I keep seeing data points like this, but does supplementing vitamin D work? Does it make sense to read things like this and conclude that taking a vitamin D supplement pill daily is a good idea?
Get sun. If you can't get sun you should eat a variety of food that contains vitamin D. If you can't do that, you should take a supplement. Take the supplement at the same time as you eat a meal, preferably a meal that has some fat.
Here's the advice for England:
https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/healthy-body/how-to-get-vitamin...
https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/vitamins-and-minerals/vitamin-...
I personally don't give a shit if you are a foreigner. If the NHS website can provide good advice and help someone - anyone, then my tax squids are being put to good use.
There are bound to be other good sources of health related advice around the place but why not start with the NHS and work out from there?
Then, if some sort of expert consensus comes up, the authorities adopt that. When that consensus is challenged by new evidence, authorities are slow to change, because that would be implicit admission that they were giving the wrong advice, which is not something that the human egos involved there can easily stomach.
A good example for this is the food pyramid[1]. It was never supported by good evidence, it was adopted through expert consensus (one might also call it lobbying), and it was later removed from the guidelines. You can still see posters of it hanging in doctor's offices, of course.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_USDA_nutrition_guid...
Yet, the UK essentially adopted the advice given by the USDA. Why? Expert consensus is formed by research, which is usually funded by interest groups, and a lot of it ultimately comes out of the pockets of US industry.
For instance, the lipid hypothesis (that cholesterol causes heart disease) has been popularized once (with US industry support), became expert consensus, despite lack of evidence to support it, despite lots of contradictory data.
Once something is expert consensus for a while, it becomes harder and harder to challenge. At that point, there is no need for industry to control the narrative anymore, the experts (who do not want to admit being wrong) will control it all by themselves.
The point I am making is that the authorities are the last ones to set things right, their advice is forever outdated and therefore likely wrong.
> If you can't get sun you should eat a variety of food that contains vitamin D.
It's admirable that you prove your own point two sentences later.
You're never going to get sensible dietary advice, period. Diet is a belief system. Most people, including doctors and health authorities, really just go by clichés, like "eat five a day" or an unspecific "balanced diet". The science on it is poor and forever will be.
> If you can't get sun you should eat a variety of food that contains vitamin D.
Half an hour in the sun, if you are light-skinned, can get your body to produce about 10,000IU of vitamin D. To get that amount in the diet, you would need to eat more than a pound of the right fish.
Diet can get you out of the "severely deficient" range, but almost certainly not into the healthy range.
> Here's the advice for England
They actually advise supplementation, but they err on the low end. The only way to know if you get enough vitamin D is to do blood tests, people react quite different to different doses and forms. One guy here reports 10,000IUs daily gets him to only 55ng/dl (high end of normal), whereas 5000IUs gets others above 70 ng/dl (possibly harmful). Vitamin D builds up over time, so one test is not enough.
I will spend enough time in the sun to damage my skin and significantly increase the risk of melanoma.
https://www.yalemedicine.org/stories/vitamin-d-myths-debunke...
By exposing more of the skin, you absorb more vitamin D quicker, and so if you tan only 5 to 20 minutes depending on your skin complexion, you basically avoid skin burns and excess damage which causes melanoma and you get the benefits of the sun.
What do you think of this?
Edit: Maybe not what people think of as tanning, but it's basically skin exposure to the sun where you want to limit how long each part of the skin is exposed, but maximise the surface area for vitamin D absorbtion.
Source: https://www.outsideonline.com/2380751/sunscreen-sun-exposure...
Frankly, I don't have the time to do an extensive literature search to find primary sources but I have seen from plenty of tertiary sources that it is a poor idea to get vitamin D from the sun. Moreover, there are plenty of foods from which you can get vitamin D.
There's quite a bit of research that seem to coroborate it.
Sun can cause melanoma, but lack of sun also has negative effects albeit harder to track. Some even unrelated to vitamin D, as it seems the Sun does more than just provide us with vitamin D.
But it seems that the research on melanoma actually indicates that it is sunburn that is the prime cause. And sun exposure while under 20 is another leading cause. But after that, exposure that does not result in burn, like short term exposure doesn't seem to cause melanoma and does provide other health benefits.
I recommend a read in any case.
Not saying to go wild sun tanning, but I think if you can avoid burn (even minor ones), you're good.
Moreover, the first double blind clinical trial on Vitamin D and COVID-19 was published [0] which had astonishing results:
N=76
Percentage admitted to ICU: 50% -> 2%
Deaths: 8% -> 0%
I suggest you read the paper for the full picture, or to watch the analysis of Dr John Cambell [1] There’s more and more studies like this that demonstrate that Vitamin D helps prevent bad outcomes. In other words: people who are Vitamin D deficient are much more likely to develop severe complications after contracting COVID-19. 42% of Americans are Vitamin D deficient. For African Americans that percentage is 82%, because darker skin makes Vitamin D more slowly.
In Europe we are going through a 2nd wave of infections, yet the death-rate is much lower than the first wave. This could be explained by the lower Vitamin D deficiency in most people thanks to the summer.
For what it’s worth, I am taking 25mcg/day of Vitamin D supplement. They are dirt cheap (5Eur for 300 days). Dr John Cambell is taking 50mcg and an email from Dr Fauci revealed that he is taking 150mcg/day [1].
So even if you get exposure to sunlight, I would suggest looking into taking a supplement. Why the main media/government channels don’t talk about this more is baffling and potentially criminal. Maybe because there’s no money to be made from Vitamin D because there are no patents?
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096007602...
Or perhaps the supplies would run empty if this became big news (?)
Additional data point: In Belgium, it's encouraged to give your children daily Vitamin D supplements until the age of 6. That tells me that there is scientific consensus about the safety, and that there is a large supply of it.
1. Statistically significant difference in patients with documented hypertension in the no-vitamin-d group (p value 0.002, 15 vs 11 patients)
2. 2:1 randomization, reducing statistical power. They do not document the sample size needed from a power analysis looking for power > 0.80. They basically assumed that twice as many people without vitamin D would end up in ICU, when in reality 13x as many people ended up ICU. In general, I wish we could have a larger sample size for studies like this, but I know it isn't practical.
3. Biggest for me is no baseline serum vitamin D level recorded, just an assumption that patients selected were overall vitamin D deficient based on population. Seems like a simple enough test that could have been run as a send out test (no need to have the level during hospitalization, just for data gathering purposes).
4. Not placebo controlled, would have helped as placebo effect is real. For all we know, giving the research medication could have meant that the patient received more care and supervision, potentially aiding in their hospital course.
Every study has limitations. Do you feel that the limitations you stated mostly invalidate the study?
Nevertheless, like the professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School JoAnn Manson stated in May 2020 [0]: "The evidence is becoming quite compelling [that good Vitamin D status will protect against severe complications]".
Small sample size but the effect seems large.
Isn't going to do much for those not deficient.