I know enough about vitamin D to take 10,000 units daily in winter, 5,000 in summer. I am not overweight or obese and weigh 170 lbs. The last time I had a test, my level was 95.
I almost never get sick. I have no depression or anxiety. I have no trouble maintaining a normal weight. Vitamin D3 is my superpower.
I assume you mean 95 ng/mL (billionths of a gram per millilitre). It is best to specify the units of "vitamin D" (really 25-hydroxyvitamin D) blood tests, because the UK, Australia and quite a few other countries normally use nanomols per liter (nmol/L), which is the ng/mL figure multiplied by 2.5.
😉🙏🏻Thank you, Robin, for this excellent information.! I live in Arizona, but in the summer its rather much for my Seattle bones.! I'm rather skinny just now, having had an small accident that gave me a few spinal fractures, though I'm on the mend (having turned down surgery!). Being so skinny & I'm 6’ tall, weighing about 145lbs or a little more; would I need the 5,000 units you speak of or maybe more..?
And wouldn't standing in the sun for say about 15 mins do..?
Again, I thank you for this incredible info. Why aren't more doctors all over this??? Big Pharma seems to have lied again by omission.!
145 lb / 2.2 = 66 kilograms. For people not suffering from obesity, Prof. Wimalawansa recommends 70 to 90 IU / kg per day, which is 4620 to 5940 IUs per day, on average. This is 115 to 148 micrograms = 0.115 to 0.148 milligrams.
To rely on ultraviolet skin exposure to provide all, or even a substantial fraction, of the vitamin D3 we need to be healthy would be firstly impractical (except perhaps near the equator, if there was no monsoon) and secondly unsafe since this damages DNA and so raises the risk of skin cancer. It also causes wrinkled skin over many years.
Many people have an unreasonable idea of how important exposing the skin to direct sunlight is. If there was no other source of vitamin D3 (and there is very little in food of any kind) then we would be best advised to do a deal with the Devil and use UV-B skin exposure, including from lamps on weeks when there was insufficient UV-B from the Sun. However, since vitamin D3 supplements are readily available all year round, the answer is clearly supplements, with food sources and UV-B exposure playing no significant role.
Many people also overestimate how much vitamin D3 they produce just by being out in the sun. "Standing in the sun for 15 minutes" doesn't mean anything specific regarding how much vitamin D3 your skin would produce. Is the Sun high in the sky? If it is lower than 45° from the horizon, the path of the light is through a significantly greater amount of ozone and atmosphere in general, which attenuates the ca. 297 nanometre UV-B wavelengths which convert 7-dehydrocholesterol to vitamin D3. How much clothing are you wearing? How much skin is directly exposed, such as at right angles to the incident light? How much melanin is in your skin, due to genetics and sun-tan? Darker skin protects the lower layers of the skin, where vitamin D3 is produced (not the dead cells in the outer layer) from harmful UV-B which includes the wavelengths needed for vitamin D3 production.
In the past vitamin D3 supplements were unavailable and only some people could use cod liver oil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cod_liver_oil. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, a tablespoonful (apparently it tastes awful), of 13.4 grams, contains 34 micrograms of vitamin D3 = 1360 IU. Then, for those not naturally exposed to UV-B light all year round, it would certainly be healthy to get more UV-B exposure, since even small amounts of vitamin D3 make a great difference to health, if the vitamin D3 intake or production is far below what we need to attain at least 50 ng/mL 125 nmol/L circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D.
Now, the answer is simple: supplement vitamin D3 and, while getting out and experiencing sunshine, go easy on the UV-B exposure of the eyes and skin, since this is damaging.
"Why aren't more doctors all over this??? Big Pharma seems to have lied again by omission.!" This is an important question and the answers are long and perplexing. There are multiple barriers to people properly understanding the importance of 50 ng/mL 125 nmol/L circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D. One day I will try to list all the barriers - it will take multiple articles. See also: https://nutritionmatters.substack.com/p/dr-pierre-kory-talks-with-tucker and Bill Grant's 2018 article: "Vitamin D acceptance delayed by Big Pharma following the Disinformation Playbook", Orthomolecular Medicine News Service: https://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v14n22.shtml.
If a pharmaceutical company could patent anything even 1/10th as beneficial as vitamin D3, they would sell it for tens of thousands of dollars a gram. I haven't checked in the last few years, but around 2020 the ex-factory price of pharmaceutical grade vitamin D3 was about USD$2.50 a gram. This is enough for the scarily high number "5000 International Units" a day for 22 years.
There are only a handful of factories worldwide making vitamin D3. Most is made in China for livestock who spend their days indoors - poultry, pigs and some cattle. Only a few factories purify it sufficiently and have all the approvals they need from multiple companies to sell pharma-grade vitamin D3 for human consumption. None of any of these factories are owned by multinational pharmaceutical companies. One company, who may be the world leader in pharma-grade vitamin D3, is Fermenta Biotech, in India: https://fermentabiotech.com/. See photos of their factory at: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#2.1 which also contains a link to a book chapter on vitamin D3 industrial production.
There are some tiny comments in the graphics regarding BMI, overestimating obesity in taller adults and underestimating it in shorter adults. This is because the formula for BMI assumes that weight should be proportional to height^2. A study I read many years ago in a mathematics journal established that weight is more closely proportional to height^2.5. Given that new exponent, I derived an improved formula for BMI:
5895*(weight in pounds)/(height in inches)^2.5
This matches the conventional BMI for people 6 feet tall.
I keep wondering whether there are any elderly care homes that have been studied with their residents vitamin d levels checked, proper supplementation and whether this influences flu outbreaks and deaths? Everything I read seems to indicate that adequate vit D should be standard practice with all residents.
Hi Sunlover, I don't recall a research article on even moderate vitamin D3 supplementation for residents in aged care homes. There are a vast number of vitamin D journal articles, and I only see a fraction of them. Any such research would probably be done with lower amounts of vitamin D3 than are really required for good health.
If doctors, public health officials etc. were doing their job, the recommendations for vitamin D3 supplementation would be adequate to attain, in all or almost all people, at least the 50 ng/mL 125 nmol/L level of circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25(OH)D), without the need for medical monitoring. Prof. Wimalawansa's recommendations do this and ideally there would be a consensus statement from other leading vitamin D researchers supporting these recommendations and arguing why 50 ng/mL 25(OH)D should be the target, rather than the current 20 ng/mL or perhaps 30 ng/mL.
The official 25(OH)D target and vitamin D3 supplemental intake recommendations of all governments are far from this. They aim for 20 ng/mL or perhaps 30 ng/mL 25(OH)D and they specify fixed quantities of vitamin D3, according to age, not body weight. There may be one or two official recommendations which take obesity into account, but most don't. A survey of government recommendations is by leading vitamin D researchers Samantha Kimball and Michael Holick, in 2017: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41430-020-00706-3 . This is behind a paywall, but you can find it at Sci-Hub: https://sci-hub.ru/10.1038/s41430-020-00706-3
The Australian government recommendations fit this pattern, with different quantities according to age, with no account taken for body weight or obesity status: https://www.eatforhealth.gov.au/nutrient-reference-values/nutrients/vitamin-d. The recommended daily intakes are: 0 to 50 years (newborns to mature adults) 5 ug (micrograms) = 200 IU; 51 to 70 years: 10 ug = 400 IU and 71 years and above" 15 ug = 600 IU. The largest vitamin D capsules which can be sold over the counter in Australia are 0.025 mg 1000 IU.
Even by these lousy standards, the vitamin D3 needs of aged care home residents are routinely neglected.
In 2020, Joseph and Carol Williams reported on this from the South of England: "Responsibility for vitamin D supplementation of elderly care home residents in England: falling through the gap between medicine and food" https://nutrition.bmj.com/content/3/2/256 . The title and first sentence: "Daily vitamin D supplements are recommended for elderly care home residents; however, they are rarely given and vitamin D deficiency in care homes is widespread." tell us that the situation is bleak for most residents of aged care homes.
As we age, our skin has less capacity to produce vitamin D3 for any given amount of UV-B exposure. (I don't have a reference for this, but have read it several times - and it makes sense.) Aged care residents, especially in the UK (especially squared in Scotland) get little or no direct sunlight exposure at any time of year. There's no significant amount of vitamin D3 in food. Unless they get some vitamin D3 in a multivitamin capsule, the only vitamin D3 they would get would be in a vitamin D capsule. It is clear that few aged care home residents get this.
The small (e.g. 200 IU) amount of vitamin D3 in a multivitamin capsule would make a significant difference to someone who has no other sources. It might (here I am guessing) take a 60 kg person's 25(OH)D level from 10 ng/mL (25 nmol/L), which is disastrously low to 14 ng/mL, which is less disastrous.
In 2017, Kimball, Mirhosseini and Holick reported on a United States program involving adults with mean age 60, so this would include some elderly, whatever the threshold of "elderly" is. They were all "community living" - meaning they were not in care homes or hospital. "Evaluation of vitamin D3 intakes up to 15,000 international units/day and serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D concentrations up to 300 nmol/L on calcium metabolism in a community setting": https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19381980.2017.1300213.
They reported that for people who were not overweight or suffering from obesity, 0.175 mg (7000 IU) vitamin D3 a day, on average, was required to attain 40 ng/mL (100 nmol/L) or more circulating 25(OH)D.
25(OH)D levels of up to 120 ng/mL "300 nmol/L were achieved without perturbation of calcium homeostasis or incidence of toxicity. Hypercalcemia and hypercalciuria were not related to an increase in 25(OH)D concentrations nor vitamin D dose." ("Homeostasis" means proper regulation - calcium has a narrow range of concentrations in the blood. Hypercalcemia means excessive calcium levels in the bloodstream, technically in the serum, which is the liquid after the cells have been removed. Hypercalciuria means excessive calcium in the urine." This article has some interesting graphs of vitamin D3 intake quantity vs. 25(OH)D levels, by body morphology (normal, overweight and obese) and initial 25(OH)D level. One day I will add ng/mL and milligrams to the scales and present them in an article here.
It is obvious from the research cited and discussed at: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/ that the health of almost everyone in the world, at every age, would be improved by vitamin D supplementation which raised their 25(OH)D level to at least 50 ng/mL. This is most obvious in people's rapidly declining health once they need to go - and are admitted - to aged care homes.
However, the best outcomes would arise from starting proper vitamin D3 supplementation earlier - before birth - with pregnant women and so (since it takes time to build 25(OH)D levels) all women of childbearing age. https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#3.2
Dementia is a common problem in those aged 70 and above. This is driven very strongly by low 25(OH)D: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#3.2 . Two people I know in their mid-90s - who have been taking proper amounts of vitamin D for 15 or 20 years - have no sign of dementia at all.
The rot sets in much earlier. One friend of mine is dying from multiple system atrophy, which is essentially the same as Parkinson's disease and dementia with Lewy bodies. He was in his mid-60s and had never supplemented vitamin D - and this is in relatively sunny Melbourne (37° S). The whole of the British Isles (50 to 58.7° N) is crazy far gone from the equator, even further than the south tip of the South Island of New Zealand (46.7° S).
I agree with most of your post but there is an exception : obese women should be very careful before supplementing.
When you analyse RCT's, you see a worrying signal : vitamin D supplementation might INCREASE cancer incidence and cancer death in obese people.
See this meta-analysis on cancer incidence (daily dosages only - I do not consider RCT where intermittent bolus are given because they are not reliable) - Fig 2.D : https://europepmc.org/articles/PMC9427835/figure/Fig2/
Now, how could this be possible ? How could vitamin D, which is so powerful against cancer, increase the danger of cancer in obese people - and apparently, especially breast cancers in obese women ?
I have no idea, but a French researcher has put forward an interesting hypothesis in this study :
"The interaction between 25(OH)D and BMI has already been observed in previous large prospective studies (European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition, Nurses’ Health Study) with results in line with ours (18, 19, 20), that is, a tendency for an inverse association in lean women and/or a direct association in women with a higher BMI. (...) Conversely, some mechanistic hypotheses may be suggested to explain the direct association observed between 25(OH)D and breast cancer risk in women with a BMI ≥ the median. Increasing BMI was associated with lower circulating 25(OH)D concentrations (14, 15), which is probably because of a dilution of the lipophilic 25(OH)D in fat mass (16). Thus, increasing 25(OH)D blood concentration is likely to be correlated with increasing 25(OH)D in fat mass. Besides, 1,25(OH)2D synthesis depends on a ratio between the activity of its degradation enzyme and its production enzyme. This ratio may be positively associated with blood 25(OH)D concentration variations, with enhanced degradation when vitamin D status is high (39). Moreover, in the adipose tissue of obese people, this ratio may be altered, with a decreased activity of production enzymes and no difference for degradation enzymes (17). This suggests that, in overweight/obese people, higher 25(OH)D may be associated with a higher 1,25(OH)2D degradation and thus a lower antiproliferative signal in the adipose tissue and its microenvironment. Thus, this could affect the mammary cells because the mammary gland is surrounded by adipose tissue (40).
If true, this is of major importance. We tend to recommend that obese people take 2 or 3 times the dose of vitamin D, but it might be bad advice.
Thanks very much for your well researched comment. It will be a while before I can read enough of these articles to respond properly.
I don't know to what extent these research studies consider or correct for the possibility that some individuals who suffer from cancer may be supplementing higher than normal amounts of vitamin D3, so raising their 25(OH)D levels above average.
The paragraph you quoted from the French researcher is from a 2016 article, Melanie et al.: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002231662300545X . I think this is written from the perspective of someone who thinks that circulating calcitriol (1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D) is important for cancer suppression vs. growth. This is not the case to any significant degree. (This is based on me reading a lot of research material in the last 4 years. I have never read such a thing or of any mechanism which would account for such a causative relationship.) This very low level of circulating calcitriol acts as a hormone, produced by the kidneys, to affect the behaviour of multiple cell types around the body which play a role in calcium-phosphate-bone metabolism.
The immune system - which combats cancer - is not significantly affected by this stable and very low level of calcitriol. Good immune system performance can only occur once these cells get a good supply of 25-hydroxyvitamin D, to run their intracrine (inside each cell) and paracrine (to nearby cells) signaling systems.
There are one or more enzymes which break down calcitriol, and as far as I know the activity of these enzymes in locations which affect the level of calcitriol and 25-hydroxyvitamin D in the bloodstream is affected by the overall 25-hydroxyvitamin D level in the bloodstream (and perhaps the calcitriol level, which only moderately correlates with the 25-hydroxyvitamin D level there).
However, I am not sure that such changes in enzymes are important for the operation of the intracrine and paracrine signaling systems in some or many types of immune cells. There, we expect calcitriol to be degraded reasonably rapidly anyway, so that the intracellularly produced calcitriol, when the intracrine signaling system is activated by a cell-type specific condition, rises in level rapidly but also diminishes rapidly once the intracrine creation of this calcitriol stops.
For the French researcher's hypothesis to apply, in reality, to cancer, I think it would need to apply to the activity of these enzymes inside immune cells AND to the degree that it reduced the ability of the intracrine signaling system to work, by degrading the calcitriol before it could bind to the vitamin D receptor molecules, also in the cytosol, which are produced along with the 1-hydroxylase enzyme (which hydroxylates 25-hydroxyvitamin D to calcitriol), when the intracrine signaling system is activated. See my tutorial: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#02-compounds .
I am sure this is not the case. There does need to be a level of one or more of these degrading enzymes in the cell to mop up the calcitriol once its production stops, but there would need to be very high level of it to actually stop the whole system from working.
Instead, all the evidence is that higher circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels improve immune system function, presumably by improving the functioning of the intracrine and paracrine signaling systems of multiple types of immune cell.
The vitamin D research literature is a mess. The great majority of articles are written by people who have never heard of 25--hydroxyvitamin D -> calcitriol intracrine and paracrine signaling. So they think that the stable and very low level of circulating calcitriol is somehow raised significantly by higher levels of 25-hydroxyvitamin D (which it does, to only a modest extent, see the first graph I added at the end of the above article) and that this somehow "boosts" the immune system. This is from Tang et al. 2019: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-43462-6 .
This is not the case. The individual scatter in calcitriol levels far exceeds the modest increase in level which results from higher 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels. Yet taking the 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels to and above 50 ng/mL 125 nmol/L evidently enables the immune system to deal very well with bacterial pathogens, as seen in the Quraishi et al. graph in my article above. Lower levels lead to obvious immune system dysfunction. This profound affect on the immune system cannot be explained by the modest, on average, increase in circulating (hormonal) calcitriol which occurs with higher 25-hydroxyvitamin D.
I will need to read the articles you cite before writing more. Does high 25-hydroxyvitamin D really correlate with lower cancer survival rates? They would need to somehow correct for the possibility that those with most severe cancer might have taken a lot more vitamin D3 than those with milder cancer.
There has been a long and difficult discussion of "J-curves" in graphs which plot 25-hydroxyvitamin D on the horizontal axis and all cause (or some specific cause) mortality on the vertical axis. It is actually a left-for-right reversed J. "Bathtub curve" would be a better description. The mortality drops dramatically from low to moderate 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels and goes up, a little, at the higher levels.
Without days of work I can't find the various articles on this debate and I am not sure where it stands.
I added, as a second graph at the end of the article above (since I can't embed them in this comment) a graph of all-cause and cardiac mortality after numerous corrections, from a very large UK BIOBANK observational study: Lai et al. 2021: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnut.2021.740855 . This does not concern cancer. Nor does it focus on obesity or women. However the curves drop consistently with 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels rising all the way to 60 ng/mL 150 nmol/L. There's no bathtub or 'J' uptick in mortality here, with higher 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels.
Thank you for your response. The French researcher's idea is just a hypothesis, and you convincingly explains why it is unlikely to be true.
However, the data is also quite clear. I quote only RCT's vs placebo, so there is no major confounding factor (for instance, cancer patients taking more vitamin D).
See especially the Vital study, the largest RCT on vitamin D and cancer. It is very interesting. For normal BMI people, 2 000 UI vitamin D reduces incidence of cancer and cancer mortality (by a lot !). But there is rather a negative effect for people with BMI > 30 - and it is probably entirely explained by breast cancer.
Hi Fizzygurl, Vitamin D3 cholecalciferol poisons rats only when they eat vastly greater quantities, per unit body weight, than humans (or rats) need to be healthy.
For a 70 kg (154 lb) adult (so not suffering from obesity), about 0.125 milligrams a day vitamin D3 is sufficient to ensure the person's 25-hydroxyvitamin D level is high enough to for their immune system to function properly. This is a gram every 22 years.
If you read this article patiently, follow the links to the research articles, and at least partly understand them, and if you read and understand the explanation of intracrine and paracrine signaling at: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#02-compounds and take a look at some of the research cited on that long page, then you will have a much better understanding of the vitamin D compounds, and how the immune system depends on a good level of 25-hydroxyvitamin D, than most doctors and immunologists.
Then you will be able to assess the claims made in the article you cited.
Very extensive research…thank you for this. I have looked at quite a few bottles of supplements and I don’t like the chemical names I see and not sure I trust anything coming out of China or India. Big pharma has taken over quite a few supplement companies so you have to be careful. I appreciate your response unlike the rude jackass who accused me of being ignorant and a fear monger.
Hi Fizzygurl, Nutrients - including those found in supplements - are all chemicals which tend to have long, complex, names. The same is true of the vast number of chemicals which our cells are made of. Open any biochemistry textbook or research article and make sure you have a lot of extra space in your brain for all the new names and concepts these documents contain.
The great majority of chemicals for both drugs and nutritional supplements are made in China and India, because it is cheaper and because these to countries have economies of scale, with it being less expensive to manufacture there and ship the products worldwide, rather than set up separate factories in the USA, Canada, the UK, Germany, France, Australia etc. It is no just the cost of setting up and running a factory. There is a lot of investment getting the products certified by the regulatory authorities of all the countries where the product is to be used.
Fermenta Biotech in India is one major manufacturer of pharma-grade vitamin D3 (cholecalciferol). I am not sure who the other manufacturers are, but I am sure that there are no such factories, for either the less purified version for agricultural animals, or the 99.9% or whatever pure pharma-grade vitamin D, in all of North and South America.
It takes a big, very specialised, factory to make vitamin D. See the photo here: https://aminotheory.com/cv19/#Maharashtra-police. This is all the factory does. Separate factories are required to make the sufficiently pure 7-dehydrocholesterol which is converted, by UV-B light, into vitamin D3. This factory does rough purification to agricultural grade. A separate building at the same site purifies some of their output to pharmaceutical grade.
The CEO of Fermenta Biotech seems like a fusspot for detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sca9nehZMTM I would be happy to use their vitamin D3. I have no idea whether the vitamin D3 I use comes from them or from some other factory.
The question of purity is something end-users such as us can't answer reliably, without exceedingly expensive analysis by some specialised laboratories.
I would rather take a probably small, but non-zero, risk of the supplements being impure to some significant degree than not take the supplements at all.
China produces most of the agricultural grade vitamin D3. I am not sure if they have a factory which produces properly certified, and so exportable to the USA, pharma grade vitamin D3. I guess there are one of two pharma-grade vitamin D factories in Europe.. I don't have good way of finding these things out, but I am very interested in where the factories are and who owns them. Perhaps DSM (a very large nutrient manufacturing company, based in Holland https://dsm.com) has a pharma grade vitamin D factory in Europe. I know they get most of their agricultural grade calcifediol (25-hydroxyvitamin D) from a Chinese factory which figured out the most efficient way to make it.
If you reject nutritional supplements because one or more ingredients are, or might be made, in India or China, I think you would be left with very little to choose from.
I don't fuss over the origin of the chemicals. If I did, I would go without nutritional supplements which I think are very important. I am an electronic technician and computer programmer. There's no reason for you to regard my approach as being in any way authoritative. I don't know how any of us can be 100% certain of the purity of anything, not least because a factory might produce occasional bad batches.
As Kalle mentioned, the amount of vitamin D3 a person needs each day is so small, that any contaminants, such as to 1 or 2%, would need to be extremely toxic, to create significant ill-effects in such tiny quantities.
Thank you for taking the time to supply me with all this info and I will check it out. As much as I was a supplement junkie before I’m thinking I’m better off without this stuff in my body and I’m trying to substitute with more fruits and vegetables. Kind of how vaccines don’t work since that’s why we have an immune system.
Dear Fizzygurl, I felt bad that maybe you were innocent but I had a look and see that you are an participating member on the hype site.
Do not assume I claim that everything they mention is rubbish, not so. However because they add so much fear mongering and half is just false it becomes impossible to gain any useful information from them because you would have to research it yourself all again.
I saw Robins message after I posted my previous one and see he comes to very similar conclusions and has similar info about where the ingredients are made.
Fun fact. Trump wanted to close borders with China at the start of Covid, turns out that the US MILITARY (and everyone else obviously) is dependent on medicines from China and he did not realise that the wars and us vs them is just theatre. All just propaganda to keep people fearful and easier to control.
Figure out which supplements you need, locate the least adulterated ones you can find and sleep easy.
Yes good point about Trump. Saying something is contradictory is not promoting it, I did not promote that site. Just searching for the truth and after reading more sources, I think I found my truth, and will not be putting that stuff in my body. We’re already pretty much fuked with all the stuff they are poisoning us with.
Sorry, I get a bit cranky when people appear to believe what they read from sensationalist conspiracy falsehood sites.
Volume Vitamin-D production is done in China, India, some in Germany and a small amount in Australia. I saw a list with 20 countries making Vitamin-D or related metabolites though they would be in small quantities.
The active ingredient is always the same, the compounder will add fillers or additives to make tablets or fill capsules.
As a general jackass I went through your doubts perhaps two decades ago and buy my Vitamin-D3 in olive oil in a dropper bottle. The brand out family usually buys from the USA bottler is called Seeking Health but I have no way of knowing where they get their raw ingredient. There are other similar products. The only additive is olive oil and I trust that is what is in the bottle.
If you focus on the vegan Vitamin-D3 offerings you may find them produced OUTSIDE China and India because they are still a bit of a boutique product but I have not read anything about it.
The reason I made assumptions about you is because of the post you made. It is a deliberate hit piece and throwing it into a remarkably progressive and well researched post on Vitamin-D3 dosing without any indication of what you felt was contradictory is a typical troll tactic.
It was a hit piece simply looking up the ingredients on the supplement bottle and doing a little research, which is what I appreciate. If that’s conspiracy, then I don’t know what to call what you do. I prefer not to put these substances in my body but you go do your thing. How about trying to have a little couth next time you post to disagree and keep your crankiness to yourself. So you went through the same thing I did years ago, but still choose to call me ignorant…interesting.
That article funnily enough came up on my feed a few days back.
What I will say is that the article you posted has a lot of issues. To put it shortly, there's a lot of errors in thinking and it contains a lot of information that ends up lacking a lot of context and ends up providing things that should be worth questioning.
There's quite a few issues but if there's anything in particular you were curious about I can provide my opinion.
Fizzygurl and All, My impression of Modern Discontent that he (I think) is a USA-based person who researches biochemical matters very assiduously and who writes with great patience and attention to detail.
I took one look at the article you mentioned and decided it contained so much crap that it was not worth bothering with. If Modern Discontent is offering to help you evaluate that article, and if you are potentially giving the article credence, I think his offer is most generous and likely to be helpful to you.
Yes, Robin is right, it’s all very overwhelming to somebody who looked at the first page of a chemistry book in 11th grade and figured out I was probably going to flunk. i’m just not a very trusting person after the Covid debacle.
It's always important to consider the context of the information we are provided. It's been a few days now but note that the author of that article you posted never makes mention of what natural Vitamin D3 is supposed to look like, and in that absence of information you are told to believe in the dangers of synthetic vitamin D3, but as Kalle mentions cholecalciferol is the name of the structure. It doesn't describe the method in which Vitamin D3 is produced, otherwise we'd have no method of categorizing molecules. But because this discernment isn't made readers are left with no knowledge for what natural Vitamin D3 looks like and are just led to believe that the author has substantiated his claims.
Note that he mentions that synthetic vitamin D3 must first be irradiated, but then what exactly is the sun doing to us in order to for us to produce vitamin D3 naturally? UV rays are needed to help reorganize the structure of D2 into D3- a form of radiation, so it is really far-fetched to assume that irradiation is needed during one step in the synthetic process?
Also, I'm not sure where he got is Vitamin D3. You can usually tell the solubility of your vitamins based on the way they are encapsulated. D3 is fat-soluble and is generally encased in gel capsules, and so you wouldn't use the cellulose and magnesium stearate as those would be found in the tablet form. So whichever form the author is referring to it's not what you would typically find.
And even then, a lot of the concerns over the cellulose and stearate when looking at an SDS doesn't tell you much about the actual toxicity. A label on a lab-grade reagent saying "not for consumption" just has the same energy as telling someone they shouldn't be consuming their lab reagents.
There is also the contradiction in which these additives are argued to help bulk up the product, when in reality you know the dosage of vitamins because it's listed. A bottle of Vitamin D3 with a label of "10,000" IU is telling you how much of a dosage you are getting. It's not as if you can take pure vitamins otherwise you run the serious risk of overdosing, which makes the comments on "rat poisoning" contradictory because it points out why you need to control the dosing of vitamins or you may easily overdose.
Sorry for the long ramble. I understand not being very trusting because I find myself very skeptical regarding a lot of the things I come across as well, and coming across this article with rather egregious issues and seeing so many people eat it up was a bit disheartening to see because it shows people can easily be led astray.
Industrially produced vitamin D3 cholecalciferol results from UV-B light breaking a carbon-to-carbon bond in one of the carbon rings of 7-dehydrocholesterol. This is exactly the same process by which vitamin D3 is made in our skin.
In industrial production: https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/B978-0-12-381978-9.10006-X and https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#2.1 the 7-dehydrocholesterol is dissolved in a hydrocarbon solvent and the light comes from water cooled, very high-power (kilowatts, I think) specialised mercury vapour lamps, which have some element (iron?) added to to create one or more peaks in the emission spectrum in the ca. 295 to 300 nm range. It is a very tricky business, with the light being further filtered by salts in the cooling water jacket to remove some light which upsets the desired transformation of 7-dehydrocholesterol into a molecule which, of its own accord, with thermal vibrations, changes its shape from one isomer to the final, stable, isomer which is vitamin D3.
Vitamin D2 (ergocalciferol) results from a similar process with a molecule which can be derived from yeast. I once read the reason behind the D2 and D3 names - there were other numbers too - but it the details were arcane and, I recall, arbitrary. So I no longer remember why they were named this way. 7-dehydrocholesterol and vitamin D3 already have an OH (oxygen hydrogen) hydroxyl group on the number 3 carbon. So does ergocalciferol and so, I assume, the compound it is made from:
The difference between D2 and D3 is at the other end of the molecule.
Both can be hydroxylated to form a 25-hydroxyl molecule, with much the same properties for the D2 and D3 versions, and likewise the 1,25-dihydroxy molecules. These have 2 and 3 hydroxyl groups in total, respectively. The D3 forms are more effective at improving health. The above article shows that the 25-hydroxyl molecule made from vitamin D3, which I refer to as "25-hydroxyvitamin D" but which is really "25-hydroxyvitamin D3" lasts longer in the bloodstream than the D2 version, properly called "25-hydroxyvitamin D2".
If you look carefully at the link you offered it includes the dog whistle warning word chemtrail. Do you know how you can tell a psy-op conspiracy from a real one, the globalists allow the psy-ops to flourish and continue to confuse, frighten and divide the population.
That site is not at all contradictory. It is a well crafted hit piece against Vitamin-D3 using every possible psychological lever, half truth and total falsehood. It uses misdirection and endless repetition and emotive words, clickbait titles and confusion to try and trigger a person into thinking there has to be some truth to the rubbish.
However the hit team shows a marked lack integrity when they spend two pages crying about the lack of info on the natural vitamin and call the commercially made product unnatural because it shares the same name. The name is the same because the chemical is the same. They make it sound dangerous because mega doses can kill rodents and the pure ingredient has a do not eat on the label. The fact that they have written all that drivel and still claim they do not know how the Vitamin-D3 comes from algae or lichen means they are not reading the right literature or else they are pretending to be ignorant to make the casual reader think the information is not available, they are wrong though.
A very large dose for acute treatment in humans might as mentioned in the post is 400'000IU=10'000ug just once, for a 70kg adult giving 143ug/kg. Yet the lowest recorded lethal dose for a dog has been 2000ug/kg giving a safety factor of 14:1 if dogs are like humans. That once off very large treatment dose is 615 times LESS than the LD50 (lethal dose for 50%) for dogs at 88'000ug/kg.
A daily dose an adult based on the recommendations repeated in the post might be 80IU/kg/day=2ug/kg/day. There is no firm upper limit but a lot of wise doctors and researchers with decades of experience often suggest that 30'000IU/day=750ug/day should be safe without other measures and clinical observation for a 75kg adult that would be 10ug/kg/day. Yes there are reports of dogs receiving 50ug/kg/day for weeks showing some symptoms. So again if humans are like dogs we would have a 25:1 safety margin if following the recommendations given here. You would still have a 10:1 margin even if working at the professional high dose regions.
But you can believe what the other site will try to tell you. That a product that cannot harm you is bad because they spend an inordinate amount of space scaring you about the fillers in a random formulation. So do yourself a favour and just buy the Vitamin-D3 in a dropper bottle mixed with olive oil. Remember too if the vitamin is sold as 98% pure from the factory (yes they can be tested and the purity is usually higher for human product) and you are scared of the 2% impurities that could be ANYTHING do the sums, an adult might take 80x70=5600IU=140ug in a day, now watch this only 2% of that is impurity, may be toxic, may be inert but that is 2.8ug and for the 70kg person that will be a dose of 0.04ug/kg=40ng/kg on this handy list I found you will see that there are only 4 organic compounds listed out of 50 that are toxic enough to harm you in that dose, basically your Vitamin-D3 would have to be laced with PURE BOTOX before it would harm you. Vitamin-D3 has been placed onto the list by the pharma corporations to frighten people. The dose we need is so small we do not approach the dangerous doses.
Oh, the last recorded death from Vitamin-D3 was due to a compounding error that gave a sick boy in India a large overdose, that was 19-21 years ago. How man drugs do you know of that have killed fewer people.
So the short answer is you have been played by an ignorant or malicious fear monger or you are one of those ignorant or malicious fear mongers.
Hi Kalle, I can't know what Fizzygurl is thinking, but my impression was that she was perplexed by the contradictions between the article she cited and this article I just wrote. I do not think that she indicated that she thought that other article was valid.
People who don't have a lot of experience reading detailed technical material can be overwhelmed by the amount of information there is about nutrition, and the difficulty of making sense of it. I am pretty good at this and I have a lot of difficulty like this too. For instance, it would probably take me 4 or 5 full days work to find what I think is the best research on vitamin K2 and write up an account of whatever reliable information I thought I could discern from this.
A lot of what is written about vitamin D in peer-reviewed journal articles is a mish mash of mistaken material from other articles. Vanishingly few vitamin D research articles concerning the immune system even mention 25-hydroyvitamin D based intracrine and paracrine signaling. None give a tutorial explanation of it - so I had to write my own.
Hi Warrior, You do not cite a source for your statements, except the main Coimbra Protocol site. This German site has more information, including in English: https://coimbraprotokoll.de/en/ . See also: Amon et al. 2022, https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/8/1575, which is written by these German doctors.
You wrote that vitamin "D3 is NOT TOXIC even at daily doses for many years at 300,000 IU PER DAY." This is a dangerously misleading statement. That amount will cause hypercalcemia in almost every person, due to them attaining 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels far beyond 150 ng/mL (375 nmol/L).
Please see the research articles I cite and discuss at https://vitamindstopscovid.info/06-adv/. I regard the Coimbra Protocol's theoretical basis, of overcoming "vitamin D resistance" as vague and unsupported by any evidence I could find.
The Coimbra and similar protocols are enormously important for treating numerous auto-immune diseases, and perhaps even dementia after it starts. They do so by raising 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels much higher than 50 ng/mL. This has nothing to do with some people not absorbing vitamin D3 very well, in the gut, or with them not hydroxylating it very well, primarily in the liver, to become the circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D the immune system needs.
My page also discusses the remarkable fact, which I have never seen anyone else discuss (please point me to any such discussions) that the large set of diseases which the Coimbra Protocol successfully treats is much the same as the set which can be treated, without any vitamin D3 supplementation, by introducing helminth (intestinal worm) infections. A better term would be "re-introducing" - since humans, and most or all mammals as far as I can tell - have been ubiquitously infected with helminths until around a century ago.
The explanation for helminthic therapy's success (https://helminthictherapy.org) is simple: it counters the long-evolved overly inflammatory (indiscriminate cell destroying) immune responses which our ancestors (going back before primates) evolved to counter ubiquitous helminth infections in which the helminths emit compounds which down-regulate these inflammatory responses. These inflammatory immune responses evolved primarily to attack multicellular parasites, including especially helminths.
Now we have all been dewormed, we in general - and some people in particular, due to their genes - are stuck with inflammatory responses which are too strong and which are the primary destructive mechanisms in all these auto-immune diseases.
This all makes sense.
What is not known - as far as I am aware - is why 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels well above the 50 ng/mL most (all?) people need for full immune responses to bacteria, cancer cells and parasites, is effective at down-regulating the excessive inflammatory responses of auto-immune disease sufferers, even without the presence of the compounds exuded by helminths.
While I regard the Coimbra protocol as generally safe and effective when conducted properly, ideally with medical supervision, as far as I know, none of the doctors who practice this have any idea of how the immune system works. The immune system does not use hormonal signaling. It uses intracrine and paracrine signaling, within individual cells and to nearby cells. Very few people understand this, and it is not explained in any peer-reviewed journal article, or anywhere else, that I know of. This is why I wrote two tutorials, the first being more detailed: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/02-intracrine/ and https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#02-compounds.
I recall reading some concerns about calcium supplementation, but I don't have any reliable information worth mentioning here. Here are some thoughts which might be of interest.
Firstly, most - essentially all - medical trials are done with people who have much less than 50 ng/mL circulating vitamin D3, and the researchers don't know that this means their immune systems are not working as well as they would with this level.
Secondly, 20 ng/mL 5-hydroxyvitamin D is widely thought to be enough to enable the kidneys to maintain a very low level of circulating calcitriol (1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D) which hormonally signals to multiple types of cell elsewhere in the body to control their activities regarding calcium-phosphate-bone metabolism. However, this is not a healthy level, since it can't supply the immune system properly.
We really need RCTs and other research done with humans who have 50 ng/mL or more 25-hydroxyvitamin D. It would not surprise me that whatever valid reasons (I guess there were some) there were for calcium supplementation to be recommended, they might not apply so much, or (depending on the diet) perhaps not at all to people with 50 to 100 ng/mL circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D.
Since calcium is needed by the body, since we excrete it and since we need to retain quite a lot of it in the bone, which is constantly being broken down and being rebuilt, moving calcium into the bloodstream and then back again into bone, it is natural that we need to have a non-trivial calcium intake. This does not lead to hypercalcemia with 50 ng to 100 ng or for most people well above 150 ng/mL circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D. So it is not right to argue that hypercalcemia is due to ingesting ordinary dietary amounts of calcium.
One problem which can lead to hypercalcemia is high 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels, with these molecules activating the vitamin D receptors in cells which are involved in calcium-phosphate-bone metabolism. Ideally, these receptor molecules in these cells would only be "activated" (have the calcitriol or 25-hydroxyvitamin D molecule bound to them, which causes the bound complex to alter gene expression after it arrives in the nucleus) by calcitriol. This molecule should really be known as the "calcitriol" receptor, since calcitriol is not vitamin D3. However, this receptor molecule has some affinity for 25-hydroxyvitamin D, so very high levels of 25-hydroxyvitamin D will cause a significant amount of binding to these receptor molecules. This causes the kidneys to lose control, to some degree, over these cells, since even with very low calcitriol levels in the bloodstream, a significant number of these molecules will be "activated". This excess activation cause calcium to be taken from the bone and put into the bloodstream in an excessive level. This is hypercalcemia. See Teben et al. 2016 https://academic.oup.com/edrv/article/37/5/521/2567097 which I quoted at: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/06-adv/ :
"The ingestion of excessive amounts of vitamin D3 (or vitamin D2) results in hypercalcemia and hypercalciuria due to the formation of supraphysiological amounts of 25-hydroxyvitamin D [25(OH)D] that bind to the vitamin D receptor, albeit with lower affinity than the active form of the vitamin, 1,25(OH)2D, and the formation of 5,6-trans 25(OH)D, which binds to the vitamin D receptor more tightly than 25(OH)D."
I have not investigated this 5,5 trans isomer of 25-hydroxyvitanin D.
I think the other mechanism by which a very high 25-hydroxyvitamin D level causes hypercalcemia is that these higher levels are observed to correlate with, and so cause, higher levels of circulating calcitriol. This can be seen in Fig 1 b of Tang et al. 2016 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-43462-6.
The problem of very high 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels causing hypercalcemia - depending in vitamin K2 intakes, magnesium and other nutrients and of course the calcium intake - is very well known and accepted. I don't have the "Death by Calcium" book handy and am unlikely to buy it any time soon. Can you suggest peer-reviewed research articles or website material which supports what the author claims? I am interested in calcium nutrition and would not be surprised if it is overrated, but I have done nowhere near enough research on this to feel that I could write something meaningful about it.
The German Coimbra protocol doctors who wrote Finamore et al. 2023 are not very interested in measuring the patient's 25-hydroxyvitamin D level, since the level which causes trouble varies a lot between individuals. However, they do check calcium levels, which have a very narrow healthy range, and the level of the parathyroid hormone, which is part of the whole system of which the kidneys are a part.
Hi again Warrior. I try to keep things short too, but if they are detailed and important, it impossible to do so.
I am glad you like the article at Brownstone.org which Simon Goddek and I wrote.
As far as I know, the very well known cardiologist Peter McCullough does not have a lot to do with vitamin D and does not have auto-immune problems. It is Dr Patrick McCullough, the hospitalist doctor in Ohio, who is a vitamin D researcher I cited in an earlier comment. The takes around 1.25mg (50,000 IU) vitamin D3 a day to suppress psoriasis. His protocol resembles that of Dr Coimbra. I discuss it, and Pete Batcheller's similar protocol for cluster headaches and migraine, at: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/06-adv/#01-higher .
There is a reasonably well known debate about how the Institute of Medicine, in 2011, made a mess of the statistics and calculated an RDA (Recommended Daily Allowance) for vitamin D of 600 IU a day, to attain, I recall, at least 20 ng/mL 25-hydroxyvitamin D in at least 97.5% of the population. This was a mistake, and the actual value is a lot higher. However, the RDA is worse than useless for vitamin D3. I will write a Substack article about this sometime, but see what I wrote about the RDA in https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#05-history .
I know enough about vitamin D to take 10,000 units daily in winter, 5,000 in summer. I am not overweight or obese and weigh 170 lbs. The last time I had a test, my level was 95.
I almost never get sick. I have no depression or anxiety. I have no trouble maintaining a normal weight. Vitamin D3 is my superpower.
This sounds good to me.
I assume you mean 95 ng/mL (billionths of a gram per millilitre). It is best to specify the units of "vitamin D" (really 25-hydroxyvitamin D) blood tests, because the UK, Australia and quite a few other countries normally use nanomols per liter (nmol/L), which is the ng/mL figure multiplied by 2.5.
That’s correct.
😉🙏🏻Thank you, Robin, for this excellent information.! I live in Arizona, but in the summer its rather much for my Seattle bones.! I'm rather skinny just now, having had an small accident that gave me a few spinal fractures, though I'm on the mend (having turned down surgery!). Being so skinny & I'm 6’ tall, weighing about 145lbs or a little more; would I need the 5,000 units you speak of or maybe more..?
And wouldn't standing in the sun for say about 15 mins do..?
Again, I thank you for this incredible info. Why aren't more doctors all over this??? Big Pharma seems to have lied again by omission.!
Can't patent anything natural,
can we..?
145 lb / 2.2 = 66 kilograms. For people not suffering from obesity, Prof. Wimalawansa recommends 70 to 90 IU / kg per day, which is 4620 to 5940 IUs per day, on average. This is 115 to 148 micrograms = 0.115 to 0.148 milligrams.
To rely on ultraviolet skin exposure to provide all, or even a substantial fraction, of the vitamin D3 we need to be healthy would be firstly impractical (except perhaps near the equator, if there was no monsoon) and secondly unsafe since this damages DNA and so raises the risk of skin cancer. It also causes wrinkled skin over many years.
Many people have an unreasonable idea of how important exposing the skin to direct sunlight is. If there was no other source of vitamin D3 (and there is very little in food of any kind) then we would be best advised to do a deal with the Devil and use UV-B skin exposure, including from lamps on weeks when there was insufficient UV-B from the Sun. However, since vitamin D3 supplements are readily available all year round, the answer is clearly supplements, with food sources and UV-B exposure playing no significant role.
Many people also overestimate how much vitamin D3 they produce just by being out in the sun. "Standing in the sun for 15 minutes" doesn't mean anything specific regarding how much vitamin D3 your skin would produce. Is the Sun high in the sky? If it is lower than 45° from the horizon, the path of the light is through a significantly greater amount of ozone and atmosphere in general, which attenuates the ca. 297 nanometre UV-B wavelengths which convert 7-dehydrocholesterol to vitamin D3. How much clothing are you wearing? How much skin is directly exposed, such as at right angles to the incident light? How much melanin is in your skin, due to genetics and sun-tan? Darker skin protects the lower layers of the skin, where vitamin D3 is produced (not the dead cells in the outer layer) from harmful UV-B which includes the wavelengths needed for vitamin D3 production.
In the past vitamin D3 supplements were unavailable and only some people could use cod liver oil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cod_liver_oil. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, a tablespoonful (apparently it tastes awful), of 13.4 grams, contains 34 micrograms of vitamin D3 = 1360 IU. Then, for those not naturally exposed to UV-B light all year round, it would certainly be healthy to get more UV-B exposure, since even small amounts of vitamin D3 make a great difference to health, if the vitamin D3 intake or production is far below what we need to attain at least 50 ng/mL 125 nmol/L circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D.
Now, the answer is simple: supplement vitamin D3 and, while getting out and experiencing sunshine, go easy on the UV-B exposure of the eyes and skin, since this is damaging.
"Why aren't more doctors all over this??? Big Pharma seems to have lied again by omission.!" This is an important question and the answers are long and perplexing. There are multiple barriers to people properly understanding the importance of 50 ng/mL 125 nmol/L circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D. One day I will try to list all the barriers - it will take multiple articles. See also: https://nutritionmatters.substack.com/p/dr-pierre-kory-talks-with-tucker and Bill Grant's 2018 article: "Vitamin D acceptance delayed by Big Pharma following the Disinformation Playbook", Orthomolecular Medicine News Service: https://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v14n22.shtml.
If a pharmaceutical company could patent anything even 1/10th as beneficial as vitamin D3, they would sell it for tens of thousands of dollars a gram. I haven't checked in the last few years, but around 2020 the ex-factory price of pharmaceutical grade vitamin D3 was about USD$2.50 a gram. This is enough for the scarily high number "5000 International Units" a day for 22 years.
There are only a handful of factories worldwide making vitamin D3. Most is made in China for livestock who spend their days indoors - poultry, pigs and some cattle. Only a few factories purify it sufficiently and have all the approvals they need from multiple companies to sell pharma-grade vitamin D3 for human consumption. None of any of these factories are owned by multinational pharmaceutical companies. One company, who may be the world leader in pharma-grade vitamin D3, is Fermenta Biotech, in India: https://fermentabiotech.com/. See photos of their factory at: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#2.1 which also contains a link to a book chapter on vitamin D3 industrial production.
There are some tiny comments in the graphics regarding BMI, overestimating obesity in taller adults and underestimating it in shorter adults. This is because the formula for BMI assumes that weight should be proportional to height^2. A study I read many years ago in a mathematics journal established that weight is more closely proportional to height^2.5. Given that new exponent, I derived an improved formula for BMI:
5895*(weight in pounds)/(height in inches)^2.5
This matches the conventional BMI for people 6 feet tall.
I keep wondering whether there are any elderly care homes that have been studied with their residents vitamin d levels checked, proper supplementation and whether this influences flu outbreaks and deaths? Everything I read seems to indicate that adequate vit D should be standard practice with all residents.
Hi Sunlover, I don't recall a research article on even moderate vitamin D3 supplementation for residents in aged care homes. There are a vast number of vitamin D journal articles, and I only see a fraction of them. Any such research would probably be done with lower amounts of vitamin D3 than are really required for good health.
If doctors, public health officials etc. were doing their job, the recommendations for vitamin D3 supplementation would be adequate to attain, in all or almost all people, at least the 50 ng/mL 125 nmol/L level of circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25(OH)D), without the need for medical monitoring. Prof. Wimalawansa's recommendations do this and ideally there would be a consensus statement from other leading vitamin D researchers supporting these recommendations and arguing why 50 ng/mL 25(OH)D should be the target, rather than the current 20 ng/mL or perhaps 30 ng/mL.
The official 25(OH)D target and vitamin D3 supplemental intake recommendations of all governments are far from this. They aim for 20 ng/mL or perhaps 30 ng/mL 25(OH)D and they specify fixed quantities of vitamin D3, according to age, not body weight. There may be one or two official recommendations which take obesity into account, but most don't. A survey of government recommendations is by leading vitamin D researchers Samantha Kimball and Michael Holick, in 2017: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41430-020-00706-3 . This is behind a paywall, but you can find it at Sci-Hub: https://sci-hub.ru/10.1038/s41430-020-00706-3
The Australian government recommendations fit this pattern, with different quantities according to age, with no account taken for body weight or obesity status: https://www.eatforhealth.gov.au/nutrient-reference-values/nutrients/vitamin-d. The recommended daily intakes are: 0 to 50 years (newborns to mature adults) 5 ug (micrograms) = 200 IU; 51 to 70 years: 10 ug = 400 IU and 71 years and above" 15 ug = 600 IU. The largest vitamin D capsules which can be sold over the counter in Australia are 0.025 mg 1000 IU.
Even by these lousy standards, the vitamin D3 needs of aged care home residents are routinely neglected.
In 2020, Joseph and Carol Williams reported on this from the South of England: "Responsibility for vitamin D supplementation of elderly care home residents in England: falling through the gap between medicine and food" https://nutrition.bmj.com/content/3/2/256 . The title and first sentence: "Daily vitamin D supplements are recommended for elderly care home residents; however, they are rarely given and vitamin D deficiency in care homes is widespread." tell us that the situation is bleak for most residents of aged care homes.
As we age, our skin has less capacity to produce vitamin D3 for any given amount of UV-B exposure. (I don't have a reference for this, but have read it several times - and it makes sense.) Aged care residents, especially in the UK (especially squared in Scotland) get little or no direct sunlight exposure at any time of year. There's no significant amount of vitamin D3 in food. Unless they get some vitamin D3 in a multivitamin capsule, the only vitamin D3 they would get would be in a vitamin D capsule. It is clear that few aged care home residents get this.
The small (e.g. 200 IU) amount of vitamin D3 in a multivitamin capsule would make a significant difference to someone who has no other sources. It might (here I am guessing) take a 60 kg person's 25(OH)D level from 10 ng/mL (25 nmol/L), which is disastrously low to 14 ng/mL, which is less disastrous.
In 2017, Kimball, Mirhosseini and Holick reported on a United States program involving adults with mean age 60, so this would include some elderly, whatever the threshold of "elderly" is. They were all "community living" - meaning they were not in care homes or hospital. "Evaluation of vitamin D3 intakes up to 15,000 international units/day and serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D concentrations up to 300 nmol/L on calcium metabolism in a community setting": https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19381980.2017.1300213.
They reported that for people who were not overweight or suffering from obesity, 0.175 mg (7000 IU) vitamin D3 a day, on average, was required to attain 40 ng/mL (100 nmol/L) or more circulating 25(OH)D.
25(OH)D levels of up to 120 ng/mL "300 nmol/L were achieved without perturbation of calcium homeostasis or incidence of toxicity. Hypercalcemia and hypercalciuria were not related to an increase in 25(OH)D concentrations nor vitamin D dose." ("Homeostasis" means proper regulation - calcium has a narrow range of concentrations in the blood. Hypercalcemia means excessive calcium levels in the bloodstream, technically in the serum, which is the liquid after the cells have been removed. Hypercalciuria means excessive calcium in the urine." This article has some interesting graphs of vitamin D3 intake quantity vs. 25(OH)D levels, by body morphology (normal, overweight and obese) and initial 25(OH)D level. One day I will add ng/mL and milligrams to the scales and present them in an article here.
It is obvious from the research cited and discussed at: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/ that the health of almost everyone in the world, at every age, would be improved by vitamin D supplementation which raised their 25(OH)D level to at least 50 ng/mL. This is most obvious in people's rapidly declining health once they need to go - and are admitted - to aged care homes.
However, the best outcomes would arise from starting proper vitamin D3 supplementation earlier - before birth - with pregnant women and so (since it takes time to build 25(OH)D levels) all women of childbearing age. https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#3.2
Dementia is a common problem in those aged 70 and above. This is driven very strongly by low 25(OH)D: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#3.2 . Two people I know in their mid-90s - who have been taking proper amounts of vitamin D for 15 or 20 years - have no sign of dementia at all.
The rot sets in much earlier. One friend of mine is dying from multiple system atrophy, which is essentially the same as Parkinson's disease and dementia with Lewy bodies. He was in his mid-60s and had never supplemented vitamin D - and this is in relatively sunny Melbourne (37° S). The whole of the British Isles (50 to 58.7° N) is crazy far gone from the equator, even further than the south tip of the South Island of New Zealand (46.7° S).
I agree with most of your post but there is an exception : obese women should be very careful before supplementing.
When you analyse RCT's, you see a worrying signal : vitamin D supplementation might INCREASE cancer incidence and cancer death in obese people.
See this meta-analysis on cancer incidence (daily dosages only - I do not consider RCT where intermittent bolus are given because they are not reliable) - Fig 2.D : https://europepmc.org/articles/PMC9427835/figure/Fig2/
There is the same signal with cancer mortality (source : supplementary material of this more recent meta-analysis) : https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10214278/
Supplementary table 12 A+B. Subgroup analyses for the efficacy
of vitamin D3 supplementation on cancer mortality in the general population
BMI (kg/m²)
VITAL (Manson, 2018) FIND (Virtanen, 2022)
< 25. 0.566 (0.381; 0.842) NA
25 - < 30 0.894 (0.642; 1.246) 1.149 (0.399; 3.306
≥ 30 1.158 (0.756; 1.775) 1.769 (0.487; 6.427)
Supplementary table 14 A+B. Subgroup analyses for the efficacy
of vitamin D3 supplementation for cancer specific survival of cancer patients
BMI (kg/m²)
VITAL (Manson, 2018) FIND (Virtanen, 2022)
< 25. 0.758 (0.510; 1.128) NA
25 - < 30 0.815 (0.584; 1.136) 0.801 (0.273; 2.350)
≥ 30 0.998 (0.650; 1.532) 1.775 (0.488; 6.460)
Cancer site
VITAL (Manson, 2018)
Prostate cancer 0.300 (0.084; 1.077)
Colorectal cancer 0.519 (0.224; 1.201)
Breast cancer 1.418 (0.400; 5.028)
Lung cancer. NA
Now, how could this be possible ? How could vitamin D, which is so powerful against cancer, increase the danger of cancer in obese people - and apparently, especially breast cancers in obese women ?
I have no idea, but a French researcher has put forward an interesting hypothesis in this study :
"The interaction between 25(OH)D and BMI has already been observed in previous large prospective studies (European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition, Nurses’ Health Study) with results in line with ours (18, 19, 20), that is, a tendency for an inverse association in lean women and/or a direct association in women with a higher BMI. (...) Conversely, some mechanistic hypotheses may be suggested to explain the direct association observed between 25(OH)D and breast cancer risk in women with a BMI ≥ the median. Increasing BMI was associated with lower circulating 25(OH)D concentrations (14, 15), which is probably because of a dilution of the lipophilic 25(OH)D in fat mass (16). Thus, increasing 25(OH)D blood concentration is likely to be correlated with increasing 25(OH)D in fat mass. Besides, 1,25(OH)2D synthesis depends on a ratio between the activity of its degradation enzyme and its production enzyme. This ratio may be positively associated with blood 25(OH)D concentration variations, with enhanced degradation when vitamin D status is high (39). Moreover, in the adipose tissue of obese people, this ratio may be altered, with a decreased activity of production enzymes and no difference for degradation enzymes (17). This suggests that, in overweight/obese people, higher 25(OH)D may be associated with a higher 1,25(OH)2D degradation and thus a lower antiproliferative signal in the adipose tissue and its microenvironment. Thus, this could affect the mammary cells because the mammary gland is surrounded by adipose tissue (40).
If true, this is of major importance. We tend to recommend that obese people take 2 or 3 times the dose of vitamin D, but it might be bad advice.
Hi Xavier,
Thanks very much for your well researched comment. It will be a while before I can read enough of these articles to respond properly.
I don't know to what extent these research studies consider or correct for the possibility that some individuals who suffer from cancer may be supplementing higher than normal amounts of vitamin D3, so raising their 25(OH)D levels above average.
The paragraph you quoted from the French researcher is from a 2016 article, Melanie et al.: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002231662300545X . I think this is written from the perspective of someone who thinks that circulating calcitriol (1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D) is important for cancer suppression vs. growth. This is not the case to any significant degree. (This is based on me reading a lot of research material in the last 4 years. I have never read such a thing or of any mechanism which would account for such a causative relationship.) This very low level of circulating calcitriol acts as a hormone, produced by the kidneys, to affect the behaviour of multiple cell types around the body which play a role in calcium-phosphate-bone metabolism.
The immune system - which combats cancer - is not significantly affected by this stable and very low level of calcitriol. Good immune system performance can only occur once these cells get a good supply of 25-hydroxyvitamin D, to run their intracrine (inside each cell) and paracrine (to nearby cells) signaling systems.
There are one or more enzymes which break down calcitriol, and as far as I know the activity of these enzymes in locations which affect the level of calcitriol and 25-hydroxyvitamin D in the bloodstream is affected by the overall 25-hydroxyvitamin D level in the bloodstream (and perhaps the calcitriol level, which only moderately correlates with the 25-hydroxyvitamin D level there).
However, I am not sure that such changes in enzymes are important for the operation of the intracrine and paracrine signaling systems in some or many types of immune cells. There, we expect calcitriol to be degraded reasonably rapidly anyway, so that the intracellularly produced calcitriol, when the intracrine signaling system is activated by a cell-type specific condition, rises in level rapidly but also diminishes rapidly once the intracrine creation of this calcitriol stops.
For the French researcher's hypothesis to apply, in reality, to cancer, I think it would need to apply to the activity of these enzymes inside immune cells AND to the degree that it reduced the ability of the intracrine signaling system to work, by degrading the calcitriol before it could bind to the vitamin D receptor molecules, also in the cytosol, which are produced along with the 1-hydroxylase enzyme (which hydroxylates 25-hydroxyvitamin D to calcitriol), when the intracrine signaling system is activated. See my tutorial: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#02-compounds .
I am sure this is not the case. There does need to be a level of one or more of these degrading enzymes in the cell to mop up the calcitriol once its production stops, but there would need to be very high level of it to actually stop the whole system from working.
Instead, all the evidence is that higher circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels improve immune system function, presumably by improving the functioning of the intracrine and paracrine signaling systems of multiple types of immune cell.
The vitamin D research literature is a mess. The great majority of articles are written by people who have never heard of 25--hydroxyvitamin D -> calcitriol intracrine and paracrine signaling. So they think that the stable and very low level of circulating calcitriol is somehow raised significantly by higher levels of 25-hydroxyvitamin D (which it does, to only a modest extent, see the first graph I added at the end of the above article) and that this somehow "boosts" the immune system. This is from Tang et al. 2019: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-43462-6 .
This is not the case. The individual scatter in calcitriol levels far exceeds the modest increase in level which results from higher 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels. Yet taking the 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels to and above 50 ng/mL 125 nmol/L evidently enables the immune system to deal very well with bacterial pathogens, as seen in the Quraishi et al. graph in my article above. Lower levels lead to obvious immune system dysfunction. This profound affect on the immune system cannot be explained by the modest, on average, increase in circulating (hormonal) calcitriol which occurs with higher 25-hydroxyvitamin D.
I will need to read the articles you cite before writing more. Does high 25-hydroxyvitamin D really correlate with lower cancer survival rates? They would need to somehow correct for the possibility that those with most severe cancer might have taken a lot more vitamin D3 than those with milder cancer.
There has been a long and difficult discussion of "J-curves" in graphs which plot 25-hydroxyvitamin D on the horizontal axis and all cause (or some specific cause) mortality on the vertical axis. It is actually a left-for-right reversed J. "Bathtub curve" would be a better description. The mortality drops dramatically from low to moderate 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels and goes up, a little, at the higher levels.
Without days of work I can't find the various articles on this debate and I am not sure where it stands.
I added, as a second graph at the end of the article above (since I can't embed them in this comment) a graph of all-cause and cardiac mortality after numerous corrections, from a very large UK BIOBANK observational study: Lai et al. 2021: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnut.2021.740855 . This does not concern cancer. Nor does it focus on obesity or women. However the curves drop consistently with 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels rising all the way to 60 ng/mL 150 nmol/L. There's no bathtub or 'J' uptick in mortality here, with higher 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels.
Thank you for your response. The French researcher's idea is just a hypothesis, and you convincingly explains why it is unlikely to be true.
However, the data is also quite clear. I quote only RCT's vs placebo, so there is no major confounding factor (for instance, cancer patients taking more vitamin D).
See especially the Vital study, the largest RCT on vitamin D and cancer. It is very interesting. For normal BMI people, 2 000 UI vitamin D reduces incidence of cancer and cancer mortality (by a lot !). But there is rather a negative effect for people with BMI > 30 - and it is probably entirely explained by breast cancer.
Cancer survival by BMI :
< 25. 0.758 (0.510; 1.128)
25 - < 30 0.815 (0.584; 1.136)
≥ 30 0.998 (0.650; 1.532)
Survival by cancer site
Prostate cancer : 0.300 (0.084; 1.077)
Colorectal cancer : 0.519 (0.224; 1.201)
Breast cancer : 1.418 (0.400; 5.028)
Just trying to sift through the mire. This seems contradictory:
https://open.substack.com/pub/chemtrails/p/vitamin-d-is-rat-poison-the-fraudulent?r=gz3ii&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
Hi Fizzygurl, Vitamin D3 cholecalciferol poisons rats only when they eat vastly greater quantities, per unit body weight, than humans (or rats) need to be healthy.
For a 70 kg (154 lb) adult (so not suffering from obesity), about 0.125 milligrams a day vitamin D3 is sufficient to ensure the person's 25-hydroxyvitamin D level is high enough to for their immune system to function properly. This is a gram every 22 years.
If you read this article patiently, follow the links to the research articles, and at least partly understand them, and if you read and understand the explanation of intracrine and paracrine signaling at: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#02-compounds and take a look at some of the research cited on that long page, then you will have a much better understanding of the vitamin D compounds, and how the immune system depends on a good level of 25-hydroxyvitamin D, than most doctors and immunologists.
Then you will be able to assess the claims made in the article you cited.
Very extensive research…thank you for this. I have looked at quite a few bottles of supplements and I don’t like the chemical names I see and not sure I trust anything coming out of China or India. Big pharma has taken over quite a few supplement companies so you have to be careful. I appreciate your response unlike the rude jackass who accused me of being ignorant and a fear monger.
Hi Fizzygurl, Nutrients - including those found in supplements - are all chemicals which tend to have long, complex, names. The same is true of the vast number of chemicals which our cells are made of. Open any biochemistry textbook or research article and make sure you have a lot of extra space in your brain for all the new names and concepts these documents contain.
The great majority of chemicals for both drugs and nutritional supplements are made in China and India, because it is cheaper and because these to countries have economies of scale, with it being less expensive to manufacture there and ship the products worldwide, rather than set up separate factories in the USA, Canada, the UK, Germany, France, Australia etc. It is no just the cost of setting up and running a factory. There is a lot of investment getting the products certified by the regulatory authorities of all the countries where the product is to be used.
Fermenta Biotech in India is one major manufacturer of pharma-grade vitamin D3 (cholecalciferol). I am not sure who the other manufacturers are, but I am sure that there are no such factories, for either the less purified version for agricultural animals, or the 99.9% or whatever pure pharma-grade vitamin D, in all of North and South America.
It takes a big, very specialised, factory to make vitamin D. See the photo here: https://aminotheory.com/cv19/#Maharashtra-police. This is all the factory does. Separate factories are required to make the sufficiently pure 7-dehydrocholesterol which is converted, by UV-B light, into vitamin D3. This factory does rough purification to agricultural grade. A separate building at the same site purifies some of their output to pharmaceutical grade.
The CEO of Fermenta Biotech seems like a fusspot for detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sca9nehZMTM I would be happy to use their vitamin D3. I have no idea whether the vitamin D3 I use comes from them or from some other factory.
The question of purity is something end-users such as us can't answer reliably, without exceedingly expensive analysis by some specialised laboratories.
I would rather take a probably small, but non-zero, risk of the supplements being impure to some significant degree than not take the supplements at all.
China produces most of the agricultural grade vitamin D3. I am not sure if they have a factory which produces properly certified, and so exportable to the USA, pharma grade vitamin D3. I guess there are one of two pharma-grade vitamin D factories in Europe.. I don't have good way of finding these things out, but I am very interested in where the factories are and who owns them. Perhaps DSM (a very large nutrient manufacturing company, based in Holland https://dsm.com) has a pharma grade vitamin D factory in Europe. I know they get most of their agricultural grade calcifediol (25-hydroxyvitamin D) from a Chinese factory which figured out the most efficient way to make it.
If you reject nutritional supplements because one or more ingredients are, or might be made, in India or China, I think you would be left with very little to choose from.
I don't fuss over the origin of the chemicals. If I did, I would go without nutritional supplements which I think are very important. I am an electronic technician and computer programmer. There's no reason for you to regard my approach as being in any way authoritative. I don't know how any of us can be 100% certain of the purity of anything, not least because a factory might produce occasional bad batches.
As Kalle mentioned, the amount of vitamin D3 a person needs each day is so small, that any contaminants, such as to 1 or 2%, would need to be extremely toxic, to create significant ill-effects in such tiny quantities.
Thank you for taking the time to supply me with all this info and I will check it out. As much as I was a supplement junkie before I’m thinking I’m better off without this stuff in my body and I’m trying to substitute with more fruits and vegetables. Kind of how vaccines don’t work since that’s why we have an immune system.
Dear Fizzygurl, I felt bad that maybe you were innocent but I had a look and see that you are an participating member on the hype site.
Do not assume I claim that everything they mention is rubbish, not so. However because they add so much fear mongering and half is just false it becomes impossible to gain any useful information from them because you would have to research it yourself all again.
I saw Robins message after I posted my previous one and see he comes to very similar conclusions and has similar info about where the ingredients are made.
Fun fact. Trump wanted to close borders with China at the start of Covid, turns out that the US MILITARY (and everyone else obviously) is dependent on medicines from China and he did not realise that the wars and us vs them is just theatre. All just propaganda to keep people fearful and easier to control.
Figure out which supplements you need, locate the least adulterated ones you can find and sleep easy.
Yes good point about Trump. Saying something is contradictory is not promoting it, I did not promote that site. Just searching for the truth and after reading more sources, I think I found my truth, and will not be putting that stuff in my body. We’re already pretty much fuked with all the stuff they are poisoning us with.
Sorry, I get a bit cranky when people appear to believe what they read from sensationalist conspiracy falsehood sites.
Volume Vitamin-D production is done in China, India, some in Germany and a small amount in Australia. I saw a list with 20 countries making Vitamin-D or related metabolites though they would be in small quantities.
The active ingredient is always the same, the compounder will add fillers or additives to make tablets or fill capsules.
As a general jackass I went through your doubts perhaps two decades ago and buy my Vitamin-D3 in olive oil in a dropper bottle. The brand out family usually buys from the USA bottler is called Seeking Health but I have no way of knowing where they get their raw ingredient. There are other similar products. The only additive is olive oil and I trust that is what is in the bottle.
If you focus on the vegan Vitamin-D3 offerings you may find them produced OUTSIDE China and India because they are still a bit of a boutique product but I have not read anything about it.
The reason I made assumptions about you is because of the post you made. It is a deliberate hit piece and throwing it into a remarkably progressive and well researched post on Vitamin-D3 dosing without any indication of what you felt was contradictory is a typical troll tactic.
It was a hit piece simply looking up the ingredients on the supplement bottle and doing a little research, which is what I appreciate. If that’s conspiracy, then I don’t know what to call what you do. I prefer not to put these substances in my body but you go do your thing. How about trying to have a little couth next time you post to disagree and keep your crankiness to yourself. So you went through the same thing I did years ago, but still choose to call me ignorant…interesting.
I did not promote my ignorance, I found a product without additives.
His site is about scaring propel with falsehoods.
You promoted his site.
That article funnily enough came up on my feed a few days back.
What I will say is that the article you posted has a lot of issues. To put it shortly, there's a lot of errors in thinking and it contains a lot of information that ends up lacking a lot of context and ends up providing things that should be worth questioning.
There's quite a few issues but if there's anything in particular you were curious about I can provide my opinion.
Fizzygurl and All, My impression of Modern Discontent that he (I think) is a USA-based person who researches biochemical matters very assiduously and who writes with great patience and attention to detail.
I took one look at the article you mentioned and decided it contained so much crap that it was not worth bothering with. If Modern Discontent is offering to help you evaluate that article, and if you are potentially giving the article credence, I think his offer is most generous and likely to be helpful to you.
Good idea. Thank you Robin and I glanced through some of your other informative posts too. Will subscribe.
Yes, Robin is right, it’s all very overwhelming to somebody who looked at the first page of a chemistry book in 11th grade and figured out I was probably going to flunk. i’m just not a very trusting person after the Covid debacle.
It's always important to consider the context of the information we are provided. It's been a few days now but note that the author of that article you posted never makes mention of what natural Vitamin D3 is supposed to look like, and in that absence of information you are told to believe in the dangers of synthetic vitamin D3, but as Kalle mentions cholecalciferol is the name of the structure. It doesn't describe the method in which Vitamin D3 is produced, otherwise we'd have no method of categorizing molecules. But because this discernment isn't made readers are left with no knowledge for what natural Vitamin D3 looks like and are just led to believe that the author has substantiated his claims.
Note that he mentions that synthetic vitamin D3 must first be irradiated, but then what exactly is the sun doing to us in order to for us to produce vitamin D3 naturally? UV rays are needed to help reorganize the structure of D2 into D3- a form of radiation, so it is really far-fetched to assume that irradiation is needed during one step in the synthetic process?
Also, I'm not sure where he got is Vitamin D3. You can usually tell the solubility of your vitamins based on the way they are encapsulated. D3 is fat-soluble and is generally encased in gel capsules, and so you wouldn't use the cellulose and magnesium stearate as those would be found in the tablet form. So whichever form the author is referring to it's not what you would typically find.
And even then, a lot of the concerns over the cellulose and stearate when looking at an SDS doesn't tell you much about the actual toxicity. A label on a lab-grade reagent saying "not for consumption" just has the same energy as telling someone they shouldn't be consuming their lab reagents.
There is also the contradiction in which these additives are argued to help bulk up the product, when in reality you know the dosage of vitamins because it's listed. A bottle of Vitamin D3 with a label of "10,000" IU is telling you how much of a dosage you are getting. It's not as if you can take pure vitamins otherwise you run the serious risk of overdosing, which makes the comments on "rat poisoning" contradictory because it points out why you need to control the dosing of vitamins or you may easily overdose.
Sorry for the long ramble. I understand not being very trusting because I find myself very skeptical regarding a lot of the things I come across as well, and coming across this article with rather egregious issues and seeing so many people eat it up was a bit disheartening to see because it shows people can easily be led astray.
Industrially produced vitamin D3 cholecalciferol results from UV-B light breaking a carbon-to-carbon bond in one of the carbon rings of 7-dehydrocholesterol. This is exactly the same process by which vitamin D3 is made in our skin.
In industrial production: https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/B978-0-12-381978-9.10006-X and https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#2.1 the 7-dehydrocholesterol is dissolved in a hydrocarbon solvent and the light comes from water cooled, very high-power (kilowatts, I think) specialised mercury vapour lamps, which have some element (iron?) added to to create one or more peaks in the emission spectrum in the ca. 295 to 300 nm range. It is a very tricky business, with the light being further filtered by salts in the cooling water jacket to remove some light which upsets the desired transformation of 7-dehydrocholesterol into a molecule which, of its own accord, with thermal vibrations, changes its shape from one isomer to the final, stable, isomer which is vitamin D3.
Vitamin D2 (ergocalciferol) results from a similar process with a molecule which can be derived from yeast. I once read the reason behind the D2 and D3 names - there were other numbers too - but it the details were arcane and, I recall, arbitrary. So I no longer remember why they were named this way. 7-dehydrocholesterol and vitamin D3 already have an OH (oxygen hydrogen) hydroxyl group on the number 3 carbon. So does ergocalciferol and so, I assume, the compound it is made from:
https://clincalc.com/blog/2015/07/vitamin-d2-ergocalciferol-vs-d3-cholecalciferol/
The difference between D2 and D3 is at the other end of the molecule.
Both can be hydroxylated to form a 25-hydroxyl molecule, with much the same properties for the D2 and D3 versions, and likewise the 1,25-dihydroxy molecules. These have 2 and 3 hydroxyl groups in total, respectively. The D3 forms are more effective at improving health. The above article shows that the 25-hydroxyl molecule made from vitamin D3, which I refer to as "25-hydroxyvitamin D" but which is really "25-hydroxyvitamin D3" lasts longer in the bloodstream than the D2 version, properly called "25-hydroxyvitamin D2".
See also: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0002916523290875 and https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0002916523028204.
Kind of funny that our skin can make 20,000 units of rat poison per day, isn't it?
If you look carefully at the link you offered it includes the dog whistle warning word chemtrail. Do you know how you can tell a psy-op conspiracy from a real one, the globalists allow the psy-ops to flourish and continue to confuse, frighten and divide the population.
That site is not at all contradictory. It is a well crafted hit piece against Vitamin-D3 using every possible psychological lever, half truth and total falsehood. It uses misdirection and endless repetition and emotive words, clickbait titles and confusion to try and trigger a person into thinking there has to be some truth to the rubbish.
However the hit team shows a marked lack integrity when they spend two pages crying about the lack of info on the natural vitamin and call the commercially made product unnatural because it shares the same name. The name is the same because the chemical is the same. They make it sound dangerous because mega doses can kill rodents and the pure ingredient has a do not eat on the label. The fact that they have written all that drivel and still claim they do not know how the Vitamin-D3 comes from algae or lichen means they are not reading the right literature or else they are pretending to be ignorant to make the casual reader think the information is not available, they are wrong though.
A very large dose for acute treatment in humans might as mentioned in the post is 400'000IU=10'000ug just once, for a 70kg adult giving 143ug/kg. Yet the lowest recorded lethal dose for a dog has been 2000ug/kg giving a safety factor of 14:1 if dogs are like humans. That once off very large treatment dose is 615 times LESS than the LD50 (lethal dose for 50%) for dogs at 88'000ug/kg.
A daily dose an adult based on the recommendations repeated in the post might be 80IU/kg/day=2ug/kg/day. There is no firm upper limit but a lot of wise doctors and researchers with decades of experience often suggest that 30'000IU/day=750ug/day should be safe without other measures and clinical observation for a 75kg adult that would be 10ug/kg/day. Yes there are reports of dogs receiving 50ug/kg/day for weeks showing some symptoms. So again if humans are like dogs we would have a 25:1 safety margin if following the recommendations given here. You would still have a 10:1 margin even if working at the professional high dose regions.
But you can believe what the other site will try to tell you. That a product that cannot harm you is bad because they spend an inordinate amount of space scaring you about the fillers in a random formulation. So do yourself a favour and just buy the Vitamin-D3 in a dropper bottle mixed with olive oil. Remember too if the vitamin is sold as 98% pure from the factory (yes they can be tested and the purity is usually higher for human product) and you are scared of the 2% impurities that could be ANYTHING do the sums, an adult might take 80x70=5600IU=140ug in a day, now watch this only 2% of that is impurity, may be toxic, may be inert but that is 2.8ug and for the 70kg person that will be a dose of 0.04ug/kg=40ng/kg on this handy list I found you will see that there are only 4 organic compounds listed out of 50 that are toxic enough to harm you in that dose, basically your Vitamin-D3 would have to be laced with PURE BOTOX before it would harm you. Vitamin-D3 has been placed onto the list by the pharma corporations to frighten people. The dose we need is so small we do not approach the dangerous doses.
Oh, the last recorded death from Vitamin-D3 was due to a compounding error that gave a sick boy in India a large overdose, that was 19-21 years ago. How man drugs do you know of that have killed fewer people.
So the short answer is you have been played by an ignorant or malicious fear monger or you are one of those ignorant or malicious fear mongers.
https://ceufast.com/imgs/lethaldoses55substances.pdf
Hi Kalle, I can't know what Fizzygurl is thinking, but my impression was that she was perplexed by the contradictions between the article she cited and this article I just wrote. I do not think that she indicated that she thought that other article was valid.
People who don't have a lot of experience reading detailed technical material can be overwhelmed by the amount of information there is about nutrition, and the difficulty of making sense of it. I am pretty good at this and I have a lot of difficulty like this too. For instance, it would probably take me 4 or 5 full days work to find what I think is the best research on vitamin K2 and write up an account of whatever reliable information I thought I could discern from this.
A lot of what is written about vitamin D in peer-reviewed journal articles is a mish mash of mistaken material from other articles. Vanishingly few vitamin D research articles concerning the immune system even mention 25-hydroyvitamin D based intracrine and paracrine signaling. None give a tutorial explanation of it - so I had to write my own.
Hi Warrior, You do not cite a source for your statements, except the main Coimbra Protocol site. This German site has more information, including in English: https://coimbraprotokoll.de/en/ . See also: Amon et al. 2022, https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/8/1575, which is written by these German doctors.
You wrote that vitamin "D3 is NOT TOXIC even at daily doses for many years at 300,000 IU PER DAY." This is a dangerously misleading statement. That amount will cause hypercalcemia in almost every person, due to them attaining 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels far beyond 150 ng/mL (375 nmol/L).
Please see the research articles I cite and discuss at https://vitamindstopscovid.info/06-adv/. I regard the Coimbra Protocol's theoretical basis, of overcoming "vitamin D resistance" as vague and unsupported by any evidence I could find.
The Coimbra and similar protocols are enormously important for treating numerous auto-immune diseases, and perhaps even dementia after it starts. They do so by raising 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels much higher than 50 ng/mL. This has nothing to do with some people not absorbing vitamin D3 very well, in the gut, or with them not hydroxylating it very well, primarily in the liver, to become the circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D the immune system needs.
My page also discusses the remarkable fact, which I have never seen anyone else discuss (please point me to any such discussions) that the large set of diseases which the Coimbra Protocol successfully treats is much the same as the set which can be treated, without any vitamin D3 supplementation, by introducing helminth (intestinal worm) infections. A better term would be "re-introducing" - since humans, and most or all mammals as far as I can tell - have been ubiquitously infected with helminths until around a century ago.
The explanation for helminthic therapy's success (https://helminthictherapy.org) is simple: it counters the long-evolved overly inflammatory (indiscriminate cell destroying) immune responses which our ancestors (going back before primates) evolved to counter ubiquitous helminth infections in which the helminths emit compounds which down-regulate these inflammatory responses. These inflammatory immune responses evolved primarily to attack multicellular parasites, including especially helminths.
Now we have all been dewormed, we in general - and some people in particular, due to their genes - are stuck with inflammatory responses which are too strong and which are the primary destructive mechanisms in all these auto-immune diseases.
This all makes sense.
What is not known - as far as I am aware - is why 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels well above the 50 ng/mL most (all?) people need for full immune responses to bacteria, cancer cells and parasites, is effective at down-regulating the excessive inflammatory responses of auto-immune disease sufferers, even without the presence of the compounds exuded by helminths.
While I regard the Coimbra protocol as generally safe and effective when conducted properly, ideally with medical supervision, as far as I know, none of the doctors who practice this have any idea of how the immune system works. The immune system does not use hormonal signaling. It uses intracrine and paracrine signaling, within individual cells and to nearby cells. Very few people understand this, and it is not explained in any peer-reviewed journal article, or anywhere else, that I know of. This is why I wrote two tutorials, the first being more detailed: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/02-intracrine/ and https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#02-compounds.
Hi Warrior. The book "Death by Calcium" scores points for having a snappy and direct title! https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/22173105.
I recall reading some concerns about calcium supplementation, but I don't have any reliable information worth mentioning here. Here are some thoughts which might be of interest.
Firstly, most - essentially all - medical trials are done with people who have much less than 50 ng/mL circulating vitamin D3, and the researchers don't know that this means their immune systems are not working as well as they would with this level.
Secondly, 20 ng/mL 5-hydroxyvitamin D is widely thought to be enough to enable the kidneys to maintain a very low level of circulating calcitriol (1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D) which hormonally signals to multiple types of cell elsewhere in the body to control their activities regarding calcium-phosphate-bone metabolism. However, this is not a healthy level, since it can't supply the immune system properly.
We really need RCTs and other research done with humans who have 50 ng/mL or more 25-hydroxyvitamin D. It would not surprise me that whatever valid reasons (I guess there were some) there were for calcium supplementation to be recommended, they might not apply so much, or (depending on the diet) perhaps not at all to people with 50 to 100 ng/mL circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D.
The Coimbra Protocol doctors insist on very low calcium intakes, and drinking lots of water: Finammore 2023 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.4161/derm.24808 . This includes avoiding foods which contain calcium.
Since calcium is needed by the body, since we excrete it and since we need to retain quite a lot of it in the bone, which is constantly being broken down and being rebuilt, moving calcium into the bloodstream and then back again into bone, it is natural that we need to have a non-trivial calcium intake. This does not lead to hypercalcemia with 50 ng to 100 ng or for most people well above 150 ng/mL circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D. So it is not right to argue that hypercalcemia is due to ingesting ordinary dietary amounts of calcium.
One problem which can lead to hypercalcemia is high 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels, with these molecules activating the vitamin D receptors in cells which are involved in calcium-phosphate-bone metabolism. Ideally, these receptor molecules in these cells would only be "activated" (have the calcitriol or 25-hydroxyvitamin D molecule bound to them, which causes the bound complex to alter gene expression after it arrives in the nucleus) by calcitriol. This molecule should really be known as the "calcitriol" receptor, since calcitriol is not vitamin D3. However, this receptor molecule has some affinity for 25-hydroxyvitamin D, so very high levels of 25-hydroxyvitamin D will cause a significant amount of binding to these receptor molecules. This causes the kidneys to lose control, to some degree, over these cells, since even with very low calcitriol levels in the bloodstream, a significant number of these molecules will be "activated". This excess activation cause calcium to be taken from the bone and put into the bloodstream in an excessive level. This is hypercalcemia. See Teben et al. 2016 https://academic.oup.com/edrv/article/37/5/521/2567097 which I quoted at: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/06-adv/ :
"The ingestion of excessive amounts of vitamin D3 (or vitamin D2) results in hypercalcemia and hypercalciuria due to the formation of supraphysiological amounts of 25-hydroxyvitamin D [25(OH)D] that bind to the vitamin D receptor, albeit with lower affinity than the active form of the vitamin, 1,25(OH)2D, and the formation of 5,6-trans 25(OH)D, which binds to the vitamin D receptor more tightly than 25(OH)D."
I have not investigated this 5,5 trans isomer of 25-hydroxyvitanin D.
I think the other mechanism by which a very high 25-hydroxyvitamin D level causes hypercalcemia is that these higher levels are observed to correlate with, and so cause, higher levels of circulating calcitriol. This can be seen in Fig 1 b of Tang et al. 2016 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-43462-6.
The problem of very high 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels causing hypercalcemia - depending in vitamin K2 intakes, magnesium and other nutrients and of course the calcium intake - is very well known and accepted. I don't have the "Death by Calcium" book handy and am unlikely to buy it any time soon. Can you suggest peer-reviewed research articles or website material which supports what the author claims? I am interested in calcium nutrition and would not be surprised if it is overrated, but I have done nowhere near enough research on this to feel that I could write something meaningful about it.
The German Coimbra protocol doctors who wrote Finamore et al. 2023 are not very interested in measuring the patient's 25-hydroxyvitamin D level, since the level which causes trouble varies a lot between individuals. However, they do check calcium levels, which have a very narrow healthy range, and the level of the parathyroid hormone, which is part of the whole system of which the kidneys are a part.
Hi again Warrior. I try to keep things short too, but if they are detailed and important, it impossible to do so.
I am glad you like the article at Brownstone.org which Simon Goddek and I wrote.
As far as I know, the very well known cardiologist Peter McCullough does not have a lot to do with vitamin D and does not have auto-immune problems. It is Dr Patrick McCullough, the hospitalist doctor in Ohio, who is a vitamin D researcher I cited in an earlier comment. The takes around 1.25mg (50,000 IU) vitamin D3 a day to suppress psoriasis. His protocol resembles that of Dr Coimbra. I discuss it, and Pete Batcheller's similar protocol for cluster headaches and migraine, at: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/06-adv/#01-higher .
There is a reasonably well known debate about how the Institute of Medicine, in 2011, made a mess of the statistics and calculated an RDA (Recommended Daily Allowance) for vitamin D of 600 IU a day, to attain, I recall, at least 20 ng/mL 25-hydroxyvitamin D in at least 97.5% of the population. This was a mistake, and the actual value is a lot higher. However, the RDA is worse than useless for vitamin D3. I will write a Substack article about this sometime, but see what I wrote about the RDA in https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#05-history .