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Comment by timothycrosley | Hacker News Reader

I often feel like a lot of problems diagnosed as "psychosomatic" illnesses are caused by bad nutrition or even lack of sun. As an example: A lot of people I know recently got sick after living in Seattle for a few years and it ended up being that at least a portion of the cause was severe Vitamin D deficiency. Kind of obvious, but also something that most doctors don't seem to check. When you look up the symptoms of various vitamin deficiencies they have wide spread and hard to pinpoint symptoms - including random neuropathy. I feel like it might be wise to for doctors to suggest to patients they see a nutritionist or to check their vitamin levels if the only diagnosis is "psychosomatic". At the very least the person might end up generally healthier after the experience.

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From another post of mine on the link between depression and nutrition:

"I'd like to encourage anyone feeling depressed to take a good, hard look at their diet and to consider the possibility that they lack some essential nutrients.

I'm not saying that a poor diet or lack of nutrients will necessarily be the only or even the main cause of depression, but these factors could have an impact (sometimes a profound impact) on the severity or frequency of depression.

For most of my life I've had a pretty poor diet, and while I knew diet could affect one's mood, I really didn't realize how profound an effect it could have until poor health recently forced me to make drastic changes in my diet and to consider and study the potential effects of diet on mental and physical health.

What I learned was that many, many nutrient deficiencies could have very severe consequences on one's mental (not to mention physical) health -- including depression, dementia, and even death. Symptoms of a nutrient deficiency are not always obvious, and some of them take a long time to manifest -- so long that they kind of sneak up on you and you could almost feel like what you're experiencing is "normal" or just the way you are (ie. depressed, just because you have a negative outlook on life).

Once I improved my diet and started taking supplements for essential nutrients which my diet still lacked, I felt so much better, and have had much more energy than I'm used to, don't need as much sleep, and my mood and motivation have dramatically improved.

I now firmly believe that many people who suffer mental issues, including depression, may be malnourished or nutritionally deficient in some way. Taking one's diet seriously, reading up on it, and improving it could really change your life."

I couldn't agree more! I have always been prone to severe depressive episodes, at a frequency of around once a week. It got really debilitating and was destroying my quality of life.

I noticed my depression seemed to correlate with my poor digestive health -- chronic constipation and frequent food poisoning. Once I started supplementing probiotics and eating a small amount of kimchi or kraut every day, my depressive episode frequency reduced to only once every few months (and my digestive symptoms disappeared).

There's a strong link between your gut and your brain.

This is anecdotal, but changing my diet changed my life for the better.

What all do you take?

Most of the people on HN probably have Vitamin D deficiency - even living in the mostly sunny bay area if you don't get 30min of daily sun exposure in a t-shirt and shorts you're probably lower than the recommended ng/ml especially if you have darker skin.

This is one of the reasons cow's milk is Vitamin D enriched. Most people don't otherwise receive enough sun exposure to synthesize it.

I think that started as a way to prevent rickets in children. For adults the amount of vitamin D you get from enriched milk is not concentrated enough to supplement for inadequate sunlight (even if you drank a glass a day which most adults don't).

> I often feel like a lot of problems diagnosed as "psychosomatic" illnesses are caused by bad nutrition or even lack of sun.

Or lack of physical activity, or being overweight. Actually, a lot of people are likely overweight, but malnourished because they eat so many empty calories.

> A lot of people I know recently got sick after living in Seattle for a few years and it ended up being that at least a portion of the cause was severe Vitamin D deficiency.

But vitamin deficiency is a relatively simple test, and often done in northern climates. Both my wife and I got one done as a standard blood screen by our doctor; my wife was much more deficient^ than I was, and was told to take a fairly-high vitamin D supplement for awhile. (I was just told to go outside more often.)

^one of the few times I get to say that

> and often done in northern climates.

In the US you often have to ask for it because the Vitamin D test is expensive and not done as a matter of course.

Weird, maybe the symptoms made it more obvious to our doctor that we had a D deficiency.

This was my experience: I felt sick after living in Seattle for about 2 years. Went to a few clinics / then primary care and was told essentially that it was in my head: couldn't find any medical causes said it may be anxiety. I actually started to believe them even though I've never had any sort of tendency to question my own health and have always been a markedly relaxed person even in stressful situations. I dropped it, but eventually, I got a UTI (unrelated) and went to zoomcare for that. They asked about my medical history and based on it they recommended the screening. It turned out my levels were extremely low even though I was already taking 1400 IU of Vitamin D a day on my own as a preventive measure after moving here. A dose of antibiotics and 50000 IU a week + 4000 IU a day for a few months and both problems are now resolved.

Anecdotally, I live in Seattle and my GP has always done a Vitamin D test as part of my standard physical exactly because it's such a common problem up here.

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