The Vitamin D Deficiency Epidemic. By TC Luoma.
There’s a direct association between vitamin D deficiencies/insufficiencies and mortality rates from health conditions like cancer, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes. (The difference between the two terms — deficiencies and insufficiencies — is just a matter of degree, like the difference between bad and sorta’ bad.)
For instance, without proper or optimal vitamin D levels, T cells don’t even put their pants on to do battle against infectious diseases, including cancer or pathogens like the coronavirus and flu. They flat-out don’t activate. Some virus or bacterium could float in and they’ll say, “Wake me when it’s over.”
The trouble is, it’s very hard to maintain adequate levels of the vitamin without supplementation.
Symptoms of deficiencies or insufficiencies, aside from an anemic immune system, include musculoskeletal pains often diagnosed as fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue syndrome, osteoporosis, bones that break too easily, weak or small muscles, low sex drive, low testosterone levels, hypertension, increased blood pressure, endothelial dysfunction, sudden cardiac death syndrome in athletes, and a long list of other undesirable stuff.
And it’s not just regular Doritos-eating couch potatoes that are being affected. .. A meta-study that threw 23 papers on vitamin D into a mixing bowl and found that of the 2313 college athletes included in their analyses, 56% had insufficient levels. Only 5% met the relatively anemic RDA. …
Why the deficiencies?
We get vitamin D from certain foods we eat and sunlight. The trouble is that very few foods contain it besides fortified dairy products, eggs, mushrooms, and the livers of fatty fish. …
Unfortunately, but understandably, pretty much everyone is scared to death of skin cancer, so most people try to avoid any kind of exposure to the sun. If they do expose their skin to the sun, it’s often covered by a sunscreen with an SPF of about a billion. …
In wintertime, vitamin-D-producing UVB rays don’t reach latitudes above 35 to 37 degrees (which is to say just about anywhere north of San Francisco, New Mexico, Arkansas, and North Carolina). …
Dark-skinned athletes need to expose their skin to UVB light up to 10 times longer than light-skinned athletes to get some adequate vitamin D production going. …
One of the oldest and most upchuck-inducing nutritional tropes is that “you just need to eat a balanced diet.” Okay, Boomer, go back to watching old CSI reruns on the Magnavox. It just isn’t that easy, particularly when it comes to vitamin D. The least risky approach is to supplement and, if possible — weather, climate, and latitude permitting — is to regularly expose your largely naked body to sunlight.
But there’s no definitive way to tell if you’re deficient or insufficient in vitamin D without getting a blood test. And even if you did get a blood test, there’s a broad range of medical opinions as to what’s “normal.” …
His recommendation:
Most biohackers and renegade nutritionist types, me included, think you should definitely supplement vitamin D daily, even without any overt symptoms or the benefit of a diagnostic blood test. That being said, most of us think vitamin D levels should be maintained at 50 to 70 ng/ml, but how you do that and what amounts of supplementation/sunlight it takes to get there is highly individual.
My own general guideline is to take around 5,000 units of vitamin D3 a day. Some caution is warranted, however, since vitamin D is fat-soluble and sticks around in the body a lot longer than water-soluble vitamins.
Possible negative side effects of vitamin D “intoxication” include anorexia, frequent urination, nausea, thirst, vomiting, and possibly altered mental status and kidney failure, but you’d have to take a whole lot of vitamin D to have that happen, or too much of a vitamin D supplement with poor manufacturing standards. …
Magnesium:
Vitamin D, regardless of how much you take, won’t do the things you need to without having adequate amounts of magnesium 26, too. Vitamin D just can’t be metabolized without sufficient magnesium. …
Perhaps not coincidentally, most Americans, particularly athletes, are deficient in magnesium too. So it could be that the magnesium deficiency is the culprit, or at least one of the culprits, in what we perceive to be vitamin D deficiencies. I suggest doing it right and taking 400 mg. of magnesium a day.
Keeping your immune system working well with good vitamin D levels is almost certainly a better long term strategy for avoiding covid than a series of mRNA shots.
