Rickets, Madness and Magic Mushrooms

“mens sana in corpore sano” – healthy mind in a healthy body.

In 1993, the Lancet medical journal reported that the remains of an 18th century woman were found under a church. Subsequent studies revealed that the bones were stronger and more dense than the bones of any modern women.

Weakening of bones is becoming a serious problem for modern woman with 250,000 hip fractures occurring annually in the US. Nearly half of all women in the US aged 50 or over have had at least one fracture of the backbone or spine and two-thirds of these go unrecognized. One in five women will have had a wrist fracture by the age of 70 contributing to an annual total of 250,000 wrist fractures. (1)

Evidence of softening of our bones first came to light in the form of rickets. Rickets is a softening of bones in children due to deficiency or impaired metabolism of vitamin D. Although it can occur in adults, the majority of cases occur in children suffering from severe malnutrition, usually resulting from famine or starvation during the early stages of childhood.

Vitamin D

Vitamin D is absorbed from food or produced by the skin when exposed to sunlight. Lack of vitamin D production by the skin may occur in people who:

Live in climates with little exposure to sunlight
Must stay indoors
Work indoors during the daylight hours

Rickets appeared in epidemic form during the Industrial Revolution where the pollution from factories blocked the sun’s ultraviolet rays. (2)

Sunblock

Today, a different barrier blocking sunlight and therefore limiting vitamin D uptake, ironically, is a protection against harmful radiation from the sun which causes skin cancer – sunblock.

Take the case of 12-year-old schoolgirl Tyler Attrill, of Sandown, Isle of Wight, U.K.

The Isle of Wight frequently records more hours of sunshine in a year than anywhere else in Britain. Her mother made sure her daughter wore plenty of high-factor suncream when she played outside.(3)

Mrs Attrill said;

“I’ve always been very careful with her and her brother, and nagged them to wear hats and sun cream when it’s hot. I used to put factor-50 cream on to protect her skin. I thought I was doing the right thing.”

The factor-50 sunscreen deprived her of essential vitamin D and left 12-year-old Tyler suffering from a vitamin deficiency linked to the bone disease rickets. She was eventually diagnosed after tests to establish why she had failed to recover properly from an unrelated operation on her hip. She suffered constant pain and weakness in her legs.

These symptoms also occur in the bone disease Osteoporosis. Osteoporosis makes your bones weak and more likely to break. Anyone can develop osteoporosis, but it is common in older women. As many as half of all women and a quarter of men older than 50 will break a bone due to osteoporosis.

While there may be other contributory factors, the National Library of Medicine states:

a diet low in vitamin D makes you more prone to bone loss.(4)

Any more health issues concerning vitamin D?

According to a study by researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and Creighton University School of Medicine in Omaha have reported that markedly higher intake of vitamin D is needed to reach blood levels that can prevent or markedly cut the incidence of breast cancer and several other major diseases than had been originally thought.(5)

“We found that daily intakes of vitamin D by adults in the range of 4000-8000 IU are needed to maintain blood levels of vitamin D metabolites in the range needed to reduce by about half the risk of several diseases;

breast cancer,
colon cancer,
multiple sclerosis, and
type 1 diabetes,

said Cedric Garland, DrPH, professor of family and preventive medicine at UC San Diego Moores Cancer Center.

“I was surprised to find that the intakes required to maintain vitamin D status for disease prevention were so high – much higher than the minimal intake of vitamin D of 400 IU/day that was needed to defeat rickets in the 20th century.”

However, one man who was not surprised by these results was Robert P. Heaney, MD a distinguished biomedical scientist who has studied vitamin D need for several decades.

“This result was what our dose-response studies predicted, but it took a study such as this, of people leading their everyday lives, to confirm it. Now is the time for virtually everyone to take more vitamin D to help prevent some major types of cancer, several other serious illnesses, and fractures,” said Heaney.

Apart from sunlight, mushrooms may soon emerge from the dark as an unlikely, but significant, source of vitamin D. (Mushrooms are Unlikely Source of Vitamin D.)

Mushrooms synthesize vitamin D, albeit in a different form, through UV exposure. Growers typically raise the mushrooms indoors in the dark, switching on fluorescent lights only at harvest time which means they now contain negligible amounts of the vitamin.

However, new research, while preliminary, suggests that brief exposure to ultraviolet light can induce farmed mushrooms with a giant serving of the vitamin.

The processing technology is suitable for boosting the vitamin D content of mushrooms and has no adverse effects on other nutrients, the first study on the topic has concluded. The technology, which involves exposing mushrooms to the same kind of ultraviolet light that produces suntans, can greatly boost mushrooms’ vitamin D content.

The scientists set out to answer several questions about commercial-scale UV light processing of mushrooms.

Among them:

Does it produce consistently high levels of vitamin D and does it adversely affect other nutrients in mushrooms?

They compared button mushrooms exposed to UVB light, those exposed to natural sunlight and those kept in the dark. The UVB-exposed mushrooms got a dramatic boost in vitamin D (700 percent more of the vitamin than those mushrooms exposed to no light) and the UVB processing had no effect on levels of vitamin C, folate, riboflavin, niacin and a host of other essential nutrients.

Vitamin C is a very important vitamin as it is crucial to healthy brain function.

A study released this month by the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology reveals that mental disorders have become Europe’s largest health challenge in the 21st century.(2)

The study’s key findings include:

Each year, 38.2% of the EU’s population – or 164.8 million people – suffers from a mental disorder

The most frequent disorders are;

anxiety disorders (14.0%)
insomnia (7.0%)
major depression (6.9%)
alcohol and drug dependence (>4%), and
attention-deficit and hyperactivity disorders (ADHD, 5% in the young)

Professor Ben Green, University of Chester says Vitamin C deficiency has been associated with sudden-onset, profound suicidal depression.(6)

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, suicide is the third leading cause of death for people aged 15 to 24 and the fourth leading cause of death for children between the ages of 10 and 14.(7)

Principal investigator Hans-Ulrich, of Wittchen European College of Neuropsychopharmacology, says:

“Concerted priority action is needed at all levels, including substantially increased funding for basic and clinical as well as public health research in order to identify better strategies for improved prevention and treatment for disorders of the brain as the core health challenge of the 21st century.”

Would it help if we all ate more mushrooms?

If they are ‘magic‘ mushrooms, then maybe.

Rigorous experiments conducted at Johns Hopkins have shed scientific light on psilocybin, a substance found in certain psychoactive mushrooms and used for centuries in various cultures for divinatory, healing, and religious purposes.

In the experiment, volunteers were given preparatory guidance and five sessions each a month apart, four with different doses of psilocybin and one with placebo (no dose). Eighteen volunteers (94 percent) who were involved in the experiment rated a psilocybin session as among the top five most or as the topmost spiritually significant experience of his or her life.

Commenting on the findings, Jerome Jaffe, M.D., of the University of Maryland School of Medicine, who served as the first White House “Drug Czar” and has also been a consultant to the World Health Organization on drug issues, remarked:

“The Hopkins psilocybin studies clearly demonstrate that this route to the mystical is not to be walked alone. But they have also demonstrated significant and lasting benefits.”

He adds,

“That raises two questions:

Could psilocybin-occasioned experiences prove therapeutically useful, for example in dealing with the psychological distress experienced by some terminal patients?

And should properly-informed citizens, not in distress, be allowed to receive psilocybin for its possible spiritual benefits, which would also allow them to pursue other possibly risky activities such as cosmetic surgery and mountain-climbing?”

Seems like a good idea to me.

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