The Big Vitamin D Mistake [pdf] (2017) | Hacker News Reader

The Big Vitamin D Mistake [pdf] (2017)

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

73 pointsfelineflock51 comments

I’ve always been wary of overconsuming fat-soluble vitamins (ADEK). Seeing strong medical consensus that 6000IU/day of Vitamin D is safe and even desirable gives me confidence to supplement more liberally.

I've been taking 6000-8000 IU of vitamin D daily along with K2, with no issues. I recommend using drops instead of pills as they allow for more flexible dosing. They aren't more expensive either (in my experience, they're actually cheaper).

I've been taking 10000 IU per day for a year. I mentioned that to my primary care doctor. When I got home and read my health summary, I saw that he wrote "Vitamin D abuse" as one of his concerns.

My local grocery store offered free blood testing for Vitamin D a few years ago, and I was low.

I take a 2000IU tablet a few times a week now.

Haha the article states that the recommended daily dose should be 6-8k

I'm conflicted. It seems like in Canada the recommendation was that there was no actual error and the dosage of 1000 IU is still considered good. It's hard to find more than 2500 IU.

I have no idea what to follow at this point

You can get 10,000 or even 100,000 IU tablets prescribed in Canada

Yeah but to get a prescription you probably have to have a valid reason. If the general directive is that 1000 is fine, I'm assuming it's not easy to get a prescription for that

i just asked. i was ready with the evidence, but to my surprise my gp said “sure, 90 day ok?”

It’s crazy how many of these comments completely ignored TFA. Hackernews is in decline and will be indistinguishable from Facebook or Reddit before long.

On published article does not mean it's proved and everyone must follow watever it says. The Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_D says

> However, the evidence for the health benefits of vitamin D supplementation in individuals who are already vitamin D sufficient is unproven.

andvitamin D is liposoluble so overdose is a risk. So I strongly recomend to ask a real medical doctor.

duh? why aren’t you discussing the merits or demerits of the article directly?

Which you literally did, in two comments.

Meanwhile, my daily 5000IU Vitamin D pills were recalled by some authority in Finland for “excessive dose”, and since it appears that a recall anywhere in the EU will apply to the whole EU, I was given a refund and presumably won’t be able to buy it again.

5kIU = 125 micrograms, that's a lot.

The linked paper recommends 8000 IU/day for adults.

I doubt it has 100% bioavailability. Anyway, I don’t trust the low “recommended” amounts.

It’s crazy how many of these comments completely ignored TFA.

Interesting. I live at the 45th parallel, and try to get out into the sun everyday during the warmer months, with 5000IU orally per day during the gloomy part of the year. Now I'm wondering if I should get my levels checked.

TLDR Unfortunately, medicine took a very long time to realize that vitamin D is not simply a vitamin that prevents rickets.

We know today that vitamin D is a powerful nuclear receptor-activating hormone of critical importance, especially to the immune system.

With the available data mentioned above, the proposed doses would probably suffice to maintain vitamin D levels around or over 75-100 nmol/L, with practically zero risk of toxicity.

(2017)

Some previous discussions:

4 months ago, flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44705486

2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24768721

2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15867918

More recent Vitamin D discussions:

We're learning more about what Vitamin D does

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46088998

Vitamin D reduces incidence and duration of colds in those with low levels

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45732670

In the US, you can get 50000 IU on Amazon, good enough for weekly supplementation if you're low (same as prescription strength).

The amount of fraud and fakes on amazon is surreal. I wouldn't trust something from amazon to open a can of beans that was already open.

I'm certainly not going to put something from amazon in my body. God only knows what you're actually getting

When you buy from reliable brands with a wide range of supplements in their own store on Amazon, you get what that store offers on Amazon as well as elsewhere. If you don't know the brand, Amazon is a bad place to learn about them.

I recall reading some research which indicated that daily dosage resulted in slightly better protections against cancer. Though better than not taking it at all.

I just got more 5000IU at Walmart which was a nice surprise. Normally I take two 2000IU tablets.

I get gummies at 2000000000 IU and that's not even the final form of my vitamin

Also what's an IU. Apparently it's meant to normalize impact across vitamin D species of which there are multiple. Part of me can see the reasoning but it runs contrary to how much of medicine/pharma operates, generally in such form as either mg per time interval or mg/kg per time interval. It would be like taking the whole armada of blood pressure drugs and dictating their doses in mmHg instead of milligrams. If only things were so simple!

So is 10,000 IU of daily does ok ?

yes, but not long term, from what i’ve read. do it for 90 days through winter maybe?

What have you read?

i cant find it now. It was an article that suggested you may underestimate your natural production, especially in summer, so its safer to use high doses for a period of 3 months or so with a break of the same duration, after all we are likely “accustomed “ to fluctuating supply through the year.

If you start from low levels, then yes, as long as you keep your blood levels in check. It would take a while to overdose it this way, but it's not impossible.

Cite?

for a couple weeks? probably.

I would not take that much consistently unless you're in the arctic circle and its winter

This article is very technical and difficult to read. Is there a TLDR?

The article's conclusion is straightforward.

Nicely uninformative, but technically correct.

Vitamin D good. Higher levels than previously thought.

Eat one small rock per day as important source of vitamins and minerals critical to digestive health.

This is why I eat fruity pebbles.

If poultry or pigeon, eat two per day.

2, they must all build up and grind together in your crop before expulsion for proper results.

Wait, we're talking about birds right?

This article is not technical and is 4 pages and includes a 1 paragraph executive summary. There's only 2 pages of content.

There's no specific info about any experiment. It just claims a statistics error was recently found in another paper/experiment. It claims fixing the error suggests we should supplement more Vitamin D.

It gestures vaguely at "Diabetes" and "immune health" and "we used to eat fish" to claim that we want/need more blood Vitamin D. It also points to some other actual studies that might have good evidence that we want or need more Vitamin D.

I would doubt anything in this could cause harm. Vitamin D is fat soluble so taking too much can be dangerous, but I don't think the recommended doses here are close to that dosage.

This paper aims for slightly more than 100nmol/l Vitamin D marker in blood, while other NIH papers claim >375nmol/l is getting into Vitamin D toxicity territory.

>https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6158375/

NIH previously claimed a serum level of less than 72nmol/l is a health problem, so this paper is bumping that up slightly.

My understanding is that large scale tests of Vitamin D supplementation don't ever seem to turn out as great as all these papers would imply. Maybe their experiments had too low a dose.

My own supplementation has done jack and shit. Maybe I needed a higher dose.

I still hold skepticism that all of humanity needs a supplement, as that's just a sales pitch from a company at that point, but the "Everyone really does need a shitload of Vitamin D supplement" hypothesis at least has a mechanism that makes sense.

Do we need to be skeptical of NIH because of Trump? or they're still okay?

Also, remember - don't take D on its own. Always with magnesium, or you get harmed by it, for all that it also does you good. Body is not built for raw D.

Also also remember, D2 is a vitamin, D3 is a hormone.

I don't think this paper is associated with the NIH besides being hosted there.

To be clear, NIH hosts an online database called PubMed that contains almost all published biomedical literature. If the article is open access, then it also hosts a copy of the article on PubMed Central.

This is the link to the article in the PubMed database: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28768407/

You can click on the DOI link to go to the article hosted by the journal.

> Also also remember, D2 is a vitamin, D3 is a hormone.

As a naive person, what's the consequence of this?

I mean, I agree MAHA sucks, and Kennedy is a fool and and loser, but the PDF is only hosted at the NIH. It was published in a journal owned by the Korean Society for Preventive Medicine, and the researcher is from Attikon University Hospital, University of Athens School of Medicine, Athens, Greece. And it was published WAAAAAAAY back in 2017.

So do your research or something.

If you're looking to build and maintain healthy vitamin D levels, D3 is generally the better supplement choice, according to health experts and studies. Consult your doctor to determine your needs and the best form for you, especially if you have a deficiency or dietary restrictions. -Google Gemini

I think it's important to clarify understandings for non-scientific/med community each time these types of technical discussions occur.

you should always be skeptical of claims and seek to understand their basis and methodology.

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