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Vitamin D, part 3 – The Evidence

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Re: Vitamin D, part 3 – The Evidence

#71

Post by staticassertion »

It seems interesting that Vitamin D may be so much more prone to false correlations due to the fact that it's tied to going out in the sun, and going out in the sun is what healthy people do. Since so many illnesses and conditions, from psychological to physical, can keep you indoors, one could conclude that vitamin D is really a miracle pill.

I take 1k iu a day, since I barely go outside anymore, but I'd probably cut that in half if life were normal again. I think of most vitamins as a "cover my bases in cases I eat like shit today", not as a "this is going to keep me from getting cancer".

I also found the commentary on metanalyses interesting - they're touted as being very high quality, but of course there's always the garbage in garbage out.

Re: Vitamin D, part 3 – The Evidence

#72

Post by pmiller2 »

Thank you again for this, Dr. Boone. This particular article has made me feel a little bit better about taking my moderate dose of D3 every day: I have asthma, have had a flare up or two of eczema, don’t want to die of cancer, and don’t want to break any bones at an advanced age.

Re: Vitamin D, part 3 – The Evidence

#73

Post by chmod600 »

beervirus wrote: post #64
chmod600 wrote: post #58

Don't over-think (unless you're a researcher, in which case that's your job). It's pretty simple: Low levels are bad. If your levels are low, supplement. Err on the high side because the risks are low, but don't go crazy for long periods of time without testing.

A little more thinking may be in order, since the whole point of TFA is that supplementing doesn't seem to do much good.

It has a green check next to "treatment for Vitamin D deficiency". What part of the article says that you should just ignore low vitamin D levels?

Re: Vitamin D, part 3 – The Evidence

#74

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

api wrote: post #25

The most obvious evidence to me has always been that Europeans are not black. A change like the loss of melanin requires selective pressure, which in this case was likely furnished by less vitamin D as we migrated away from the equator. The pressure must have been significant since being white carries a big downside: higher vulnerability to sunburn and skin cancer. When I lived in Cali I always envied my darker skinn…

You can still get sunburn with darker skin. It just takes a lot more exposure.

Re: Vitamin D, part 3 – The Evidence

#76

Post by raverbashing »

scott_s wrote: post #28
raverbashing wrote: post #17

TL;DR: skip to the part "The areas in which meta-analyses have identified benefits from Vitamin D" Also "Vitamin D failed to prevent cancer, stroke, heart attack, or cardiovascular death. " Which is fair enough. But at least for the cardiovascular diseases mentioned, I don't think it was expected. And of course, this does not mean anything against the role of Vitamin D in Covid prevention Basically: don't dismiss X f…

I find it odd to encourage people to skip what I consider the most important conclusion for most people: "Vitamin D does not appear to prevent disease in healthy adults."

2nd line of my post

Describing it as "prevent disease in healthy adults" means pretty much nothing. Which diseases? Does being Vit D deficient count as healthy? It's an empty statement.

Re: Vitamin D, part 3 – The Evidence

#77

Post by nicoffeine »

tboyd47 wrote: post #60
m12k wrote: post #2

So Vitamin D deficiency is linked to cancer, heart disease, respiratory infection, stroke, diabetes, and death. But taking it as a supplement helps with none of the above. What is a reasonable hypothesis then? That having an active lifestyle that brings you outside in the sun both causes your Vitamin D to go up, and is correlated with better physical health in general?

Perhaps it's just more complicated than the prevailing paradigm of "have problem -> take drug -> problem go away." It could be that Vitamin D deficiency is itself a symptom of an array of underlying problems, or that it is one factor among many leading to a pathology, or that various levels of Vitamin D have various effects among different patients, or all of the above.

I think it's also that health has become a product, which is skewing all the solutions into things that are easy to market, package, and distribute. You probably need sunlight in addition to foods with other nutrients to optimize systems that regulate Vitamin D levels, whether it's just a marker or not.

Just like they discovered using cannabinoids to treat seizures required the "full spectrum" of the plant to be the most effective, we are finding out the hard way that trying to isolate compounds to treat anything in a biological system is often the wrong approach.

It's been 20 years since "the only thing more effective is regular exercise" was a punchline on the Simpsons. It's disappointing that we are still prioritizing R&D for magic pills rather than getting fresh food and physical activity reintegrated into our lives.

Re: Vitamin D, part 3 – The Evidence

#78

Post by beervirus »

chmod600 wrote: post #73
beervirus wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A little more thinking may be in order, since the whole point of TFA is that supplementing doesn't seem to do much good.

It has a green check next to "treatment for Vitamin D deficiency". What part of the article says that you should just ignore low vitamin D levels?

Yes, adding vitamin D increases vitamin D.

Re: Vitamin D, part 3 – The Evidence

#79

Post by amai »

It's the magnesium, stupid!

Dai (2018): Magnesium status and supplementation influence vitamin D status and metabolism: results from a randomized trial https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30541089/ "Our findings suggest that optimal magnesium status may be important for optimizing 25(OH)D status. "

Coincidence?

"Vitamin D is currently the only Essential Vitamin or Mineral which appears to have deficiency rates at a similar level to Magnesium"

https://examine.com/supplements/magnesium/research/#nutrient...

Re: Vitamin D, part 3 – The Evidence

#80

Post by exhilaration »

CyanLite2 wrote: post #31
jeffreyrogers wrote: post #20

Shouldn't they be looking at getting vitamin D via sun exposure, rather than supplementation? If the real benefit is sun exposure, which also increases vitamin D, then just supplementing vitamin D won't show any benefits.

Very hard to quantify sun exposure and do this in a controlled way.

I installed an app a few months back called dminder that attempts to do exactly that. You pick your skin tone, it figures out your location, time of day, cloud cover and uses that to estimate the amount of vitamin D you can get based on the amount of time you're outside.

Links:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ontometric...

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/d-minder-pro/id547102495

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