Chair, honourable members of the committee, my name is Allan Markin, and my vision is preventive health care for everyone.
I am the founder and chief accountability officer of the Pure North S’Energy Foundation, Canada’s largest primary prevention-focused not-for-profit organization. I'm accompanied by Dr. Mark Atkinson, a medical doctor and director of quality assurance, and Dr. Samantha Kimball, research director at the Pure North S’Energy Foundation.
At Pure North we empower Canadians to feel better and live longer through the use of simple and effective prevention-focused clinical interventions. These include vitamin D3 and high-quality multivitamin and mineral supplementation, health education, and the safe removal of mercury amalgam fillings. Our preventive program supports the advancement of modern medicine. Our multidisciplinary team of over 100 people includes medical doctors, naturopathic doctors, nurse practitioners, dentists, pharmacists, nurses, and other health care professionals.
Over an eight-to-ten-year period, 40,000 Canadians, including 25,000 vulnerable seniors, homeless, and first nations, have accessed our preventive health program, and have their blood panel taken regularly. Participants in our program experience a significant increase in quality of life and a 20% improvement in physical and mental health. Forty-eight per cent of those with pre-diabetes have experienced a complete reversal in their disease. Emerging evidence demonstrates there's a 17% reduction in the prevalence of metabolic syndrome for every 25 nanomoles per litre of vitamin D3 increase.
Our request is for the Government of Canada to proactively resolve what we call the four injustices, and for all Canadian physicians, medical students, dentists, and allied health professionals to be educated about these injustices.
Injustice number one is that Health Canada has regulated that no supplement in Canada contain more than 1,000 IUs of vitamin D3. Any amount higher than this requires a doctor’s prescription and is regarded a drug. In the U.S.A., a country that has exactly the same recommended daily allowance for vitamin D3 as Canada, people have access to vitamin D3 supplements containing 7,000 IUs of vitamin D3 per tablet. It does not require a prescription, to our knowledge. The FDA has not put a limit on the amount of vitamin D3 in a pill, but Health Canada has. Canadians should have access to vitamin D3 supplements at the same dose as Americans, or higher.
Injustice number two is that the recommended daily allowance for vitamin D3 should be changed to be between 7,000 IUs and 9,000 IUs. Health Canada has been proven to have made a significant mathematical error in their calculation of the RDA for vitamin D3. The Health Canada vitamin D3 RDA for most adults is 600 IUs per day. Using Health Canada data and the correct statistical methodology, Professor Paul Veugelers at the University of Alberta has shown that the IOM vitamin D3 recommendation would have been 9,000 IUs per day if IOM had not made a math error. Another group, led by Dr. Heaney, a vitamin D3 expert from Creighton University in Nebraska, came up with a similar figure of 7,000 IUs based on an analysis of a dataset of 3,600 individuals. Dr. Kimball has published extensively on vitamin D3, including a trial of 14,000 IUs per day in patients with MS. The evidence is clear: vitamin D3 is safe, and the vitamin D3 RDA should be 10 to 15 times higher than the current Health Canada RDA.
Injustice number three is that Canada needs to mandate a complete ban on the use of mercury amalgam fillings in all Canadians, and not just children, pregnant women, and those with impaired kidney function. In Health Canada's report, “The Safety of Dental Amalgam”, they acknowledge that amalgams impair kidney function. Pure North research has found that the safe removal of amalgams results in a significant improvement in kidney and liver function and in self-reported physical and mental health symptoms, such as anger, depression, and anxiety. The World Health Organization acknowledges that mercury is poisonous at any level. The use of mercury amalgam fillings has already been completely banned in Norway, Sweden, and soon Brazil, as well as a partial ban in Denmark. Canada needs to follow suit. Amalgam removal needs to be done safely.
Injustice number four is that Canadian emergency departments have unnecessarily long lineups and waiting times. The Wait Time Alliance’s annual report card states that 27% of Canadians reported waiting more than four hours in an emergency department, as compared with 1% in the Netherlands, for example.
A recent analysis of the data relating to 6,600 of our program participants by the school of public policy at the University of Calgary found that a preventive health program such as Pure North's keeps people out of hospital. Within one year of being on the program, the Pure North participants had 45% fewer nights in hospital and accessed emergency departments 28% less than controls. This happened in less than one year.
The inconvenient truth is that millions of Canadians experience disease and suffer unnecessarily because our health care system has not yet made primary prevention a priority.
In 1943 the Canadian Medical Association called for preventive medicine to become a federal priority.
The World Health Organization report on the impact of chronic disease in Canada predicted that between 2005 and 2015 over two million Canadians, or 400,000 people a year, on average, will die from chronic disease.
Studies have found that if Canadians optimized their intake of vitamin D3, 37,000 premature deaths would be prevented annually, and the economic burden would be reduced by $20 billion per year.
In summary, integration of a proven preventive health program such as Pure North’s prevents premature deaths and saves the government money. An assessment of the economic impact of our program estimated that every dollar invested in the Pure North program provides a return of between 13:1 and 25:1.
The result is that the health care cost curve is bent downwards with real potential cost savings of at least $420 million per year if rolled out to 600,000 Canadians. If Alberta, for example, implemented the Pure North program province-wide, this could free up the equivalent of 1,600 hospital beds every year. This is roughly the same as building two entirely new hospitals.
The provincial governments are also locked into an unfortunate mindset that the health care costs avoided rather than current health care dollars saved are not worth pursuing. Preventing [Technical Difficulty—Editor] chronic disease in the future avoids the size of the increase in budget that we are otherwise headed for. To avoid prevention since it does not reduce the size of the health budget today is nothing more than flawed logic with tragic implications, a sicker population and ever-increasing costs of treating them.
It is our hope that the Standing Committee on Health will attach great importance to these issues and take action to resolve them.