Did my masters on Vitamin D - It is very difficult to extract CLINICALLY RELEVANT information from retrospective epidemiological studies.
However, there a a few things that are clear:
1. Calcium absorption from the intestine increases with vitamin D supplementation dose up to around 8-10,000 IU D3 daily.
2. 15 minutes of full body exposure in noon sun is equivalent to a dose of ~20,000 IU D3
3. There are few cases of vitamin D overdose in the literature - doses in the 1,000,000 IU+ range within days is generally where symptoms are noted - this excludes people with kidney disorders.
Personally, I take 10k IU D3 a day. The D3 is important because D2 has 1/2 to 1/3 the effect per dose in raising calcium absorption levels.
I would recommend this level of supplementation to anyone who doesn’t have a kidney disorder.
Re #2: the figure gets thrown around a lot. But who is outside, naked, at noon for fifteen minutes? It's really hard to translate that to anything meaningful or actionable.
Here's a tool that can help calculate useful exposure depending on your location/time of year. Doesn't take clothing into account however..
The point is that being outside naked at noon every day for 15 minutes wouldn't hurt you. Therefore, a daily dose of 20,000 IU / day won't hurt you. Therefore, a 5000 IU supplement every day won't hurt you either.
I've been taking vitamin d3 10K IU/day for 10 years and it has allowed my blood V-D3 levels to go from 12 ng/mL to ~50 which is within normal range. The NIH recommended dose has been going up over the last 2 decades starting at 400 IU and now 4,000 IU as we learn more and more about it's effectiveness.
Not sure why this is being downvoted. This advice is far more useful than OPs.
Be careful of anyone claiming to be an expert on anything, especially on an anonymous forum - even if that forum has in general higher quality opinion.
And the OP does not mention Vitamin K2 at all. How does anybody who claims to have done a Masters on Vitamin D not mention K2?
> 2. 15 minutes of full body exposure in noon sun is equivalent to a dose of ~20,000 IU D3
For someone who claims to have done a masters on Vitamin D, I find this generalized statement disturbing. What skin tone the person has, what season it is, what latitude the person lives at, age of the person etc., are factors in how much Vitamin D is produced by the body on exposure to sunlight. I’m afraid I can’t take the other points seriously because of the brevity and lack of nuance.
Yes, this was overly brief and a tilde is not enough to qualify this statement, and I should have said noon equatorial sun.
My point here was meant to be about how this is essentially the daily maximum dose from UV radiation due to the isomerization of previtamin D into inactive isomers, and to give context to a dose of 10,000 IU D3 seeming large when it is half the amount a person might receive from sun exposure.
Can increased calcium absorption lead to kidney disorders?
This is my biggest worry when taking Vitamin D3 supplements, I have Vitamin D deficiency but when I take supplements it quickly reaches to toxicity levels (> 80 ng/mL) and so I have the revert to monthly supplement of 60,000 IU of Cholecalciferol.
PSA: I'm a dwarf, possibly Achondroplasia, but during childhood (4 - 15years) I wasn't categorised as such and my bone troubles were always attributed to Vitamin D deficiency. After age 17, I didn't have much of bone problems and so I didn't follow up on my Vitamin D deficiency.
Fast forward to age 32, I was diagnosed with Spinal Stenosis among other cerebral spinal fractures risking becoming quadriplegic[1]. So, if you have bone problems due to Vitamin D deficiency, please follow it up regularly, it's likely going to be life-long but taking proper supplements is better than a fracture. Also visiting a good endocrinologist to get to the root of Vitamin D problems is recommended.
IANAD, but the word is you should couple it with vitamin K to offset the extra calcium absorption. Which is a good idea on general principles, since K is one of the other very few supplements worth taking by the gen pop.
There are many cases of kidney disorders causing issues in vitamin D metabolism - the majority of literature examples I read involved genetic kidney disorders which would not be be caused by increased calcium absorption.
Interesting, I've always heard of the calcium absorption effect as a negative aspect of D over-supplementation — I guess the theory is that it raises your blood calcium level too high, leading to arterial calcification? Is that effect overblown in your opinion?
In acute hypervitaminosis D, there can be organ calcification that has to be treated. These cases are rarely reported - one case occurred when the patient ingested crystalline vitamin D - dosing themselves in the range of 1-2 million IU D3 per day for weeks, and although there was not an extensive follow-up to determine the long-term effect on the patient, the acute calcification was reversed with treatment.
Vitamin D is involved with calcium in the body in many different ways, specifically I was talking about a measure of the absorption of calcium into the body from food as promoted by vitamin D.
Organ calcification is extremely serious and a very understandable reason why doctors have been hesitant to recommend higher doses of vitamin D, however most medical thinking about vitamin D until recently has focused on the prevention of Rickets, which requires only a small amount of constant supplementation (500 IU D3) to avoid serious effects. In context, 10,000 IU seems like an enormous dose. However if you look at the blood serum levels of people who receive consistent UV exposure, they have much higher levels than someone who is being supplemented with 500 IU D3 and no UV. So much of this debate is around trying to find out what the "optimal" vitamin D level is rather than what level is "sufficient" to prevent Rickets.
Not an expert, but from what I read that is exactly why you should not supplement high dosage vitamin D without also supplementing vitamin K2 (mk7 all-trans). Studies that show positive health effects from D3 typically supplement 40ug K2 for every 1000IU D3.
I knew people that would go for a walk during lunch around the office building with a friend. Ate a packed sandwich, got a walk in, a conversation, and apparently got a much needed dose of D3.
Seems like such a low effort, high reward thing to do.
Depending on the latitude and skin complexion that may be all thats needed for D3.
When my vitamin D levels tested a little low, I asked my doctor about it, and he said studies don't show any benefit for supplementing vitamin D deficiencies that are asymptomatic. At the time, I looked up the study, though I can't seem to find it now.
The studies I've seen relaying the same sentiment of no appreciable benefit only looked at a single outcome, normally bone density or bone fracture occurrence. Vitamin D levels affect expression of almost 300 different genes in humans (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3604145/) so looking at a single outcome to gauge the entire efficacy of that vitamin is absurd and disappointing that so many other doctors push their narrow minded interpretations of those same limited studies.
Ditto re 10K. I've been taking Vitamin D3 10K IU/day for 10 years and it has allowed my blood V-D3 levels to go from 12 ng/mL to ~50 which is within normal range. The NIH recommended dose has been going up over the last 2 decades starting at 400 IU and now 4,000 IU as we learn more and more about it's effectiveness.
Re lux with full body exposure. I was under the impression it's an hour per day to get 15-20 IU? Either way it means exposing legs, hands and face to the sun which most people rarely do on a daily basis.
I personally aim for 10,000 IU D3 daily from either sun or supplement. In normal times, living in New York, I would supplement 10,000 IU D3 from November through March, and then I would make sure to be outside 1 hour a day with at least arms and face exposed.
Shots of 250,000 IU are given clinically and the therapeutic dose was traditionally 50,000 IU D2 weekly - corresponding to a dose of about 3,500 IU D3 daily.
I highly recommend getting tested for kidney disease if you are worried and get multiple vitamin D tests - the tests are imprecise but will give you a general idea of what your levels are.
No, it won’t, but that’s only after a certain limit that’s much higher than 5000IU. Even if you spend all day in the sun, your body will stop the synthesis at a certain level (10000IU in the day is what I had read long ago, but that may be incorrect or outdated).
In other words, 5000IU is much lower than what the body would naturally produce when exposed to sunlight for long durations in a day (assuming good latitude, sunny season, lower atmospheric pollution, around noon, lighter skin tone, etc.).
It depends - ancient ancestors had a lot of different lifestyles. For example, Soranus of Ephesus reported deformations in the bones of children as early as the 100 CE.
However, this is I think what you are trying to get at:
One particular epidemiological study stands out as a guide for what typical 25-(OH)D levels might have been be for our earliest ancestors.
Luxwolda et al. studied populations of pastoral Masai and hunter-gatherer Hadzabe, sampling their blood for 25-(OH)D levels and taking note of their daily habits in reference to UV exposure.
The mean 25-(OH)D concentration in these populations was 115 nmol/L, with a range of 58 nmol/L to 171 nmol/L.
This study provides a general framework for the expected 25-(OH)D level of active, healthy humans working outdoors at a low (< 5 degrees) latitude. Humans have modified their living conditions greatly from this model of ancestral life, leading to reduced exposure to UV radiation.
Since I was a child I’ve been a walking respiratory illness machine. Bronchitis, sinusitis, flu, pneumonia, common cold, etc.
During “flu” season I was usually sick for the entire season with a rotating assortment of viral respiratory issues, this lasted until about 7 years ago.
8 years ago in September I started taking 10,000 IU of vitamin D3 and 180mg of K2 daily.
I haven’t had a deputies illness since. My children were getting sick at their normal clip, my wife the same, but not me. I went from being sick all the time to not getting sick ever. I made one change in my life, adding the D3 and K2.
After 2 years of not getting sick my wife and children started supplementing with D3 and K2, everyone stopped getting sick. My son went off to college and stopped taking the D3 and K2 and during the winter semester he got sick twice, he had me sent him the D3 and K2, he hasn’t been sick since.
It’s a small sample size, but even at 10,000 IU daily D3 is not dangerous or expensive, the only caveat seems to be that you need to supplement with K2 or you can cause gardening if the arteries due to calcification.
My doctor thinks it’s a lot of nonsense, but then again he wants every patient on blood pressure and cholesterol medication “just in case”.
I had anxiety attacks and back pain for years. Maybe it’s just a weird and strong placebo effect, but after starting to take vitamin D these things were simply gone.
I found the same - I was starting to get anxiety first thing in the morning - started taking Vitamin D and it simply stopped. At the time I had no idea that Vitamin D could have that effect.
My allergies started to dramatically improve after taking 8-10k IU vitamin D daily. This isnt medical evidence and may be pure luck but I am just adding to the anecdotes.
Another data point: 5000 IU of D3 daily for years, after testing initially at around 20 ng/dL (iir the units c); this spring my level from a blood test was >90 in the first test since then. It seems like taking 10000 IU instead would've been overkill for me.
I supplement K2 and Mg also (plus a few unrelated things). I also get sick less, though I made enough other changes I can't tell whether to credit the supplements. (The K2 definitely helped a skin issue -- I could reliably bring it back by stopping taking the K2. That's probably a pretty idiosyncratic problem of mine, but it's an example of a supplement clearly helping.)
Chris Masterjohn has suggested that high levels of vitamin D could make you more susceptible to the virus, because some papers suggest that D upregulates ACE2 expression. He thinks it's best to aim for a blood level in the 30-35 range. I don't know how seriously to take this suggestion. For now I reduced my supplement to 1000IU/day.
As the article says, D works with other vitamins to do a lot of things. It works with K to help calcium get into your bones. Otherwise you can absorb it and it can hang around in places it's not really supposed to, and that turns out to not be a good thing. You're probably better off with D + K (if you need it) than trying to skimp on D.
(I have celiac [1], and I had to learn about this connection the hard way. The horrid thing is that my normal daily lunch was an enormous bowl of leafy greens, exactly where you're supposed to get vitamin K from, and I still had to supplement it. Calcium in the wrong places was one of the contributing factors to my heart issues in the link. I still have to be a bit careful not to eat too much hard cheese, but only slightly more careful than a normal person who faces potentially blocking themselves up anyhow.)
Doctors usually recommend 1k IU per day but this has been shown to be problematic. 8k-10k IU is much better. Spending a day on the beach will net you many 10ks of vitamin D (given full body exposure to the sun).
All these articles about different individual nutrients start to feel like heath whack-a-mole.
How about this: to be in the best possible position to beat any serious infection, you need to be in generally good health.
That means having adequate levels of all essential nutrients - i.e., all the vitamins, minerals, amino acids, enzymes etc that you get from maintaining a good diet and healthy lifestyle over the long term.
To focus on just one nutrient as a pandemic looms just isn't the answer; it's not how health works.
That said, I've personally researched what nutrients (note the plural) are most important for beating an infection like this, and have adjusted my nutrient intake somewhat, and recommended to close relatives they do the same. But this is after I and they have spent many years researching and maintaining good health practices.
Update: if I was in not-so-good health (and not in medical treatment for a diagnosed condition, in which case, consult your doctor), my approach would be:
- boost my amino acids, fatty acids and minerals with a few spoonfuls of hemp seeds every day
- take extra supplements of vitamins A, B complex, C and D (and perhaps K?)
- do plenty of walking in the fresh air and sun,
- keep a generally healthy diet of good quality protein and veg.
Update 2: Others are mentioning Vitamin K, which seems like a good idea to supplement if you're generally nutrient deficient, but may not be necessary if you have a good diet. [1]
Disclaimer: not a health professional, but have had personal reasons to get very knowledgable about health and diet over many years.
And, try to get those things from foods. It can't be said enough: Fruits and Vegetables have extremely high densities of all your minerals and vitamins. I've calculated all their densities here based on USDA nutritional info: https://kale.world/c All the results are normalized to 200 calories for easy comparison.
When you get your vitamins/minerals from a pill, you run the risk of your body not absorbing it because that's not how our bodies adapted to absorb those things for millions of years.
If you're eating a healthy diet (90%+ plant based whole foods), you will get more than enough minerals/vitamins and amino acids.
Taking a few spoon fulls of hemp seeds is an excellent idea: it's super high in magnesium which is a mineral that most of us are greatly lacking. But, I would consider hemp seeds as just another food part of a plant based whole foods diet. personally, i add it to salads, smoothies, etc.
And you don't need Vitamin K supplements. Greens are extraordinarily high in Vitamin K. Even, just 20 calories of Spinach will provide over 400% of your daily Vitamin K intake!
People, be especially careful with supplements, they're very much unregulated and can put almost anything they want in those things.
Nature makes the best supplements: it's called food (plant based whole foods with a variety of grains and beans, lots of vegetables and fruits and some meat) and it has everything our body needs. Yes, for vitamin D, you'll need to go outside and get some exposure to the sun. Actually, doctor's tell us, Vitamin D isn't even a Vitamin, it's actually a hormone that your body makes all on it's own with enough exposure to sun. But, based on your skin pigmentation, you may need more or less exposure.
>...And you don't need Vitamin K supplements. Greens are extraordinarily high in Vitamin K. Even, just 20 calories of Spinach will provide over 400% of your daily Vitamin K intake!
I agree with you that most people don't eat enough fruits and vegetables. Though if someone is worried about a particular nutrient, it isn't that simple. It doesn't matter how much Vitamin K is in spinach if you don't absorb it:
>...Circulating phylloquinone levels after spinach with and without butter were substantially lower (7.5- and 24.3-fold respectively) than those after taking the pharmaceutical concentrate. Moreover, the absorption of phylloquinone from the vegetables was 1.5 times slower than from Konakion.
You & I can proffer this advice until we are blue in the face, but what people want is one magic pill that solves all their problems. So that's what they will keep trying.
Vitamin D seems like a special case in the whack-a-mole though, since health authorities have been heavily pushing behavior that leads to getting less of this for a generation now. The message to never go outside without wearing sunscreen has probably killed way more people than it has saved.
"Adipose tissue (“belly fat”) appears to absorb but not release vitamin D. If we want to do some armchair hypothesizing, perhaps people historically used to lose weight in winter, which definitely would release the stored vitamin D just when it was needed."
This is an interesting idea. It's believed our bodies get fat to ensure we have energy when food is scarce. It makes sense that we'd also want to have vitamins available too.
An addition to that: Over a decade ago (so unfortunately I have no reference, this just stuck with me for how against common sense it was) I remember reading that being overweight but not obese correlated with good health better than being "normal" weight did. Their theory was that if being sick made it so you were less hungry, you could still get an energy boost by using up fat reserves and be able to fight off illness faster.
This sounds like a much more specific and more testable version of that theory.
There is a problem with the BMI [1] calculation, which is the standard measure used to determine "normal" weight, in that it is dimensionally incorrect. The BMI calculation gives results that are appropriate for those around 5'6" (168cm) in height. The units are in kg/m^2.
The Ponderal Index [2] (AKA the "Corpulence Index") gives values that work for any height, with units in kg/m^3. If you are a young child or over 6 feet tall, you might find the PI/CI works better for you.
Sufficient levels of Vitamin D are good for your health in general, separate from this pandemic. Getting sufficient levels of it is something we all should’ve been doing before anyways, which is not true of Chloroquine.
I'm surprised the article barely mentions Vitamin K, which is needed along with Vitamin D - D to mobilize the calcium and K2 to put it into the right place.
There is another important pair, too: Vitamin D and Magnesium. But consult your doctor before taking extra amounts of anything.
There is a lot of misinformation on the web around Vitamin D, such as that even high amounts (>= 5000IU) are tolerable and safe. After a blood test showed me Vitamin D deficient, taking 5000IU (that size is readily available over the counter at my grocery store) daily gave me disturbing heart palpitations, which I didn't realize were related to Vitamin D until after thousands of dollars in tests showed my heart to be perfectly healthy. It wasn't until I had slacked off in taking the vitamins and then started taking them again that I discovered the connection. Apparently magnesium has something to do with it, but IANAD. (I was not taking magnesium supplements at the time.) I can tolerate 1000IU occasionally, but people need to be aware that not everyone tolerates supplements (especially high doses) the same.
I was happy to see the article you linked to above only claims Vitamin D is considered safe up to 4000IU. Although IMHO, after my experience, anything over 1000IU should require a prescription. Of course nothing would stop people from taking five 1000IU OTC doses to get 5000IU, but I think most people know better than to take five of the same type of vitamin daily without talking to their doctor first.
These units seem _incredibly_ low to me. Your skin can generate almost 3000 IU in just 15 minutes on the right day. Many doctors even recommend treatments of 150,000 IU or more, in one go to correct deficiencies (do not do attempt without a doctor's recommendation and supervision).
I do not doubt your experience, but it seems incredible to me that just a 5000 IU supplement gave you heart palpitations. Then again, I've also read many reports about incorrectly labeled products (e.g. milk, supplements, etc.) which contained far more D2 or D3 than what was written on the tin, causing toxicity.
I've been researching this a lot and I've read that taking D3 without Magnesium can do this. That is, taking the D3 might have tipped you into a Mg defficency. That's why D3 is taken with Mg, Ca, K and Vitamin K2. They all work together.
Did the supplement you took include those, or at least Mg?
There are some interesting discussions about Vit K and Covid, basically Vit K promotes coagulation but it seems that its deficiency is associated with the coagulation issues seen in Covid patients. And it might as well be that the correlation is inverted (that is, the development of coagulation troubles might cause low Vit K)
Welp. I don't think it's gonna make the difference if I get COVID-19, but I did order some Vitamin D supplements. I live in a low-sunlight area, work indoors, and don't drink a lot of milk. 75% of people in my region are Vitamin D deficient. I can put two and two together.
My guess: It might not make _the_ difference whether you _get_ it, but it's not at all unlikely (given all the evidence that has accumulated so far & extrapolation from experience w/ other viral respiratory infections) that it will influence disease severity significantly.
There are so many medical questions that can only be answered definitively with large-scale, years-long randomized experiments. Anything relating to supplements, where effect sizes are probably small, especially. These are expensive and difficult to perform and there's (to my knowledge) no institution dedicated to that goal.
Readit News
However, there a a few things that are clear:
1. Calcium absorption from the intestine increases with vitamin D supplementation dose up to around 8-10,000 IU D3 daily.
2. 15 minutes of full body exposure in noon sun is equivalent to a dose of ~20,000 IU D3
3. There are few cases of vitamin D overdose in the literature - doses in the 1,000,000 IU+ range within days is generally where symptoms are noted - this excludes people with kidney disorders.
Personally, I take 10k IU D3 a day. The D3 is important because D2 has 1/2 to 1/3 the effect per dose in raising calcium absorption levels.
I would recommend this level of supplementation to anyone who doesn’t have a kidney disorder.
Here's a tool that can help calculate useful exposure depending on your location/time of year. Doesn't take clothing into account however..
https://fastrt.nilu.no/VitD-ez_quartMEDandMED_v2.html
My pale skin in the midday desert sun for fifteen minutes in July? I'd have a pretty serious burn.
It is certainly true that a few high dosages of vitamin D are not harmful. The issue is the negative effects of having too high of a vitamin D status.
Anyone taking more than 2k IU/day should do so after consulting their doctor or at least testing of their vitamin D levels.
I've been taking vitamin d3 10K IU/day for 10 years and it has allowed my blood V-D3 levels to go from 12 ng/mL to ~50 which is within normal range. The NIH recommended dose has been going up over the last 2 decades starting at 400 IU and now 4,000 IU as we learn more and more about it's effectiveness.
Be careful of anyone claiming to be an expert on anything, especially on an anonymous forum - even if that forum has in general higher quality opinion.
And the OP does not mention Vitamin K2 at all. How does anybody who claims to have done a Masters on Vitamin D not mention K2?
For someone who claims to have done a masters on Vitamin D, I find this generalized statement disturbing. What skin tone the person has, what season it is, what latitude the person lives at, age of the person etc., are factors in how much Vitamin D is produced by the body on exposure to sunlight. I’m afraid I can’t take the other points seriously because of the brevity and lack of nuance.
My point here was meant to be about how this is essentially the daily maximum dose from UV radiation due to the isomerization of previtamin D into inactive isomers, and to give context to a dose of 10,000 IU D3 seeming large when it is half the amount a person might receive from sun exposure.
Can increased calcium absorption lead to kidney disorders?
This is my biggest worry when taking Vitamin D3 supplements, I have Vitamin D deficiency but when I take supplements it quickly reaches to toxicity levels (> 80 ng/mL) and so I have the revert to monthly supplement of 60,000 IU of Cholecalciferol.
PSA: I'm a dwarf, possibly Achondroplasia, but during childhood (4 - 15years) I wasn't categorised as such and my bone troubles were always attributed to Vitamin D deficiency. After age 17, I didn't have much of bone problems and so I didn't follow up on my Vitamin D deficiency.
Fast forward to age 32, I was diagnosed with Spinal Stenosis among other cerebral spinal fractures risking becoming quadriplegic[1]. So, if you have bone problems due to Vitamin D deficiency, please follow it up regularly, it's likely going to be life-long but taking proper supplements is better than a fracture. Also visiting a good endocrinologist to get to the root of Vitamin D problems is recommended.
[1]https://abishekmuthian.com/i-was-told-i-would-become-quadrip...
I hope you are receiving the treatment you need.
Vitamin D is involved with calcium in the body in many different ways, specifically I was talking about a measure of the absorption of calcium into the body from food as promoted by vitamin D.
Organ calcification is extremely serious and a very understandable reason why doctors have been hesitant to recommend higher doses of vitamin D, however most medical thinking about vitamin D until recently has focused on the prevention of Rickets, which requires only a small amount of constant supplementation (500 IU D3) to avoid serious effects. In context, 10,000 IU seems like an enormous dose. However if you look at the blood serum levels of people who receive consistent UV exposure, they have much higher levels than someone who is being supplemented with 500 IU D3 and no UV. So much of this debate is around trying to find out what the "optimal" vitamin D level is rather than what level is "sufficient" to prevent Rickets.
Seems like such a low effort, high reward thing to do.
Depending on the latitude and skin complexion that may be all thats needed for D3.
Re lux with full body exposure. I was under the impression it's an hour per day to get 15-20 IU? Either way it means exposing legs, hands and face to the sun which most people rarely do on a daily basis.
I’m worried about overdosing if I take 5000 UI and get a lot of sun.
Shots of 250,000 IU are given clinically and the therapeutic dose was traditionally 50,000 IU D2 weekly - corresponding to a dose of about 3,500 IU D3 daily.
I highly recommend getting tested for kidney disease if you are worried and get multiple vitamin D tests - the tests are imprecise but will give you a general idea of what your levels are.
In other words, 5000IU is much lower than what the body would naturally produce when exposed to sunlight for long durations in a day (assuming good latitude, sunny season, lower atmospheric pollution, around noon, lighter skin tone, etc.).
However, this is I think what you are trying to get at:
One particular epidemiological study stands out as a guide for what typical 25-(OH)D levels might have been be for our earliest ancestors.
Luxwolda et al. studied populations of pastoral Masai and hunter-gatherer Hadzabe, sampling their blood for 25-(OH)D levels and taking note of their daily habits in reference to UV exposure.
The mean 25-(OH)D concentration in these populations was 115 nmol/L, with a range of 58 nmol/L to 171 nmol/L.
This study provides a general framework for the expected 25-(OH)D level of active, healthy humans working outdoors at a low (< 5 degrees) latitude. Humans have modified their living conditions greatly from this model of ancestral life, leading to reduced exposure to UV radiation.
Define "full-body exposure", please? I'm not going to walk around naked outside in the sun.
During “flu” season I was usually sick for the entire season with a rotating assortment of viral respiratory issues, this lasted until about 7 years ago.
8 years ago in September I started taking 10,000 IU of vitamin D3 and 180mg of K2 daily.
I haven’t had a deputies illness since. My children were getting sick at their normal clip, my wife the same, but not me. I went from being sick all the time to not getting sick ever. I made one change in my life, adding the D3 and K2.
After 2 years of not getting sick my wife and children started supplementing with D3 and K2, everyone stopped getting sick. My son went off to college and stopped taking the D3 and K2 and during the winter semester he got sick twice, he had me sent him the D3 and K2, he hasn’t been sick since.
It’s a small sample size, but even at 10,000 IU daily D3 is not dangerous or expensive, the only caveat seems to be that you need to supplement with K2 or you can cause gardening if the arteries due to calcification.
My doctor thinks it’s a lot of nonsense, but then again he wants every patient on blood pressure and cholesterol medication “just in case”.
I supplement K2 and Mg also (plus a few unrelated things). I also get sick less, though I made enough other changes I can't tell whether to credit the supplements. (The K2 definitely helped a skin issue -- I could reliably bring it back by stopping taking the K2. That's probably a pretty idiosyncratic problem of mine, but it's an example of a supplement clearly helping.)
Chris Masterjohn has suggested that high levels of vitamin D could make you more susceptible to the virus, because some papers suggest that D upregulates ACE2 expression. He thinks it's best to aim for a blood level in the 30-35 range. I don't know how seriously to take this suggestion. For now I reduced my supplement to 1000IU/day.
Sorry the nitpicking, but may I assume you mean 180ug? That would be the normal order of magnitude for K2 supplementation.
Also, what dosage of D3 and K2 are you using for your kids?
(I have celiac [1], and I had to learn about this connection the hard way. The horrid thing is that my normal daily lunch was an enormous bowl of leafy greens, exactly where you're supposed to get vitamin K from, and I still had to supplement it. Calcium in the wrong places was one of the contributing factors to my heart issues in the link. I still have to be a bit careful not to eat too much hard cheese, but only slightly more careful than a normal person who faces potentially blocking themselves up anyhow.)
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22454099
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5541280/
Dead Comment
How about this: to be in the best possible position to beat any serious infection, you need to be in generally good health.
That means having adequate levels of all essential nutrients - i.e., all the vitamins, minerals, amino acids, enzymes etc that you get from maintaining a good diet and healthy lifestyle over the long term.
To focus on just one nutrient as a pandemic looms just isn't the answer; it's not how health works.
That said, I've personally researched what nutrients (note the plural) are most important for beating an infection like this, and have adjusted my nutrient intake somewhat, and recommended to close relatives they do the same. But this is after I and they have spent many years researching and maintaining good health practices.
Update: if I was in not-so-good health (and not in medical treatment for a diagnosed condition, in which case, consult your doctor), my approach would be:
- boost my amino acids, fatty acids and minerals with a few spoonfuls of hemp seeds every day
- take extra supplements of vitamins A, B complex, C and D (and perhaps K?)
- do plenty of walking in the fresh air and sun,
- keep a generally healthy diet of good quality protein and veg.
Update 2: Others are mentioning Vitamin K, which seems like a good idea to supplement if you're generally nutrient deficient, but may not be necessary if you have a good diet. [1]
Disclaimer: not a health professional, but have had personal reasons to get very knowledgable about health and diet over many years.
[1] https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/foods-high-in-vitamin-k
When you get your vitamins/minerals from a pill, you run the risk of your body not absorbing it because that's not how our bodies adapted to absorb those things for millions of years.
If you're eating a healthy diet (90%+ plant based whole foods), you will get more than enough minerals/vitamins and amino acids.
Taking a few spoon fulls of hemp seeds is an excellent idea: it's super high in magnesium which is a mineral that most of us are greatly lacking. But, I would consider hemp seeds as just another food part of a plant based whole foods diet. personally, i add it to salads, smoothies, etc.
And you don't need Vitamin K supplements. Greens are extraordinarily high in Vitamin K. Even, just 20 calories of Spinach will provide over 400% of your daily Vitamin K intake!
People, be especially careful with supplements, they're very much unregulated and can put almost anything they want in those things.
Nature makes the best supplements: it's called food (plant based whole foods with a variety of grains and beans, lots of vegetables and fruits and some meat) and it has everything our body needs. Yes, for vitamin D, you'll need to go outside and get some exposure to the sun. Actually, doctor's tell us, Vitamin D isn't even a Vitamin, it's actually a hormone that your body makes all on it's own with enough exposure to sun. But, based on your skin pigmentation, you may need more or less exposure.
I agree with you that most people don't eat enough fruits and vegetables. Though if someone is worried about a particular nutrient, it isn't that simple. It doesn't matter how much Vitamin K is in spinach if you don't absorb it:
>...Circulating phylloquinone levels after spinach with and without butter were substantially lower (7.5- and 24.3-fold respectively) than those after taking the pharmaceutical concentrate. Moreover, the absorption of phylloquinone from the vegetables was 1.5 times slower than from Konakion.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8813897
I don't think they have B12, you need to get that from animal sources or a pill.
Health is complex. No one is advocating ignoring all the other aspects of immune system function by paying attention to vitamin D.
[Update] I see you have toned down your comment since I started composing this response. We are in agreement.
Everybody in nutrition disagrees about specific, outsized effects. But pretty much everyone agrees what constitutes "basically healthy".
This is an interesting idea. It's believed our bodies get fat to ensure we have energy when food is scarce. It makes sense that we'd also want to have vitamins available too.
This sounds like a much more specific and more testable version of that theory.
Important to note it refers to overweight (might be referred to as "a little chubby"), not obese.
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The Ponderal Index [2] (AKA the "Corpulence Index") gives values that work for any height, with units in kg/m^3. If you are a young child or over 6 feet tall, you might find the PI/CI works better for you.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/healthyweight/assessing/bmi/adult_bmi/en...
[2] https://www.omnicalculator.com/health/ponderal-index
This is mostly selection bias. Society is so fat that being normal / underweight is correlated with sickness/disease.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5613455/
There is a lot of misinformation on the web around Vitamin D, such as that even high amounts (>= 5000IU) are tolerable and safe. After a blood test showed me Vitamin D deficient, taking 5000IU (that size is readily available over the counter at my grocery store) daily gave me disturbing heart palpitations, which I didn't realize were related to Vitamin D until after thousands of dollars in tests showed my heart to be perfectly healthy. It wasn't until I had slacked off in taking the vitamins and then started taking them again that I discovered the connection. Apparently magnesium has something to do with it, but IANAD. (I was not taking magnesium supplements at the time.) I can tolerate 1000IU occasionally, but people need to be aware that not everyone tolerates supplements (especially high doses) the same.
I was happy to see the article you linked to above only claims Vitamin D is considered safe up to 4000IU. Although IMHO, after my experience, anything over 1000IU should require a prescription. Of course nothing would stop people from taking five 1000IU OTC doses to get 5000IU, but I think most people know better than to take five of the same type of vitamin daily without talking to their doctor first.
I do not doubt your experience, but it seems incredible to me that just a 5000 IU supplement gave you heart palpitations. Then again, I've also read many reports about incorrectly labeled products (e.g. milk, supplements, etc.) which contained far more D2 or D3 than what was written on the tin, causing toxicity.
Did the supplement you took include those, or at least Mg?