It's official: Vitamin D deficiency is so widespread in U.S. children that it poses a huge threat to the future health of an entire generation. A new study published in the journal Pediatrics paints a disturbing picture of vitamin D deficiency across the population of children aged 1 through 21. Three-fourths of young African American children, for example, are deficient in vitamin D. Much the same pattern holds true for Mexican American children. Even white kids, with their fairer skin and greater vitamin D production, hit the charts with 50% – 60% deficiency, depending on the age group.

Of course, in classic medical doublespeak style, health researchers don't actually call it "deficiency." (Because that would trigger a whole new urgency to correct the problem.) Instead, they call it "vitamin D insufficiency," while reserving the term "deficiency" for children who have virtually no vitamin D in their blood whatsoever.

Of course, "insufficient" means "deficient" in the real world, since kids who are now labeled as "insufficient" in vitamin D are, of course, actually quite deficient in the nutrient. And keep in mind that these frighteningly common vitamin D deficiencies exist even when the accepted standards of vitamin D levels in the blood are artificially low to begin with. If you use real numbers of the vitamin D levels required for peak human performance, the truth is that as many as 90 percent of U.S. children are chronically deficient in vitamin D.

"It's astounding," said Michal L. Melamed of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, in a Washington Post report (source below). "At first, we couldn't believe the numbers. I think it's very worrisome."

But why are American kids so deficient in vitamin D in the first place?

The answer, of course, is because kids are sunlight deficient. And that's due to a few reasons: First, too many kids today spend most of their hours in front of computers, televisions or gaming consoles. The live almost like vampires, staying awake all night, sleeping during the day, living off the flesh of other creatures (beef jerky and hamburgers…).

Many of their parents, too, are part of the problem. Today's moms seem terrified that their kids might actually experience "the outdoors" for more than a few moments. They wait with air-conditioned cars at the school bus stops, then hustle their kids into pre-cooled cars to drive the quarter mile back to their artificially air-conditioned homes. Sunlight almost never touches these kids (they might turn to dust).

The sunscreen industry also shares some blame in all this, as it thrives on the silly idea that sunlight is bad for children and that all kids need to be smothered in sunscreen lotions before venturing outdoors. (Of course, they never admit their own sunscreen products are filled with cancer-causing chemicals in the first place…)

Above all, the medical establishment is to blame for vitamin D deficiency. Rather than teaching parents and children about the importance of vitamin D, they seem to have declared a blackout on most useful information about the nutrient, preferring instead to prescribe toxic pharmaceutical drugs to treat the symptoms of vitamin D deficiency. Osteoporosis drugs, in particular, are made virtually obsolete by vitamin D alone. That's why you don't see any drug companies talking about vitamin D — it would destroy osteoporosis drug sales!

The entire "sick care" industry (including Big Pharma) actually depends on widespread nutritional deficiencies in order to create repeat business. Vitamin D deficiency, of course, figures prominently in this equation: It promotes cancer, bone loss, obesity, depression and heart disease. It's no coincidence that these are some of the biggest profit earners for drug companies.

Drug company profits, to say it another way, depend heavily on widespread vitamin D deficiency. That's why medical schools (which are heavily funded by drug companies) and cancer non-profit (also funded by Big Pharma) almost never teach anyone about the health-protective properties of vitamin D. It's simply bad business to admit that a simple nutrient (that people can get for free) could prevent cancer or other high-profit diseases.

Check out all the popular cancer non-profit groups: The American Cancer Society, Susan G. Komen, etc. Have you ever seen any of them actually promote sunlight and vitamin D as a way to prevent or reverse cancer? Of course not! It's bad for business. They collect a lot more cash convincing people that they're "searching for the cure" when, in reality, the cure already exists: It's called vitamin D.

That's why I've often stated that these cancer non-profit groups are really in the disinformation business. In order to protect their own existence, they spread disinformation about cancer that leaves people ignorant about real solutions like vitamin D. As such, these organizations are inherently destructive and evil, and we would all be better off if they simply ceased to exist (or were shut down by the Justice Dept for their racketeering ways…).

When considering today's grand, lumbering debate over health care reform, you'd have to be a complete idiot to not realize that vitamin D could slash health care costs across the board. Considering that this one nutrient helps prevent so many diseases — cancer, heart disease, osteoporosis, depression, obesity, diabetes, etc. — it's almost like the "miracle health reform nutrient" that our modern world has been waiting for.

And yet there's not a single lawmaker in Washington who has uttered the name of this nutrient in the context of health care reform. In fact, it's a pretty good guess that most lawmakers in Washington are vitamin D deficient themselves. And their nutritional ignorance is, of course, inherited by the health care reform legislation these people craft. The end result? A truly short-sighted health care reform system that continues to pay for treatments of preventable disease rather than promoting a single nutrient that could slash health care costs by as much as twenty percent all by itself (by my estimate, anyway).

Despite all the bickering, the accounting, the negotiating and the grandstanding, the simple truth is that our health care reform dialog is missing half the picture: Nutrition!

This new research about widespread vitamin D deficiency supports this important point:

You can't talk seriously about health care reform unless you address vitamin D deficiency in the population.

Because unless you correct these nutritional deficiencies, all you're doing is flushing money down the Big Government toilet (which is almost stopped up from all the wads of paper money they keep forcing into it).

In other words, the entire dialog about health care reform taking place in Washington right now is a complete waste of time. It's absolutely useless. There will be no real health reform until you admit that nutrition plays a role in human health. And the FDA, of course, insists that all nutrition is biologically inert — that only "drugs" have any ability to prevent or treat any disease, not vitamins or minerals. That's literally the FDA's official position. That's also the position of various medical associations, medical journals, med schools and far too many old-school doctors: Nutrition? It's not even on their radar.

Meanwhile, we spend hundreds of billions of dollars treating diseases that can be cured with vitamin D. Cancer is one of them. Most cancer tumors simply cannot grow in the presence of vitamin D. You show me someone on chemotherapy, and I'll show you someone who's deficient in vitamin D.

The vitamin D cover-up is, of course, a grand conspiracy. There is actually a concerted effort to downplay nutrition (and even outlaw it, if you're the FDA) while keeping the population nutritionally ignorant so that people remain sick, diseased, bankrupt and easily controlled by powerful corporations and oppressive governments. It's the new American way: Keep the people stupid, sick and broke. And it's working like gangbusters.

Even while the American people are ridiculously diseased and bankrupt, the real sickness in America isn't with the people — it's with the pursuit of profit. This cancerous condition has spread through the U.S. economy, causing corporations to abandon products and policies that help the People and, instead, promote products and policies that maximize corporate profits.

As a result of this insidious pursuit of profit, a huge portion of the U.S. economy is now based on ripping people off, selling them things that actually harm them: Junk food, diet soda, cigarettes, pharmaceuticals, chemotherapy, etc. Vitamin D, of course, produces no real profit (since it can't be patented), so it remains universally ignored by all the corporations that dominate health care today.

It's the same story with zinc, magnesium, calcium, selenium or natural plant-based nutrients. They're all ignored (or outlawed) because they generate no profits. That's why there's no real talk of solving our nation's health care crisis with nutrients like vitamin D — even when the research clearly shows the majority of the population is deficient in the nutrient!

The whole situation is truly astonishing: The solutions to our health problems are staring us right in the face, but modern medicine refuses to acknowledge them (because they aren't made in a lab or available by prescription). So real solutions remain ignored while high-profit, short-term "treatments" get all the attention.

As long as that's the case, health care reform will simply never work. Even if you had all the money in the world, it's still not enough to pay for a nation of diseased people who are intentionally kept ignorant and sick. Sooner or later, you've got to either go broke as a nation or find a way to promote nutrition and wellness.

America, sadly, has chosen the former.

Vitamin D3