Vitamin D levels have been shown to be negatively correlated with the really bad effects of the Covid-19 disease. In one study, there was a stark difference between those who had less than 20 ng/mL serum levels, and those who had more. There are many studies which corroborate this, generally.
There was another study that showed that taking 5000 IU or 10000 IU would result in levels well below 210 ng/ml in average people, which is around the level where we'd expect side effects. This is not medical advice. I am not a doctor, just a random guy on the Internet. However, I take 5000 IU daily, and I intend to raise this to 10000 IU when I get vaccine doses. Again, this is not medical advice. Look up the studies yourself, and do your own research.
TLDR of this referenced article: In each and every scenario and study that is examined there is a general consensus that Vitamin D deficiency may be correlated to increased susceptibility or severity of COVID-19. The final conclusion is a word of caution that this news may cause some people to load up on Vitamin D at dangerous levels. However it also states that taking a small daily dose IS actually a good idea during Covid. The dose recommended in the article for pretty much anyone is 1000 IU during Covid.
Remember hearing a podcast (the drive peter attia with someone else) and they were saying up to 10k iu there is no harm, anyway I heard somewhere else that vitamin D also overexpreses ACE2 so you probably just want to take between 1k and 2k covid 19 wise. Not a doc though
Right now, I'd rather have a calcium problem than a Covid-19 problem. Also, some of the studies being thrown around in this discussion have mentioned that safe levels of Vitamin D are much higher than a lot of medical professionals actually think.
> there is virtually no risk of toxicity in supplementing up to 10,000 IU of vitamin D3 daily
Don’t the mandate lots of added vitamin D in foods? I was reading vitamin D deficiency is correlated with COVID deaths. The UK is mailing out 400 IU doses to the elderly, but it ought to be 5000 IU.
Since covid hit I wasn't really going outside that much.
I was taking 2500 IU daily since September. Got tested in December and had 102 nmol/l. The conservative reference is > 75 nmol/l and newer ones are 100-150 (https://www.grassrootshealth.net/document/vitamin-d-dose-res...).
So even with 4+ months of taking 2500 IU I was on the lower end of the reference.
You're probably well aware of this, but Vitamin D supplements have been life changing for me. There was an article a while back pleading to the FDA to fix the recommended daily limit, suggesting it might be 10x too low. I take 10,000 IU a day and the difference is very noticeable.
Thanks. Couple friends got diagnosed with vitamin D deficiency after going through Covid, both got 1-2k i.u, a day. But 60K? Good god. That really seems like overdoing it !!!
> Get enough vitamin D… but not too much. ... even as high as 2,000 IUs a day
2,000 IU is not a high level of Vitamin D. That's a medium-to-low level of Vitamin D. 20,000 IU is high.
Most people can very safely take 5,000 IU and won't come even remotely close to seeing negative health consequences. Quite the opposite, studies have suggested you may need that level of VitD intake just to get up to a healthy blood reading, especially if you have low sunlight exposure.
The old RDA guidelines have increasingly been shown to be a scientific embarrassment over the last 20 years.
5000 IU is high dose. 10,000 is really high. A more moderate dose would be 1000 to 2000 daily.
If you live in a northern state, your Vitamin D level will vary with season. And with increased use of sunscreen (which is a good thing), it can be hard to get enough Vitamin D. I'm not opposed to anyone taking Vitamin D (I take it actually). I just want people to take it in moderation unless there is a very clear reason for taking high doses (and there are indications for that).
My doctor checked my vitamin D levels and they were very low. I started taking the recommended daily intake of 1000 IU. After reading that the analysis setting the RDI for vitamin D was faulty, I went on double the RDI, 2000 IU. That has made a marked improvement in my mood and helped with the stability of my sleep cycle. As a bonus, my vitamin D levels are now spot on, and it offers some protection against the worst effects of COVID-19.
> For reference, 5,000 IU is >800% the FDA daily recommended value.
Unfortunately the daily recommended value was established erroneously and should be much higher. Many research papers mention this. For example:
> The Institute of Medicine recommendation for adults younger than 70 years of age is 600 IU of vitamin D daily. We are told that this would achieve a level of 50 nmol/L in greater than 97.5% of individuals.6 Regrettably, a statistical error has resulted in erroneous recommendations by the Institute of Medicine leading to this conclusion and it might actually take 8800 IU of vitamin D to achieve this level in 97.5% of the population.7 This is a serious public health blunder.
The anecdote about taking 50k IU of vitamin D is really dangerous. Above 4000 daily IU is already putting a lot of people in hypervitaminosis (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21646368/)
Note that very high levels of vitamin D supplements are possibly linked to reduction of volumetric bone density[0]. Low levels make sense given most people are more housebound during the pandemic.
"Conclusions and relevance: Among healthy adults, treatment with vitamin D for 3 years at a dose of 4000 IU per day or 10 000 IU per day, compared with 400 IU per day, resulted in statistically significant lower radial BMD; tibial BMD was significantly lower only with the 10 000 IU per day dose. There were no significant differences in bone strength at either the radius or tibia. These findings do not support a benefit of high-dose vitamin D supplementation for bone health; further research would be needed to determine whether it is harmful."
Could you link them? I got me tested. My vitamin D level is low, but my doctor told me 1.000 IU per day is too much and I should take 1.000 IU only every other day.
Hypervitaminosis D is incredibly rare. Taking 1000 IU per day ought to be harmless for literally everyone. Even 10,000 IU per day is WAY below toxicity.
We shouldn't be telling people to overdose on Vitamin D, obviously. I dread the day that Donald Trump mentions "Vitamin D", but then again even a massive overdose of Vitamin D isn't going to be life-threatening.
The generally safe amount is 4000 IU daily, which should get almost everybody to healthy levels. However, if your doctor finds that you have low levels, he may prescribe far higher amounts for a while.
there was a post a day or two ago about vitamin D3, as well as academic literature finally catching up to medical science vis a vis vitamin D3.
I won't cite, but only because i don't have a way to index my personal PDF repository, but the common consensus among people who study such things is that anyone living above the 20th parallel (or below, technically) absolutely must supplement vitamin D3, as even a full day in the sun naked is not enough to synthesize the amount of D3 we need.
So with that in mind, I'd honestly expect more people to know this and be supplementing D3. I don't have any specific recommendations, but i do know some guidelines and recent discoveries into "max dosing", so here they are. Anecdotally, i take 5000-6000iu every two days. I have a weird sleeping schedule so i really only notice "a day" as the sort of fog and fatigue i get after having gone more than 30 hours without D3. Prior to about 2015 or so, the max dosage was in the sub-5000iu range, with most supplement's labels stating that 500-1000iu was the "RDA" for D3.
However since covid was exponentially responsible for research into literally anything that could help alleviate symptoms/the disease and accelerate the time to recovery, some doctors were giving extremely high iu, up to 250,000iu over the course of a few days, or single doses of 50,000-80,000iu, with no deleterious effects reported.
Personally, unless i actually get sick, i try to stay under 8000-10000iu, at least until someone does a longitudinal study about the long term effects of doses higher than that.
As to the article and your point about lights helping - i've never noticed anything about any sort of light. I can feel awful at noon on a clear day while outside, or awful inside under every light type imaginable. I'm glad that light (and types of lights) help some people. I just think that the root cause is D3 deficiency, and no amount of 20k lumen arrays is really going to help.
As a quick aside, if you want to supplement children with D3 i recommend finding chewable d3 or a childrens multi-vitamin with omega-3/6 fatty acids. A couple of studies (with decent N and correlations) showed that merely supplementing omegas in children's diets improved the relationship and overall wellbeing of the children's parents - you read me right, parents didn't have to supplement to get the benefits of the children supplementing.
There was another study that showed that taking 5000 IU or 10000 IU would result in levels well below 210 ng/ml in average people, which is around the level where we'd expect side effects. This is not medical advice. I am not a doctor, just a random guy on the Internet. However, I take 5000 IU daily, and I intend to raise this to 10000 IU when I get vaccine doses. Again, this is not medical advice. Look up the studies yourself, and do your own research.
EDIT: negatively correlated
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