The Big Vitamin D Mistake [pdf] (2017)

mushrooms and herring

Haha the article states that the recommended daily dose should be 6-8k

5kIU = 125 micrograms, that's a lot.

The amount of fraud and fakes on amazon is surreal. I wouldn't trust something from amazon to open a can of beans that was already open.

I'm certainly not going to put something from amazon in my body. God only knows what you're actually getting

I get gummies at 2000000000 IU and that's not even the final form of my vitamin

Also what's an IU. Apparently it's meant to normalize impact across vitamin D species of which there are multiple. Part of me can see the reasoning but it runs contrary to how much of medicine/pharma operates, generally in such form as either mg per time interval or mg/kg per time interval. It would be like taking the whole armada of blood pressure drugs and dictating their doses in mmHg instead of milligrams. If only things were so simple!

I recall reading some research which indicated that daily dosage resulted in slightly better protections against cancer. Though better than not taking it at all.

I just got more 5000IU at Walmart which was a nice surprise. Normally I take two 2000IU tablets.

The article's conclusion is straightforward.

Eat one small rock per day as important source of vitamins and minerals critical to digestive health.

Vitamin D good. Higher levels than previously thought.

This article is not technical and is 4 pages and includes a 1 paragraph executive summary. There's only 2 pages of content.

There's no specific info about any experiment. It just claims a statistics error was recently found in another paper/experiment. It claims fixing the error suggests we should supplement more Vitamin D.

It gestures vaguely at "Diabetes" and "immune health" and "we used to eat fish" to claim that we want/need more blood Vitamin D. It also points to some other actual studies that might have good evidence that we want or need more Vitamin D.

I would doubt anything in this could cause harm. Vitamin D is fat soluble so taking too much can be dangerous, but I don't think the recommended doses here are close to that dosage.

This paper aims for slightly more than 100nmol/l Vitamin D marker in blood, while other NIH papers claim >375nmol/l is getting into Vitamin D toxicity territory.

>https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6158375/

NIH previously claimed a serum level of less than 72nmol/l is a health problem, so this paper is bumping that up slightly.

My understanding is that large scale tests of Vitamin D supplementation don't ever seem to turn out as great as all these papers would imply. Maybe their experiments had too low a dose.

My own supplementation has done jack and shit. Maybe I needed a higher dose.

I still hold skepticism that all of humanity needs a supplement, as that's just a sales pitch from a company at that point, but the "Everyone really does need a shitload of Vitamin D supplement" hypothesis at least has a mechanism that makes sense.

I don't think this paper is associated with the NIH besides being hosted there.

> Also also remember, D2 is a vitamin, D3 is a hormone.

As a naive person, what's the consequence of this?

If you're looking to build and maintain healthy vitamin D levels, D3 is generally the better supplement choice, according to health experts and studies. Consult your doctor to determine your needs and the best form for you, especially if you have a deficiency or dietary restrictions. -Google Gemini

I think it's important to clarify understandings for non-scientific/med community each time these types of technical discussions occur.

you should always be skeptical of claims and seek to understand their basis and methodology.

I mean, I agree MAHA sucks, and Kennedy is a fool and and loser, but the PDF is only hosted at the NIH. It was published in a journal owned by the Korean Society for Preventive Medicine, and the researcher is from Attikon University Hospital, University of Athens School of Medicine, Athens, Greece. And it was published WAAAAAAAY back in 2017.

So do your research or something.

You can get 10,000 or even 100,000 IU tablets prescribed in Canada

yes, but not long term, from what i’ve read. do it for 90 days through winter maybe?

Yes, as long as you keep your blood levels in check. It would take a while to overdose it this way, but it's not impossible.

for a couple weeks? probably.

I would not take that much consistently unless you're in the arctic circle and its winter

More recent Vitamin D discussions:

We're learning more about what Vitamin D does

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46088998

Vitamin D reduces incidence and duration of colds in those with low levels

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45732670

On published article does not mean it's proved and everyone must follow watever it says. The Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_D says

> However, the evidence for the health benefits of vitamin D supplementation in individuals who are already vitamin D sufficient is unproven.

andvitamin D is liposoluble so overdose is a risk. So I strongly recomend to ask a real medical doctor.