Vitamin D3 Deficiencies and Supplments

[IrritableBob]

I'm looking for reccomendations for vitamin D3 supplment brands. I am currently on a prescription strength , but I will be needing to take a supplement as soon as I'm finished with the prescription.
I know there are liquid forms, capsuls and so on. Anyone have any opinions for or against any particular kind?
Also, I'm curious if anyone takes cod liver oil as a means to get vitamin D?

Dairy and other vitamin D rich foods are triggers for my crohn's, so it is very difficult keeping my levels up through food alone. I also work night shift, so that adds to the problem.

I welcome any thoughts about vitamin D. Thanks in advance!

 

[Garbanzo]

Now and Jarrow are good brands for the caps- Make sure its in an oil base (oilive oil)

 

[ebarker2]

There's no real substitute for light. on a sunny day, 1 minute of sunlight on arms and legs creates about 10,000 ui on a white person. Also its bioavailable. The problem with synthetic vitamin D (As with many other synthetic vits) is that they can actually block the transporter and receptor proteins in the cells as they are usually not quite the right shape. This happens more if the cell membrane itself is either soggy or too rigid (which happens a lot to those with chronic conditions).

So best way is to get sunlight. Body will store vit d for several months. So if you get a full body sunbath (not fake tan!!) 15 min either side total 1/2 hour for three days, that will be several million UI. Do not let yourelf get red though. So in stints of max 5 min. No suncream.

Do that several times a year and you don't need to supplement.

 

[Lady Organic]

There's no real substitute for light. on a sunny day, 1 minute of sunlight on arms and legs creates about 10,000 ui on a white person. Also its bioavailable. The problem with synthetic vitamin D (As with many other synthetic vits) is that they can actually block the transporter and receptor proteins in the cells as they are usually not quite the right shape. This happens more if the cell membrane itself is either soggy or too rigid (which happens a lot to those with chronic conditions).

So best way is to get sunlight. Body will store vit d for several months. So if you get a full body sunbath (not fake tan!!) 15 min either side total 1/2 hour for three days, that will be several million UI. Do not let yourelf get red though. So in stints of max 5 min. No suncream.

Do that several times a year and you don't need to supplement.

Hi could you please post research evidence of these claims? I have never heard of that and highly doubt this claims...

''on a sunny day, 1 minute of sunlight on arms and legs creates about 10,000 ui on a white person.''

This definetaly never applied to me!!! And I definately do not cummulate Vit D for the cold season! I so wish it was this easy! We only have 3 months of sunshine in canada.
Since I take vit D supplements (best if consumed during a meal), I have normal levels in my blood reports. My IBD nurse talked about sun exposure 15-20 minutes when the sun is not too strong (end of day), but she never spoke about cummulative back ups of sun exposure for the cold season and the recommendation is always to supplement in the cold season. We must take supplements when we have deficiencies. We cant solely rely on sun exposure for long periods every day especially with risks and damages sun exposure entails nowadays. Most drs will now very often prescribe vit D even on healthy patients during the cold season.

 

[cmack]

I take 1000 IU of vitamin D3 per day. They are soft gels. I was advised by my GP to take this dosage on any day that I could not get a sunburn. I hope this helps.

 

[IrritableBob]

Hi could you please post research evidence of these claims? I have never heard of that and highly doubt this claims...

''on a sunny day, 1 minute of sunlight on arms and legs creates about 10,000 ui on a white person.''

This definetaly never applied to me!!! And I definately do not cummulate Vit D for the cold season! I so wish it was this easy! We only have 3 months of sunshine in canada.
Since I take vit D supplements (best if consumed during a meal), I have normal levels in my blood reports. My IBD nurse talked about sun exposure 15-20 minutes when the sun is not too strong (end of day), but she never spoke about cummulative back ups of sun exposure for the cold season and the recommendation is always to supplement in the cold season. We must take supplements when we have deficiencies. We cant solely rely on sun exposure for long periods every day especially with risks and damages sun exposure entails nowadays. Most drs will now very often prescribe vit D even on healthy patients during the cold season.

Yeah, I deal with the same thing, being from Michigan. I also work night shift, so that makes it even more difficult to get sun exposure. I am trying to get a day-shift position, but I still had low vitamin D levels before I started this job (and since I literally craved sunlight like one craves chocolate, my sun exposure should have been adequate to keep up to normal levels).

Yes, vitamin d is processed in the skin by aid of the sun, but if your body is not absorbing enough to begin with you will suffer deficiencies from that. The sun does not give you vitamin D, it just helps convert it to a form that your body can use, from what I understand.

I just read a research article about vitamin d3 the other day that was quite interesting. I will try to find it and post it.

And thank you all for responding! You have been most helpful.

 

[IrritableBob]

Here, this was published by the Harvard Medical School, Harvard Medical Publications, for those who like to read this kind of stuff (like me )

http://www.health.harvard.edu/mens-health/vitamin-d-and-your-health

 

[Beach]

From what I've read most doctors that promote vitamin D mention a mix of getting sun exposure and taking supplements. For example, Dr. Cannell of the web sight Vitamin D Council mentions sunbathing in the warmer months and vitamin D in the winter. (He lives in S. California so imagine he sun bathes most of the time.)

The reason for mentioning both sunbathing and when that is not possible to take vitamin D is that there are greater health benefits found when sunbathing. Vitamin D in pill form is not able to provide these health benefits.

Sunbathing falls under the title of light therapy or heliotherapy. It's an older therapy idea, best known in modern time for helping reduce one of the leading killers of the recent past tuberculosis (TB), including intestinal TB.

Light therapy is a broad topic with books written on its. I didn't watch this interview all the way but one of the leading heliotherapy researcher is this Germany doctor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVvKedHSYb0

On a personal note I all but stopped taking vitamin D supplements. Since I live in S. Florida I make it a point to sunbathe a few times a weeks. I think it has helped my stomach condition and improved my health.

For general health, I enjoyed this article on benefits seen with sunbathing.

Sunbathing is good for you

https://drmalcolmkendrick.org/2016/03/23/sunbathing-is-good-for-you/

excerpt:

.

..Why do sunbathers live longer than those who avoid the sun?

New research looks into the paradox that women who sunbathe are likely to live longer than those who avoid the sun, even though sunbathers are at an increased risk of developing skin cancer.

An analysis of information on 29,518 Swedish women who were followed for 20 years revealed that longer life expectancy among women with active sun exposure habits was related to a decrease in heart disease and noncancer/non-heart disease deaths, causing the relative contribution of death due to cancer to increase.

Whether the positive effect of sun exposure demonstrated in this observational study is mediated by vitamin D, another mechanism related to UV radiation, or by unmeasured bias cannot be determined. Therefore, additional research is warranted.

“We found smokers in the highest sun exposure group were at a similar risk as non-smokers avoiding sun exposure, indicating avoidance of sun exposure to be a risk factor of the same magnitude as smoking,” said Dr. Pelle Lindqvist, lead author of the Journal of Internal Medicine study. “Guidelines being too restrictive regarding sun exposure may do more harm than good for health.”1

There is a point here I think I should repeat… avoiding the sun is as risky for your overall health and life expectancy, as smoking. Which is pretty damned amazing? It has been estimated that smoking reduces life expectancy by six, on average. Thus, if you sunbathe regularly, it seems you can expect to live six years longer.

If I may indulge myself by quoting from my book ‘Doctoring Data’ on this very topic:

‘How about frightening people to stay out of the sun, or slap on factor 50 cream at the first suspicion that a deadly photon may sneak through 10 layers of protective clothing. Not necessarily a good idea, because without vitamin D synthesis in the skin, from exposure to the sun, there is significant danger that we can become vitamin D deficient, which can lead to all sort of other problems.

Here are just two stand-out facts from a major study in the Annals of Epidemiology entitled ‘Vitamin D for Cancer prevention.’

Women with higher solar UVB exposure had only half the incidence of breast cancer as those with lower solar exposure
Men with higher residential solar exposure had only half the incidence rate of fatal prostate cancer
To put that in simple English. If you spend longer in the sun, you may be far less likely to die of breast and prostate cancer. But what about the increased risk of dying of skin cancer! I have you cry. Well, what of it. Around 2,000 people a year die of malignant melanoma in the UK each year. It increased sun exposure were to double this figure we would have 2000 more cases.

On the other hand, breast cancer kills around 20,00 a year, as does prostate cancer. If we managed to halve the rate of breast and prostate cancer, we would reduce cancer deaths by 20,000 a year. Which is ten times as great as any potential increase in deaths from malignant melanoma.’

To what I wrote in Doctoring Data, I would further add that sun exposure is the best known way of increasing NO synthesis throughout the body. This protects the endothelium and, as you would expect, lowers blood pressure (the natural way). So, you are far less likely to die from CVD....

 

[ebarker2]

Hi could you please post research evidence of these claims? I have never heard of that and highly doubt this claims...



Hi, IIRC the research I was referring to was comparing uptake of vitamin D by people with IBD. Since its largely taken up in the upper intestinal tract, this is often a problem. I can't find the paper right now, but this 2013 paper Vitamin D bioavailability; State of the Art

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262977228_Vitamin_D_Bioavailability_State_of_the_Art

is a good place to start, though not directed to IBD patients.

Many aspects of Vitamin D research are controversial, and there isn't even a settled view of healthy levels (with the exception of levels to avoid rickets). The deeper one digs, the more complex the issue becomes.

But there are certain things that stand out; latitude is important; vitamin d not produced by sun over 35 degrees of latitude in winter months is one important aspect for those living in Canada, or UK like myself.

The questions about bioavailability, storage, and uptake are too complex to go into right now, (and I also think its really important to do the research oneself, so one owns the results and buys into the process of acting on it), but the issues worth looking into that affect it include lipids, damage to lipids, lipid bioavailability in IBD, liver storage of Vit Ds, vitamin D receptors, and obviously solar vs dietary bioavailability.

I did a certain amount of research last year, and as a result stopped taking cod liver oil supplements (I was taking the very best I could find).

Instead, I began to change my viewpoint on sunlight. I have keratosis and have been told to stay out of sun to avoid developing melanomas, so it wasn't an easy thing to shift towards seeing sunbathing as good again...

Anyway, the result is that if there is a day of sunlight in say october or march, I value that massively and will stop pretty much anything to make sure I get a few minutes of it on the skin. The best research on storage I could find suggested the liver stores several months of Vit D (Assuming liver is health, and a number of other factors as well).

I also try to eat wild alaskan smoked salmon several times a week, not just because of the Vitamin D, but its a good source that's more likely to actually become bioavailable.

Generally speaking, the more i read about synthetic vitamins (or hormones if that's what Vit D actually is), the less i want to put them in my body.

 

[cjjey]

Sun is the best source!