I posted this because I've been deficient for over a year and half now. It seems my body has stopped producing Vitamin D. I was on supplements for 8 months then went hiking for three weeks and off supplements. I came back and my levels had actually dropped.
In my case the supplements have literally changed my life. I sleep better, I don't get mid-afternoon drowsiness any more (which I had for years), and my wife can predict whether I've been taking my supplements based on my mood.
EDIT: I should have mentioned that the blood test is extremely easy and inexpensive. Though try to avoid Quest Labs as there have been reports that their results are not accurate for Vitamin D. I have little doubt that my grad school years - in the office before 9am and out after 7pm - hurt my skin's ability to make Vitamin D. I started having afternoon drowsiness then and for over five years. Within one day of starting the supplements it has completely gone away.
It carried over for years after grad school even as I regularly got 7-8 hours of sleep. Quite literally, it was gone within one day of supplements (5,000 IU) and it has never come back. For me there couldn't be a stronger personal causation. One day it was there and for years, the next it was gone.
Sorry, I usually don't post comments because of how much context is lost. Part of the problem was trying to isolate the cause. I was in grad school for five years. In year two I started to notice the problem but I thought it was simply stress related. The solution was the futon in the office. I'd take an afternoon nap and then I was mostly good to go. During my post-doc I was less stressed but the problem remained. Only after my three year post-doc, a family member nutritionist literally looked at my eyes and said I was Vitamin D deficient. Sure enough, the results came back and I was badly deficient. 1.5 years of supplements later and I never take a afternoon nap.
Vitamin D deficiency is the most common medical condition in the world. A majority of persons that live above the 33rd parallel north, San Francisco for example, are deficient.
If you are at all interested, a must read is The Vitamin D Solution.
Excuse my language, but that's bullshit, and it makes me angry.
Firstly, vitamin D deficiency is not the most common medical condition in the world. I don't know what the most common medical problem is, but of serious diseases Hepatitis B affects around 2 Billion people (http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0903696.html).
Secondly, even if you believe vitamin D deficiency is a serious problem then you may be surprised to learn about places such as China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria etc etc, all of which have very very large populations well south of the 33rd parallel. In fact, by far the majority of the worlds population lives south of the 33rd parallel north.
Thirdly, where I live (Australia) one of the major causes of death is cancer, specifically skin cancer. I know at least one person who sends her kids out to play in the sun in summer after hearing this (without sunscreen).
In my view Vitamin D deficiency is a minor problem, easily fixed which affects a small number of people. Blowing it up into a major issue has the potential to cause a much bigger problem (skin cancer) in a similar way to how vaccination scares caused public health risk.
As I understand it, one of the main reasons indigenous Europeans evolved lighter skin was to allow vitamin D synthesis in a cloudier climate. An indigenous Australian in Europe is more at risk of vitamin deficiency, while an indigenous European in Australia is more at risk of skin cancer.
To be more explicit about it being "easily fixed", here's a quote:
Asked for a general recommendation, Dr. Holick suggests going outside in summer unprotected by sunscreen (except for the face, which should always be protected) wearing minimal clothing from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. two or three times a week for 5 to 10 minutes.
Yeah, certainly throws that Aussie mainstay "between 11 and 3 sit under a tree" out, and that's a dangerous move if you do live in Australia. Since moving to the northern hemisphere I really feel as though the sun here is less intense, but I'm also a lot further north (Belgium) than I was south (Sydney) of the equator, or so the longer summer days seem to imply. It certainly doesn't feel as though it will bake your skin off like it did back home, though old habits die hard and I still go out slathered in cream :)
No, you aren't feeling things, the sun in the Northern Hemisphere (at least Europe) is less intense, even at lower latitudes like Italy.
I only got sunburnt once in Europe, and that was after being the sun all day with no sunscreen or hat. It took literally hours to get sunburnt. Here, I think 30 minutes is about all the average Australian can take, and for a recent arrival from Europe, 15 minutes will do them in, and 2 or 3 hours will put them in hospital.
My personal theory is that there is a lot more airborne pollution in Europe, and because of all the air traffic a lot of high-level cloud gets laid down by planes. You'll note the sky is never as deep blue as it is in Australia. I also think that because of the tilt in the Earth's axis, the SH summers receive a more directly overhead sun than even on the summer solstice in most of Europe. Finally my theory rounds out that, in Europe, periods of hot sunny weather seem to coincide with long periods of stable weather with little wind, when the pollution quicklyk builds. In Australia, in summer (in much of the country) the really hot days come during the thunderstorm period, when the high wind and heavy rain blows all the pollution away, and the next day is scorchingly hot.
Of course, all just random theories but based on a lot of observation.
I suspect you're right, especially about the pollution. When landing in a plane into Brussels (in particular) the brown blanket is quite obvious. Not so much when you're on the ground, though you're right in that the sky never seems quite as blue (though I'm willing to accept a certain amount of home bias there).
I mostly agree with you but I think Australia is a special case. We've got a largely white population living in some extremely hot areas so the risk of skin cancer is far greater than the risk of Vitamin D deficiency. For people in northern latitudes those risks are going to be reversed.
Many people with pets kept indoors would be very surprised to learn that these animals can needlessly suffer from painful arthritis in old age due to vitamin D deficiency. Dogs and cats don't get much sun on their skin, but they secrete oils on their hair which produce the vitamin when in sunlight. The animals then ingest it when they lick themselves.
Some people that thing they're getting sun while driving don't realize that auto windows are designed to block UV.
For people living in the 3rd world it is appalling how crazy and unrealistic is the world view of people that never saw someone with schistosomiasis, malaria, sleeping disease, tuberculosis, ...
Even for developed countries, what about the side effects of overweight and obesity? According to the World Health Organization the 2 most common causes of death are heart attacks (ischemic, in particular with 12% of deaths) and brain circulatory diseases (e.g: stroke). Overweight/obesity is an important factor for both.
Are you familiar with any theory as to how your natural D-making capability atrophied? (Is there evidence that it is lost over time in the absence of sun exposure?)
No, and none of the clinicians I've seen have any idea what's going on. They just know I've been tested 6 times and my levels haven't moved to acceptable levels even as I've been on supplements pretty regularly. I've experimented here and there - like the 3 weeks of hiking and being off supplements and while I was outside a bunch last summer - but it seems either I'm not making or I'm not storing. They could do more invasive tests - like a biopsy from my intestine - but I feel so good on the supplements, I don't see any reason to change anything. My nutritionist thinks my levels will bounce back after sticking with the supplements and I think that's the best course of action.
I first heard about this last year after elite marathoner Deena Kastor found that she had a Vitamin D deficiency. She ended up breaking a bone in the Beijing Olympics. It turned out that she had plenty of calcium, but was deficient in Vitamin D from overusing sunscreen.
Are Vitamin D supplements and Vitamin D obtained from the sun the same thing? What I mean is, are supplements good enough, or is sun exposure really required?
Scientifically, that seems to be a tough question to answer. But it's probably better if your body makes it because it will be more easily usable. You only need 15 mins of direct sun exposure to produce more than enough for your daily requirements. The problem is my body has stopped producing Vitamin D. We've tried kick starting the system with the 50,000 IU dose and it barely moved my levels.
Of course, the sun is also free (unless you worry that 15 mins/day can cause cancer) while if you buy supplements you'd want the high quality ones and preferably in a fatty medium for easier absorption. The D3 form is more easily converted by the body into an active form.
It's important to qualify that this is only true of people with lower levels of melanin (ie white people). For Hispanics and Asians/Indians the number is probably closer to 60 minutes, and for those of African descent the number is closer to 120 minutes.
That's evolution in action, folks. Just look at where each ethnicity originates from, and it makes perfect sense. When you live in northern Europe, you may not get much sun, and have to make the most of it.
An interesting addition to that point is the fact that it's the unique combination of little sun + arable land that set the stage for whiteness to develop in northern Europe. Take northern Native Americans-- they had little sun but also couldn't grow grains and so got plenty of vitamin D through their meat-only diet. There was an article here on HN about this some time ago.
I believe we Scots are adapted (or at least attempting to adapt) to produce the necessary vitamins from a combination of alcohol and deep fried food. (e.g. deep fried pizzas and Mars bars).
The Scots have adapted to harsh modern environments containing hazards like the deep fat fryer, but what of more recent technological hazards? (And Hollywood!)
It's a large, blazing fiery mystic beast that is greatly feared for its ability to kill masses of people through silent, sneaky death via waves. Many people are convinced one day it will destroy everything.
My battery is about to die in the iPhone, so I don't have time to curate the list, but from a quick glance a couple of the sources from the google search look credible.
I would assume that it gets turned into the same thing by the process they describe in the article. It ends up as 25-hydroxyvitamin D, which is what they measure in the end I believe. But I'm anything but an expert.
UV-B reacts with the 7-Dehydrocholesterol in your skin to produce cholecalciferol (D3)
If you take vitamin D, make sure it is D3! So either way it will hit your liver as D3.
The body was designed to get D from sun, and it is difficult to overdose that way unless you are a lifeguard. It is easy enough to overdose on D if it is taken orally.
There are other effects than vitamin D from sun exposure- it would be presumptuous to assume you could achieve optimal health from a vitamin D supplement.
In his book _The Vitamin D Solution_, Dr. Michael Holick ( the discoverer of the active form of Vit-D) debunks this myth with data. I haven't read most of it, but it looks interesting.
Thanks, I have his older book- I will see if he mentions that in there. I think either way it would be a safer bet to take D3- it seems everyone (including Holick I presume) is in agreement that D3 is a perfectly good form of vitamin D.
I believe that vitamin D is best taken with and is absorbed in and later stored in fat (and the liver).
Excessive amounts of animal fat are bad since it is a saturated fat, but some is beneficial. I suspect that range fed beef has more vitamin D since animals in the open get more sun and would store vitamin D in a smaller amount of fat built up over more time.
Obese corn fed feed lot cattle are less healthy for other reasons also. The corn diet is very unnatural for them. It leads to rapid fat buildup with some meats containing over four times the fat of range fed animals. The diet causes the digestive system to become more acidic making the animals prone to various infections including E-coli a very dangerous bacteria. The E-coli mutates in the overly acidic animals becoming a form which humans often can't fight off without antibiotics if it wasn't already killed in cooking. The E-coli in range fed animals is not so troublesome. Bacterial that does survive in the animals loaded with antibiotics is also apt to be more resistant to treatment.
Because of the the danger of E-coli, ground beef must be cooked well done all the way through. Slaughter exposes meat from other parts of the animal to the bacteria and if gets mixed all the way through when ground. Other beef should be eaten fresh and washed well before cooking, and utensils and cutting boards used with the raw meat should be kept separate from those used for vegetables and other foods. Besides tasting better, non-ground beef is more nutritious if the color isn't cooked out. Meat that's still juicy contains a fair amount of iron in the blood.
PBS in the US has been running a documentary about corn production in Iowa. The subsidized inedible corn (tastes like cardboard, engineered for high yield per acre) is used mainly as cattle feed and to produce high fructose corn syrup, a non-nutritious addictive destructive AND CHEAP sweetener that's found its way into many of our foods. It's hurting us not only when consumed directly, but by degrading the beef produced as explained above. People consume more saturated fat in the beef. The excess fat and sugar has caused a major increase in diabetes in the last 20 years.
Although supplements help with vitamin D problems, we really should be looking closely at what we eat and how it is produced. END CORN SUBSIDIES!!! contact your representatives. The corn isn't profitable without subsidies, farmers (big business now) would switch to nutritious crops if not paid to do the wrong thing.
U.S. broadcasting has become dangerously consolidated in the hands of a small number of corporations and even more insidious venture capital groups. Pressure the F.C.C. and your representative for change, and watch and support your P.B.S. (non profit community tv) stations.
For all of us to be healthier we should step back and see what's going on, be educated, produce healthy foods, eat properly, and live a healthier lifestyle. Some would say that's all too costly, but disease treatment costs even more and there is no price tag on suffering.
Some may be interested to know that the beef industry has attempted to manipulate the education process. Clearly they're fighting even awareness of healthier food practices and don't want future employees to know what's up
As a corollary to this, I am also curious about vitamin D levels in people using UV tanning beds.
Assuming equal carcinogenic potential from sun exposure and from such beds (which is most likely an incorrect assumption), the results should be insightful.
The absolute amount of Vitamin D needed is quite modest, and the risk of cancer is (typically seen as) proportional to sun exposure; hence the recommendation for some - but not much - UV exposure.
Dr. William Davis, whom I follow for his cardiology related advice, also advocates taking vitamin D for optimum heart health. He notes that most people lose the ability to synthesize vitamin D as they age. Here's a typical post on the subject:
My own report is that after taking 6000IU/day of vitamin D, I rarely suffer from afternoon drowsiness, whereas before it was so bad I'd sometimes go take a nap in in my car in 90+ degree heat around 3pm.
Just from my own experience, I started taking vitamin D supplements during the winter months (roughly from equinox to equinox) 3 winters ago, and it seems like my immune system has vastly improved. The number of colds and flus I was subject to fell from about 3 per season to 1 the first season and zero the next two (knock on wood).
This is just my experience, but I noticed that I used to have flu every 3-4 month between the age of 18 to 22 and then it suddenly stopped. I didn't take any supplements for this to happen, just graduated from college. I am not sure if it was the hormonal changes or change of environment or just plain growing up, but I'd think twice before attributing it to supplements.
Correct, this is only anecdotal "evidence". It's hard enough even for professionals to do controlled medical studies. However, my work environment has not changed at all, and my colleagues continue to get as sick as ever.
You probably developed immunity to the most common viruses after having exposure to them earlier on. The same thing happened with me after growing up in the Midwest winters.
I used to get symptoms associated with Seasonal Affective Disorder every winter. Now for two winters straight the Vitamin D supplements have minimized those symptoms.
During my second winter in Portland, OR, I started to feel chronically tired and nearly unable to wake up each morning, no matter how much sleep I had had. Once I realized something was wrong, I started Vitamin D supplements and within a day or two, I felt like a brand new person. It was really dramatic. Since then, I take them every year during the colder months.
I take 4,000 UI of vitamin D3 in gelcaps (it's fat soluble, so much better absorbed than with dry tablets) each day. Been doing it for years.
Make sure you get the gelcaps if you get supplements. Blood tests have shown that dry tablets are really badly absorbed, so that some people who think they might be taking enough supplements could still be deficient.
The dry tablets are so much a combination of ineffective and popular that their deposits in water treatment plants is often a problem. Pretty crazy, right?
As far as I can see, you'd have to have a pretty screwy sort of lifestyle, or an obsessive use of sunscreen, to not achieve this recommendation:
Dr. Holick suggests going outside in summer unprotected by sunscreen (except for the face, which should always be protected) wearing minimal clothing ... two or three times a week for 5 to 10 minutes
I'm pretty confident that I'm not going to suffer from Vitamin D deficiency. (Skin cancer maybe...)
Seriously, I can't think of any of my friends who regularly spend time outside with their shirt off each week, which I'm pretty sure is what is meant by "minimal clothing."
I think that's a bit of an underestimate. Short sleeves basically expose only the skin on the top of your arm from the elbow down. That's a lot less surface area compared to your full front and back, shoulders, and neck. Your chest/shoulders/upper back will also be receiving direct, unbroken sunlight, while your arms are probably blocked a good deal when they are at your side by shadows.
If it were that easy I don't think deficiency would be so prevalent. I agree that it's almost impossible not to get 30 min of partial exposure.
SPF means "sun protection factor". SPF 10 is not "completely exposed" it's actually a very high level of protection, it means that it will take 10x as much sun exposure to lead to the same amount of UV-B reaching your skin, more or less.
SPF 10 is 90% covered, and cotton T-shirts are usually higher than that. You'll find that you can see visible light through a T-shirt at around a 10× reduction too.
is there any problem with going outside before you have lunch, taking off your shirt and running a mile? this should allow for at minimum 5 minutes, at maximum 15 minutes of sun exposure.
In the US, there are laws against this kind of thing, although they typically exempt nearly half of the population. Worse than the laws, though, are the social sanctions.
i assumed the half of the population who weren't allowed to take off their shirt would wear some kind of minimal sports covering. even an a-shirt or something similar would still expose one to a sufficient amount of vitamin D, perhaps with a few more minutes exposure.
According to the US Department of Health and Human Services, sunscreen does not prevent vitamin D from being produced, at least at SPF 15.
"There has been some concern that use of sun protection factor (SPF) of 15 results in vitamin D deficiency. However, a randomized trial in people over 40 years of age found that sunscreen use over the summer had no effect on 25-hydroxyvitamin D3 levels."
There are different kinds of sunscreen (physical and chemical) and of course different strengths. 15 would be considered low in my social group (young sailors).
Speaking from personal experience, we found out our daughter was vitamin D deficient about a year ago, and she has subsequently been diagnosed with Type-1 Diabetes, as well as celiac disease. If it's possible that vitamin D deficiency and Type-1 Diabetes (and other autoimmune disorders) are linked, then I urge everyone to supplement their and their children's diets.
Those diseases may well be linked, but in reverse order. Vitamin D deficiency is caused by:
1. Reduced gut uptake of (fat-soluble) Vitamin D due to malabsorption.
2. Reduced renal hydroxylation of 25-hydroxyvitamin D3 into 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D3.
I can't speak to your daughter's specific problems, but since she has gut and, possibly, renal disease (given her diabetes), Vitamin D deficiency is quite possibly a consequence of those problems, and almost certainly not cause.
I can't speak to your daughter's specific problems, but since she has gut and, possibly, renal disease (given her diabetes)...
The complications of chronic hyperglycaemia take years to develop, and T1D develops fast. There's no way a newly diagnosed T1D would have renal complications at the time of diagnosis, never mind a year earlier.
I haven't seen any human data on this, so please share if you have, but in animal models of T1D, impaired calcitriol conversion occurs within days of the onset of diabetes. If they had to develop renal failure in order to have impaired Vitamin D metabolism, then I would agree that the timecourse makes no sense.
The rising incidence of Type 1 diabetes may be due, in part, to the current practice of protecting the young from sun exposure. When newborn infants in Finland were given 2,000 international units a day, Type 1 diabetes fell by 88 percent, Dr. Holick said.
So I suspect that your statement, "vitamin D deficiency is ... of those problems [including type-1 diabetes mellitus] ... almost certainly not cause," is undermined by the evidence. Do you know of some problem with the study cited in the article?
Thank you for disagreeing. The article was actually so sparse with the information that I misunderstood it for an epidemiological association. I went and found the study in pubmed, and I see that it's actually stronger than that - it's a cohort study with an intervention. It's not gold-standard, randomized-trial-level evidence, but it's still important.
I'm still a bit skeptical, because the human genetic data, so far, doesn't back up the association between Vit D deficiency genes and T1D. Nevertheless, I'll revise my statement to agree that both (a) diabetes can cause a decrease in the hormonally active form of vitamin D, and (b) high-quality Grade B evidence suggests that the converse is also true.
Nevertheless, I don't see Vitamin D deficiency as the unifying diagnosis here. One could even speculate that the Vit D deficiency was secondary, and the T1D was tertiary, but we really don't have enough information to speculate here and I'll stop now. I probably shouldn't have in the first place.
Your point is well-taken, although it's one step removed from the point I'm getting at. My point, it's true, assumes that more than 0% of vitamin D deficiency is genetic. In other words, my point only stands if the heritability of Vit D levels is greater than 0. From that assumption, I discuss the association between Vit D genetics and T1D. (The heritability of Vit D levels has actually been measured, and has been found to be very high - greater than 60% in some populations - so genetic factors are driving a huge amount of the variation that we see.)
If there were an association between T1D and Vit D, you would expect an excess of Vit-D-associated variants among those with T1D when compared to matched individuals. It is true that if 75% of the population is Vit D deficient and most of this is due to environmental effects, this would would hurt your power, requiring a larger study before convincing yourself that the null hypothesis really should not be rejected. Hence the couching of my language with "so far," since I know that associations can definitely be uncovered as sample size increases. But given the high heritability, at least in some populations, we shouldn't need a stratospheric sample size to detect association.
How much of the observed vitamin-D deficiency is caused by known Vit-D-associated genetic variants? You can measure heritability without knowing what alleles in particular code a trait, right?
Correct, you can measure heritability without any genetic information whatsoever. Because of this we can know that, say, 60% of Vit D variability is heritable.
In short, 4 base pairs (out of 3 billion) account for 2.8% of the population variance of circulating Vitamin D. With such a small # of people, it's not surprising that few independent SNPs hit the genome-wide significance level, but it's still pretty impressive that the 4 SNPs that they found can account for so much of the variance. (In other words, it looks like they identified the source of ~5% of the genetic variance, or 2.8% of the total variance.)
This looks much like the lipids story: early GWASs give you a handful of loci with influence, and later GWASs with may more participants will give you a much richer set of loci that collectively explain 20-30% of the variance. And keep in mind that these are just the common SNPs.
Asked for a general recommendation, Dr. Holick suggests going outside in summer unprotected by sunscreen (except for the face, which should always be protected) wearing minimal clothing from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. two or three times a week for 5 to 10 minutes.
Slathering skin with sunscreen with an SPF of 30 will reduce exposure to ultraviolet-B rays by 95 to 98 percent. But if you make enough vitamin D in your skin in summer, it can meet the body’s needs for the rest of the year, Dr. Holick said.
Personally I'd rather take a supplement than risk skin cancer later in life from sun exposure. There is definitely a tradeoff between the natural technique of acquiring vitamin D and the safe way. Getting vitamin D via sunlight on the skin was safer when we had more ozone and fewer ultraviolet rays.
Just in case that wasn't a rhetorical question, no.
Skin cancer is as much a pre-disposition affair as it is induced by UV radiation, and people with far higher exposure levels are still not at a significant risk for skin cancer unless their genetic make-up is such that they are very prone to contracting it.
If you have extremely light skin, have freckles (especially darker ones), have red hair or if there is a history of skin cancer in your family better be careful though.
Bad phrasing on my part, it was a serious question. It seems to me that a few minutes in the sun every couple of days would be very unlikely to have any long term impacts (obviously, I'm not an expert though).
I started using Vitamin D supplements after I read an article about a Dr. at Atascadero State Hospital. He noticed that some of his patients had low vitamin D. He started giving it to them all and got remarkable improvements. (Sorry I couldnt find the article.
That article of others noted that the normal range for vitamin D tests is too low. Someone who is low normal is probably deficient. Vitamin D is not just for rickets. A deficiency can cause all kinds of other nonspecific problems.
It also depends on the form. As others here note, Vit D is fat soluble so gel caps are much better. 1400 IU may not be enough especially if it's a pill. I take a 5000 IU gel cap most days.
Still, if you haven't been tested, you should. It's easy and inexpensive.
Maybe you weren't deficient? I had a blood test that said I was deficient, after taking about 4000IU of vitamin D a day for a long time (years). I upped the dose to 10,000-12,000IU, and I feel the same, but the blood test comes back as not deficient.
Interestingly, a strong immune system is not always good. I am allergic to everything. (But that problem is solved with immunotherapy.)
Vitamin D via sun, meats, or supplementation is likely beneficial even if you don't "feel" any difference. But also, most pro-vitamin-D sources suggest 2000IU or more per day -- sometimes much more, though traditionally there was thought to be toxicity risks at very high doses.
At some point, yes. But as the linked article notes -- and as someone concerned about this enough to take a supplement and ask a question, you did read the article, right? -- adults have taken 10,000IU/day for 6 months with no ill effects, and 50,000IU/week is usual for people with a diagnosed deficiency until it's cured.
So as for everything else, the dose makes the poison, but typical official recommendations (1000IU/day and lower) seem to be a fraction of what's best and a tiny fraction of what's safe.
I always prefer to take things these things the way they're found in nature, rather than isolated in a pill (bonus points if people have been taking them for a really long time with no ill effects). So I take cod liver oil instead of vitamin D supplements.
Do you get the oil by sucking on an actual cod liver?
Note that regular unrefined cod liver oil is very high in vitamin A, so you can kill yourself by drinking enough of it(see hypervitaminosis A). Vitamin A pills contain trivial amounts though(to stop people from killing themselves I am told), so the cod liver oil is a nice way to go if you feel that you need to supplement for some reason. And of course you also get the D, some nice fatty acids, and maybe a little mercury too.
The vitamin D in cod liver oil actually comes from the algae the cod eats, so a pill based on that algae is closer to it's original state than the oil.
Funny enough, my uncle suffered from bi-polar for decades before he died of heart disease. He became a nudist because he said sunshine helped him feel better.
I'm just going to go ahead and comment here and say how much I hate newspapers trying to publish scientific information.
I began raising my own pigs last year, and one of the things I get back from the slaughter house is about 20 pounds per pig of fatback and leaf lard.
Do you know what the USDA has to say about the vitamin D content of pork lard? 2,800 IU per 100g.
So, it seems as though our consumption of animal fat in the winter time helps to offset the fact that the sun in the great white north is so rare. It would also help explain why Inuit and other far northern cultures don't die of vitamin difficencies. (i.e., our bodies are extraordinary machines and have developed ways to function optimally without relying on a single source of any one nutrient) It is only when we shuffle the deck and start eating a tropical, fruit + veggie heavy diet, in January that all hell breaks loose.
Of course, from everything I've read, it would also appear that pure corn-fed lard is so bad for you that the vitamin D doesn't matter. Best to eat pastured organic pork lard (oh, and plenty of fatty fish) in the winter time or move back to the equator.
Oh, I would love to have pigs, but the wife is not thrilled about the idea so for now I have to content myself with chickens :-(
Do you read Walter Jeffries blog on Sugar Mountain Farm? http://flashweb.com He has a lot to say about how he raises his pigs on pasture using free surplus whey & milk from local dairies, etc. I've learned a lot from him about raising chickens & pigs.
Pigs are also nature's rototillers. Instead of a cover crop, my wife and I put the pigs on the garden and let them go to town. They turn over EVERY corner, pooping as they go. By next May, we're all good to plant again!
We've also got meat birds, which I can say I've never had better meat that what we've raised the past few years. Also can't beat that we slaughter them ourselves. From chick to oven without ever leaving the farm, perfect!
"Pastured organic pork lard is substantially more likely to lead to trichinosis."
Not true. It is unfortunate that myths like this get spread. Trichinosis is virtually non-existent in the pig populations. If you want trichinosis then I would recommend eating wild bear from down south. If you want to avoid it, just cook your meat. In either case, better not to spread lies from Big Ag.
Hmmm. Unless you are just ripping the lard off the animals back, last time I checked trichinosis was the result of undercooking meat.
Also, I should hope that the farmer is using some form of dewormer. There are plenty of proven organic herbal supplements you can give livestock that drastically reduce the parasite load of your average farm animal. I'm using a two-step wormwood-based dewormer and also supplement my animals' diets with garlic powder.
Its a result of diet too. The feed those factory pigs irradiated insanity, which has other debatable negative outcomes, but it does not have the same population of bacteria leading to this kind of infections.
Indeed. The D3 form is one you want. I actually had a endocrinologist prescribe the D2 form. Luckily my nutritionist has been following the literature for years.
And that incredibly low standard is also how the FDA set the "recommended daily allowance." Similar things are true for most other vitamins and minerals, as I recall.
Also, D2 causes overdose effects pretty easily, but you can take big multiples of the "RDA" in D3 (I think 10,000 IU/day for months for vitamin D deficiency has been mentioned) for quite a while without overdosing.
> you can take big multiples of the "RDA" in D3 (I think 10,000 IU/day for months for vitamin D deficiency has been mentioned) for quite a while without overdosing.
That's actually a problem, as people can become accustomed to taking large doses and then not understand why problems are occurring when they start way down the road.
In my case the supplements have literally changed my life. I sleep better, I don't get mid-afternoon drowsiness any more (which I had for years), and my wife can predict whether I've been taking my supplements based on my mood.
EDIT: I should have mentioned that the blood test is extremely easy and inexpensive. Though try to avoid Quest Labs as there have been reports that their results are not accurate for Vitamin D. I have little doubt that my grad school years - in the office before 9am and out after 7pm - hurt my skin's ability to make Vitamin D. I started having afternoon drowsiness then and for over five years. Within one day of starting the supplements it has completely gone away.