51–60 of 112 posts
Awareness of Vitamin and immune boosting nutrition needs to be mentioned alongside the call for masks
Everyone on HN always says they are taking like 10x the RDA and it's the only thing that makes them survive the winter, blah blah blah. Intentionally hyperbolic, but not far off. Every time I try just 400 IU per day for a week it makes me dizzy and woozy. I eat plenty of meat and veggies with K2, and nuts and fish with magnesium. Vitamin-D containing foods like milk, eggs and fish are totally fine. I can bake all day…
I guarantee that you're consuming more than 400IU of Vitamin D in your regular diet. You can consume almost double that amount just by eating a decent sized salmon filet.
I doubt the miniscule amount of Vitamin D (10 micrograms) in your supplement is causing your problems. It's possible that you're allergic to the capsules themselves, or fillers, or something unique to the supplements.
> I eat plenty of meat and veggies with K2, and nuts and fish with magnesium. Vitamin-D containing foods like milk, eggs and fish are totally fine. I can bake all day in the sun and don't burn easily.
If you're getting plenty of Vitamin D from diet and sunlight, you don't need to supplement. I know the popular sentiment will beat the drum of "more is better", but it's not true. The goal is to get Vitamin D levels into an optimal range and keep them there, which, despite internet opinion, is entirely possible on a healthy diet with light sun exposure.
Everyone on HN always says they are taking like 10x the RDA and it's the only thing that makes them survive the winter, blah blah blah. Intentionally hyperbolic, but not far off. Every time I try just 400 IU per day for a week it makes me dizzy and woozy. I eat plenty of meat and veggies with K2, and nuts and fish with magnesium. Vitamin-D containing foods like milk, eggs and fish are totally fine. I can bake all day…
Paul Stemets, a mycologists, had worked out a way to get button or shitake mushrooms to generate a lot of vitamin D. You simply expose them to sunlight for about a "day" (and no more). (Unfortunately, I wish there were more detailed study on this; how many hours of sunlight are we talking about? Is it latitude dependent?) My point is that there are ways to generate supplemental vitamin-d without having to go get synt…
I know Paul Stamets is held in high regard in certain circles, but be careful. He's a personal brand builder, first and foremost, and many of his claims range from dubious to pure pseudoscience. Even though he's become a figurehead for mushroom research, his own line of supplements is notoriously inferior to many other products on the market. Fun guy (hah) to listen to on podcasts, as long as you don't take him too seriously or get hooked by his disguised sales pitches for his products.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're under the absurd illusion that a substance with some weak evidence (that may be just statistical noise and bad interpretation of data) would have a significant effect. If there's an effect of vitamin D it's likely very small.
There's actually a couple dozen studies on Vitamin D's effects on Covid-19: https://c19vitamind.com/ Some are retrospectives some are randomized clinical trials. Vitamin D has a major effect on the immune system that is well documented. OP is right. Even if supplementation reduced the death rate by only 25%, the cost-benefit analysis says that it would absolutely have made sense for countries to issue free Vitamin D…
It almost certainly won't reduce death rate by 25%. Very few medical interventions have an effect size that large.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's actually a couple dozen studies on Vitamin D's effects on Covid-19: https://c19vitamind.com/ Some are retrospectives some are randomized clinical trials. Vitamin D has a major effect on the immune system that is well documented. OP is right. Even if supplementation reduced the death rate by only 25%, the cost-benefit analysis says that it would absolutely have made sense for countries to issue free Vitamin D…
This lists 2 RCTs (related to Covid-19 + a few others for other infections). One is very small (16 people), the other is dubious, it seems to be the one that combines with hydroxychloroquine "standard of care". (I believe this was discussed on HN before.) It almost certainly won't reduce death rate by 25%. Very few medical interventions have an effect size that large.
Vitamin D levels in summer months are associated with 25% lower mortality rates for all causes. Vitamin D almost certainly influences the immune system to fight off Covid in the same way it does the seasonal flu and other pneumonia. There's hundreds more studies on Vitamin D. Read up when you get a chance.
Hell even if it was a 5% reduction we're talking an abundant vitamin that costs pennies to manufacture.
This isn't new, we knew about this in April. If you don't get much sunlight or do but have melenated skin which reduces absorption and live in a northern climate, you should be taking supplements.
The reality is, there is a very weak body of evidence that maybe vitamin D provides a slight benefit. And yet, its proponents engage in the same hyperbole as the medical marijuana crowd.
Take it if you want, it's not going to hurt you at any kind of reasonable dose, but it's not some miracle cure that is going to solve everyone's health issues.
The current discussion here seems to be about Vitamin D in general, and ignoring the study itself. In my reading, this study is weak evidence. This was not a randomized, controlled trial, but historical analyses of a natural experiment. In itself, that's not a problem: we can learn a lot from natural experiments. But I don't think this instance is much of an "experiment." As I understand it, all of the residents (96…
Under subheading 2.2: "All residents in the nursing-home receive chronic vitamin D supplementation with regular maintenance boluses (single oral dose of 80,000 IU vitamin D3 every 2–3 months),"
The comparator (not recent supplement) group was on a different schedule, and had received a supplement probably two months ago.
>Finally, there were four total interventions: corticosteroids, hydroxychloroquine, "dedicated antibiotics" and the observation about Vitamin D. The more things you try, the less surprising it should be that there is a correlation along one of them.
Are you referring to these lines: "use of corticosteroids and/or hydroxychloroquine and/or antibiotics (i.e., azithromycin or rovamycin), and hospitalization for COVID-19 were used as potential confounders."
You only run up against ( https://xkcd.com/882/ ) when you perform multiple statistical tests, not when you merely have a heterogeneous study population. Unless they were also testing these other interventions, that critique does not apply.
Everyone on HN always says they are taking like 10x the RDA and it's the only thing that makes them survive the winter, blah blah blah. Intentionally hyperbolic, but not far off. Every time I try just 400 IU per day for a week it makes me dizzy and woozy. I eat plenty of meat and veggies with K2, and nuts and fish with magnesium. Vitamin-D containing foods like milk, eggs and fish are totally fine. I can bake all day…
Have you tested your level in the winter? You may not need it.
I've been taking 5k a few times a week and haven't been sick longer than a day for perhaps a decade.
The current discussion here seems to be about Vitamin D in general, and ignoring the study itself. In my reading, this study is weak evidence. This was not a randomized, controlled trial, but historical analyses of a natural experiment. In itself, that's not a problem: we can learn a lot from natural experiments. But I don't think this instance is much of an "experiment." As I understand it, all of the residents (96…
>and they - as far as I can tell - do not explain why these people did not receive their normal Vitamin D supplementation Under subheading 2.2: "All residents in the nursing-home receive chronic vitamin D supplementation with regular maintenance boluses (single oral dose of 80,000 IU vitamin D3 every 2–3 months)," The comparator (not recent supplement) group was on a different schedule, and had received a supplement…
How do we know they weren't? Since this is not a RTC, but rather an analysis of historical data, we don't know how much they divided up this historical data looking for correlations.
I am curious to know why countries didn't buy large quantities of vitamin D and distribute them to all people? Wouldn't that be cheaper and more effective than complete lockdowns, full hospitals, etc.?
what I've learned while figuring out what supplements I should be taking is that the entire recommended daily allowance is based on avoiding acute diseases like ricketss or scurvy, and not based on a model of what is optimal for our bodies. when you look at diseases by latitute or wonder why our annual influenza pandemic is during the winter months, it makes me wonder why there hasn't already been studies of supplements. it seems like a perfectly straightforward study.