I live in Seattle and have been depressed for a while. I had my Vitamin D3 levels checked via blood test, and they were really low. Started taking 5,000 IU per day, and I feel exactly the same as before.
I have never felt an affect from oral vitamins in any situation.
Sitting in the sun however seems to do more than just “increase vitamin d levels”. The sensation is just overwhelmingly lovely. It seems to reduce cortisol, makes you feel tired in a euphoric way. Animals love to warm their fur in shafts of sunlight too.
Perhaps we should be thinking more in terms of joyful activities in general and less trying to biohack.
That narrative might work for you, but the bio-hack narrative might work for others.
Maybe the takeaway is to go into things with a positive attitude but also take a personal inventory and adapt if something that is supposed to work doesn’t work for you.
Yes sunlight makes me extremely tired, like if I go for a walk or a picnic or something I'll end up far more exhausted than anything else can explain. I wonder if it's some kind of overcompensating effect due to my typical lack of it.
To answer a bunch of questions: Yes, I had bloodwork done later showing my D3 level in the typical range. Whether that was due to the supplement, or diet, or lifestyle I can't say. I take 1 pill (USP certified) on average 2-3x per week. So not every day.
I've got treatment resistant depression and have tried probably everything else you're about to suggest. The only thing that kind of helped was dihydrotestosterone, but that is now illegal in the US. Also tianeptine and vorinostat, but also very hard to get in the US these days.
Did you try vorinostat yourself to treat depression, or was it coincidental? I never heard of that for depression, but looking at the mechanism it can make sense-- some HDAC inhibitors have powerful effects on mental issues
10k IU's a day is what it took me. I found that value almost by accident, while starting to follow Stan Efferding's Vertical Diet, which recommends that as a part of a suite of daily vitamins (it is much better than the name belies). IMO anyone who works a desk job should take 10k IU's daily. I fell out of the habit during covid quarantine and my levels (and my mood) were dangerously low when I came out on the other side.
I wasn't depressed but had low energy levels. I started taking 24,000 IU a day and within two weeks I had way more energy, constantly elevated mood and just felt happy overall. I recently lowered the dose to 12,000 IU per day. I did blood test before that and I had super low Vitamin D3 levels and I live quite far up north.
5k IUs is well beyond anything your body has a use for, and in fact is above what your body can tolerate! [0]
> RDA: The Recommended Dietary Allowance for adults 19 years and older is 600 IU daily for men and women, and for adults >70 years it is 800 IU daily.
> UL: The Tolerable Upper Intake Level is the maximum daily intake unlikely to cause harmful effects on health. The UL for vitamin D for adults and children ages 9+ is 4,000 IU.
So it's possible your 5k IUs were causing you more harm than good.
Highly doubt 5k IUs is the issue. Some select quotes from "Vitamin D Is Not as Toxic as Was Once Thought: A Historical and an Up-to-Date Perspective" by Michael Holick in Mayo Clinic Proceedings [0]:
> Ekwaru et al recently reported on more than 17,000 healthy adult volunteers participating in a preventative health program and taking varying doses of vitamin D up to 20,000 IU/d. These patients did not demonstrate any toxicity, and the blood level of 25(OH)D in those taking even 20,000 IU/d was less than 100 ng/mL.
> The evidence is clear that vitamin D toxicity is one of the rarest medical conditions and is typically due to intentional or inadvertent intake of extremely high doses of vitamin D (usually in the range of >50,000-100,000 IU/d for months to years).
[0] is an editorial and [1] seemingly went unpublished, other than in PLOS One, which means it goes through a very different peer review process than most other journals (that is, no peer review on its content, only on its methodology).
The "tolerable upper limit" for vitamin D is set absurdly low.
I have perused the literature on D toxicity and each case involved someone taking at least 100k IU per day, and usually way more than that. I take 50k IU per day every winter and have never had an issue. Blood calcium levels normal, etc
5k IU is an average dose and will absolutely not cause harm.
Someone who is wholly uninterested in the credential theory of epistemology. Back to reddit with that, please.
> This is wildly irresponsible to post, and should be removed from HN.
You don't seem to know what the TUIL actually means. The tolerable upper intake level of a substance is not the actual safe upper limit, it just guarantees that a certain level is safe. In the case of vitamin D, the actual safe upper limit is likely an order of magnitude higher, which was even acknowledged by the people who, very conservatively, set the TUIL at 4k IU.[0] If 4k IU is completely safe (which it is), then there is nothing at all irresponsible about suggesting that 5k IU is completely safe (which it is), unless that extra 1000 IU somehow accomplishes some deleterious effect, which it doesn't.
That extra 1000 IU between 4k and 5k is simply insignificant. To put all these numbers in context, the body synthesizes the equivalent of anywhere from 4k-12k IU per day from sunlight,[1][2] and possibly 20k+ IU if you're sunbathing with most of your skin exposed.[3] So really, a 5k dose is in the low to moderate range. If 5k IU of vitamin D is scary or irresponsible, then getting even a little sun exposure is really scary and irresponsible!
> Someone who is wholly uninterested in the credential theory of epistemology.
So nobody qualified to answer this question? That's what I expected. In medicine more so than in nearly any other field, qualified experts should be the only people to express opinions publicly, considering the potential negative outcomes.
You really shouldn't be giving medical advice on any website, Reddit or Hacker News. This is on the same level as anti-vaxx shit, I hope you realize.
This, more than Reddit, is a place where qualified people discuss topics. If you'd like to wildly speculate, that sounds more like what happens on Reddit.
And yet, not a single reputable journal will publish those papers, the medical community won't change the recommendations, and those studies go unreplicated.
It seems like there's an undereducated underground on the Internet that has the hubris to think they know more than the medical consensus, so what you're seeing are the effects of that hubris, nothing more.
Turns out Vitamin D is the anti-vaxx of computer nerds. Pretty hypocritical, but unsurprising.
That assumes your body is absorbing all of it. I suspect a lot of people's aren't, hence the high doses. I have found for example that 1000iu in the form of drops under the tongue has dramatically more effect than 1000iu in the form of a chewable tablet.
Those numbers are wrong by an order of magnitude, because the original estimation was based on faulty math. The actual dose needed to bring serum levels up for most people would be far higher.
I'm going to go ahead and trust Harvard Medicine over a single study that has since gone largely uncited, and was published in "Nutrients" which carries an h-index of 115 (Nature, for example, carries an h-index of 1226) [0][1].
You should never judge an article by where it was published (some exceptions of course), only in the quality of the work. Impact factors are loosely a measurement of significance of the work, in terms of how broadly applicable they are to the fields of science. It is absolutely not a strict measure of the expected quality of the article.
Also, for what it's worth, most of the articles referenced in the Harvard Medicine review referring to dosages are from before 2010, so they may be out of date.
And why should I trust you? You've given a decree, "Thou shalt not judge a paper based on where it was published!" and then don't give any reasons why that would be the case.
Also, I'm not qualified to judge a paper by its work quality, I need to rely on the experts in the field for that, and a decent proxy for that judgement is where a paper gets published, so by looking at where a paper was published, I am judging a paper by its quality.
Sorry, I thought my reason was clear from my comment. I did not intend it as a decree you should follow blindly. I’ll expand on my explanation.
Impact factor is not a measurement of an individual article’s quality. It is a summary statistic, a rough measurement for how frequently that particular journal gets cited in other journals.
By judging an individual article by the impact factor of its journal, without reading the article and determing its quality yourself, you bias yourself to whatever those results might be one way or another with a statistic not intended to relay any information about the journal article itself.
You are right that it is a decent proxy where higher impact tends to have better journal quality (anecdotal, but I have observed this for sure) but I got annoyed when you claimed an article published in a low impact journal had no merit. That is simply not the case.
You can have the best, high quality scientific study ever about a highly specific thing, but because it is so specific you won’t have the broad impact that would get into one of the top tier journals. But with your viewpoint, that study would get thrown out the window.
did you get blood work done again though after taking the 5K IUs for a while? it's possible that the supplementation didn't bring your Vit D levels to within range and you need 10K IUs+. Of course, I'm not suggesting this would necessarily help with your depression, but just pointing that you gotta be scientific/anecdotal when it comes to supplementation/blood panels
No, 5000 IU per day is generally considered the highest non megadose. Make sure it is good quality (D3, USP in the US), and it should be fine. Some people say also to take K2 (also make sure it's USP in the US), but I'm not sure the exact supposed mechanism of protection from adverse effects from D3. Something about preventing calcium from leaching from the bones and accumulating in the blood, I think.
"Vitamin D controls the absorption of calcium into the blood. Vitamin K2 controls where that calcium ends up.
"Over-supplementation of vitamin D3 without ample vitamin K2 leads to problems of excess calcium.
"If calcium isn’t laid into bone, it will find itself in other tissues, like your arteries. Calcium in the arteries is BAD. It contributes to atherosclerosis and vessel stiffness."
Unless you are a doctor that has been monitoring the poster, you have no idea if that is true. My blood levels are consistently deficient when I’m not taking 10,000 IU/day (and this is with a fair amount of daily sun exposure.) People have widely varying needs.
I use 60,000 to 90,000 IU's per day and have been doing so for years. The most I have taken in a 24 hour period is 140,000 IU's. There is no way I could have started off at those levels however. It would have induced major hypercalcemia had I done that prior to mobilizing all the stored/misplaced calcium in my gut and vasculature. I am not suggesting anyone else do this. One must have a specific need when doing this.
I only mention this to say that one can go well above the RDA/RDI that are highly contested to be far too low for modern diets, environmental inputs and lifestyles.
> Taking 60,000 international units (IU) a day of vitamin D for several months has been shown to cause toxicity. This level is many times higher than the U.S. Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) for most adults of 600 IU of vitamin D a day. [0]
That would certainly be true had I done that from day one as I had mentioned. Their documentation as with most medical documentation is based on the lowest common denominators. They will not risk explaining why one might do what I am doing.
I suppose time will tell. I've been doing this a number of years. I will check back in a few more years to see how things are going. Honestly the cholecalciferol levels are the least taboo of the biohacking I do with myself. The more risky testing I did was to see how high I could go on the tocotrienols, tocopherols and fibrinolytic enzymes before I ran into bleeding.
That's a crazy amount. I had a very low blood test started supplementing with k2/5000 vitamin d several years ago and my blood levels have been fine ever since.
100mcg for each initial 5000 IU's for the day but I stop at 800mcg of K2 MK-7 regardless. I sometimes also take K2 MK-4 in addition to that. I also get a small amount of K2 from eggs.
I took 15k IU daily (at the advice of my doctor) for several months at one point to get my levels back up. I don't remember the numbers, but my levels were extremely low.
Sitting in the sun however seems to do more than just “increase vitamin d levels”. The sensation is just overwhelmingly lovely. It seems to reduce cortisol, makes you feel tired in a euphoric way. Animals love to warm their fur in shafts of sunlight too.
Perhaps we should be thinking more in terms of joyful activities in general and less trying to biohack.