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The worthlessness of Vitamin D is mildly exaggerated

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Re: The worthlessness of Vitamin D is mildly exaggerated

#171

I was told I was Vitamin D deficient and accidentally over indexed on supplements and got quite sick. Some of the dosages on OTC are ridiculously high

A different personal experience. I had Vit D deficiency. Started on 2000IU per day and was still deficient after months. Then started on 5000IU per day, initially daily but now every other day or so. My last test was in the middle of the "normal" range. I have been taking VitD for 4 years or so. A lot of my symptoms like tiredness, sleepiness etc have improved since then.

I asked my immediate family members to do a test as well. Male/female, young old, across states and even countries. All of them except my mother had low Vit D levels. My mother regularly supplements as its recommended for bone loss prevention in that age.

Re: The worthlessness of Vitamin D is mildly exaggerated

#173
I have HIV and am under treatment using medication, I have found D3 and K2 helps alleviate some of the side effects of the medication; largely my mood. Which makes a lot of sense because my immunity system is in constant daily activity.

However, I need to get more sunlight; I just don't think supplementation is the same as being in the sun. When I was homeless I never had these mood issues, but that's complicated, living day-to-day & meal-by-meal puts you survival mode so nothing is really past the hour.

All anecdotal, duh.

Re: The worthlessness of Vitamin D is mildly exaggerated

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can get most tests (although often not genetic) in many countries, with Canada being an outlier in forcing you to get a doctor’s note for just about everything.

Really terrible in Canada. If you don’t have a family physician (like everyone I know), good luck making it through triage at the walk-in clinic because you want a test to see your baseline values or proactively check for deficiency. The “hack” is you can pay a naturopath to order tests but the tests are not covered by public insurance in this case (actually pretty expensive IIRC).

I’ve had good experiences with getmaple for random and quick doctors appts

Re: The worthlessness of Vitamin D is mildly exaggerated

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty safe to assume all hyped supplements are pointless. Being generally active and eating fruits/vegetables is like 80% of the work for being healthy. > almost everyone is Vitamin D deficient This was the red flag that made me realize it was BS early on. If everyone is deficient, then it must not be that important.

> If everyone is deficient, then it must not be that important. Most people are overweight. Does that make being a healthy weight not that important?

[dead]

Re: The worthlessness of Vitamin D is mildly exaggerated

#177

Not in the field, but every time vitamin D studies come up I am reminded of the one that called out how current recommendations are based on faulty math (confusion on how to combine different sized studies confidence ranges ) and miss the mark significantly (and a lot of studies are based on those recommendations...) https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5541280/

This has come up several times before. It's not well cited. I read through it myself and even if the math is right, the application of the math seems incorrect.

The original data was a small number of studies with a small amount of old (1980s?) data that found a slope with so-so correlation.

The revised math finds a much smaller slope with what appears to be much worse fit to the same old data. The data was nearly horizontal before, but after the math changes it's much further away from 0.

The original study was making predictions near the data. The revision is doing massive extrapolation, far away from the range of what any of the studies tested.

I'm not a statistician, but it's not surprising to me that it's being ignored.

Re: The worthlessness of Vitamin D is mildly exaggerated

#178
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I took 2000IU (+K2) a day for many years in between testing my blood levels and still had Likewise, 23ng/ml while taking 2000iu/day of dry vitamin-d. Switched to 5000iu +K2 in MCT oil, -- 8 months later I'm at 64ng/ml.

Any noticeable difference how you feel health wise? Energy levels? Mood? Sleep quality?

for me, i was so deficient that i would notice it the next morning. also probably not a placebo as the D supplement i am taking is not something my mind goes to 7 am pre coffee lol

Re: The worthlessness of Vitamin D is mildly exaggerated

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sun in northern countries in summer is less intense?

Yeah, kinda. I moved from Indiana to Norway - Trondheim, which is about in the middle of the length of Norway. During the summer, I can read outside at night even though the sun technically goes down for about 4 hours in June. It never gets darker than twilight. A few clouds means you might just have sunset all night. The sun does get surprisingly hot and very warming if we happen to have a sunny day. Jacket in the s…

Huh now I know why I never liked living in Washington and Oregon, especially at higher altitudes. The sun always felt hotter.

Re: The worthlessness of Vitamin D is mildly exaggerated

#180
post #7

This is a refreshingly balanced and honest analysis of Vitamin D studies. The strongest evidence for Vitamin D is in people who are severely deficient. Bumping up to a normal range can provide some improvements. The health influencers started noticing that the Vitamin D studies coming out weren't matching their original hype for Vitamin D, so many pivoted to trying to make claims that most people are severely deficie…

My family runs a blood analysis lab in Belgium for which I wrote some of the statistics gathering software.

The thresholds for 25-OH vitamin D: When I looked at all 1738 blood samples that had their Vitamin D tested between Feb 1, 2020 and Mar 13, 2020 (We were looking into the link between Vitamin D and COVID-19): The median (P50) was 20.1 ng/mL and the average was 22.4 ng/mL. Standard deviation: 11.24 ng/mL Half the samples were deficient, and the next 20% was insufficient.

Coming out of winter in Europe in a country with limited sunshine: most of the population is deficient in Vitamin D.

Histogram: https://files.catbox.moe/p785wx.png

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