It seems based on casual reading of research that more people are deficient than not and dosing to toxic levels is unlikely. But it's not a bad idea to do this under the care of a doctor.
Get your blood work done people.
The negative effects of false positives can easily outweigh the benefits of early screenings. For example, an NHS study shows that PSA antigen testing for prostate cancer is actually net harmful. [1]
Of course this isn't a blanket statement against testing in general, I'm just cautioning you against pre-judging the Dutch system as somehow less effective on the basis of "lack of preventive care" in general based on your personal experiences. It could well be that the other systems you participated in were less effective but attempting to placate anxious humans wanting to feel like they're 'doing something.'
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/01/17/prostate-cancer-...
Amazing when something goes awry, not great at preventing the thing going awry though they have made some good improvements recently (starting with their website debunking bullshit claims and headlines in the press).
As an example here's a list of all the tests, prices that a diagnostic center chain in South India provides https://appointments.aarthiscan.com/#/city/Bangalore/select-... https://aarthiscan.com/test-package/preventive-health-checku...
The test for Vitamin D is about 16EUR and comprehensive blood screening starts at 18EUR
My current doctor agrees to get my blood tested quite easily ( I don't have very serious issues ). It is not expensive either. When symptoms improved, we agreed let's test again, see where we are.
My previous doctor however, was very adverse. I left him because of this.
Socialized health is also available here but with the usual pushing and prodding necessary for anything outside the most basic, routine preventative tests, and slow at that. Advanced countries with socialized healthcare offer wonderful advantages for medical catastrophes and sufferers of chronic illnesses that would be hard to privately insure against, but when it comes to preventative discretionary healthcare, my impression is that they can be awfully bureaucratic (I used to live in Canada).
It's sad, because a full blood profile (including hormones) has such huge cost to benefit ratio in avoiding completely unnecessary speculative wild goose chases.
In Romania, getting blood work is very common, even for trivial things. A few years back it was also very cheap, about 20-30 euros for the basics.
I know Romania pretty well and I'd say they have Romanian wages and European prices on almost everything.
1. Find a different huisarts, one that specializes in expats. Check on google maps reviews. I found a great one that will give me referrals whenever I ask. 2. Go to that doctor and tell them you've been tired and want to check nutrition levels.
We found a local huisarts that does walk-ins in the mornings which makes it much easier.
My partner went and said he was having stomach pains and that we recently went vegan, that was enough to get a referral for a blood test.
More complex screenings can cost between 30-100 euros.
Or get it all for free if your doctor prescribes it. It is quite easy, you just have to be a bit lucky to have a doctor who actually want to go trough the investigation about your health issues.
I would be hesitant to go above 4000IU daily without monitoring blood levels every six months or so.
Its winter here in Canada, I'm taking 3000IU per day. I drop that to 1000IU in the summer. I'm not a doctor, not recommending you do the same. Just sharing.
Get your blood checked, get recommendation from a doctor... before supercharging your blood with calcium & other fun stuff...
I imagine someone reading this may not have healthcare coverage, but bloodwork can be cheap! Save up! Please be cautious
I did that for a little while (though the nurse practitioner at my work clinic wasn't too keen on signing off on non-medically indicated blood tests). IIRC, I was supplementing at 5000IU a day and after a few months wound up with a higher blood level than I was comfortable with, based on the ranges that came with the tests. After that, I reduced down to 2000IU a day or less.
I've been much less into supplements in general, but I only take 2000IU irregularly now.
https://www.devaboone.com/post/vitamin-d-part-2-shannon-s-st...
Her post about vit d in general:
https://www.devaboone.com/post/vitamin-d-part-1-back-to-basi...
Five years. Of 5000 IUs per day
Five years. Of more than 10x the EU RDA (and maybe 5x more than the US RDA, still)
But please tell me again how easy it is to overdose
And in another thread a guy was saying his daily D3 was 20,000 IU a day as if it was perfectly normal.
I was found to be extremely deficient in a blood test and personally been prescribed 10k UI, or maybe even 50k I can't remember, but it was a weekly tablet for only 6 weeks.
But since seeing the alarming articles on HN I reduced a bit, and I'm thinking of getting my blood tested.
If you do take Vitamin D, variant D3 is by far best, and it may be wise to take vitamin K2 as well to avoid calcium metabolism issues (calcification).
But due to fat solubility and therefore slow build up in the body, you are increasingly growing towards toxic levels over a long time.
The body can only regulate vitamin D before synthesis, after sunlight exposure. But if you take already-synthesized vitamin D, that regulation won't kick in and you're free to get hypervitaminosis.
Time in combination with individual biology are what brings issues here. Get blood work done (it cost me 30€ in Germany but was combined with 2 other tests).
> This could lead to a recommendation of 1000 IU for children <1 year on enriched formula and 1500 IU for breastfed children older than 6 months, 3000 IU for children >1 year of age, and around 8000 IU for young adults and thereafter. Actions are urgently needed to protect the global population from vitamin D deficiency.
Then, a person that consumed from 8000 IU to 12000 IU per day and had kidney damage due to high calcium levels in his blood.
https://www.webmd.com/vitamins-and-supplements/news/20190408...
Given that 10000 is considered more than the maximum safe amount by many health authorities, I doubt Fauci would say he's taking that much even if he did.
> A statistical error in the estimation of the recommended dietary allowance (RDA) for vitamin D was recently discovered; in a correct analysis of the data used by the Institute of Medicine, it was found that 8895 IU/d was needed for 97.5% of individuals to achieve values ≥50 nmol/L.
> This could lead to a recommendation of 1000 IU for children <1 year on enriched formula and 1500 IU for breastfed children older than 6 months, 3000 IU for children >1 year of age, and around 8000 IU for young adults and thereafter.
Source please?
I find Fauci said 6,000IU
https://vitamindwiki.com/Dr.+Fauci+takes+6%2C000+IU+of+Vitam...
- In Winter (especially USA/Canada/Europe) most people are deficient. Even more so the older and less active you are
- Read the labels and do basic math. A lethal dose of common OTC medicine is not that hard to obtain as well, are you going to ask a doctor how many Tylenols to take or are you going to read the label?
- Sure, if you're insecure go to the doctor and get it checked. But don't be surprised if consultations and lab exams are backed up at the moment.
- Vit D is fat soluble. Yeah you don't need to keep cranking high doses every day, the buffer lasts long. In fact for some people 10kIU should be good for a week. Review your dose, test your levels if you're taking a high dose for a long time.
In all those "Vit D overdose" stories there's someone doing something blatantly stupid for a long time OR (for the benefit of the doubt) they might have some other unknown problem or contributing factor.
Well of course, drinking 100x times the recommended amount of water would be even worse.
Most I find anywhere are 5k, and I'm the only one I know that buys them. In a supremajority of cases 50k daily would mean... let's see... about 10 fistfulls of pills. It takes dedication to swallow that much every day.
I would never take more than 10k daily, and even that might be too much. I really need to have my blood tested.
Here in France when doctors prescribe vitamin D it's a one time thing, say for 3 months. It's in liquid form and comes in a small glass tube.
It's either 50 or 100k.
Here's a picture : https://journaldunenaturopathe.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/i...
I think it looked something like this [0]. Curiously it was much cheaper than my supplements after insurance and was like $0 or $5.
I worry a little about risk compensation, or whatever the equivalent is for diet. That is to say, if I feel like I'm all set on vitamins & minerals via pills, maybe I don't need to try so hard to eat my fruits & vegetables anymore...
Now, that's a cheap multivitamin, so it's got about 300IU of vitamin D, which is a pretty small dose. At a guess it's probably cheaping out on some of the other ingredients as well. On the other hand, ingredients bought in bulk and distributed through outlets in the developing world with very low overhead might be more affordable.
EDIT: the numbers for global poverty are probably out of date, but you get the point
And its a little misleading not to talk about sunlight - technically that's not a food, but you were kind of implying you couldn't get it from the natural environment.
- Mushrooms, raw: 0.2 µg (7 IU)
- Mushrooms, Chanterelle, raw: 5.3 µg (212 IU)
- Mushrooms, enoki, raw: 0.7 µg (29 IU)
- Mushrooms, maitake, raw: 28.1 µg (1123 IU)
- Mushrooms, morel, raw: 5.1 µg (206 IU)
- Mushrooms, oyster, raw: 0.7 µg (5 IU)
- Mushrooms, portabella, raw: 0.3 µg (10 IU)
- Mushrooms, shiitake, raw: 0.4 µg (18 IU)
- Mushrooms, white, raw: 0.2 µg (7 IU)
As you can see, there are many types of mushrooms and most of them do not have much vitamin D. Some do, but unless you are a mushroom nerd you are getting the wrong kind.
Young adult daily recommended dose = 1000 IU
https://fungi.com/blogs/articles/place-mushrooms-in-sunlight...
Holy cow.
I believe also that there will be more vitamin D in mushrooms that are irradiated to give them a longer shelf life. I don't think usa is a country where that practise is common, but i believe it is common in some other countries.
(Around here, it’s salt, milk, flour and cereals that get fortified).
Dunno where fluoride fits, but that too.
SUNNY VALLI CRAG
http://3.251.20.7/log-details/?log_id=490&y=2009
I was puzzled by your phrase "can't rhyme off". Google returns very few instances that are not related to spontaneous spoken word poetry (which is likely an example of convergent evolution). After poking around a bit, it seemed as though I had heard a similar phrase before "try (to|and) rhyme off" in which 'rhyme' is synonymous with 'to list' as well
Best wishes for yourself, your friends and your family during these uncertain times!
T'was the Scots that built this Country
I believe “being vegan” is the point of most milk substitutes.
https://www.vegansociety.com/resources/nutrition-and-health/...
I went through one meta-analysis and found only 3 of about 35 studies that were actually useful. So take a close look at the methods section of the paper. You don't just read the abstract, do you? Do you?
Why 600 IU / day is not enough:
1. Meta-analysis that concluded this was faulty due to back statistical analysis and understated need by a large factor Nutrients 2014, 6, 4472-4475; doi:10.3390/nu6104472 "A Statistical Error in the Estimation of the Recommended Dietary Allowance for Vitamin D" by Paul J. Veugelers and John Paul Ekwaru
2. Lactating women who get only the RDA have vitamin D deficient milk. This makes no sense if the RDA is valid
3. When people go out in the sun their bodies produce up to 10,000 IU per day but not more. Why produce all that Vit D if it is not useful?
Sorry I am away from my paper trove so I do not have the cites for 2 and 3.
This isn't true--especially for Vitamin D. We have several doctors at this point who deal with cases where too much Vitamin D causes Calcium uptake issues and affects cognition and heart function.
Vitamin D is NOT something like Vitamin C. Your body easily dumps excessive Vitamin C so you can take fairly massive doses with no real ill effects.
Your body has a much tougher time excreting Vitamin D--so large doses of Vitamin D can cause issues and accumulate.
This not accurate. I remember that there was an article on the front page of Hacker News an article that explain that Vitamin D is actually a hormone and telling the story of woman that had been prescribed high level of supplementation that could not talk anymore. It had something to do with her calcium intake regulated by that hormone. Luckily she was so distressed she stopped taking the supplementation but still it took her six months to get back to to talking normally and a normal hormone concentration level.
EDIT : I found the article : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24261948
As someone pointed out below, if you drink 10x-100x the recommended amount of water, you're likely to have adverse effects (almost certainly including death at 100x) too.
It looks like she was getting 600,000 IU injections every week for three months. That's 85,714 IU per day. The NHS recommends maintenance does of 400 IU per day, others recommend up to 2000 IU.
Although Vitamin D isn't a particularly exciting supplement most of the time, that isn't enough of a reason for us to ignore it, as the proper way to make the decision of taking it or not would be to perform a cost/benefit analysis (as we should with any other supplements, lifestyle changes, etc).
The costs of vitamin D are just about as low as any supplement gets, and can be between $0.01 and $0.05 per day. The non-financial costs such as side effects or potential adverse effects are practically non-existent as well. So I do think that even those that have a healthy bit of skepticism over some results should still consider supplementation - there are a lot of potential benefits even if some are minor, and almost no risks or real costs. The optimal way to supplement is to get a blood test before+after starting supplementation in order to be confident you're taking the correct amount, but this isn't required of course. But I think the cost/benefit analysis is clearly in favor, so I didn't hesitate to add Vitamin D to my list of supplements that I take daily (https://nearcyan.com/supplements/ if curious), along with many others at this point.