Study confirms vitamin D protects against colds and flu (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Study confirms vitamin D protects against colds and flu (2017)

news.harvard.edu

91 pointsColanR19 comments

I was looking at the temp and humidity of cities effected and most were in the under 20C 50% humidity band. Maybe sunny weather makes a diff given the vitamin D connection.

That would be bad news for UK and could be good news for India, Indonesia, and some African and South American countries

Here’s an analysis of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22563932 (“High Temperature and High Humidity Reduce the Transmission of COVID-19”):

> One degree Celsius increase in temperature and one percent increase in relative humidity lower R by 0.0383 and 0.0224, respectively.

Unfortunately, if you take a look at figure 3 in that paper, you'll see that correlation is extremely weak and the non-zero coefficients almost entirely driven by a single outlier.

It's quite obviously spicy food that helps the most. Or rather its my excuse to eat everything spicy for the next month.

Ah, Linus Pauling was just one letter off https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_C_and_the_common_cold

Vitamin C, taken orally, reduces length of cold with 8% in adults, and 12% in children.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10796569

Vitamin C deficiency makes you more susceptible to the cold and severe infections.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16988135

Vitamin C has shown inhibitory effect in chickens for avian coronavirus.

https://academic.oup.com/jac/article/52/6/1049/731701

Chinese are testing intravenous Vitamin C for treating COVID-19 with promising results for reducing cytokine-induced damage to the lungs.

https://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=2...

I am really not sure why news organizations all around the world feel the need to debunk Vitamin C usage for novel coronavirus. For instance: https://www.snopes.com/news/2020/03/09/coronavirus-its-time-... . Their conclusions all amount to: washing hands is better, you may get a tummy ache, and don't believe folk remedies.

Vitamin C is essential.

This means it is essential for tissue repair. Also the production of neurotransmitters / cell signalling molecules.

Of course it improves recovery and reduces severity of symptoms. Of course it won't prevent anything.

I can't understand how there is any dispute.

Also the word VITAmine gives it away, doesnt it :)

That is the idea.

A lot of people are magnesium deficient too. Magnesium is known essential in over 300 enzyme pathways.

> Of course it won't prevent anything.

You are full of nonsence. Of course it prevents scurvy ffs.

> This means it is essential for tissue repair.

This totally doesn't mean that. Vitamin C is cofactor and resource. It is used in bunch of processes, only some of it are for repair.

Ah, sorry, yes, that's true. I didn't mean Vitamin C doesn't prevent Vitamin C deficiency.

Your second statement doesn't negate my claim that Vitamin C is essential for tissue repair. It absolutely is, but of course that's not all it's essential for, and I did hint at this in the bit you didn't quote.

https://www.xkcd.com/882/ There are issues with significance. Everyone loves testing Vitamin C as a cure for X. Wake me up when follow-up studies from another group show an effect.

He was not off.

Vitamin C is probably the only well known anti-viral agent used by basically entire planet.

I suggest anybody to take several grams of C, in divided doses (mandatory) all the time, particularly now (also inform your elders). There is no downside to this, there can only be neutral or positive effects (to anybody jumping about oxalate levels, please stop your thoughts now).

Pauling also claimed you need to take bunch of other vitamins in his books - 25K IU A, 5K D etc... so he was not mistaken. If it was only about vitamin C, he would not call his medicine orthomolecular but probably ascorbatomolecular ... His claims on C were never tested (not in the doses he used, but using x10-x100 times lower doses). What happend then was not medicine, but politics.

That's why we warehouse patients in hospitals without sunlight exposure.

You could couple disinfecting against MRSA with vitamin D production by bombarding patients (and microorganisms) with UV rays.

Also maybe invest in the skin cancer department.

And if everybody got wrinkles, age discrimination would be lessened too.

There used to be outdoor wards when dealing with tb patients not very long ago. Seems medieval now

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/south_west/6571543.stm

would be interesting to see how really dark black people with high natural sun insulation are fairing. I mean its armchair biology but you could theorize that people with very dark black skin that work in office and dont see much sunlight would be more susceptible to the coldflu seasons...

I dont remember seeing anything like that, and one of my workmates from Kenya, who has been told that her Vit D levels are too low in winter (by her GP) and that she should go for walks at lunchtime to get them up a bit, doesn't seem to get especially hammered by the cold/flu season.

That is a anecdotal data pool of (1) though :-P

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