I've been tracking my depression for a few years now, and I'm amazed at the number of things that can trigger a depressive episode. I used to think I had a disease called depression, but it now appears that I had arrived at a collection of various life circumstances that made experiencing depression on any given day more likely for me.
Some of the main triggers have been:
- Attempting to proceed without a plan
- Pushing for more productivity when less is called for (New year's resolutions were a great example personally)
- Bad sleep (I now use the calculator at sleepyti.me and have had great results)
- Too much exercise without rest days
- Too much exposure to social experience
- Too few dopamine-injecting experiences (e.g. not enough achievement, not nibbling away at my problems and watching leverage build up)
Strikingly to me, some of these seem tied to my psychology and I would hesitate to tell others "hey not having a plan is bad for you" when I know some people for whom planning is a mental health liability. Personalized medicine can't get good enough, fast enough.
Indeed, I personally do see similar triggers, but for me too little exerting exercise and I'm starting to mentally fall apart. This means daily exerting myself. I can skip a few days here and there but then I have to play catch up to "fill back the tank". The trickiest thing for me to notice that was that there's definitely some buildup phenomenon (the "tank" thing), when it's going down I think I'm fine but by the time I start to feel bad it's already too late and filling it back up takes as much time as I skipped exercising, which is even harder since I'm mentally down, driving a nasty feedback loop. As the best exercise for me is outdoors (skateboarding and calisthenics) this puts me in a delicate situation where I'm constantly on the edge during winter time.
As for social experience is a tight rope for me: too much and I'm burning out, too little and I'm crashing hard.
Real vacations also help to put work stress into a proper perspective. In day-to-day worklife it's sometimes too easy to forget that work is there to support the other aspects of life, and not vice versa.
This is interesting and resonates with me. While I agree with your conclusion about giving advice, could you perhaps share your methodology for discovering your triggers?
Every negative episode I deal with gets tracked and logged. I have a notebook just for this purpose, I time stamp my results, and I try to develop my own theories of what might be going on, and what might have happened, while remaining open to trying others' ideas (that's how I found out about sleep cycles, dopamine, etc.). My purpose is to develop a framework which gives me greater leverage against the suffering.
When I feel low, I immediately put myself in a resting state (usually laying down) and start logging and taking notes.
Incidentally my lowest periods of depression produce about 2 to 3 negative thoughts per minute for up to 30 to 45 minutes at a time, whereupon my body naturally seems to cycle out of that a bit before returning. So I'm noticing that even really depressed days have lots of little less-depressed leverage points where I can trust my judgments and rally myself to make smart decisions.
This tracking and logging and modeling stuff was not something with which I was familiar before I started studying a bit of personality psychology. I basically looked for tools that would help someone like me, but that I hadn't yet tried.
Your tracking reminds me of the book Eloquent Javascript. A chapter walks through a story where a guy would turn into a squirrel every night and he doesn't know why. He tracks everything and run correlations on it to find a cause. http://eloquentjavascript.net/04_data.html
Thanks for sharing your methods... very proactive and persistent.
> Bad sleep (I now use the calculator at sleepyti.me and have had great results)
Interesting site, didn't knew about it!
I've checked it out, and as I wake everyday at 7am, it suggests me four different hours: 10pm, 11:30pm, 1am and 2:30am. What I find interesting is that none of it matches exactly the 8h average sleep value. As you say that you have had great results, could you comment a little bit on that?
8 hours is typically time from bedtime to wake time. It allows for some time spent falling asleep, and maybe one wake-up to visit the bathroom.
You'll notice that your suggested wake times are an hour and a half apart. Natural sleep cycles tend to run about 90 minutes (on average). So 7.5 hours would be 5 cycles. 8 hours is 5 cycles plus that buffer time.
I haven't used the app you mention, but I have begun a habit of getting out of bed between cycles instead of whenever in the cycle my alarm goes off. It definitely increases morning alertness and willingness to get up. Not sure it affects restedness much.
And I've been measuring my sleep in cycles (or at least in 90 min increments) instead of in hours - which gives me a much clearer perspective on how much I've had and need.
The point of the calculator is to time your sleep so that you wake up between REM sleep cycle (rather than being awoken by your alarm in the middle of a REM cycle, which usually puts you in groggy zombie mode). The calculator works off the assumption that the average sleep cycle is 90 minutes (1.5 hours), so it calculates times that would allow you to wake up between sleep cycles (9 hours, 7.5 hours, 6 hours, and 4.5 hours all being multiples of 1.5 hours).
I often push it too far and stay up till 3AM and wake up around 7:45 and then I can just proceed normally that day. I'm a bit melancholic on those days, but that's it :D
I was a bit surprised that this site suggested the 3AM as an option to fall asleep.
magnesium deficiencies have been known to cause depression and anxiety as well, so make sure to eat plenty of leafy green vegetables and pumpkin seeds.
>>severely doubt multivitamins can help with depression
If the multivitamin has sufficient Vitamin D, it definitely can. There are plenty of research papers indicating at least some sort of link, and Soviet Sports scientists have known about the performance benefits for a long time, well prior to oral supplementation (they irradiated athletes).
Consider replacing the fish oil with algae-derived omega 3. It has all the benefits with none of the downsides (toxic metals, fishy burps, environmental cost). Fish get their omega 3 from algae anyway so why not go straight to the source?
However the article doesn't describe any new research and cites a meta-analysis that has a different conclusion:
"A target range of 25(OH)D of greater than 30 ng/mL could be achieved in most individuals by intake of approximately 1000 IU per day of vitamin D3, which is one quarter the National Academy of Sciences–Institute of Medicine tolerable upper level of intake of 4000 IU per day at ages 9 years and older. Although it is above the National Academy of Sciences–Institute of Medicine–recommended daily allowance of 600 to 800 IU per day, intake of 1000 IU per day has been reported as safe for daily use for almost all adults, according to the recent Endocrine Society clinical guidelines. Still, some authors have expressed concern about the efficacy and absolute safety of doses greater than 1000 IU per day, so caution is reasonable. The Endocrine Society has established a tolerable upper-limit intake of 10 000 IU per day at ages 19 years and older. Doses of vitamin D3 below 10 000 IU per day in adults have not been associated with toxicity, and serum 25(OH)D concentrations less than 200 ng/mL are generally not considered toxic. This leaves a considerable margin of safety for efforts to raise the population concentration of 25(OH)D to 40 ng/mL."
Interesting that this stems in part from misinterpretation of confidence intervals. The referenced paper, A Statistical Error in the Estimation of the Recommended Dietary Allowance for Vitamin D [0], seems like an excellent example to illustrate how (and how not) to interpret confidence intervals.
A couple years after I moved to Seattle I started noticing some odd aches and pains. After a coworker had similar issues, I went to the doctor, and they tested my Vitamin D levels. They were ridiculously low. They had me on a high initial dose, and than taking supplements ever since. I've heard the same story from tons of neighbors. Nowadays it's one of my first suggestions for new transplants. It's made a marked difference (along with a sunlamp).
If you intend to take vitamin d I read in various places you should also take magnesium and probably vitamin k as well. And less calcium. Everything is interconnected.
I recently started taking 3000mg of magnesium per day as magnesium chelate. The bottle recommends three capsules per day for muscle spasms / cramps.
Historically, I have a couple of basic assault charges, an assault with sexual intent charge, I was charged with two counts of trafficking a controlled drug (later dropped).
Shortly after I commenced taking six capsules a day I started feeling a lot less psychotic.
I would also recommend taking Zinc with it. I was taking Magnesium at one point by itself and developed a muscle twitch which was fixed by adding Zinc.
Everything is very interconnected. The underdose and overdose numbers are determined in isolation, just as any good scientific experiment should.
Casual observation reveals that vitamin D overdose results in hypercalcemia, a condition treatable by vitamin K. Vitamin E overdose results in hemmorrhaging, a condition treatable by vitamin K. There are no known symptoms of vitamin K overdose. Vitamin A overdose (from retinol) can be treated by vitamin E and vitamin K.
Magnesium is balanced with calcium. Sodium is balanced with potassium.
So naturally, I wonder what happens when you supply vitamin K in excess, then determine the overdose amounts for the other fat-soluble vitamins. Once that number is found, reduce the K by steps and repeat, until you have the recommended minimum ratio of K to the other vitamin.
About once every 6 months I remember to start taking my vit D supplements again. I've always taken more than the recommended dose because vitamin D is not extremely bioavailable in pill-form, and I notice amazing improvements in mood, mostly. Usually I am sad in the mornings. I have a cup of coffee, browse around on HN, and then convince myself to do work, and the sadness goes away with the distraction, and by the evening I feel pretty good for "doing so much work". When I take vitamin D, after about a week I begin to wake up and set to work immediately, leaving time in the evening for fucking around. I really should do that now, before finals.
Same experience for me. The University of Washington headache clinic recommended Vitamin D and Magnesium supplements and it made a marked difference in my mood. Turns out having constant mild headaches is pretty depressing.
This effect is more pronounced with lower-quality magnesium supplements, such as magnesium oxide, magnesium sulfate, and magnesium chloride. These compounds are insoluble in water (magnesium oxide), or their counter-ions are not absorbed (magnesium sulfate). Magnesium + glycine (specifically bisglycinate which is the magnesium salt with two glycine molecules) is more bioavailable and does not have a laxative effect since glycine is easily absorbed by cell walls. Magnesium citrate also does not have a marked laxative effect and is more bioavailable than magnesium oxide, but less bioavailable than magnesium bisglycinate.
Thank you for the info, I'll check those out, my medication is thought to affect nutrient levels so I take supplements (I found out about the laxative effects myself..)
If the recommendations of this study become the guideline, it may validate the other studies suggesting that nearly everyone is deficient in magnesium, which is a co-factor in the Vitamin D / calcium cycle.
AFAIK (and correct me if I'm wrong), the vitamin D metabolism requires magnesium, calcium, vitamin K2, and vitamin A. K2 in particular needs special attention, as it's the hardest of the substrates to get.
It seems dishonest to hide content that may be relevant to the discussion, especially after teasing it that way. Maybe if it warrants mentioning in your original comment it also warrants explaining why you think it's irrelevant?
There's no dishonesty. They are easily found for anyone interested. As I said the horse been has beaten to death so I didn't want to do what I was discouraging others from doing.
They are mostly uneducated, lazy, decade-old, hand-wavy, and baseless personal attacks on him.
The man has been a geek, engineer, programmer and a techie for multiple decades.
He has been on record for the past 12-13 years audio, video and text transcripts, 2-3 hours per week, discussing many topics in detail, explaining his thoughts and ideas and reasoning carefully (on SecurityNow podcast, 600+ episodes!).
Every time he has made a mistake he comes back and carefully corrects himself, and it doesn't happen often either.
He is no Linus Torvalds, and he doesn't claim to be one, most of us aren't either.
And his knowledge goes into all sorts of weird corners from science fiction to medicine like the vitamin D stuff and the "sleep formula".
All of it available for free for anyone who has the patience to sit through it and learn. I have, and he has improved my life in many ways that I owe him for and can never pay back (including starting to take vitamin D many years ago after he talked about as I have referred to).
He has contributed positively to this community and industry for many years. He has done nothing to deserve people bringing up stupid pages that call him a "charlatan" or "snake oil salesman" every time someone calls his name.
There isn't even any substance to those claims. Most of them say "he said XP raw sockets were bad!! GET HIM!!".
Or variations of "Spinrite doesn't fix prostate cancer. It must be snake oil software.".
He has probably explained 10+ hours on SecurityNow the history behind Spinrite, what it does, what it doesn't, why it works, where it works, where it doesn't work and everything in between.
But these bitter 20-something neckbeards are too busy for that. Let's jump the man that has been a programmer for longer than you have existed because he uses assembly or something ... GET HIM!
I have no horse in this race. I'm just angry at the smug reply that inevitably follows every time him or his pages/products/projects are mentioned.
As if everyone needs to be warned about this monster of a man for the unimaginable sins he committed 10+ years ago when he said something about XP raw sockets, or something else.
If these people criticising him had produced a tenth of the content that he has produced they would have made many more mistakes.
What are we to do now? Crucify Gibson because his Spinrite software doesn't perform miracles? Or because he has made a few mistakes here and there? Everyone else is perfect?
Are we going to dig up the past history of everyone else who is mentioned too? And link to a page that enumerates the minor mistakes they have made over their entire career?
Go dig up Github commits to shame people who introduced stupid bugs in open source software? (not that he has, just an example)
Or how about we dig through their medium posts, conference presentations, and list and archive any possible mistakes.
Then every time someone mentions them say "HEY LOOK EVERY BODY THIS PERSON HAS MADE 3 WHOLE MISTAKES SINCE 10 YEARS AGO, THEY ARE CLEARLY A MONSTER! STAY FAR AWAY.".
It is completely uncalled for and has gotten real old.
He doesn't come here to write something like this himself so I had to do it for him.
Steve, if you ever read this, thank you for your work.
Edit: fixed some typos, added some additional sentences
Jesus man, I think you overestimate the amount of people with an axe to grind against Steve Gibson and you're letting whatever negativity, real or imagined, majorly distract from your original comment.
This article recommends around 100 nmol/L. Most people are between 20-30, because they don't get enough Sun and do not take supplements. It gets really really bad when the number gets below 10 and it takes months to recover.
Another Vitamin whose deficiency cause irreversible damage is B12. Folks, get both of these checked.
I happen to have a gene mutation that makes methylation of B12 inefficient. I never did well in chemistry or biology for that matter, but my limited understanding is that methylation is necessary for it to be useful.
It turns out that you can buy methylated B12 called methylcobalamin. The more common form is cyanocobalamin, and is not very useful for people like myself.
That is my understanding, if anyone here knows better or more, please correct me.
Thanks for this added information. I discovered the same thing, with another family member where Methylcobalamin worked wonders and Cyanocobalamin didn't.
One thing I would add is that Methylcobalamin needs to be injected to work best. If people do not have your gene mutation, they are better off taking Cyanocobalamin.
PS: Whenever someone in family has major health issue which no one can get handle on - they reach out to me. My lifelong dream has been to cure Cancer using AI. Just started working on that.
Typically it is further up the methylation pathway. You might need methyltetrahydrofolate (5-MTHR, brand names Metafolin and Deplin) supplementation combined with methyl-B12.
Because of impaired kidney function, I get my vitamin D levels monitored every month. Yes supplements can take 2-3 months to increase the levels. The sun actually works pretty good if you can stay outside 15 minutes in noon sun. But that's difficult in the winter months.
I've read varying reports of how much sun you need to generate a day's supply of vitamin D, but rarely do they mention how much skin needs to be exposed.
Face only? Face and arms? Entire upper body? Entire body?
Is there some online resource for this with time of year and latitude corrections? I imagine there's quite a difference between vitamin D production in noon sun in Fairbanks Alaska versus Miami Florida.
"John Jacob Cannell, MD, executive director of The Vitamin D Council, notes that the skin makes 10,000 IU of vitamin D after 30 minutes of full-body sun exposure. He suggests that 10,000 IU of vitamin D is not toxic."
For it, my face and arms are exposed. I walk in the bay area sun for 15 minutes after lunch. Doing this regularly over a month or two will boost my numbers from the mid 20s to mid 30s.
Not to mention it needs to be adjusted for skin tone. The whole reason that humans have a range of skin tones is that paler skin allows for better vitamin D absorption at higher latitudes.
Depends on a lot of things as you mentioned, but also especially on your pigmentation/levels of sunburn. I'm very dark skinned, so I need a lot longer for UV rays to penetrate.
Note that in the winter months even if you're naked outside in the UK you won't get any vitamin D, the sun is too low, the latitude (about same as Alaska) too high.
I've never read a recommendation for 100 nmol/L before. Previous numbers were around 50-70 nmol/L. So this seems noteworthy.
There also appears to be some evidence to support Vitamin K2 as a complement to Vitamin D supplementation, in order to reduce or prevent cardiovascular calcification.
I just want to say the b complexes are indeed super important, but recent studies indicate a potential link between overly high dosage and some types of cancers, particularly in men. So be wary of overdoing it with those 3000% dv supplements.
5-hr energy drinks have 8333% the recommended dosage!! When I saw this I threw mine away, that’s a scary amount, considering the cancer link as you said.
The occasional B vitamin overdose is unlikely to harm you. B vitamins are water soluble, so if you consume more than you need you'll just pee it out within 24 hours. And the toxic levels for most B vitamins are between 100 and 10,000 times the recommended levels.
What if the increase in lung cancer was caused by more breathes being taken. It would be funny if both the “energy/metabolism” crowd and the “cancer” risk proponents were correct.
Yes, please. I'm spreading this news for years. Many are deficient in both. B12 has a name for being low in veg*ans, while that is true many omnis are deficient as well.
It's good to have more papers published on "high-dose D3". But by what I read this has been know for many years.
And shun multi-AZ tablets, they provide a false sense of security. Eat loads of fresh produce and beans, that should help with most of your nutrition needs. Shun dairy and processed foods -- they kill you. Limit (or drop) meat, fish and eggs. Finally you want to eat a brazil nut every day for your selenium.
Supplement D3 and B12. Possibly (after doing your research) iodine, iron, high-DHA omega 3.
Drop meat, fish, eggs, dairy products...what's left? Vegan cuisine?
Not that it wasn't obvious, but you should still disclose your bias.
Good luck with your vegan diet. I hope that beans and veggies can provide for all your nutrition needs. But better keep going to those regular doctor checkups.
Yes. Let's call it plant-based. As veganism is much broad and often based on ethics. Where plant-based diets mostly based on scientific findings. Especially the whole-plant (WFPB) diet seems to have a lot of scientific backing in being the healthiest diet.
> I hope that beans and veggies can provide for all your nutrition needs.
Thanks. But this is more then well proven by studies now. And I did my checkups, only D and B12 were deficient (now fixed). I never felt healthier. See "the china study" and "the adventist studies". Also the nutritionfacts.org website/YTchannel and MicTheVegan will give you a good overview of the scientific evidence behind the health benefits of a whole plant-based diet.
> Not that it wasn't obvious, but you should still disclose your bias.
We're all biased. I'm not paid say this, or paid by big-broccolli, thus no conflict of interest :)
Without being too facetious, do you have anything to contribute as to why you might think dropping meat, fish, and eggs from your diet would be detrimental?
The benefits of eliminating meat include reduced markers of inflammation within the body. Reduction of cholesterol. Changes in gut microbiome which as the emerging science is describing may have a more important impact on mood and cognition than we previously thought. Lengthening of telomeres. Oh and how about making the single most impactful change an individual can make to reduce climate change.
From my understanding of the subject the only real downside from eliminating meat or reducing it substantially is the reduction in essential B vitamins provided. This is widely recognized by those who promote a plant-based diet and the solution is to simply supplement with a super B vitamin supplement.
> the only real downside from eliminating meat or reducing it substantially is the reduction in essential B vitamins provided.
Only the B12 actually. And omnis are also often deficient. Even industrially farmed animals were deficient until they started to supplement their feed (so when eating industrial meat, you indirectly eat supplement).
The B12 deficiency in those eating plant-based is a hygiene issue: before settling in villages we ate a lot of "soil" with our food, and drank a lot of soil-run-off surface water. As the soil contains a lot of B12 and the microbes that create it (which probably can even live in our intestines).
What is the correct conversion? Quest, one of the dominant lab providers in the US, reports in ng/mL and I'm not sure how to interpret my result in nmol/L.
The recommended daily intake of Vitamin D currently seems to be ~600 IU for adults. This article is arguing that this recommended dosage should be increased thirteen-fold to 8,000 IU for adults.
Summary is adults need at least 8000 IU of Vitamin D per day.
This confirm what I have suspected since almost a decade. I have been taking 5k Vitamin D per day since one of my cousin had serious health issues because of low vitamin D for 3 years and as soon as she started having 5k IU per day, they disappeared within a month.
Basically yes. I didn't read the paper, but the abstract says that our current recommendations were designed to get us past a threshold of 50 (nmol/L, but the units aren't that important).
But they claim that we should be aiming to get above 75, and it would be best if we could get above 100. So drink more fortified milk.
Edit: oops, looks like I read it wrong. 50 nmol/L isn't the threshold the current RDA gets us to, it's way lower than that.
You would need to drink over 4 gallons of fortified milk per day to get the recommended 8000 IU. Milk just isn't fortified enough, because the current daily recommendations are so low.
Leave some mushrooms out in the sun, gills up, and enjoy ;). Though you may want to calculate it out first. This research survey at least makes me more confident in taking larger doses of vitamin D.
I assume the article is about milk since it's very common to drink milk in Finland. I'd wager most adults drink milk both with lunch and dinner as long as it fits the cuisine.
The amount of disinformation commonly expressed about vitamin D is quite amazing.
Bogus claims:
1. Spend a couple of minutes outside and you will be OK.
2. It is absorbed through the eyes.
3. Deficiencies are rare.
When in fact:
1. Does not apply at any time when your body is covered up mostly. Wear trousers and a T-shirt and you've cut yourself off severely already. Add weather with less sun, sunscreen, and/or more clothes and you've cut yourself off almost entirely unless you are outside for very long periods of time.
2. Fuck no.
3. They are extremely common even in sunny places. In the developed world a majority of people are.
You'd think sunny places would fare better - however after moving to Key West from Montreal I discovered people here spent a lot of effort avoiding the sun (skin cancer is big down here).
If you wear clothes and/or aren't near the equator it's not gonna make a big enough of a difference. Also you're gonna have to balance that with negative sun exposure. Salmon is probably a top vitamin d source, but supplements are probably the cheapest way to pack it in.
Melanoma correlation with sun exposure is tricky; regular (non burning) exposure tends to correlate with lower risk (eg in outdoor workers). Non-melanoma skin cancers are usually curable. It's plausible to argue the benefits of regular non burning sun exposure overweight the risks.
Hmm. "Actions are urgently needed to protect the global population from vitamin D deficiency." I wish this sentence wasn't in the abstract, because it's the first thing the "science journalists" are going to latch on to. It's not like people's bones are snapping because everyone has rickets. Maybe not an urgent need, just something we should publish a revised RDA and diet guideline. We had a very different looking food pyramid when I was growing up, but changing it didn't drastically increase life expectancy. Everyone choking down extra vitamins isn't going to fix a non-existent problem.
It essentially ranks supplements based on the amount of research there is to support the claim (so the same supplement can show up in multiple categories). You can see Vitamin D is backed by a lot of research for various ailments, but the category for which there is least evidence is mood related disorders.
On a side note, be very wary of the supplements you take (in the US). There is virtually no oversight in their manufacture, and various groups' investigations have shown that the claimed dosage can be way, way off. And the inactive ingredients may be false as well. Relying on well known companies did not seem to make a difference.
I recall an interview with a pharmacist at a hospital that had decided they test the supplements they had in stock - given that they were giving them to patients. They were rather shocked.
If anyone has a good resource where a group tests different manufacturers' supplements and has some kind of reliability rating, I'd love to know. I pretty much stopped taking supplements when I saw how unreliable the claimed dosages were.
>6 of the 19 products in this report exceeded their label claims by greater than 40%.
>All 19 vitamin D supplements met or exceeded their claimed vitamin D3 content, ranging from +0 to +900.0 IU versus their stated label claims.
>The average label variance in this testing batch was 22%.
Wow.
Let's look at melatonin:
>Only half of the products tested (15 of 30) measured melatonin levels within 10% of their label claims. 7 products deviated from their claims for melatonin by at least 25%. 3 of those products recorded 40% or more melatonin than their label claims, and 1 product had less than 1% of its label claim for melatonin.
Vitamin B12:
>Overall, vitamin B12 measurements in this batch analysis ranged from 515 mcg to 6990 mcg per serving, deviating from label claims by an average of 27%. 3 products also recorded vitamin B6 and/or vitamin B9. 9 of the 13 products recorded more vitamin B12 than claimed, with one product recording as much as 74% of its label claim for vitamin B12. All products passed heavy metal screenings, and recorded vitamin B12 levels considered to be safe by the Institute of Medicine (IOM)1.
Henry Osieki in the 9th edition of his book The Nutrient Bible factors increasing demand for Vitamin D include:
alcohol, autoimmune reactive arthritis, bile problems, cancer (breast, prostate, colon, and skin). Crohn's disease, cystic fibrosis, elderly individuals, hypoparathyroidism, intestinal disorders, insulin dependent diabetes, kidney disorders, lack of exposure to sun, mineral oil intake multiple sclerosis, obesity pancreatic disease, pregnancy, rickets, schizophrenia, smog exposure, ulcerative colitis, use of anti convulsants e.g. phenytoin and phenobarbital, steroid medication, vegetarianism.
Functions facilitated: anti-proliferative effect - osteosarcoma, melanoma, colon and breast cancer, apoptosis, anti-inflammatory action, blood clotting, calcium and phosphate absorption and regulation, cofactor in synthesis of heat shock proteins, differentiates leukaemia cells and induces apoptosis, heart and muscle action, helps induce monocyte conversion to macrophages, increases bone strength, induces apoptosis in breast and prostate cancer, increases neurotrophic factor synthesis (NGF, GDNF, NF-3), increases the activity of tyrosine hydroxylase and choline acetyltransferase, increases neural glutathione levels, inhibits iNOS and TFN - alpha activity, immune-regulating properties, mineralisation of bone and teeth potent anti-proliferative agent in the colon, protects against neurotoxicity associated with ischaemia, reduces the risk of colorectal and prostate cancer, regulates cellular differentiation in intestinal cells, regulates or inhibits T-cell mediated immune response, regulation of calcium and phosphorous metabolism, selectively reduces interleukin 2 levels and proliferation of T cells, stimulates polyamine, stimulator of ornithine decarboxylase and spermidine acetyl transferase.
Interesting admission. There's been recognition of subclinical vitamin D deficiencies for years in the professional athlete community, a segment of the population at higher risk of bone and tissue disorders:
I've tried out a handful of supplements for Vitamin D but haven't landed on a good one. Has anyone tested, tried specific supplements, and then retested and documented results?
This makes it sound impossible for some people to get enough vitamin D from sun and food without supplements. If you're fair skinned and living in northern climates, you'll be deficient even with a healthy diet given that you can't be out in the sun that long without burning. Is the human body that defective?
This is true, yes. But really both have issues. It takes much longer in the sun for a dark skinned person to get enough exposure to produce a healthy amount of D. But the fair skinned person burns readily, so they can't stay in the sun long without protection which would inhibit getting enough sun.
Living in scandinavia I've taken vitamin D every winter. But lately started taking it all year.
I've been sloppy and it seems to coincide with periods of poor energy and a bad mood.
I'm not sure if the energy and mood precede the drop in vitamin use or vice versa. But either way I think it's good to supplement if you live up north.
If you're looking for a better way to get vitamin D from supplements, try drops instead of pills. Each drop contains ~1000 IU, so you could get around 40,000 IU with just a dropper-full... For most of us, a week's worth of 40,000 IU/day could really be a boost.
"Taking 50,000 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 Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) for most adults of 600 IU of vitamin D a day.Feb 5, 2015" (https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-h...)
Anyone who takes Vitamin D supplement, make sure you take 25-Hydroxy (Calcifediol) and not the active form - 1,25 dihydroxy (Calcitriol).
Active form has severe side effects and is not supposed to be used for supplementation unless in you have kidney problem which prevent metabolizing 25-Hydroxy.
I thought all D2 and D3 supplements would be ergocalciferol and cholecalciferol, respectively, while calcitriol is what gets tested to assess blood levels. Do any supplements actually contain calcitriol?
Medical system in India is a mess of kickbacks. A Doctor gave my cousin a prescription of Calcitriol because it was much more expensive. Led to major side effects which went away as soon as it was stopped.
Supplements don't have it. However that warning was for someone who goes out of way to acquire Calcitriol.
I always wondered about this. Since I was very young, let's say after age 14 or so I rarely travelled for summer vacation and was living in Europe and had almost no vitamin D from sunlight (working as software engineer and being a nerd so all my hobbies were indoors).
I have always felt like I missed having a good time at a beach while sun was shining (I remember it from family vacations when I was very young). Since then I have spent couple of months in a country near equator and gotten lots of (hours per day) sunlight. I feel healthier and happier now.
I also used to have deficiency of vitamin B when I was very young. I remember I had to eat lots of fish oil to replenish my B complex (recommended by my doctor).
Several years ago I read an article on Facebook about vitamin D, and because I was in pain and tried many things like this, I read more about it, and started using 2000 IU daily. In about two weeks I felt a lot better. Later that year I was on holiday in the mediterrenean and noticed how much better I felt after a morning in the sun. This made me decide to take even more, so I increased use to 6000 IU/d, and I felt even better.
Several weeks ago I had my blood tested, and I came out under 100nmol, which shocked me. I changed pills immediately, and am going to test again. I want levels to be around 120, so I'm going to test once again. I'm going to call my docter right now in fact.
I recommend 1000 IU drops. They contain 1000 IU in a single drop, literally. You can get them off the shelf at my local health foods co-op. I've taken 40,000 IU before in a single day (I read that was a safe upper limit for most people). It felt amazing. It also helped me process built up emotions from winter darkness and depression. That day I took 40000IU I literally wept, then felt relief like none other, and a lightness of being.
Also, by the way, people under stress might appreciate some vitamin B complex. There's a reason why they put vitamin B in those 5 hour energy drinks: it helps our bodies cope with the stress of that much caffeine.
Be careful with that kind of dose! To compensate for insufficiency, it's totally OK, but I wouldn't take it daily. You may start suffering from calcification of the bones. This cannot be undone.
Its good to be cautious. I did some research to come up with this upper limit as an amount to take on a given day, and also wouldn't be worried about taking this daily for a week since I live in Minnesota and am chronically deficient.
"Taking 50,000 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 Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) for most adults of 600 IU of vitamin D a day.Feb 5, 2015" (https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-h...)
I read another post somewhere that said all you need is 12 minutes of direct sunlight to maximize your Vitamin D intake. It's because your body can only absorb so much vitamin D at one time, from the Sun.
As for food products, there aren't that many natural sources of vitamin D. Milk is fortified with vitamin D but doesn't come with it naturally.
It drives me crazy that popular brands of soy and almond milk don't have vitamin D. I've long moved off real milk because its really calories dense and gives me gas. Now I'm missing out on one of the few easy sources of vitamin d.
I was recommended Vitamin D by the wife of a Chiropractor. I do 2000IU somewhat daily to every other day in the winter & 5000IU if I feel a cold coming on with some extra zinc. This has made a significant improvement in my ability to fend off colds. That said, I do try to exercise a few times a week & eat as reasonably healthy as one can do in the far north midwest of America.
For Vitamin D 1IU is 0.025mcg.
8000IU = 200mcg
My box of vitamin shows a Vitamin D3 content on 5mcg/pill (noted as 100% of recommended daily intake). Time to change pill I guess...
This is fake news. I'll explain why I think so. Please counter me if I'm wrong.
>>This piece of news is a literal "copy-paste" of the abstract of the article "Big Vitamin D Mistake - BVDM"
BVDM is an article published by a Greek group. About the population from Finland.
BVDM has 2 premises and 2 conclusions.
>Premise 1: There is a correlation (not causation) reported recently in Finland of country-wide vit. D supplementation and lower Diabetes Mellitus type 1 incidence.
>Premise 2: There was a study published in America (Meta Analysis of All Cause Mortality and Vitamin D - MAACVD) that investigated deaths that had the lab values of vitamin D available. The main finding of the study was: Vit. D levels of >30ng/mL is probably better than <9ng/mL, correlated with a lower risk of death (hazard ratio of 1.6 to 2.2).*
THESE ARE THE PREMISES AND NO MORE. Here are their magical conclusions:
>Conclusion 1: The right level of vitamin D is 100ng/mL.
This is apparently extrapolated from a subgroup analysis in MAACVD. I find this extrapolation shocking because: 1- this finding wasn't considered significant enough to be published in the abstract by the original American group. 2- subgroup analyses shouldn't be extrapolated.
>Conclusion 2: in order to make sure everyone gets this alleged "correct vit. D levels", here are the doses of supplementation that everyone should get.
>> As you can see, the conclusions are far outside the realm of possibilities offered by the premises. What the Greek authors did was nitpick a couple of minor points in some random published studies and synthesize them into a magical conclusion of how much more Vit D everyone should take (more than 3x the current recommended amount in some ages).
This is sensationalism. I'm sorry to see such poor material to be presented as science by "scientists" and "scientific journals".
>>Please correct me if I'm wrong.
*PS: I wasn't able to read the MAACVD full article, it wasn't free online. In these kinds of articles, the axis of the study is presented in the abstract, and the most significant findings are never left out. If someone has access to the full text, please share it with me and this forum.
Anybody have tips on balancing all the cofactors? You need other things to absorb & use the vitamin D. Some kind of multivitamin that focused only on D and its cofactors might be handy, without going whole-hog to the "everything" multivitamin popular today.
Is it standard for medical papers to write values with four significant figures when they appear to have less than one significant figure worth of precision? This is an actual question.
Are you talking about the abstract or is there something in the actual paper you're talking about? Because I can't personally see anything in the abstract to suggest that the values quoted to 4 s.f. only have 1 s.f. of precision.
Yes, the abstract. One sentence cites a result suggesting that 8895 IU/d is necessary to reach >= 50nmol/L and the next another that 6201 IU/d is necessary to reach 75 nmol/L. Clearly these aren't compatible to even 1 significant figure. Now, of course this is a matter of accuracy and not of precision, but do you really believe someone's 4 sig figs of precision is at all justified when they disagree with another person's 4 sig figs to such an extent? It's possible, I guess! But I'm betting if you look at the original study you only have 1 or maybe 2 significant figures that are actually justified.
Look further at the paper where the 8895 number comes from [1]. That's the only number reported to more than 2 sig figs in the paper and comes in this context [emphasis mine]: "It also estimated that 8895 IU of vitamin D per day may be needed to accomplish that 97.5% of individuals achieve serum 25(OH)D values of 50 nmol/L or more. As this dose is far beyond the range of studied doses, caution is warranted when interpreting this estimate. Regardless, the very high estimate illustrates that the dose is well in excess of the current RDA of 600 IU per day and the tolerable upper intake of 4000 IU per day [1]." The two figures don't even show half the range needed to see this value and make it pretty clear that this is a laughable amount of precision to report. To make this clear: the value reported is the intercept of the dashed red line with the 50nmol/L line in the second figure -- which has been extrapolated out to a value almost three times as large as the highest dose used in any experiment. And the extrapolation is done on a curve that is getting very close to level at that point so even a minor error in dose response would cause a large error in reported dose. Frankly, after looking at this, I don't think the originally posted article should have quoted this number in its abstract - the point of this paper seems to be to show that the standard value of 600 IU/day is unsupported form the data, not to suggest that their 8895 IU/day is well supported.
Consider the most well-studied nutritional number we ever see: the daily caloric intake! It's never given more than 2 sig figs and often just 1! And this study is making the argument that the daily recommendations for this are off by a factor of 10x. It'll take a lot to convince me that any number in nutrition can be reported to 4 significant figures, and even then I expect that it would be useless since inter-person variation is going to cause at least a 1% difference (probably more like 25% differences like calories just for men/women differences).
I think that vitamin D defficiency may have contributed to start of my Multiple Sclerosis! I used to sit mostly inside all summer programming. So be careful.
The study was about Finland. Scandinavia and northern countries broadly often have a variety of bad health effects from very low VitD levels (including eg very high rates of multiple sclerosis). Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Canada, UK, Germany are among the nations with the highest rates of multiple sclerosis, heavily due to their low VitD.
If you don't get enough sun (a minority of people anywhere on the planet do or can), Vitamin D can be an important supplement no matter where you live. It's well worth it to have a simple blood test done to get your levels checked, if you can at some point, just to know where you stand.
I was just looking this up after reading this article and discovered that an NHS lab can send you a test kit in the post for £28, which will likely be cheaper than any private option.
Go to your GP. If you get frequent colds, feel lethargic, or have pretty much any ache or pain which can't be ascribed to a physical damage, they will test you for VitD deficiency. You can also ask to be tested.
One con of being in a Tropical country is that you don't have to worry about your Vitamin D intake. The sun roasts you every year in the pre Monsoon heat.
not to mention apparent connection to autism. Best example - Somali immigrant populations concentrated in Sweden and Minnesota have unnaturally high child autism rates and extremely low vitamin D levels (very dark skin, weak Sun, a lot of clothes covering almost the whole body most of the year due to the cold climate). Another Swedish study found, though much smaller effect, uptick in autism rates among children whose 3rd trimester, when the brain develops the fastest, fell onto the winter.
Sufficient vitamin D is gained primarily from Sun exposure..
typically between 10am and 2pm, I have read that at certain latitudes and times of year the required window is considerably less but cannot find a reference.
The fact is that if you live in higher latitudes and have dark skin, you physically cannot absorb enough vitamin D from sunlight during the winter months. While it is physically possible during the summer, it is not practical to spend hours sunbathing.
The fact is that the majority of people of planet earth can go out in the sunshine at the right time of day and get 80-90% the vitamin D they need and get the rest from a balanced diet.
No that is not true at all. In today's world people of all races are living everywhere, so we should give recommendations based off a person's individual health. It is simply not true that a brown skinned person can absorb enough vitamin D from the sun in the northern latitudes.
I said the above viewpoint was caucasian centric because it assumed that everyone could get enough vitamin D from the sun. My response is not 'coloured'-centric because I did not say that no one could get enough from the sun, only that your absorption depends on your skin color. My response was not a generalization, unlike the comment I replied to.
