Vitamin D deficiency is a widespread problem | Hacker News Reader

Vitamin D deficiency is a widespread problem

articles.sun-sentinel.com

26 pointscwan17 comments

Does anyone else think that layout and number of ads screams of a made for adsense site that is more spam than genuine content?

It's a newspaper. They have to pay for that building somehow.

If you take D3 supplements, make sure they are in gelcap format and not dry tablets. Vitamin D is fat-soluble and much better absorbed that way.

Personally, I take 4000 UI/day (living in Canada).

I'd recommend taking fish oil for vitamin D, as it also contains proper Omega-3 acids (many things labeled with Omega-3 contain useless variants).

If you are going to be practical about it, taking a spoonful from a bottle each morning costs about 95% less than the equivalent dose from fish oil capsules.

Taking a swig of fish oil ("tran") in the morning is quite common in Norway. It is normal to start giving it to kids from when they are a few months old, to get them used to the taste.

I take fish oil capsules now and don't care for the fish burps that can come later even when I take them in the middle of a meal as opposed to after. I couldn't imagine just downing a spoonful of the stuff :)

Try one with added lemon aroma, they should be relatively easy to get hold of. Concentrated fish oil capsules give me a more nasty aftertaste than the real liquid oil.

What you want is fish oil capsules with "enteric" coating. That gets rid of the fish burps.

Agreed, I tried downing some fish oil by spoon (which was lemon flavored as well) and could do it longer than 5 days.

Simple fix, take them before you go to bed, you won't notice the burps at all in your sleep.

It sounds like you're recommending Cod Liver Oil, which contains both Vitamin D and Vitamin A. Be careful about the Vitamin A, as you can overdose. I take 4,000 IU of Vitamin D a day, and I also take Fish Oil (without Vitamin A or D) capsules separately, to avoid overdosing on Vitamin A.

Yep, Cod Liver Oil.

This was discussed a couple weeks ago - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1550974

At least it's not another Foursquare/Techcrunch article!

I've found that taking Vitamin D seems to absolutely boost the immune system. Especially important if you live somewhere with little sun, like Seattle.

Original article (the one at sun-sentinel appears to be a copy-paste of this): http://www2.journalnow.com/content/2010/aug/14/diet-dficienc...

Vitamin D also helps prevent lots of forms of cancer: http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/cancerMain.shtml

Somehow it seems unlikely that this is a neutral source.

haha, very true, I just googled vitamin D+ cancer and that was the first hit. But there are lots of other non-biased publications who claim the same thing. I heard some discussion on NPR a few months back about it is why I remembered.

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