At the base address of this Substack: https://nutritionmatters.substack.com you can enter your email address and click the Subscribe button. There is no paid subscription. This means you will get subsequent articles by email.
I am working on an article about research which shows, I think reliably, that influenza vaccines do not appreciably reduce hospitalisation or death in England and Wales for ~65 year olds.
I do not see this button. I think I was automatically subscribed when I replied. To be sure, I have bookmarked your substack. I am sorry to muse about how and why Covid got out there. I will say more later today. You present so much material. I read it all but cannot respond to all in an intelligent way.
But why do you like the number 50 for D3? Four years ago I paid no attention to my D3. I tested at 34 with my zero efforts. I was able to see this due to Quest diagnostics showing my prior blood tests. Now I am at 74, as of 14 days ago.
Don't you think 70 is a better D3 number to shoot for these days to self-protect? Don't bet against the Woo Flux man. As I told you, he got in early on bitcoin. He has been analyzing internet trends via tools be put together. He analyzes internet chatter to make predictions. This is how he scored with BitCoin. btw--- I am not a BitCoin fanatic. I don't own any.
You can do an internet search for Mr. Woo. His name/handle is Clif High. You can see what he has been analyzing and predicting long before Covid-19 came on the scene. Matter of fact, he likes to look ragged in his videos as a test. My opinion....
Clif High has a patent on computer-assisted reading technology which allows reading from computer screens at up to 2000 words per minute. Reaching into other areas of hidden potential within language use by humans, he has been developing a system of software internet agents (like search engines use) and other proprietary processing methods to predict future events. The software project, begun in 1997, captures near-real-time changes in language patterns within internet discussions. Then, employing radical linguistic techniques of his own devising, he develops a model which anticipates future events with some seeming accuracy. The processing has, at its core, a method of assigning emotional values to complex content and time carry-values to predict changes in future behavior based on how people are using language now.
Since June 2001 when the work projected a major 'tipping point', that is a 'life-changing event' with aspects of 'military and accident' that would forever change the way we live to occur inside 90 days, the web bot project has continued to give archetype descriptors of future events such as the anthrax attack in Washington, the crash of American 587, the Columbia disaster, the Northeast Power outage, the Banda Aceh earthquake and most recently the flooding of the Red River. As a continuing project, reports are offered from the extracted archetype information at his web site, www.halfpasthuman.com.
Here is a very rough history of desirable 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels, bearing in mind that this compound was only discovered around 1970. I am not sure what happened until the 1990s or so, but eventually 20ng/ml 50nmol/L was adopted as a standard of vitamin D sufficiency - which was only to avoid rickets and weak bones in general. It was not necessarily enough to avoid osteoporosis later in life - but boron, magnesium and maybe other nutrients are also important, and hardly recognised even now. There was a big Institute of Medicine report in 2011 which is still followed by most authorities. IT too chose 20ng/ml, which is generally sufficient for the kidneys to maintain a very low level of circulating 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D which hormonally regulates circulating calcium levels and bone remodelling.
This was despite multiple MDs and researchers arguing for 40 to 60ng/ml to provide enough 25-hydroxyvitamin D for other purposes, such as the immune system. A little later, the Endocrine Society chose 30ng/ml. The IOM completely messed up their calculation for how much D3 to take each day to attain their lousy 20ng/ml (or at least for 97.5% of the population to do so, which is the definition of the Recommended Daily Allowance. They chose 0.01mg 400IU when the real value is about 0175mg 7000IU. However, the RDA concept is flawed. More details on this page and particularly at this section https://vitamindstopscovid.info/01-supp/#iom . This page contains a link to the Grassroots Health D3 intake (nutrition, not drug = dose) calculator, Afshar et al.'s D3 as ratio of bodyweight recommendation and my own ratios, including a higher set of ratios for those suffering from obesity. Ideally there would be proper peer-reviewed articles making such recommendations, but this is not the case, so I derived them myself from the results of Ekwaru et al. 2014.
MDs and researchers in 2008: https://www.grassrootshealth.net/project/our-scientists/ called for 40 to 60ng/ml. Luxwolda et al. 2012 found the average 25-hydroxyvitamin D level of traditionally living Maasai pastoralists and Hadzabe hunter-gatherers was 47ng/ml 115nmol/L. A perfectly good but previously little known article (I tell everyone about it) by Quraishi et al. 2014 shows very clearly that the innate and adaptive immune responses to bacteria which cause post-operative infections starts to fail when 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels fall below 50ng/ml. Man MDs and researchers regard this as a good, minimal, target.
I am 66, about 70kg and take 1.25mg 50,000IU D3 (dry) a week, at the end of a meal. I guess my 25-hydroxyvitamin D level is most likely 50 to 90 or 100ng/ml. That is fine. I have not felt the need to get it measured. I don't have any obvious autoimmune problems, but many people who do find higher than 50ng/ml 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels very helpful: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/06-adv/ This page also concerns the inflammatory problems most of us have due to lack of helminths - intestinal worms.
In answer to your later question, the 0.01mg 400IU D3 in multivitamins is the IOM RDA, even though it was shown years ago, in peer reviewed articles, to be a factor of 10 or more too low.
Thanks for the link to the medicalnewstoday article on seasonality. This research generally ignores the principle that conditions in buildings and vehicles get hotter and dryer in winter - and this is where most transmission happens. I didn't find the specific smog etc. Wuhan article mentioned there and I can't find it in my bookmarks.
I am not betting against Mr Woo - just not investing my time in him.
I must ask you a stark question. Do the Chinese have lower D3 levels than Europeans and European- Americans? This is the claim of the man who made the Woo Flux video that can be found at bitchute.com. YouTube too, but has been buried by YouTube. Tune in at the 56 minute mark.
Summary --- He says Covid was an intentional release. The Chinese assumed that others worldwide have the same low D3 levels that the Chinese have. That Covid would have been much worse in the USA-Europe if our D3 levels were the same as the Chinese. He says get your D3 up to 90, then the worst that Covid can do to you, is you are sick at home for a few days.
The Chinese defense against Covid would be the very authoritarian isolation measures that only their government can pull off. I only read this once, and months ago. That the Chinese Government was making huge quantities of vitamin C and distributing it. To nullify Covid-19. I obviously can not say true or false on this.
Woo Flux man is Clif_High, who got in very early on bitcoin. He says the same thing about D3 and Covid seasonality.
Hi Sloop John B, thanks for your interest and question. I have no reason to believe that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was intentionally released. I haven't read all the evidence in detail, but my impression is that it is all consistent with an accidental release of a virus produced by gain-of-function research. I understand such research is very interesting and may lead to important research findings, but I believe it should never be allowed.
There is at least one article I can't find right now which report gloomy weather and pollution reduced 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels in Wuhan in the winter in which the virus was first found in the wild. However, I doubt that such lower than normal winter levels were decisive in its spread. I guess average levels were around 15ng/ml, using UK White winter average levels as a guide: https://aminotheory.com/cv19/#ukseas, though they could be lower due to Wuhan being highly urbanised and industrialised.
If everyone in Wuhan had been supplementing D3 properly to gain, generally, 50ng 125nmol/L 25-hydroxyvitamin D, then I believe the accidental release would have infected very few people, so there would be no pandemic at all - infections would probably have dropped to zero. As evidence for this view, please see the above-mentioned graph. It shows that in summer, average White levels in the UK (as best we know, the research was not of the whole population, recently) of about 23ng/ml, with a large fraction of the population with melanin-rich skin averaging less then 15ng/ml. At this point, in the summer of 2020, with no lockdowns, little or no social distancing or masks (as far as I know) the strain of SARS-CoV-2 then dominant in the UK (I forget which one, but it was one or two variants evolutionarily from the original Wuhan strain, which was quickly overtaken in Wuhan by a more transmissible variant) had an R0 well below 1.0, so the number of cases and hospitalisations was dropping progressively. If these conditions had remained, the pandemic would have died down to sporadic infections or perhaps to no transmission at all, except perhaps in closed communities. However, the Sun went south, vitamin D levels dropped and a more transmissible strain - alpha, I recall - took off and caused the big winter wave of early 2021, which is not shown on this graph.
I watched a few minutes of the Woo Flux video but it was too woo for me.
The Chinese government would not be looking people in their dwellings, or expelling them to quarantine, and shutting down whole cities if it knew that severity, transmission, harm and death could be very strongly suppressed with vitamin D supplementation. Chinese factories make the great majority of vitamin D3 cholecalciferol, mainly for export as agricultural feed. They could easily refine this for human use (though there is probably no need, since it is surely pure enough already) and properly supplement most or all of their population. This - with early treatments such as melatonin, zinc, vitamin C, magnesium, B vitamins, quercetin and ivermectin - would surely end the pandemic and prevent most hospitalisation and almost all deaths, without vaccines and lockdowns.
Sooner or later a country or Indian state will do this. Then, unless the current madness is a terminal condition, all other countries will change their thinking and put nutrition and early treatment first and foremost in their policies and actions. This will almost certainly suppress and end the pandemic worldwide - *unless*, some extremely transmissible, seriously harmful (even with 50ng/ml 25-hydroxyvitamin D and early treatment) variant evolves. I think this is unlikely, but the lesson of the past two years is that no-one can predict how disastrously crazy things can get.
"There is at least one article I can't find right now which report gloomy weather and pollution reduced 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels in Wuhan in the winter in which the virus was first found in the wild."
I remember this article. It was either Wuhan winters in general or the 2019-2020 winter in Wuhan was colder and more cloudy than usual. I bet it is still on the internet.
I do not see how to subscribe to your substack
At the base address of this Substack: https://nutritionmatters.substack.com you can enter your email address and click the Subscribe button. There is no paid subscription. This means you will get subsequent articles by email.
I am working on an article about research which shows, I think reliably, that influenza vaccines do not appreciably reduce hospitalisation or death in England and Wales for ~65 year olds.
I do not see this button. I think I was automatically subscribed when I replied. To be sure, I have bookmarked your substack. I am sorry to muse about how and why Covid got out there. I will say more later today. You present so much material. I read it all but cannot respond to all in an intelligent way.
But why do you like the number 50 for D3? Four years ago I paid no attention to my D3. I tested at 34 with my zero efforts. I was able to see this due to Quest diagnostics showing my prior blood tests. Now I am at 74, as of 14 days ago.
Don't you think 70 is a better D3 number to shoot for these days to self-protect? Don't bet against the Woo Flux man. As I told you, he got in early on bitcoin. He has been analyzing internet trends via tools be put together. He analyzes internet chatter to make predictions. This is how he scored with BitCoin. btw--- I am not a BitCoin fanatic. I don't own any.
You can do an internet search for Mr. Woo. His name/handle is Clif High. You can see what he has been analyzing and predicting long before Covid-19 came on the scene. Matter of fact, he likes to look ragged in his videos as a test. My opinion....
_______________
This bio was written circa 2010
https://www.coasttocoastam.com/guest/high-clif-39980/
Clif High
Biography:
Clif High has a patent on computer-assisted reading technology which allows reading from computer screens at up to 2000 words per minute. Reaching into other areas of hidden potential within language use by humans, he has been developing a system of software internet agents (like search engines use) and other proprietary processing methods to predict future events. The software project, begun in 1997, captures near-real-time changes in language patterns within internet discussions. Then, employing radical linguistic techniques of his own devising, he develops a model which anticipates future events with some seeming accuracy. The processing has, at its core, a method of assigning emotional values to complex content and time carry-values to predict changes in future behavior based on how people are using language now.
Since June 2001 when the work projected a major 'tipping point', that is a 'life-changing event' with aspects of 'military and accident' that would forever change the way we live to occur inside 90 days, the web bot project has continued to give archetype descriptors of future events such as the anthrax attack in Washington, the crash of American 587, the Columbia disaster, the Northeast Power outage, the Banda Aceh earthquake and most recently the flooding of the Red River. As a continuing project, reports are offered from the extracted archetype information at his web site, www.halfpasthuman.com.
Website(s):
halfpasthuman.com
Here is a very rough history of desirable 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels, bearing in mind that this compound was only discovered around 1970. I am not sure what happened until the 1990s or so, but eventually 20ng/ml 50nmol/L was adopted as a standard of vitamin D sufficiency - which was only to avoid rickets and weak bones in general. It was not necessarily enough to avoid osteoporosis later in life - but boron, magnesium and maybe other nutrients are also important, and hardly recognised even now. There was a big Institute of Medicine report in 2011 which is still followed by most authorities. IT too chose 20ng/ml, which is generally sufficient for the kidneys to maintain a very low level of circulating 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D which hormonally regulates circulating calcium levels and bone remodelling.
This was despite multiple MDs and researchers arguing for 40 to 60ng/ml to provide enough 25-hydroxyvitamin D for other purposes, such as the immune system. A little later, the Endocrine Society chose 30ng/ml. The IOM completely messed up their calculation for how much D3 to take each day to attain their lousy 20ng/ml (or at least for 97.5% of the population to do so, which is the definition of the Recommended Daily Allowance. They chose 0.01mg 400IU when the real value is about 0175mg 7000IU. However, the RDA concept is flawed. More details on this page and particularly at this section https://vitamindstopscovid.info/01-supp/#iom . This page contains a link to the Grassroots Health D3 intake (nutrition, not drug = dose) calculator, Afshar et al.'s D3 as ratio of bodyweight recommendation and my own ratios, including a higher set of ratios for those suffering from obesity. Ideally there would be proper peer-reviewed articles making such recommendations, but this is not the case, so I derived them myself from the results of Ekwaru et al. 2014.
MDs and researchers in 2008: https://www.grassrootshealth.net/project/our-scientists/ called for 40 to 60ng/ml. Luxwolda et al. 2012 found the average 25-hydroxyvitamin D level of traditionally living Maasai pastoralists and Hadzabe hunter-gatherers was 47ng/ml 115nmol/L. A perfectly good but previously little known article (I tell everyone about it) by Quraishi et al. 2014 shows very clearly that the innate and adaptive immune responses to bacteria which cause post-operative infections starts to fail when 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels fall below 50ng/ml. Man MDs and researchers regard this as a good, minimal, target.
I am 66, about 70kg and take 1.25mg 50,000IU D3 (dry) a week, at the end of a meal. I guess my 25-hydroxyvitamin D level is most likely 50 to 90 or 100ng/ml. That is fine. I have not felt the need to get it measured. I don't have any obvious autoimmune problems, but many people who do find higher than 50ng/ml 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels very helpful: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/06-adv/ This page also concerns the inflammatory problems most of us have due to lack of helminths - intestinal worms.
In answer to your later question, the 0.01mg 400IU D3 in multivitamins is the IOM RDA, even though it was shown years ago, in peer reviewed articles, to be a factor of 10 or more too low.
Thanks for the link to the medicalnewstoday article on seasonality. This research generally ignores the principle that conditions in buildings and vehicles get hotter and dryer in winter - and this is where most transmission happens. I didn't find the specific smog etc. Wuhan article mentioned there and I can't find it in my bookmarks.
I am not betting against Mr Woo - just not investing my time in him.
Hi-
I must ask you a stark question. Do the Chinese have lower D3 levels than Europeans and European- Americans? This is the claim of the man who made the Woo Flux video that can be found at bitchute.com. YouTube too, but has been buried by YouTube. Tune in at the 56 minute mark.
Summary --- He says Covid was an intentional release. The Chinese assumed that others worldwide have the same low D3 levels that the Chinese have. That Covid would have been much worse in the USA-Europe if our D3 levels were the same as the Chinese. He says get your D3 up to 90, then the worst that Covid can do to you, is you are sick at home for a few days.
The Chinese defense against Covid would be the very authoritarian isolation measures that only their government can pull off. I only read this once, and months ago. That the Chinese Government was making huge quantities of vitamin C and distributing it. To nullify Covid-19. I obviously can not say true or false on this.
Woo Flux man is Clif_High, who got in very early on bitcoin. He says the same thing about D3 and Covid seasonality.
Hi Sloop John B, thanks for your interest and question. I have no reason to believe that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was intentionally released. I haven't read all the evidence in detail, but my impression is that it is all consistent with an accidental release of a virus produced by gain-of-function research. I understand such research is very interesting and may lead to important research findings, but I believe it should never be allowed.
There is at least one article I can't find right now which report gloomy weather and pollution reduced 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels in Wuhan in the winter in which the virus was first found in the wild. However, I doubt that such lower than normal winter levels were decisive in its spread. I guess average levels were around 15ng/ml, using UK White winter average levels as a guide: https://aminotheory.com/cv19/#ukseas, though they could be lower due to Wuhan being highly urbanised and industrialised.
If everyone in Wuhan had been supplementing D3 properly to gain, generally, 50ng 125nmol/L 25-hydroxyvitamin D, then I believe the accidental release would have infected very few people, so there would be no pandemic at all - infections would probably have dropped to zero. As evidence for this view, please see the above-mentioned graph. It shows that in summer, average White levels in the UK (as best we know, the research was not of the whole population, recently) of about 23ng/ml, with a large fraction of the population with melanin-rich skin averaging less then 15ng/ml. At this point, in the summer of 2020, with no lockdowns, little or no social distancing or masks (as far as I know) the strain of SARS-CoV-2 then dominant in the UK (I forget which one, but it was one or two variants evolutionarily from the original Wuhan strain, which was quickly overtaken in Wuhan by a more transmissible variant) had an R0 well below 1.0, so the number of cases and hospitalisations was dropping progressively. If these conditions had remained, the pandemic would have died down to sporadic infections or perhaps to no transmission at all, except perhaps in closed communities. However, the Sun went south, vitamin D levels dropped and a more transmissible strain - alpha, I recall - took off and caused the big winter wave of early 2021, which is not shown on this graph.
I watched a few minutes of the Woo Flux video but it was too woo for me.
The Chinese government and mainstream doctors obviously know nothing more about vitamin D and the immune system than those of any other country - though a few countries, or at least Indian states, do have governments and doctors who use ivermectin and other early treatments with great success: https://www.thedesertreview.com/opinion/columnists/indias-ivermectin-blackout---part-v-the-secret-revealed/article_9a37d9a8-1fb2-11ec-a94b-47343582647b.html .
The Chinese government would not be looking people in their dwellings, or expelling them to quarantine, and shutting down whole cities if it knew that severity, transmission, harm and death could be very strongly suppressed with vitamin D supplementation. Chinese factories make the great majority of vitamin D3 cholecalciferol, mainly for export as agricultural feed. They could easily refine this for human use (though there is probably no need, since it is surely pure enough already) and properly supplement most or all of their population. This - with early treatments such as melatonin, zinc, vitamin C, magnesium, B vitamins, quercetin and ivermectin - would surely end the pandemic and prevent most hospitalisation and almost all deaths, without vaccines and lockdowns.
Sooner or later a country or Indian state will do this. Then, unless the current madness is a terminal condition, all other countries will change their thinking and put nutrition and early treatment first and foremost in their policies and actions. This will almost certainly suppress and end the pandemic worldwide - *unless*, some extremely transmissible, seriously harmful (even with 50ng/ml 25-hydroxyvitamin D and early treatment) variant evolves. I think this is unlikely, but the lesson of the past two years is that no-one can predict how disastrously crazy things can get.
"There is at least one article I can't find right now which report gloomy weather and pollution reduced 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels in Wuhan in the winter in which the virus was first found in the wild."
I remember this article. It was either Wuhan winters in general or the 2019-2020 winter in Wuhan was colder and more cloudy than usual. I bet it is still on the internet.
I did find this >>>> https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/how-does-weather-affect-covid-19#Controversy
Hi Robin after seeing info from your substack I bumped up my D supplementation, just had it checked and its at 154 nmol/L so I am happy with that.