How One Disease Changed What We Know About Medicine – Twice

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I’m a bit disappointed the link between excess vitamin D and vitamin K2 deficiency wasn’t mentioned. Vitamin K2 helps the body use the calcium properly after it’s been created by vitamin D. So if you’re deficient in vitamin K then supplementing vitamin D by itself will make the issue worse. The two work in balance.

I had a problem with abysmal vitamin D in my adult years. Thought it was anemia mut instead, my vitamin D levels were single digit. I was immediately given 50k supplements to be taken once per week. Was nice not having to fight for 30min just to wake up and not constantly be hungry, depressed, and weak.

It’s perhaps worth mentioning that the daily recommendations by most Governmental health authorities is still based around what is needed to prevent rickets in children, not what is required for an optimum immune system for a child, or certainty for an adult . It’s such an important Vitamin (it actually functions as a hormone), for the entire body’s physical and mental well-being, that it shouldn’t be dismissed, or ignored because “I eat a healthy diet”. Personally, I’d recommend people get their levels checked before any supplementation, if they can, as that provides a baseline to work from. Doing a test over the Winter will be the most useful, as that’s when D levels in the blood will be lowest. There are home tests available, if you can’t get it done by your Doctor. In the UK, a blood prick home test costs about £30, so not expensive, and results are usually back within two weeks. However, if that’s not possible, there are many videos available which go through Vitamin D levels of deficient, insufficient, sufficient, optimum and toxic, and suggest levels of supplementation based on various criteria, such as age, ethnicity, geographical location etc, as well as what should be taken with the D to safely optimise its use when higher levels of D are taken.

In my language, rickets is called “English disease”. IDK how that happened.

You need to also have vitamin K2 to move blood calcium into bone. If not you get calcified arteries and kidney stones.

I, apparently, can’t get enough Vit D. When I was at my lowest, I felt like I was dying. Now I’m on 5KIU a day just to keep it up. My body definitely doesn’t make it.

Every time I think I understand DNA I learn one more thing and I’m reminded I know nothing.

When I was a kid in the 1950s it wasnt uncommon in my northern England home town to see old folk with short bowed legs. My mum told us about rickets when we asked about them. And as the eggs from which we all grow are created when our mothers are conceived the health if our grandmothers directly affects our own health. So many if these diseases caused by our environments take at least a couple of generations to die out? Someone with more knowledge on this than I will be able to correct or add to this

There’s been some debate in the scientific community regarding whether the 400 IU recommendation is based on bad math – literally off by a factor of ten for some adults I personally take a 5,000 IU daily as an adult but I was diagnosed with very low vitamin D about 10 years ago. I’m so pale that once equinox has passed I can’t get any sunshine without a layer of serious sun block on (already got burned once this year because I forgot about my neck.) My vitamin D levels once dropped as low as 12 ng/dl, when the recommendation is a minimum of 30 ng/dl. 5K IU daily is my magic number for keeping it at normal levels.

This is also partly a consequence of having genes that were meant to be a few latitude parallels above where I actually live. I’m sure the ancestors that lived in the snowy frozen north and ate salmon every day had no problems maintaining vitamin D.

But again, I’m an adult, not an infant. 400-600 is probably plenty for a small human!