When I was in medical school more than 32 years ago, the incidence of autism was 1 in 10,000. Today, the incidence has climbed to less than 1 in 50, according to CDC statistics.¹

Projections from reputable experts suggest that within 10 to 20 years, HALF of all children will have some form of autistic disorder.

While there’s a strong component of increased awareness, which means more children are being diagnosed, this still cannot account for the exponential increase in autism incidence.

How can a culture continue to thrive if every other child has a dysfunctional brain? It can’t. It’s a prescription for social breakdown. Clearly something needs to be done to curb this avalanching trend.

But just what can a parent do to reduce the risk to their child?

Biological scientist Rhonda Patrick, Ph.D. has published two papers^2,3 that expand on some very exciting, simple, but powerful lifestyle interventions that could have profound influence not only on autism but a variety of other developmental disorders in childhood.

We’ve heard about the influence of vitamin D on autism before, but only from a superficial point of view. In her studies, Patrick has dug deep, arriving at a really brilliant hypothesis.

Vitamin D Is an Important Gene Regulator

To understand why vitamin D plays such an important role in brain function (and dysfunction), it’s important to understand what vitamin D actually is. Despite being named a “vitamin,” vitamin D actually gets converted into a steroid hormone (other steroid hormones include estrogen and testosterone).

As a steroid hormone, it regulates over 1,000 different physiological processes, and controls around 5 percent of the human genome. Dr. Michael Holick, who’s a leader in vitamin D research, thinks it may even control twice that amount of genes.

When you have enough vitamin D in your body, it binds to vitamin D receptors located throughout your body, thereby acting like a key that opens the proverbial door.

The vitamin D receptor complex can go deep inside the DNA, where it recognizes the tell-tale sequence of code that instructs the vitamin D receptor complex to either turn the gene on (making it active), or off (making it inactive).

Emerging evidence suggests those little tell-tale sequences are present in as much as 10 percent of all genes, but according to Patrick, it hasn’t been empirically proven that vitamin D has the ability to activate or deactivate all of those genes.

She agrees it’s quite likely that this might be the case though, which gives vitamin D a truly profound influence.