And I leaned In, I said, Dr. Kumaro, what happened as a result of that? Now you got to picture this guy. Big, big guy, six, three, got this glint in his eye. He leans in, he goes, morally, I'm the only one left standing. All the others dead.

Oh, my God.

So that set me on a search for. Is there more to the story? And I began to find whole series of research studies in 1962. A Dr. John Ferris at Yale Medical School, I think that's a pretty good medical school, wrote a very important article in 1962 that vitamin D supplementation caused renal potassium wasting.

Wow.

Very important article. Well, fast forward. In the fall of 2020, when we're kind of coming out of our stupor, we decided to do a series of webinars, and one of them was on. On vitamin D. And I can send you the link. And I Actually, you do have the link. You just haven't opened it up. I think you will find that mesmerizing. What you don't know about what Vitamin D. There is a downside to vitamin D. And I grew up in Baltimore. My nickname is Baltimorely, and I worship at the altar of Hopkins. Now, it's not perfect, but it's a really prestigious institution, both from a medical school and a public health school. Very, very outstanding schools of their own. Right. And in 2014, Muhammad Amer did a study of vitamin D and all caused mortality. It was either 2013 or 2014. I think it was 2014. In any event, what he found was that there was no. No clinical benefit to having storage D above 21. And yet the functional range now is 60 to 80 or even 80. Even higher.

Yes.

And so what's important to understand about that position is that the vast majority of those studies have been based on correlation, not causation. And one of the most important studies for people to read is by Meg Mangan, 2013. And it's vitamin D and inflammation. Now, the mantra is, if you have low vitamin D, it is highly correlated with inflammation. Mm. Now, the word correlation is important. Do flies cause garbage? No, but they're correlated with garbage. Do firemen Cause fires? No, but they're highly correlated with fires. And so the mistake that's been made is that low vitamin D has been turned from causation into, in, from correlation into causation. And that because you're, because you have inflammation, because your vitamin D is low, we're going to raise your vitamin D to overcome your inflammation. The body doesn't work that way. And what Meg Mangan does in her wonderful article is pull the curtain all the way back. So you understand the abject confusion of physiology. And there's a difference in the body as it relates to the immune system. There's a difference between suppressing the immune system and down regulating the immune system. You as a clinician know there is a difference. Average person doesn't know that. So suppression is like putting a pillow over someone who's sleeping. Down regulating is taking someone who's excited and calming them down through friendship and through, you know, talking with them and things like that. But downregulation is very different than suppression. And vitamin D suppresses the immune system. Vitamin A downregulates the immune system. Now, why is this important? Well, it turns out that vitamin D suppresses the inflammatory cytokines interleukin 1, beta interleukin 6 and MCP1. They're very, very reactive to an inflammatory state. And what do those cytokines do? They jack up a hormone called hepcidin, which you may have heard of, you may, you may or may not have heard, but hepcidin. And, and the difficulty of this conversation is we lost your listeners about 10 minutes ago because it gets very technical very fast. And, and I'm happy to step it down in subsequent conversations. But, but hepcidin is a, it's considered the iron hormone. Well, there's two ways to regulate iron. You regulate it with bioavailable copper, which would be like your mother making sure that you're dressed and that you're fed, that you get to school on time. And moms have a great way of inspiring you to get things done. And Hepcidon is like a SWAT team. And SWAT teams will get things done too, but they come at very untoward times. Now, what does hepcidin do? In our earlier conversation, I made mention the iron recycling program. The formal name is called reticulo endothelial system. And that iron recycling program is very important, run by copper. And what will turn it off is hepcidin. Hepcidin goes after a protein or an enzyme. It's called ferroportin. We talked about that previously, and it degrades ferroportin, and then the iron can't get out of the cell. So hepcidin has a very negative effect.

So basically, by taking vitamin D, you're putting more iron in the tissues.

Yes, that's exactly what you're doing. And hepcidin is really designed for when the body senses that there's an infection, the body senses that there's an inflammation, there's iron sequestration, get the iron out of the blood system, keep it away from the pathogens. And what the hepcidin does is it overrides that.

I see.

And that's the challenge we've got. So the difficulty we've got is that there are maybe a dozen people on the planet who really understand what we're talking about right now. And we've been trained like circus bears, pink tutu, riding a bike to believe that we need more vitamin D. And most people don't understand that. There's way more to the story. That's the challenge that we face.

Okay, so let's say we have low vitamin D, which is, from what you're saying, a result of inflammation. So we're focusing on the wrong thing. We shouldn't be focusing on increasing the vitamin D. We got to focus on decreasing maybe inflammation or what. What's your recommendation when the vitamin D is low?

Well, the thing is, what we've got to focus on is why is there a chronic condition of inflammation and chronic infection? That's what we got to focus on. And people are not focusing on the chronic state. Our body was really designed for acute infection, acute inflammation. It was never designed to have a chronic state. What causes the chronic state? Lack of copper. If you can't turn oxygen into water, you're going to create, as we talked about before, oxidants. Well, one of those oxidants is hydrogen peroxide. If a biochemist were with us right now and we asked them, how do you spell inflammation? They would spell it H2O, O2. Well, when you oxygen becomes H2O2, it can't release energy. When oxygen becomes 2 H2O, then you can release energy. So inflammation is ineffective energy production, and so the inflammation is the problem. Why is it chronic? What can we do to overcome that? And instead of solving the inflammatory issue, we're suppressing it and we're correlating it back to a marker that blocks the uptake of retinol. And retinol is what makes copper bioavailable. So that this whole paradigm of the root Cause protocol is based on producing more energy, based on more bioavailable copper. It's a completely different parallel universe to the world of convention that is all about suppressing markers, suppressing activity and that, that's the conflict, okay? The world is not energy centric, it is enemy centric, toxin, heavy metals, some pathogen.

True.

And what the RCP is trying to do is focus on the energy.

Okay? So basically when vitamin D is low, we gotta focus on the intake of retinol and copper. Did I understand that correctly? So how do we. A lot of people never heard of retinol. They probably have heard of synthetic vitamin A, but not retinol.

Right. We eat a low fat diet and we have since September 24th of 55 when Eisenhower had his first of eight heart attacks. And so they brought cholesterol down. And again, one of the best presentations at that meeting was by Frank Schellenberger saying cholesterol does not cause heart disease. People in the know knew that, but the general public doesn't know that. But when you lower cholesterol, you're lowering the intake of retinol. And so then if retinol's down, then the mechanism to make copper bioavailable is totally defunct. The world doesn't know about copper. The world doesn't know about bioavailable copper. The world knows what the big pharma wants us to know.

Right.

Mother Nature wants us to know.

Yes. There's not that much money in copper and retinol intake.

No, there isn't, but it's, but it's what our metabolic pathways are designed for.

So let's go back to this low fat diet, because you're right, I mean the low fat diet is a wrong way approach, wrong approach to this. So when the vitamin D is low, we need more intake of retinol in order to get retinol, we need to incorporate healthier fats in our diet.

Absolutely.

What are some of these?

The other thing that's going to be low. Excuse me for interrupting. The other thing that's going to be low is magnesium is going to be low. Yes, magnesium is always low when there's inflammation.

Do you recommend supplementation with magnesium?

Absolutely. 5 milligrams per pound body weight or 10 milligrams per kilo depending upon what part of the world you're in. But magnesium, it's critically important for regulating energy, but also for responding to inflammation. But there, but that's not taught in doctor school. They don't. Doctors think of inflammation as a disease, not a failed energy process. And so the other side that's not taught is that, and it took me years to figure this out that what causes magnesium loss? What stress. What we know. Mildred Selig and other famous clinicians connected the dots between stress and magnesium loss. But what's the source of stress? It's oxidative stress. It's the greatest stressor on planet earth. And so why is oxidative stress up? Because copper's down in the diet. Iron is rising in our body, especially in the river. It generates a lot of reactive oxygen species which burn up the magnesium. And I coined the phrase the magnesium burn rate. And so when magnesium is low you can't make enough vitamin D because the enzyme to make the storage form that gets measured is magnesium dependent. So it's all these mechanisms are all related to each other. But that's not taught in doctor school. Doctors numbers low supplement. But the question that's never asked is why is my vitamin D, why is my blood, why is my iron low in the blood? They're not taught why, they just know it's slow. Take this, it's low, take that. And that's the kind of knee jerk response that I think is creating a lot of problems in the humanity.

So when it comes to the root cause protocol and now you stop taking vitamin D, what do you see in terms of a level like on an average of people getting their vitamin D up to once they start doing the right retinol and magnesium people experience regularly.

Is their vitamin D comes down to a normal level in the twenties back in, back in the eighties it was very common for vitamin D to be in the teens. All that changed about 30 years ago. In the 90s is when it changed. Up until the 90s it was very common to have have vitamin D in the teens. And so it's just there's been this complete distortion of reality. What does the word distortion start with? D this information D. It just people don't realize the programming behind taking more vitamin D and I. And then we come back to Fred Kumrow, we come back to John Ferriss at Yale. We come back to some amazing research that calls all this into question. There's a wonderful video out by Dr. Brian Walsh but I would encourage you to track him down and I'll make sure I send you his got like a 10 minute video 8 things to reconsider with low vitamin D. He's done a really nice job of distilling it down and getting it to these little sound bites of don't assume that because that marker is low, that you need more of it. And I really commend him for what he's put together. And so this has been a 15 year long battle trying to challenge people's mind numbing programming to think that they need more vitamin D because they don't know the second and third order implications of what that does. And it blocks vitamin A uptake. That's a physiological fact. It prevents copper from being bioavailable. It then prevents iron from being properly regulated. It's going to accelerate magnesium loss. And we got some problems, Houston, when all that starts to take place and it's just people want it simple, right? Keep it simple. You know, where's the easy button? Right? And when I start to talk about all these moving parts, people go, oh, I think it would just be easier just to take vitamin D and like. But it's, it's not what you think it is. And so it's. The beauty of the protocol is that we talk about taking beef liver and cod liver oil, both of which have these nutrients. And what you find in nature is that there's always at least 10 times more retinol than there is vitamin D. Now why would Mother Nature want us to have this much vitamin A and this much D? Maybe because vitamin A is that much more important. And no one's been taught that, that wisdom. When you go into the research in the 1910s. Vitamin A was first identified in 1912. The Nobel Prize was in 1929 for vitamin A. You know what they were doing with vitamin D in those early research studies?

No.

Throwing it in the garbage because they knew it had no value.

I see.

And now what they've done is they've turned it into this paragon of virtue. And what people need to understand is that we live in a world of duality. And within our lifetime, white has become black and black has become white, just as the book 1984 told us it would. And that's the world we live in now. And it's very unsettling to think that the movie, the Matrix, it's not a movie, it's actually a documentary. And it's very hard to come to grips with that reality. So people tend to put their heads in the sand and do what they're told. That's what most people do. I was raised in a home that had no father, so I questioned authority from the very beginning. I'm really good at it. And so. And what that questioning of authority has taught me is there's way more to the story. And we are Taught this. We're never taught about all of this. Well, why don't they want us to know that? That's where I usually gravitate to. And one of my favorite quotations is from Mark Twain. When you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to switch sides. Because the truth is rarely with the majority we think it is. That's where society is supposed to be, but that's not where the truth necessarily is. And that's what I'm seeking to do, is just bring people into a very uncomfortable confrontation with the truth, and then they can decide what they want to do with it. What we found over the years on the magnesium advocacy group on Facebook is that as people began to back away from their vitamin D supplementation, from their iron supplementation, from their calcium supplementation, from their zinc supplementation, lo and behold, they started to feel really good.

Interesting.

And so it's just, it was. And it wasn't me expressing an opinion. I've read over 10,000 articles, peer reviewed articles. It's a compendium of knowledge that I share with the public. It's not an opinion. I mean, I do have opinions. You can well imagine. I've got opinions. But when I'm talking to you or your colleagues, I make sure that I ground my comments in the research because they. That's what's missing in the narrative. In society, what your neighbor tells you to do, what your family member tells you to do, what your doctor tells you to do isn't always grounded in science. And that's what I try to introduce to people. And is, Is the science unilateral? Well, you know, it's not. And that's, that's where you've got to learn to discern. Is this a white hat, Is this a black hat, Is this a gray hat? And they come in three flavors. They really do. That's true. There are amazing researchers who really want humanity to advance, and there's some other researchers who aren't quite as equally wired. And that's okay. That makes our work that much more stimulating. But they're really there, just as there is in life. There's a spectrum of information out there. And part of our challenges as we have this experience is to learn to discern what is the truth and, and be able to act on that. What we believe, what we've come to learn is our truth and make decisions based on that. And all I'm trying to do with the book, with the podcasts, with the articles I've written online and things like that is introduce people to a vein of truth they've never been exposed to and let them come to their own conclusions.

Because, you know, as I was looking into the role of vitamin D3 in oral health, I found a few articles linking, you know, higher levels of vitamin D D with decreased periodontitis or gum disease, decreased cavities with a higher level of vitamin D and also less risk of losing teeth. On the implant side, I found several articles, if there were animal studies, that the higher level of vitamin D, the better bone to implant contact and better osseointegration we get. So what are your thoughts about that? Why do you think we're seeing this, you know, in research with a higher level of vitamin D? And would you recommend it for people suffering from these conditions or not at all?

The research has not been done. How actively have you researched retinol status with those conditions?

It's not mentioned in the studies.

It's not. Yeah, the research is out there, but it's not mentioned in those studies because they want you thinking a certain way. So to do justice to, to the subject, you need to look at the retinol side. And what you're seeing is, as we alluded to a minute ago, the research has all sorts of conflict in it as well. I'm sure if I really worked at it, I could find articles that would demonstrate that maybe vitamin D is not preventing caries, maybe vitamin D is not preventing herd. Any, any word, any clinical word that ends in the letters I T I S stands for. It's the iron seeker. That's what's causing that reaction. That's what's causing that infection, that inflammation. What, the vitamin. What I learned just this morning, Sandra, is that vitamin D does suppress the inflammatory cytokines. That's a known reaction, yes. Does that mean that's a good thing? No. Again, suppression is different than downregulation.

Ideally, we'd want to downregulate for sure.

Absolutely. And there is an article, the author's last name begins with M and I'm embarrassed. I can't think of it right now. It's 2013. I will send it to you. And it talks about the difference between vitamin A versus vitamin D and what they do to the immune system. Completely different. We know about vitamin D, we don't know about vitamin A. And your training has been based on a narrative about one nutrient, but you are not taught about another nutrient that is profoundly important, especially the metabolic pathways. What is really intriguing me is the fact that vitamin D, I'd have to really see that article to understand it because my research tells me that vitamin D suppresses energy production and a carry will be produced in a low energy tooth, not a high energy tooth. I don't know, I'm not sure what the logic trail is on that particular study, but those are important studies that you've identified. What's completely missing are studies relating retinol health to oral health, retinal health to oral systemic health.

I will definitely look into that. Absolutely makes sense. I mean, the biggest problem with nutritional research is, you know, trying to isolate one thing. It is, it is.

That's very true. Yeah. And so in the world of retinol, we know that vitamin D is a hormone. You know, it's, there's a storage form and an active form. How many times has the doctor told you your active status?

Usually, yeah. That's not what.

Never done. They always tell you the storage status but never your accurate stats. And there's a ratio. Kenny Merlier in the Netherlands, he says it should be about the number because they're measured in pico grams versus nanograms. But the active number should be twice the storage number. It very rarely is. But as it relates to vitamin A, there's a whole series of hormones. They're called retinoic acids. 9 cysts, 11 cysts, 13 cysts, all trans retinoic acid. Those are the hormones that are very powerful and very important inside the body that nobody knows anything about. Very little information. I think it'd be fascinating to see what does exist as it relates to retinal metabolism and oral systemic health. I've never researched it, I've never been that focused. But it'd be intriguing to see what you come up with. But the problem is people don't know that. Retinol then goes on to become what are called retinoid receptors. When you get inside the nucleus, there are receptors that need to be present in order for hormones to be made. The thyroid hormone can't be made unless there's RXR next to the thyroid receptor. If those two aren't together, you can't make thyroid hormone. And it turns out that lack of retinol is really what's behind hypothyroidism. And so it's, it's an important metabolic fact that not a lot of people know about. But there's RARs, RORs, RXRs, and RZRs. These are all different families of retinoic receptors that are pivotal in nuclear functioning that nobody knows anything about about. So the, the, the discussion gets very deep Very fast. In a whole another world of metabolism that nobody knows anything about because we've been conditioned and trained to only think about vitamin D. And all I'm trying to do is get people to step back and say, wait, is there more to the story? What else do I need to know? That's really the, the challenge is to get people to broaden their field of vision.

It's interesting, the connection that you mentioned with the retinol and hypothyroidism, because I do have a lot of patients with hypothyroidism and a lot of them are vegetarian, interestingly enough.

Absolutely.

So what are some foods that are high in retinol that you recommend? You mentioned cod liver oil.

Cod liver oil, grass fed butter, grass fed heavy cream, not light cream, heavy cream, grass fed liver. Of course. Right. And so these ancestral foods that sustain society for millennia are completely missing in the diet today. A lot of the research that I've done has taken place at Starbucks. They're always open in the morning. I can get a cup of coffee, get my juices flowing going. And I'm fascinated by the number of people, the vast sea of people who ask for a skinny latte.

That's right, non fat lattes. That's the answer.

And people don't realize that what they're sacrificing in that choice, they still believe because they haven't had the pleasure of hearing Dr. Frank Shallenberger talk about, about cholesterol is not causing heart disease. They still think it does. Fat has nothing to do with heart disease. And they've been trained for four generations now that you got to get fat out of your diet. And what people don't realize is that when they get fat out of their diet, they're going to increase their sugar intake and then that's going to put fat on their body.

That's right. Absolutely true. The fat is replaced by sugar.

Absolutely.

So, you know, growing up in Romania, we ate a lot of organ meats while I was there. Even today, you know, my mom is in her 80s, she's very healthy. She eat, she drinks whole milk. That's what she does. She has the heavy cream like you say, and the butter. It's something that we definitely have to go back to and look to see what our ancestors were doing and pick up some of those habits.

Again, my experience with people from Eastern Europe is it when they present, they need to get back to balance. They snap to very quickly. People from Lithuania, Romania, Poland, it's amazing because their genetic code is looking for that Ancestral food. And once they get it, the body turns right back on, knows what to do.

Yeah, absolutely. Very true. Well, I have some research to do on retinol and oral health. Thank you. This was super enlightening morally. Thank you very much. Definitely. You are making me question some of the things that I've been doing now and I've been taught to do through my nutritional license and American College of Nutrition. And I'm looking forward to taking your Root Cause Protocol class coming up in July. So for those of you who want to join me, there's a link below. And I think your registration opens mid April.

Mid April, exactly. That's great.

Yeah, perfect. Any last words of wisdom that you want to leave us with?

I think it's important for people to know that there is more to the story. And the other thing that I would really encourage people to take to heart is please get more copper in your diet. Our ancestors grew up on 4 to 6 milligrams of copper a day. That was in the 30s. By the 60s, it had dropped to 2 to 5 milligrams. And now today, in the modern era, we have access to 9/10 of 1 milligram.

Wow, that's really low.

It's very low. And in fact, 60% of North American society doesn't even get that. So people don't know about this mineral. And of course, we were talking about vitamin D in this discussion. But what I learned in my research this morning is that there is a mechanism by which vitamin D supplementation is a synthetic surrogate that I think has second and third order effects. It'll probably take me the rest of the year to really sort this out. But now I've got my footholds on where the mechanism and I can really begin to dig in. But I would just encourage people to see how they respond to the mineral that we were designed to have. And make sure that in addition to your vitamin D, make sure you're getting plentiful amounts of vitamin A. Because we were designed, our body was designed for a balance between vitamin A.

And vitamin D. That's great advice. I hope everyone takes it. To really pay attention to the copper, retinol and magnesium. Those are the three things.

Absolutely.

Thank you so much, Morley. It's been a pleasure and hope to see everyone on the next show.

Thank you so much for joining me this week. Please make sure you check out the show notes for any links mentioned in the show. If you like today's show, please invite your friends to listen as well. That would mean a lot to me. Do you have have a question you'd like me to answer? Message me on Instagram @Dr. Sanda.

This is Dr. Sanda.

And remember, your mouth is the gateway to your health. So take care of it in the most natural and best way possible.