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Vitamin D and Omega-3 have a larger effect on depression than antidepressants

blog.ncase.me

531–540 of 669 posts

Re: Vitamin D and Omega-3 have a larger effect on depression than antidepressants

#531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. But sometimes there is no "root cause", the brain is still a mystery. If you had been depressed even when you knew there was nothing to worry about, you would see it differently, because then you deduce that the black cloud is produced within. Chemistry trumps psychology. Good enough chemistry enables cognitive treatments. But to fix the wrong chemistry you need chemistry.

The neurotransmitter model of mental illness is largely incorrect. It's much more complex than just "Depressives have less serotonin, therefore lets give a reuptake-inhibitor to keep serotonin in the brain".

The creator of the Serotonin hypothesis admitted it was wrong, and he shifted to melatonin's precursor later in his career. The challange with any research in this area is Serotonin and Melatonin both affect biological functions by gradient activity not lock and key receptor models. This pair is how plants and animals respond to seasonal changes which vary year to year. Serotonin is the warm and light lide melatonin is for cool and or dark.

My personal preference is to always suggest getting actual daylight on your retina for 20 min three times a week. Not through glasses, including eyeglasses, but can be through eyelids. That loads transferatin, as in transfer, this loads the enzyme that make serotonin. This then allows the body a better chance to make the intermediate between Serotionin and Melatonin, and is the one believed to help. But the patents have expired so it is like an orphan drug now.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3779905/

Re: Vitamin D and Omega-3 have a larger effect on depression than antidepressants

#532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also noticed that. Opened issue: https://github.com/ncase/blog/issues/4

Hi, author of the blog post here! Yes thank you for catching this awful typo, it's fixed now! I did write "4000 or 5000 IU of Vitamin D" everywhere else in the article -- main text, conclusion -- just my luck that the one place I mess up is right at the very start. (Do not take 5000 mg , that's 200,000,000 IU. You'd have to chug dozens of bottles per day)

Colon Blow: "It would take over 30,000 bowls. [ a giant pyramid of cereal bowls shoots up from under the man, who yells in terror as it rises ] To eat that much oat bran, you’d have to eat ten bowls a day, every day for eight and a half years."

https://snltranscripts.jt.org/89/89ecolonblow.phtml

Re: Vitamin D and Omega-3 have a larger effect on depression than antidepressants

#533
post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally, Vitamin D and B12 had more of a positive effect on my mental health than therapy or any of the half dozen prescription meds I tried. Hiking has the biggest effect though. I think maybe the problem is that therapists are diagnosing people, and psychiatrists are prescribing pills based on those diagnoses, but neither are ordering bloodwork to check for deficiencies. Which leads to a lot of people suffering…

I bought an E-Bike two years ago and it’s changed my life. I want to ride my bike all the time, and am counting down the days to spring. During the warmer months I run all the errands I possibly can with my bike instead of driving, and ride for pleasure often, going on multi hour bike rides. It’s just such a blissful feeling, and as I’ve gotten more fit I’ve been able to turn down the bike assist and built a lot of l…

Are you riding on roads or trails? How are you treated by other road users? I'm tempted by ebikes but live in semi-rural UK with very poor (and getting worse) road surface and lots of blind bends.

Re: Vitamin D and Omega-3 have a larger effect on depression than antidepressants

#534

Vitamin D and Omega-3 are the two supplements that consistently appear to be super powerful in small studies and then fail to do anything significant at all in larger studies. Pause for a moment and consider the mere plausibility of the claims in the first few paragraphs: The effect size for antidepressants is 0.4, but the effect size for Vitamin D is 1.8? Are we to believe that Vitamin D supplements have an effect s…

> Vitamin D and Omega-3 are the two supplements that consistently appear to be super powerful in small studies and then fail to do anything significant at all in larger studies.

That statement is broadly true for most outcomes studied, but specifically for depression the larger study results are pretty mixed.

VITAL (the heavily cited metastudy) shows no effect. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32749491/

But there are other large metastudies like this one for Vit D (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39552387/) and this one for Omega 3 (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31383846/) that do show robust moderate effects.

Re: Vitamin D and Omega-3 have a larger effect on depression than antidepressants

#535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, author of the blog post here! Thank you for writing in with your concerns. First: > Please be very careful when someone tries to tell you that supplements are miraculous and pharmaceutical drugs don’t work at all. I'll concede I unintentionally gave the tone that one should replace antidepressants with supplements, even though the conclusion specifically writes: "(Don't quit your existing antidepressants if they'…

> Researchers have noticed it for 13 years! From the linked Ghaemi et al 2024 meta-analysis You’re cherry picking papers. Others have already shared other studies showing no significant effects of Vitamin D intervention. For any popular supplement you can find someone publishing papers with miraculous results, showing huge effect sizes and significant outcomes. This has been going on for decades. With Omega-3s the la…

the larger the trial size, the smaller the outcome

I find this a bit surprising. Could there be something else affecting the accuracy of larger trials? Perhaps they are not as careful, or cutting corners somewhere?

Re: Vitamin D and Omega-3 have a larger effect on depression than antidepressants

#536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone that falls on the side of “depression is real and antidepressants can help” it is very clear that there are people in this thread that need to hold their tongues because they know not of what they speak. (Not you OP) There are some forms of depression that you cannot think or act your way out of. If you haven’t experienced that, I promise that you do not understand what it is like. You cannot really unders…

A: The same is true for people that say that antidepressants are mostly placebo. They are not. B: When people say that antidepressants saved their life, they aren’t joking or exaggerating in the least. Are placebos unable to save lives? Not claiming antidepressants are or are not mostly placebo, and don't mean to minimize the pain of depression in anyway. I just don't think whether or not they saved a person's life i…

When you do this, you're just accusing people of having no real evaluative power about their own experience. It's pointless, and it's not really an opinion.

Placebo-controlled RCTs show that some people react well to antidepressants with major variation from person to person.

Re: Vitamin D and Omega-3 have a larger effect on depression than antidepressants

#537

I saw a thing from HealthyGamerGG youtube[1] that he said one of the things about depression is that it causes/influences one to avoid the things that would make their life less depressing. eg just to paint the picture: you're depressed so you don't get out of bed, therefore you don't go do your workout, therefore you lack endorphins and look in the mirror and see squishy, you're sad about how squishy you are and so…

>he's a real Dr.

Careful, he is also a believer in Ayurveda[1]. Which basically basically categorizes people into different elements like fire and water and then tries to change their diet and habits to match their elemental style or something. You can hear him talking about it here [2]. Kinda reminds me of Humorism [3]. Dr. K seems like a nice enough guy but don't get too lured in by the "Harvard-trained" credentialism.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayurveda [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQ2xnThRGPg [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humorism

Re: Vitamin D and Omega-3 have a larger effect on depression than antidepressants

#539
post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bought an E-Bike two years ago and it’s changed my life. I want to ride my bike all the time, and am counting down the days to spring. During the warmer months I run all the errands I possibly can with my bike instead of driving, and ride for pleasure often, going on multi hour bike rides. It’s just such a blissful feeling, and as I’ve gotten more fit I’ve been able to turn down the bike assist and built a lot of l…

Are you riding on roads or trails? How are you treated by other road users? I'm tempted by ebikes but live in semi-rural UK with very poor (and getting worse) road surface and lots of blind bends.

I largely ride on paved bike trails that are wholly separate from the roads, or suburban residential roads that have a Swiss cheese of bike trails interconnecting via parks. It’s never the fastest way, but there’s almost always a “safe way” to bike somewhere, due to a lot of effort by our city council. I’m more avoidant of the major roads, an elderly man was extremely close to me and my kid in her bike trailer when he made a right turn, I think I’d be more cautious if I didn’t have so many accessible ways to bike separate from the roads.

Oddly a lot of the “guys with road bikes wearing full gear” seem to just ride on the road anyway. I have no idea why, I’ve double checked the laws and I’m allowed to ride there.

Re: Vitamin D and Omega-3 have a larger effect on depression than antidepressants

#540
I was an RA at the RAND Corp who put together literature reviews for mental health interventions like this. The Vitamin D result is implausible. If true it would be the biggest breakthrough in the history of psychiatry.

This is the referenced meta-analysis: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/psychological-medici...

The largest N study (N=18,353; more than half of the entire 31 study sample) included is https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2768978, which found: "Risk of depression or clinically relevant depressive symptoms was not significantly different between the vitamin D3 group...and the placebo group."

The highest dose study (100,000 IU/week) included is https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30532541/, which found: "...the treatment response or BDI scores did not differ significantly between groups."

The paper/supplementary materials doesn't include a simple table of the depression outcomes for the 31 included studies, which is a glaring omission.

I think someone just messed up here. Maybe missed a decimal place?

For a more realistic perspective, here's another careful meta-analysis of RCTs of Vitamin D for depression that found null result: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S08999... (granted, 2015). And another from 2025 that found a .36 effect size, which is plausible and still fantastic: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychiatry/articles/10....

I don't mean to dissuade people from trying these given the low risk profile, just don't expect to go from a C to an A.

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