Spirit Voyage Blog

Dr. Soram has been a member of the Kundalini Yoga community and a devoted student of Yogi Bhajan for over 35 years.  As one of America’s top medical professionals, working at Los Angeles’ famed Cedar Sinai Hospital, he  is also a founding member of the American Holistic Medical Association, the American Academy of Medical Acupuncture, a member of the Bureau of Naturopathic Medicine Advisory Council for the State of California and serves as medical director for the East-West Medical Research Institute.

And with all of those credentials aside, he is an amazing doctor who has helped care for his patients for decades.  In his private medical practice, he integrates Eastern medicine, nutrition, homeopathy, and Western Internal medicine.   It was from this base of knowledge and practice that Dr. Soram began to recognize the critical importance of Vitamin D which ultimately led to his Vitamin D Revolution.

I recently sat down with Dr. Soram to ask him about this revolution and get an understanding of what it’s all about.  He started noticing the incredible connections between Vitamin D and health in his personal practice.  He had himself tested and discovered that he was deeply deficient in Vitamin D and had early signs of adul rickets or osteomalacia.  At that point, he started measuring patients and discovered that a high majority of his patients were very deficient as well.

I asked him why so many people are deficient.  He said that it is a combination of things, all connected to the sun.  People spend so much of their time indoors, wear so much sunblock, and have become unable to convert sunlight into Vitamin D.  It turns out that Vitamin D isn’t even a Vitamin, it’s a hormone that interacts with over 2000 genes in the body.  Shortage of Vitamin D in the body has been associated with cancer, heart attack, strokes, osteoporosis, diabetes, autism, childhood asthma, chronic pain, and many other  disorders.

About a year ago, Dr. Soram discovered that home testing kits were available for testing your Vitamin D levels.  The next morning while he was meditating during his morning sadhana, he clearly saw this combination of a test kit, a book, and high quality Vitamin D pills that could be offered to the public and really revolutionize the understanding and consumption of this critical hormone/vitamin through the country and the world.  And the Vitamin D Revolution was born.

As a Sikh, Dr. Soram said that Vitamin D deficiency is much more common because sikhs cover up so much of their bodies with their bana (traditional clothing) – this is also true of many religious clothes including muslims, jews, priests, nuns, etc. etc. 

Dr. Soram gets very passionate when he talks about this Vitamin.  “If  I told you there was a pill that could potentially reduce breast cancer by 50%, wouldn’t you think every woman in the world would take it?  Epidemiological studies show that if women raise their Vitamin D levels over 52 mg/ml, it is estimated that breast cancer would be reducd by 50% without side effects!!”  It is also extremely critical for pregnant and nursing mothers, having a huge impact on the health of their children. 

So, I asked Dr. Soram what the best way to get Vitamin D into your system is.  He said that getting sun on your skin is great, and recommends that you get 20 minutes of sun before putting on your sunblock, but he says this just won’t be enough.  First of all, it is only during the summer that the sun is strong enough for our bodies to effectively convert it to Vitamin D and only at very specific latitudes – it needs to be at 35 degrees or less.  And race also effects this ability – peopl of African descent need much more sunlight to create Vitamin D than people of European descent with a wide range in between.  So he recommends taking a daily supplement.

It is possible to overdose on Vitamin D, so until you get tested, he recommends staying at 2000 units per day, but he highly reccomends taking the test and figuring out the correct dosage for your individual levels.

There is so much information about Vitamin D that I can’t possibly include in this blog – you’ll have to read the book to get all the info.  You can click here to see more about it on our site: http://www.spiritvoyage.com/yoga/The-Vitamin-D-Revolution/Soram-Khalsa/BKS-009164.aspx 

Dr. Soram has much more to come, so keep your ears open – he has had a long-standing dream of writing about merging Eastern and Western medicines.  He says that he loves and cares for his patients in Los Angeles, but feels he has a duty to provide a service to the planet as a whole and this is just a first step.