Dr Paul Mason obtained his medical degree with honours from the University of Sydney, and also holds degrees in Physiotherapy and Occupational Health. He is a Specialist Sports Medicine and Exercise Physician.
Dr Mason developed an interest in low carbohydrate diets in 2011. Since then he has spent hundreds of hours reading and analysing the scientific literature.
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[Music] There’s been a lot of data over the years saying that we’ve got terribly low vitamin D levels and it’s a wonder supplement. If you take it, it’ll do amazing things for you. And the reason people thought this, and when I say people, doctors like me, is that when you have a look at the population levels, the people with the lowest level of vitamin D in the population die at a significantly higher rate than peoples with the highest level of vitamin D in their body. Now, we know that you get vitamin D from the sun, but the idea was that you don’t need to get it from the sun. You just take the tablet and that will bring you up to that same level of health protection. Well, guess what? It doesn’t. So, if you get high levels of vitamin D from tablets, it helps out with other things in your health with bone health and several other things, but the effect on all cause mortality, your chance of falling off the perch is not significantly altered. And the reason that I think is this is that it’s a concept of a surrogate marker. Vitamin D from the sun is an indication that you’re getting something else from the sun. And that something else relates to nitric oxides. We know that in summer blood pressure in the population is lower and that rate of heart attacks is lower than in winter when people aren’t exposed to as much sun. And there’s very good evidence. I was reading a dermatology journal several years ago and I came across this and I don’t know why it’s not been more widely promulgated but they were able to demonstrate that UV exposure on the skin led to these beneficial effects on heart health through nitric oxide production. So I suspect that vitamin D is acting as a surrogate marker for this other pathway that’s going on and that’s where we get a lot of the benefit from sun exposure.
