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

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

#321

Post by WarmWash »

hu3 wrote: post #269
subscribed wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stupid question - why do you keep suggesting that having a libido equals hypersexuality? Is this your trauma speaking, or do you automatically associate any sexual needs with a pathology? You've done it twice in this thread alone.

I'm not whom you asked. But it's a resonable association for some cases. But I understand that it would have been better to ask and not associate because it's a fraction of the cases.

If I told you that I often have a fire in my fireplace, it would be incredibly strange if you suggested that pyromania can be a trauma response.

Either OP is confused about what libido means, or has some kind of heavy shame around sexuality.

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

#322

Post by grep_name »

staticassertion wrote: post #228
chasil wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time I have a yearly physical, my GP will ask if I have feelings of depression. I know this road leads to SSRIs at the very least, so I always reply in the negative. The parent comment hints to me that this might be a mistake. I do not want to become accustomed to an antidepressant, so perhaps my course of action was correct. I was measured low on Vitamin D, which I've hopefully corrected, and I haven't always…

> I know this road leads to SSRIs at the very least, so I always reply in the negative. Seems odd. Your doctor can't force you to take anything. If they say "do you want to try X?" just say "No". Not giving your doctor full medical context seems like a mistake - for example, maybe depression would be indicative of another issue, or maybe people who are depressed really shouldn't take a specific medication. To each th…

N=1, but last yearly physical my primary care doctor asked me if I ever had anxiety. I said yes, but that I wasn't really interested in treating it outside of lifestyle change. They asked if I wanted a prescription for prozac, without explaining anything about how to does it or titrate up or down or a time frame. I said I wasn't interested again, and that I particularly didn't want to take any medications that you can't just stop taking one day on a whim (a statement she didn't respond to).

She then proceeded to say "well I'll just write you the prescription anyway and you can do your research later and decide to fill it or not".

I was actually shocked by this interaction, and think about it often. She's a regular family doctor with the local hospital system, and this was just a regular checkup. I answered one question with a "yes, but it's manageable and I think I can handle it with lifestyle change" and then said no twice to medication and ended up with a prescription, which I ignored but don't appreciate having on my record, since it's a false indicator for future prescribing physicians.

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

#323

Post by nxobject »

GenBiot wrote: post #309
nxobject wrote: post #35

Be careful - many studies in the Vitamin D meta-analysis *enrolled patients already taking antidepressants.* [1] Reporting effect sizes without specifying "on which population?" is misleading. (As an aside, Cohen would be the person not to tell you to assign qualitative values to effect sizes. They are as arbitrary as any other threshold used by working statisticians.) [1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/psyc…

Based on your own citation, this is untrue. The citation you have linked is a meta analysis of 31 trials, many of which specify no medication use at recruitment. You are however correct about population being important (which is a big reason meta analyses can be very useful).

I said "many", not "all". (Many don't indicate, either.)

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

#324

Post by zigman1 »

Aurornis wrote: post #292
isoprophlex wrote: post #43

Because it's common to hate on antidepressants, I've always personally had a bias against them. For the past 15-20 years, november thru february are basically a writeoff due for me due to seasonal affective disorder. Cold showers, exercise, no alcohol, strict sleeping rituals. Vitamin d. I can still sleep 11 hours and feel like reheated cat shit. Enter citalopram. "It will take up to six weeks to dial in" they said.…

> I won the SSRI lottery I guess, From reading internet comments you’d think so, but your experience is more typical than anything. Depression is deceptively common. As a consequence, SSRI use over a lifetime is also more common than most would assume. Any drug will come with negative side effects for some portion of its users. Multiply that by the high number of people who have ever taken an SSRI and it starts to be…

To add to this discussion as someone who had above experience this winter, after (literally) years of mood fluctuations, fatigue and brain fog.

I have started taking SSRI after a harder-than-usual body collapse, and after no matter what I did my mood hasn't improved for a month. Regular running, meditating, writing, crafting, coding etc were my antidote to my mood swings but this time it didn't work. Started taking SSRI and continue doing all this things, and I was reborn.

My therapist said that a big chunk of why i am feeling better is also because I kept doing things that are good for me. That she sees with a lot of her patients that they think a pill will magically change the situation. It doesn't work on itself, you need to show up and do things that release serotonin in your body.

But seriously, unbelievable, years of frustration and friction in my life disappeared and I have never felt better.

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

#325

Post by Aurornis »

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 size 4.5X larger than antidepressant drugs, and nobody noticed this massive discrepancy until now?

Effect size is also a favorite metric in this vein of supplement-over-pharma writing because it’s so commonly misunderstood and it’s so easy to find small supplement studies that have outlier effect sizes.

To put it in context, even common OTC pain meds can have effect sizes lower than 0.4 depending on the study. Have you ever taken Tylenol or Ibuprofen and had a headache or other pain reduced? Well you’ve experience what a drug with a small effect size on paper can do for you.

Please be very careful when someone tries to tell you that supplements are miraculous and pharmaceutical drugs don’t work at all. I know too many people who delayed trialing SSRIs for years due to internet driven fears and lost many years of their lives to depression based on content like this. People with cabinets full of dozens of supplement bottles that were chosen based on studies, too. Then they finally decided to try real antidepressant medications and wished they’d done it sooner.

As much as I wish we could all just cure depression by taking a simple Vitamin D supplement that has 4.5X higher effect size than antidepressant drugs, this claim just isn’t passable.

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

#326

Post by ncasenmare »

Xunjin wrote: post #38
r1ch wrote: post #4

Please do not take 5000mg/day of Vitamin D. The author confuses IU and mg which is very dangerous.

It's unbelievable crazy what the author suggests, even say "10,000 IU if you're feeling daring / have darker skin / live in less sunny climates.". Just a simple look at the side effects of high dosages: Safety and side effects Taken in typical doses, vitamin D is thought to be mainly safe. But taking too much vitamin D in the form of supplements can be harmful and even deadly. Taking more than 4,000 IU a day of vitam…

Hi, author of the blog post here! Thanks for your concern. I do still stand by my claim, since more recent peer-reviewed studies have shown that up-to-10,000 IU is safe. As written in the post:

> McCullough et al 2019 gave over thousands of patients 5,000 to 10,000 IU/day, for seven years, and there were zero cases of serious side effects. This is in line with Billington et al 2020, a 3-year-long double-blinded randomized controlled trial, where they found "the safety profile of vitamin D supplementation is similar for doses of 400, 4000, and 10,000 IU/day." (though "mild hypercalcemia" increased from 3% to 9%. IMHO, that's a small cost for reducing the risk of major depression & suicide.)

So why then does Mayoclinic, etc, all say 4000 IU is the limit? I think because policy is decades behind science (this happened with trans fats), and also policymakers are much more risk-averse. (this is why in California, thanks to Prop 65, up until ~2018, there used to be a warning in every coffeehouse that coffee causes cancer.)

But thanks to your comment, I will edit the intro to note what the official max safe dose is, and that more recent peer-reviewed research shows it's too low!

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

#327

Post by ivm »

Aurornis wrote: post #311
ivm wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tea, especially green tea, doesn’t have the same caffeine bioavailability as coffee – otherwise people would abuse it just as much as coffee. I’m quite sensitive to caffeine, yet I can drink green tea all day without noticing much effect, while even a light coffee or a caffeine pill is clearly noticeable. I can also drink tea before going to sleep without any problems.

> Tea, especially green tea, doesn’t have the same caffeine bioavailability as coffee – otherwise people would abuse it just as much as coffee You can absolutely get high doses of caffeine from tea if you really want to. It comes down to the type of tea, how much is used, and how strong it’s brewed. There is nothing special about tea that breaks the rules of caffeine. It comes down to the content of the leaves, quant…

> There is nothing special about tea that breaks the rules of caffeine.

There's definitely something special, just poorly studied: typical "how much caffeine is in X?" tables show tea having caffeine levels similar to coffee, but I never feel the same effects.

> Caffeine pills generally have really high dosages, FYI.

I use 200 mg tablets split into quarters for doses of 50–100 mg. Yet, they produce a much milder curve than coffee (which I no longer drink) and, as a side effect, cause no gastrointestinal side effects!

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

#328

Post by ncasenmare »

Bender wrote: post #94
Xunjin wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's unbelievable crazy what the author suggests, even say "10,000 IU if you're feeling daring / have darker skin / live in less sunny climates.". Just a simple look at the side effects of high dosages: Safety and side effects Taken in typical doses, vitamin D is thought to be mainly safe. But taking too much vitamin D in the form of supplements can be harmful and even deadly. Taking more than 4,000 IU a day of vitam…

FWIW just anecdotally I took 160,000 IU per day for a few months along with 800mcg to 2mg of K2 MK-7 and about double the suggested amount of magnesium citrate . I slowly titrated up to that amount over a few months. I am not suggesting anyone else do that as I had a specific purpose slow action TPA when combined with many protease so to speak but just my own experience I did not have any of those issues. I don't kno…

Hi, I'm the author of the main blog post. Just wanted to say that's a fascinating experience, 160,000 IU a day! I mean, I'm not going to try that, but that's good to hear that 5,000 IU/day for years has been working fine for you. Thanks for sharing!

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

#329

Post by Aurornis »

ghusto wrote: post #161
isoprophlex wrote: post #43

Because it's common to hate on antidepressants, I've always personally had a bias against them. For the past 15-20 years, november thru february are basically a writeoff due for me due to seasonal affective disorder. Cold showers, exercise, no alcohol, strict sleeping rituals. Vitamin d. I can still sleep 11 hours and feel like reheated cat shit. Enter citalopram. "It will take up to six weeks to dial in" they said.…

The hate on antidepressants is not because they're not effective, but rather that they're abused by psychiatrists. Ideally, a professional will prescribe them as a necessary helper to becoming (more) mentally healthy whilst tackling the root cause. Most of the time however, it's more of a "here, take these indefinitely". It's like if we took sleeping pills every time we had trouble sleeping. Having said that, I just…

> The hate on antidepressants is not because they're not effective,

But that’s exactly what many claim. Even this article is trying to claim that Vitamin D has 4.5X higher effect size than antidepressants (e.g. that they don’t work)

> It's like if we took sleeping pills every time we had trouble sleeping. Having said that, I just realised I have the impression that's exactly what people do in the USA?

USA is actually not the world leader in over medication in this domain, even though it’s popular and safe to hate on Americans. The rates of benzodiazepine and Z-drug prescription in some countries like France are substantially higher than the USA.

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