Multiple Sclerosis & Vitamin D Deficiency: Health Story

Aired on Lifetime Television
Sunday, April 22 and June 3, 2007
Show 410

Juli O'Flaherty was a new business owner, a competitive body builder and an outdoors enthusiast, and at one point thought it was her busy lifestyle that was wearing on her body. "Pains in my legs, loss of feeling in my legs, and when I had these things I also blamed them on the restaurant business," Juli says. Then in 2003 she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, or MS. "It's not a pretty disease. It doesn't look like there's much hope, but then the more I started to learn about what was out there, I started to realize that there really was hope in taking care of yourself," she says. Some of the new hope stems from recent research about a possible prevention and treatment method for MS with vitamin D. "There may be as much as 50 percent of cases of MS are in fact related to vitamin D deficiency. Most experts agree you need 1,000 units of vitamin D-3 a day." says Dr. Michael Holick.  Dr. Holick says there are two ways to get vitamin D, sunlight and eating oily fish.