Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by devaboone 2127 days ago
Thanks for commenting. These are all great points. For a while I have thought that Vitamin D just became the latest Vitamin C - are people on here old enough to remember when Vitamin C was a miracle drug that treated and prevented cancer? Fortunately you can expel excess Vitamin C much easier than Vitamin D. In my next post on this I really want to go into the human trials. The evidence for Vitamin D supplementation in the general population is just not there. And yes, darker skin color is a risk for Vitamin D deficiency. And the correlations that you mention are all real, which can partly explain the correlations between low Vitamin D and health problems - and then explain why supplementing doesn't seem to help. It's not the Vitamin D causing an increased mortality - it's everything else that might be associated with low Vitamin D and at the same time associated with mortality.
1 comments

Deva,

Thanks for your articles (P1 and P2) as well as your posts on HN. I'm happy to hear there will be a Part 3. The topics you describe above will be of interest. I'm a layperson who has read many of the recent papers on D3 and have been supplementing 6k IU D3 with 100mg K2-mk7 (recently increased to 10k D3). My 25-H is 71 ng/mL as of last week (lab 'normal' = 20 - 79 ng/mL). Here are some questions I'd appreciate you considering addressing in Part 3.

* Do you think that some patients (like Shannon) have adverse reactions (and others don't) mostly due to random individual sensitivity or does it seem like there are may be some factors that could serve as indicators? For example, I don't even know if a person's size (kg) 'matters' either in the test result or in absorption.

* I've seen claims that some reasonable UV exposure can A) increase uptake of supplemented D3, or B) Is recommended (if possible) because 'UV-sourced D3' is somehow 'different/better'. Yet I haven't found any published discussion of A or B. I realize the answer is likely both complicated and uncertain, but would love to know if either A or B has been evidenced, is unevidenced but 'seems plausible' or unevidenced and doesn't seem plausible.

To be clear, I'm not asking for personalized advice. Just giving you N=1 context on one reader's questions: I currently have no apparent ill-effects from supplementation. Based in part on your post, I'm now considering dropping back to 5k IU D3 as my goal is really to ensure I'm not D3 deficient (not mega-dose). I started supplementing initially due to diagnosed SAD and more recently went up from 6k to 10k in light of possible CV19 bonus benefit (I'm not at elevated CV risk anyway).