I live in Seattle and have been depressed for a while. I had my Vitamin D3 levels checked via blood test, and they were really low. Started taking 5,000 IU per day, and I feel exactly the same as before.
Sitting in the sun however seems to do more than just “increase vitamin d levels”. The sensation is just overwhelmingly lovely. It seems to reduce cortisol, makes you feel tired in a euphoric way. Animals love to warm their fur in shafts of sunlight too.
Perhaps we should be thinking more in terms of joyful activities in general and less trying to biohack.
Maybe the takeaway is to go into things with a positive attitude but also take a personal inventory and adapt if something that is supposed to work doesn’t work for you.
Indeed. My dog always lies in the sun for a while when he goes outside. Once he's warm enough, he moves to the shade. Animals know.
I take vitamin D regularly, 4000iu+, and I don’t feel anything remarkable. With the sun it’s almost an instant jolt of joy.
And, of course, Vit-D is not the only contributor to depression so it might be good to see a GP and/or get a general blood panel done.
I've got treatment resistant depression and have tried probably everything else you're about to suggest. The only thing that kind of helped was dihydrotestosterone, but that is now illegal in the US. Also tianeptine and vorinostat, but also very hard to get in the US these days.
Wish you luck, it’s been an especially gloomy year here.
I bet you haven't tried MDMA therapy.
ergocalciferol
- vitamin d2 derived from plants
- vitamin d3 from sunlight
- vitamin d3 derived from lanolin washed from lambs wool
- vitamin d3 derived from lichen
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Designs-Health-Emulsi-D3-Emulsified-V...
If redressing your vitamin D levels doesn't fix it, look for hidden mold and/or allergies.
> RDA: The Recommended Dietary Allowance for adults 19 years and older is 600 IU daily for men and women, and for adults >70 years it is 800 IU daily.
> UL: The Tolerable Upper Intake Level is the maximum daily intake unlikely to cause harmful effects on health. The UL for vitamin D for adults and children ages 9+ is 4,000 IU.
So it's possible your 5k IUs were causing you more harm than good.
[0] https://www.scimagojr.com/journalsearch.php?q=19700188323&ti...
[1] https://www.scimagojr.com/journalsearch.php?q=21206&tip=sid&...
Also, for what it's worth, most of the articles referenced in the Harvard Medicine review referring to dosages are from before 2010, so they may be out of date.
Also, I'm not qualified to judge a paper by its work quality, I need to rely on the experts in the field for that, and a decent proxy for that judgement is where a paper gets published, so by looking at where a paper was published, I am judging a paper by its quality.
Impact factor is not a measurement of an individual article’s quality. It is a summary statistic, a rough measurement for how frequently that particular journal gets cited in other journals.
By judging an individual article by the impact factor of its journal, without reading the article and determing its quality yourself, you bias yourself to whatever those results might be one way or another with a statistic not intended to relay any information about the journal article itself.
You are right that it is a decent proxy where higher impact tends to have better journal quality (anecdotal, but I have observed this for sure) but I got annoyed when you claimed an article published in a low impact journal had no merit. That is simply not the case.
You can have the best, high quality scientific study ever about a highly specific thing, but because it is so specific you won’t have the broad impact that would get into one of the top tier journals. But with your viewpoint, that study would get thrown out the window.
> Ekwaru et al recently reported on more than 17,000 healthy adult volunteers participating in a preventative health program and taking varying doses of vitamin D up to 20,000 IU/d. These patients did not demonstrate any toxicity, and the blood level of 25(OH)D in those taking even 20,000 IU/d was less than 100 ng/mL.
> The evidence is clear that vitamin D toxicity is one of the rarest medical conditions and is typically due to intentional or inadvertent intake of extremely high doses of vitamin D (usually in the range of >50,000-100,000 IU/d for months to years).
[0]: Holick, https://www.mayoclinicproceedings.org/article/S0025-6196(15)...
[1]: Ekwaru et al, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25372709/
I have perused the literature on D toxicity and each case involved someone taking at least 100k IU per day, and usually way more than that. I take 50k IU per day every winter and have never had an issue. Blood calcium levels normal, etc
5k IU is an average dose and will absolutely not cause harm.
...and you are?
> 5k IU is an average dose and will absolutely not cause harm.
This is wildly irresponsible to post, and should be removed from HN.
It seems like there's an undereducated underground on the Internet that has the hubris to think they know more than the medical consensus, so what you're seeing are the effects of that hubris, nothing more.
Turns out Vitamin D is the anti-vaxx of computer nerds. Pretty hypocritical, but unsurprising.
Someone who is wholly uninterested in the credential theory of epistemology. Back to reddit with that, please.
> This is wildly irresponsible to post, and should be removed from HN.
You don't seem to know what the TUIL actually means. The tolerable upper intake level of a substance is not the actual safe upper limit, it just guarantees that a certain level is safe. In the case of vitamin D, the actual safe upper limit is likely an order of magnitude higher, which was even acknowledged by the people who, very conservatively, set the TUIL at 4k IU.[0] If 4k IU is completely safe (which it is), then there is nothing at all irresponsible about suggesting that 5k IU is completely safe (which it is), unless that extra 1000 IU somehow accomplishes some deleterious effect, which it doesn't.
That extra 1000 IU between 4k and 5k is simply insignificant. To put all these numbers in context, the body synthesizes the equivalent of anywhere from 4k-12k IU per day from sunlight,[1][2] and possibly 20k+ IU if you're sunbathing with most of your skin exposed.[3] So really, a 5k dose is in the low to moderate range. If 5k IU of vitamin D is scary or irresponsible, then getting even a little sun exposure is really scary and irresponsible!
[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17209171/
[1] https://doi.org/10.1093/ajcn/61.3.638S
So nobody qualified to answer this question? That's what I expected. In medicine more so than in nearly any other field, qualified experts should be the only people to express opinions publicly, considering the potential negative outcomes.
You really shouldn't be giving medical advice on any website, Reddit or Hacker News. This is on the same level as anti-vaxx shit, I hope you realize.
This, more than Reddit, is a place where qualified people discuss topics. If you'd like to wildly speculate, that sounds more like what happens on Reddit.
"Over-supplementation of vitamin D3 without ample vitamin K2 leads to problems of excess calcium.
"If calcium isn’t laid into bone, it will find itself in other tissues, like your arteries. Calcium in the arteries is BAD. It contributes to atherosclerosis and vessel stiffness."
https://dralexrinehart.com/articles/the-vitamin-d-and-vitami...
I only mention this to say that one can go well above the RDA/RDI that are highly contested to be far too low for modern diets, environmental inputs and lifestyles.
I think you may be poisoning yourself.
[0] https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-h...
What you're saying here has a lot in common with "woo", I hope you realize.
It sounds like there are a ton of confounding variables possible, not to mention your own personal biases in interpreting any potential causality.
Absolutely 100% this. For years I was following the scientific method, reading countless papers on PubMed, binge watching videos from micro biologists and eventually reached the conclusion that if I continued down that path my progress would be paralyzed by the scientific method itself. To use those methods properly in a controlled manor would take thousands of years that I simply don't have.
In summary, I have long since dropped the scientific method on the cutting room floor and instead use the "shoot in the dark" or "shotgun" methodologies. I don't have to tell you this comes with many risks, but I have weighed the risks and benefits and concluded that this was the right path for me. Anecdotally I am very pleased with my progress. I have reversed many chronic health issues. I look and feel decades younger than I did a decade ago. That is of course my own biased opinion of which I hold in high confidence. I would never expect anyone else to do what I am doing nor would I try to convince anyone that I am doing the right thing.
As for the original topic of vitamin D3 which isn't a vitamin at all, I stand by my words that the RDA is far too low for most people today given the lack of sunlight exposure, the poor diets, the high levels of stress and inflammation from bad diets and so many more factors. I should add the disclaimer that I am a doctor though most doctors are not really trained in this and what little training they receive in medical school is crammed into their heads and lost as fast as they gained it.
You aren't qualified to make this statement, doctor or no, especially considering it's in direct contradiction to consensus medical advice.
The RDA, in general, is not necessarily the same as current consensus medical advice. In fact, ISTR that it has actually been clearly established that the RDA for Vitamin D was, given it's premises, based on erroneous calculations, and that there is broadly accepted clinical evidence that it is too low, but the government just hasn't acted to update it.
> The Tolerable Upper Intake Level is the maximum daily intake unlikely to cause harmful effects on health. The UL for vitamin D for adults and children ages 9+ is 4,000 IU. [0]