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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

#291

Post by Remnant44 »

adrian_b wrote: post #275
monadgonad wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Too much protein can definitely kill you, or at least make you ill, as discovered by the Europeans who explored the northern parts of America and who had initially tried to live from the meat of hunted animals, until they learned from the natives that they must eat enough fat besides the lean meat, in order to survive (most wild animals have little fat, except the bone marrow, which must be extracted). That's an is…

No, it was too much protein, not too little fat, because they had to eat a lot of meat from hunting to provide enough calories, as they did not carry with them enough food containing starch and/or fat that could provide calories from other sources than protein. It does not matter if most of the calories (i.e. more than two thirds) are provided by carbohydrates or by fat, as long as they are not provided by protein. F…

Do you have any sources for this? I have also heard of rabbit starvation many times over the years, and it has always been in the context of too taking in too little fat -- essential fatty acids -- as well, due to the extreme leanness of the meat.

Re: The worthlessness of Vitamin D is mildly exaggerated

#292

Post by xolox »

adamredwoods wrote: post #99
written-beyond wrote: post #8

Earlier 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 am deficient, too, and take supplements (rare liver disease). I wonder if taking mushrooms soaked in the sun improves absorption compared to supplements?

Make sure those mushrooms are prepared well though because as I understand it, the human digestive system has a hard time breaking down chitin cell walls, so without proper preparation, the mushrooms may pass through mostly undigested.

The point about letting the mushrooms soak up sunlight to boost their vitamin D content is totally true and absolutely fascinating though!

> When commonly consumed mushroom species are exposed to a source of ultraviolet (UV) radiation, such as sunlight or a UV lamp, they can generate nutritionally relevant amounts of vitamin D. The most common form of vitamin D in mushrooms is D2, with lesser amounts of vitamins D3 and D4, while vitamin D3 is the most common form in animal foods. Although the levels of vitamin D2 in UV-exposed mushrooms may decrease with storage and cooking, if they are consumed before the ‘best-before’ date, vitamin D2 level is likely to remain above 10 μg/100 g fresh weight, which is higher than the level in most vitamin D-containing foods and similar to the daily requirement of vitamin D recommended internationally.

Source: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6213178/

Re: The worthlessness of Vitamin D is mildly exaggerated

#293

Post by Imanari »

nullbio wrote: post #279
Imanari wrote: post #196

I started to take VitD on a whim and my mood and energy sure improved. Also I feel like I get sick less often. 3 friends whom I recommended VitD told me the same. Living in northern germany. YMMV.

Placebo is a strong thing. Unless you're actually getting more sunlight, it's doing nothing for you.

I'll take it ;)

Re: The worthlessness of Vitamin D is mildly exaggerated

#294

Post by NavinF »

jvican wrote: post #181
NavinF wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other Quest resellers like https://goodlabs.com/ are way cheaper. Eg "Testosterone, Free (Direct) With Total Testosterone, LC/MS-MS" is $159 on that website vs $15 on goodlabs.

Nice! I didn't know about this company. Thanks for sharing. Has anyone tried and can they vouch for them?

Yes I've used goodlabs. I paid them and they sent a prepaid lab order to Quest just like any other reseller. Also donated blood via goodlabs to get some basic labs for free, but that requires driving to SF. No donation sites in south bay

Re: The worthlessness of Vitamin D is mildly exaggerated

#295

Post by red-iron-pine »

khurs wrote: post #206

I 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…

a years supply of Vit D is like ~$30

you're telling me Big Vitamin is hustling the rubes that much?

the reason it is commonly hyped is because it is in fact reasonably common, and because the fix is cheap and has no real side effects unless you take comically massive doses

Re: The worthlessness of Vitamin D is mildly exaggerated

#296

Post by torstenvl »

systemsweird wrote: post #145
torstenvl wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> loading up a construction site with more materials than are needed shouldn't automatically be assumed to be good It is almost universally recognized as good to do exactly that. It's better to have one planned extra trip to return excess materials (if they can't be used on the next job) than to have multiple unplanned trips when you unexpectedly run out of this or that.

You mean my DIY projects that result in a dozen trips to Home Depot aren’t optimal :)

Ha. Yeah. Plumbing is the worst for this. I'll buy like twice what I think I need, including some coupling to one size larger and smaller and some larger and smaller pipe. I learned after fixing a well took SIX TRIPS.

(Turns out the line to the gauge was borked, so it never turned off the pump, so the pressure built until it busted my pipes.)

Re: The worthlessness of Vitamin D is mildly exaggerated

#297

Post by NoPicklez »

pseudohadamard wrote: post #164
NoPicklez wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come to Australia during the summer and watch how quickly you burn outside without sunscreen.

For non-Australians, that's burn as in "burst into flames", not "your skin goes red". Go to somewhere like Cairns and you can hear people crackling as they walk down the street.

Smells like pork everywhere

Re: The worthlessness of Vitamin D is mildly exaggerated

#298

Post by dgfl »

teiferer wrote: post #266
dgfl wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve found the UV index forecasts to generally be a good metric, so try looking at those for various locations. The main factor here is that the lower the sun is from the horizon, the more its light will be absorbed by the atmosphere due to the longer path. The maximum altitude that the sun will ever reach is (90° – (latitude – 23.4°)), so at the 60°-ish of Scandinavia it’s rarely more than 50° in the sky. It’s a ver…

> it’s almost impossible for me to get sunburn in daily life in Sweden even without sunscreen. Um most Swedes, even with not-super-pale skin get a sunburn every june. Just being outside in the sunshine for 2-3 hours without any protection and they turn "kräftröd" as they say.

Swedes have an almost comical compulsion to stay in the sun. Growing up in a hot place you get the opposite instinct.

Still, it’s known that your skin color is the main thing that matters, which is why Australians have the worst melanoma statistics. I guess mine tans fast enough to keep up with the seasons here.

Re: The worthlessness of Vitamin D is mildly exaggerated

#299

Post by arjie »

economistbob wrote: post #258
annzabelle wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pale skin in general helps synthesize Vitamin D. The less melanin you have the more you absorb, this is why lighter skin happens at northern latitudes. Darker skinned people are more likely to need to supplement it.

That sounds like a hypothesis that brown folks migrated north and evolved to be light as opposed to "light skinned peopled moved to the north". The latter is the historically accurate situation.

> That sounds like a hypothesis that brown folks migrated north and evolved to be light as opposed to "light skinned peopled moved to the north". The latter is the historically accurate situation.

Wait, no, that's inverted. Our ancestral state out of Africa was dark skin and we evolved light skin when we were no longer subject to the UV pressures there. It makes sense to me since the advent of light skin is quite recent in our species, and the darkest skin requires a bunch of pigmentation genes to be set just right, so random mutation can easily produce lowered pigmentation, so adaptation to the Vitamin D pressure would have been quite possible. I remember looking at this ages ago and it was pretty well-known at the time but I just took a second look and it seems it is still quite established though the advent of light skin among humans is not as smooth as previously thought: https://www.anthropology.net/p/the-evolution-of-european-pig...

Just in a smell-test way, we'd have had to sustain these lighter skinned populations under intense UV selective pressure for a long enough time for them to migrate North out of Africa. That just sounds unlikely on its own.

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