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Comment by yoyohello13 | Hacker News Reader

It's pretty safe to assume all hyped supplements are pointless. Being generally active and eating fruits/vegetables is like 80% of the work for being healthy.

> almost everyone is Vitamin D deficient

This was the red flag that made me realize it was BS early on. If everyone is deficient, then it must not be that important.

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> If everyone is deficient, then it must not be that important.

Most people are overweight. Does that make being a healthy weight not that important?

most people can tolerate being overweight pretty well it seems

For what definition of “tolerate”?

Not according to the public health literature. But, hey, don't let hard population data spoil what things "seem" to you.

Here are a few highly-cited articles to get you started:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/1471-2458-9-88 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1614362

> Being generally active and eating fruits/vegetables is like 80% of the work for being healthy.

I suspect that a relatively low percentage of people in a solid number of wealthy countries meet these qualifications.

> If everyone is deficient, then it must not be that important.

This isn't sound logic. Something being common doesn't make it unimportant or less of a problem.

> Being generally active and eating fruits/vegetables is like 80% of the work for being healthy.

Except for the things that you get from sunlight, not diet.

> If everyone is deficient, then it must not be that important.

But nobody who lives in e.g. East Africa and spends a lot of time outdoors is deficient.

So it's actually pretty reasonable to say that a modern indoor lifestyle combined with long winters would truly lead most people in those regions to being deficient.

If everyone is deficient, how would you even establish a baseline of what counts as deficient and excessive? The way they do that is they sample the population and look at the ranges of the values and maybe look at when comorbitity issues arise within those ranges. But “everyone is deficient in X” is easily dismissed hokum.

Logically speaking, an affliction being extremely common or universal does not dismiss it as no longer being an affliction.

Many things about our society are extremely new compared to the conditions for which our bodies are evolved to be in.

I think you missed my point. vitamin D levels in and of themselves aren’t an affliction. The “correct” level is established by looking at what everyone else has and also by trying to look for comorbidities. But the comorbidities are often hard to tease out; about the only disease we know is rickets. Everything else is weakly correlational for vitamin D.

How do you think they define healthy levels of other hormones like testosterone and estrogen? They look at the range of levels for them, they look to see when they think diseases start, and they say those are correlated and you should adjust.

>Everything else is weakly correlational for vitamin D.

All cause mortality is correlational for vitamin D. Various disease outbreaks (common cold, etc) and severity are correlational for vitamin D. etc We even know by which mechanisms so it's not like this is far fetched stuff where we're overlooking things.

This kind of stuff slaps you in the face if you live in the northern half of europe. To then think us now spending the majority of our waking hours indoors and the prevalence of those things and seasonal depression in winter when one leaves in the dark and comes home in the dark all has no effect....I think that's just hubris.

Similarly, many things have issues that may not seem like issues at first. For instance most people are deficient in protein owing to simply not getting enough and a significant chunk of what they do get coming from sources with extremely low digestibility/DIAAS scores.

And somebody may not even realize this until they decide to start downing a few more chicken breasts per day and suddenly see their energy levels skyrocket, their hunger diminish, and so on. But if you surveyed them prior, they'd claim to feel perfectly normal.

Another one is testosterone which is extremely unfortunate because there's no remotely natural way to meaningfully regain significant amounts of it, but TRT is a life changing thing for many people who have low testosterone which in modern times is a huge chunk of all men and essentially all of them over a certain age.

> is like 80% of the work for being healthy

I would suspect you're a man under 60.

I don't think your statement applies to the elderly (e.g. my mum needing D and Calcium for osteoporosis).

And I've seen many active healthy female friends under 60 actually need suppliments (I'm ignoring the stereotypical yoga worried well): plus pregnancy or health issues have an impact too.

But maybe I'm a victim of sampling bias since the men I know seem much less likely to see a doctor.

I don’t want to get into an argument about health on the internet, it’s really a no win situation.

Although feeling bad, going to a doctor, getting labs, taking a calcium supplement is completely legitimate and a very different story from watching a YouTuber say ‘everyone is vitamin D deficient’ then going out a buying a bottle of supplements.

Pretty much the only one with a real consensus around it is creatine. And even that has debate around the right dose

The interesting thing about creatine is that people's natural absorption varies dramatically. So some chunk of people will see basically nothing from creatine because their natural levels are already at saturation, whereas most will see relatively major benefits. I continue my 5g/day even when I'm not actively lifting.

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