This post motivated me to order Vitamin D supplements, and write a thoughtful email to my family advocating that they do the same. Note: Mayo Clinic advocates around 600 IU/day for young adults and 800 IU/day for adults over 80. Too high a dose can apparently counteract the benefits. Most Vitamin D supplements on Amazon are in the 5,000-10,000 IU range. These ones are 400 IU/day.
The official recommendations are crazy low. Zvi’s recommendation here of 5000IU/day is the number I normally hear from smart people who have actually done their research.
The RCT showing vitamin D to help with covid used quite a bit. This converter from mg to IU suggests that the dose is at least somewhere around 20k on the first day and a total of 40k over the course of the week. The form they used (calcifediol) is also more potent, and if I’m understanding the following comment from the paper correctly, that means the actual number is closer to 200k/400k. (I’m a bit rushed on this, so it’s worth double checking here)
In addition, calcifediol is more potent when compared to oral vitamin D3 [43]. In subjects with a deficient state of vitamin D, and administering physiological doses (up to 25 μg or 1000 IU daily, approximately 1 in 3 molecules of vitamin D appears as 25OHD; the efficacy of conversion is lower (about 1 in 10 molecules) when pharmacological doses of vitamin D/25OHD are used. [42]
I’ve always been confused why the official recommendations for vitamin D are so darn low, but it seems that there might be an answer that is fairly straight forward (and not very flattering to the those coming up with the recommended values). It looks like it might be a simple conflation between “standard error of the mean” and “standard deviation” of the population itself.
Pure side note here. It seems that most of the vitamin and supplement producers all tend to go big—which is generally less good than smaller, more frequent doses.
I’ve considered starting to directly source the chemical and then make my own doses for personal consumption. Still tossing that idea around in my head but leaning that direction the more and more I come across information as you just mentions.
This post motivated me to order Vitamin D supplements, and write a thoughtful email to my family advocating that they do the same. Note: Mayo Clinic advocates around 600 IU/day for young adults and 800 IU/day for adults over 80. Too high a dose can apparently counteract the benefits. Most Vitamin D supplements on Amazon are in the 5,000-10,000 IU range. These ones are 400 IU/day.
The official recommendations are crazy low. Zvi’s recommendation here of 5000IU/day is the number I normally hear from smart people who have actually done their research.
The RCT showing vitamin D to help with covid used quite a bit. This converter from mg to IU suggests that the dose is at least somewhere around 20k on the first day and a total of 40k over the course of the week. The form they used (calcifediol) is also more potent, and if I’m understanding the following comment from the paper correctly, that means the actual number is closer to 200k/400k. (I’m a bit rushed on this, so it’s worth double checking here)
I’ve always been confused why the official recommendations for vitamin D are so darn low, but it seems that there might be an answer that is fairly straight forward (and not very flattering to the those coming up with the recommended values). It looks like it might be a simple conflation between “standard error of the mean” and “standard deviation” of the population itself.
Thanks for that information. I’ll pass it along.
Pure side note here. It seems that most of the vitamin and supplement producers all tend to go big—which is generally less good than smaller, more frequent doses.
I’ve considered starting to directly source the chemical and then make my own doses for personal consumption. Still tossing that idea around in my head but leaning that direction the more and more I come across information as you just mentions.