Re:Ask HN: Resources on vitamin D supplements and studies
by DoreenMichele on Wednesday January 10, 2018 @01:32PM
(#16117547)
Look up info on cod liver oil. It is high in vitamin D and is how we discovered vitamin D. If you dig a bit, it is known to help a number of conditions, though the Wikipedia article makes it sound like we have hand wavy, vague guesses and nothing definitive. Search for inflammatory conditions, like arthritis, and vitamin D or cod liver oil. Trying to dig up what I saw recently also led me to a piece on PCOS and cod liver. The known benefits of vitamin D seem to not be well advertised or well understood.
The Wikipedia article makes no mention of the fact that people with cystic fibrosis are generally deficient. It is a fat soluble vitamin. People with CF are typically deficient in all fat soluble vitamins and are frequently prescribed supplements for A, D, E and K because of it.
In a nutshell, CF predisposes people to chronic infection and average life expectancy in the US is currently around age 37. Most scholarly articles do not blame the symptoms on things like vitamin deficiency. They basically say having CF causes deficiencies, not that deficiencies cause the symptoms of CF. Which seems pretty dumb to me.
Your bone marrow is an important part of your immune system. Vitamin D plays an important role in bone health. It really shouldn't come as a surprise that a deficiency would undermine your immune system.
It interacts with a bunch of stuff, like calcium and magnesium. Taking a lot of one thing in isolation probably won't have an optimal effect, though there are a lot of confounding factors because if you start eating calcium rich foods because you crave them, you may not realize that you are getting more of other things. Most people don't think of diet that way.
Anyway, if you have reason to think you need this, you should also read up on the other nutrients it is known to significantly interact with. If you need one of them, you like need all of them. If a vitamin D deficiency exists, you likely aren't really on solid ground for things like calcium and magnesium either.
The Wikipedia article makes no mention of the fact that people with cystic fibrosis are generally deficient. It is a fat soluble vitamin. People with CF are typically deficient in all fat soluble vitamins and are frequently prescribed supplements for A, D, E and K because of it.
In a nutshell, CF predisposes people to chronic infection and average life expectancy in the US is currently around age 37. Most scholarly articles do not blame the symptoms on things like vitamin deficiency. They basically say having CF causes deficiencies, not that deficiencies cause the symptoms of CF. Which seems pretty dumb to me.
Your bone marrow is an important part of your immune system. Vitamin D plays an important role in bone health. It really shouldn't come as a surprise that a deficiency would undermine your immune system.
It interacts with a bunch of stuff, like calcium and magnesium. Taking a lot of one thing in isolation probably won't have an optimal effect, though there are a lot of confounding factors because if you start eating calcium rich foods because you crave them, you may not realize that you are getting more of other things. Most people don't think of diet that way.
Anyway, if you have reason to think you need this, you should also read up on the other nutrients it is known to significantly interact with. If you need one of them, you like need all of them. If a vitamin D deficiency exists, you likely aren't really on solid ground for things like calcium and magnesium either.