I rather liked his writing style - very easy to follow. He could have a future as a science communicator.
The worthlessness of Vitamin D is mildly exaggerated
201–210 of 308 posts
Re: The worthlessness of Vitamin D is mildly exaggerated
#202Thousands of words and no mention of the obvious thing - testing whether sun exposure is beneficial or harmful. The article opens with the observation that southern states had lower cancer rates due to solar irradiance. But then we intervene by taking pills. Why not try to absorb through the skin, even if it means something like a tanning bed?
Yep, it's sunlight. Nobody will run that trial though because we've spent decades telling people the sun is dangerous and gives you cancer (both things can be true of course). Putting people in the sun every day would not pass ethics tests. Also you cannot sell sunlight.
> Also you cannot sell sunlight.
Don't give them ideas.
Re: The worthlessness of Vitamin D is mildly exaggerated
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
My life changed after I got tested for vit D and started talking supplements. I was severely deficient. I am now sufficient and everything changed for me.
I used to take 4k IU + K² and think that I'm covered, since 4K units was a lot. I landed on just above deficient when tested. My wife was on kind of same regime, but didn't follow it very strictly. She was deficient, but not extremely. It was quite surprising, because I got warned when buying 4k unit tabs that they were quite strong and pharmacy clerk suggested taking less.
Have you looked into UVB lamps?
Re: The worthlessness of Vitamin D is mildly exaggerated
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure but i hide a lot more from the intense sun in spain then i do for the softer sun in sweden. In general i think it balances out quite well.
Does vitamin D synthesis require direct sunlight, or does it work with scattered light as well?
Not really, it requires direct sunlight above 45 degree, so northern sweden for example gets plenty of sun in summer, but only for a very short time intense enough sun.
Re: The worthlessness of Vitamin D is mildly exaggerated
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> The reason for this is that the sun is at a low angle, so it hits more of your body than it does when the sun is overhead - like you'd get in Australia. This also means that while you need some sunscreen during the day - from about 10 to 5 - it doesn't burn as much. Not sure if I parse this correctly - I'd imagine you need more sunscreen at "low angles" due to more severe and longer exposure? Low angle -> more body…
No, because the sun at low angles passes so much atmosphere, that filters most out.
The exposure angle of your body also has a effect, but much weaker.
Re: The worthlessness of Vitamin D is mildly exaggerated
#206I think Vitamin D deficiency hype is driven by supplement sellers.
As someone who grew up in a European country where we don't get long summers, I suffered no demonstrable issues from the lack of sun nor did the many around me.
My family wasn't rich so food was reasonably nutritious but not perfectly balanced either.
Vitamin D supplements are sold widely, including in smaller supermarkets like Lidl and Aldi. And one imagines it all comes out of the same few factories.
There will be some who do need it, but not as many as are led to believe they do.
Re: The worthlessness of Vitamin D is mildly exaggerated
#207I have made this comment on HN many times [0] now but: it's the goddamn sunlight. Sunlight has many pathways in the body, and increased vitamin D levels are just one of those pathways. Swallowing one element of a many-element pathway cannot simulate the human synthesis of vitamin D! This should be obvious! Your car might not run because of bad needle bearings, but the solution is not to add them to the gas tank! Firs…
Here in northern Europe, there just isn't enough sunlight to not become deficient, so a vitamin D supplement is a must.
I looked up data from a calorie tracking app I used a while ago and I got just enough vitamin D. Main sources were fish, eggs and dairy products. However, I ate a lot and I'm quite sure in winter there will have been periods where I didn't get the recommend intake.
So if you live in a northern country and you don't like fish, I suppose it's quite a good idea to take a supplement.
Though as OP said, even if the sun isn't strong enough, there are plenty of benefits to going outside beside vitamin D.
Re: The worthlessness of Vitamin D is mildly exaggerated
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
Logically speaking, an affliction being extremely common or universal does not dismiss it as no longer being an affliction. Many things about our society are extremely new compared to the conditions for which our bodies are evolved to be in.
I think you missed my point. vitamin D levels in and of themselves aren’t an affliction. The “correct” level is established by looking at what everyone else has and also by trying to look for comorbidities. But the comorbidities are often hard to tease out; about the only disease we know is rickets. Everything else is weakly correlational for vitamin D. How do you think they define healthy levels of other hormones li…
>Everything else is weakly correlational for vitamin D.
All cause mortality is correlational for vitamin D. Various disease outbreaks (common cold, etc) and severity are correlational for vitamin D. etc We even know by which mechanisms so it's not like this is far fetched stuff where we're overlooking things.
This kind of stuff slaps you in the face if you live in the northern half of europe. To then think us now spending the majority of our waking hours indoors and the prevalence of those things and seasonal depression in winter when one leaves in the dark and comes home in the dark all has no effect....I think that's just hubris.
Re: The worthlessness of Vitamin D is mildly exaggerated
#209Your body needs vitamins in order to form complex aminos to operate. But your body only needs to make so many of them - especially if you are an adult, not pregnant, or not suffering from a disease of some sort. The very premise that loading up your body with "excess" vitamins beyond what you need is already pretty fraught. Building a house without enough lumber can lead to long term deficiency - but loading up a con…
While there is no doubt that excess vitamin intakes are useless or even harmful, the problem is that for most vitamins there is a great uncertainty about which are the optimum daily doses, because the controlled experiments that would be needed to determine those doses would be rightly deemed as unethical.
Therefore, since we only have some weak circumstantial evidence, debates about how much vitamin D is good, and the same about other vitamins, will continue. As long as the uncertainty persists, it is safer to ingest somewhat higher doses of vitamins than those recommended, but not many times higher.
The conclusions of the article were that high amounts of vitamin D have been shown to be correlated with good health outcomes, but the supplementation studies could not reproduce the same outcomes, so it remains mysterious what factor was associated with vitamin D in the studies with positive effects and whether vitamin D itself had any role or its presence was just a coincidence.
Re: The worthlessness of Vitamin D is mildly exaggerated
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
More hours of sun, but it's less intense.
The sun in northern countries in summer is less intense?
I found this resource which shows that sun intensity in June in northern Europe is similar to that in sub-Saharan Africa (in June).
https://physics.weber.edu/schroeder/ua/EarthCirclesAndSunRay...
