McGill University in Canada is home to professors John White and David Goltzman in the Faculty of Medicine Department of Physiology. These two men lead a team that discovered that vitamin D in active form essentially shuts down cancer cells. Before everyone starts to pop vitamin D in mega doses, or gives huge amounts to dogs, let’s get more of a handle on the mechanism of action that causes this incredibly beneficial effect.
It turns out that vitamin D inhibits production and function of the protein cMYC which happens to be the driver behind cell division and is active in elevated levels in over half of all cancers. The natural antagonist of cMYC is called MCD1 (had enough of letters and numbers yet?) and what’s key here is that vitamin D stimulates production of MCD1. So, essentially, we have more more of the good stuff to shut down the protein that drives cell division in a great many cancers.