It's not good...
I no longer supplement with D unless I'm fighting off a bug. And that doesn't happen very often any more. However, I do spend a lot of time in the sun, without wearing sunscreen, so my blood levels are higher than the usual malnourished industrial human...
Your body is perfectly capable of keeping D at the correct level if you allow it to.
Well, 'not good' isn't exactly what the report showed. It showed that extremely elevated levels of vitamin D were bad, and it was only bad in those that they could correlate that died but also had the 25OH levels tested, but it wasn't proven that vitamin D was the cause. But if one supplements when necessary -- and it's pretty necessary in places like Denmark -- it does need to based on actual numbers received from a 25OH test.
ReplyDeleteFrom the link: "The surprising finding is that people with unusually high levels of vitamin D also had higher mortality: those above 140 nmol/l were 1.4 times more likely to die." I think "not good" is a pretty good summary, unless you're going to be pedantic.
ReplyDelete"...and it's pretty necessary in places like Denmark..."
Why is it necessary? Vitamin D was discovered about 100 years ago. What did people in Denmark do prior to that, when supplementation was not possible?
No, saying vitamin D is "not good" indicates that vitamin D overall is not good, but the report said highly elevated levels could be bad, not that all levels were bad. And again, the data only showed this in people who had their levels tested and also died but did not correlate that high levels of vitamin D were the cause at all. The study did not, at all, look at cause of death, it just looked at 25OH levels in those who were tested and, obviously, were also dead. This is from the article:
ReplyDelete"The design of the study meant that they had no information on why subjects died, and they also had no control over who the subjects were -- it was simply whoever went to the doctor in Copenhagen and had their vitamin D levels tested. That means there's no way to speculate on what might explain the link between high vitamin D levels and mortality at this point."
So right now, it could entirely be a red herring, or it could not be, they don't know because they didn't investigate that data. That's an incredibly important distinction made by the authors.
And who knows what they did before supplementation was available to deal with the lack of sunlight during polar twilight, common to Scandinavian countries. One can safely assume the Danes would have had some issues related to a deficiency that they may have been able to combat during the extended daylight hours of summer.
"No, saying vitamin D is "not good" indicates that vitamin D overall is not good..."
ReplyDeleteExcept I never said that.
I don't supplement D any more because my levels through sun exposure in the summer are high enough that I think it would be unwise to supplement, since that could get me to a level where D is too high. That would be "not good", as it is possible to experience D toxicity, as studies other than this one have shown.
Hypervitaminosis D