Posted by surprisetalk 3 days ago
So whilst you may be able to take a supplement to boost your vitamin D levels, the negative health effects of lack of sunlight are still going to occur.
I feel bad for posting this without references so here's one reference I could find right now:
> This study shows that longer wavelengths in sunlight are transmitted through the body. When these are presented via NIR LEDs in a laboratory-controlled environment at much lower energies, they again have the ability to be transmitted through the body and also are associated with improved visual function independent of ocular exposure. Hence, body penetration by longer wavelengths impacts systemically. Longer wavelengths improve mitochondrial membrane potential and ATP production and improve function in a species conserved pattern that can impact on mobility, visual function and cognition, particularly in ageing. In short lived animals they can extend average life span.
> Taken together, these data provide evidence of the importance of the full spectrum of sunlight for human health. They also highlight the potential dangers of the restricted spectra found in white LED lighting in the modern built environment that lacks longer wavelengths and whose output is generally restricted to around 400–650 nm. The absence of longer wavelengths from LED light sources may have implications for public health that should be addressed.
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-09785-3#Sec5
I think of it similarly to Beta-Carotene, in that consuming the "natural source" has no known toxic amount, while consuming processed vitamin A can be toxic in large doses.
Increasing sun exposure will not raise blood vitamin D metabolite concentration indefinitely, and we don't have good studies that accurately measure the amounts of Vitamin D and its photo-isomers and their concentration in relation to large doses of UV exposure.
Therefore, through sun exposure, people may be storing large doses of Vitamin D isomers in their skin, keeping their levels much higher than typically prescribed oral supplementation levels.
As someone who grew up in a European country where we don't get long summers, I suffered no demonstrable issues from the lack of sun nor did the many around me.
My family wasn't rich so food was reasonably nutritious but not perfectly balanced either.
Vitamin D supplements are sold widely, including in smaller supermarkets like Lidl and Aldi. And one imagines it all comes out of the same few factories.
There will be some who do need it, but not as many as are led to believe they do.
Having a balanced diet and enough time to spend in the sun isn't a given, though, and many struggle getting enough vitamin D without suppments.
you're telling me Big Vitamin is hustling the rubes that much?
the reason it is commonly hyped is because it is in fact reasonably common, and because the fix is cheap and has no real side effects unless you take comically massive doses
However, I need to get more sunlight; I just don't think supplementation is the same as being in the sun. When I was homeless I never had these mood issues, but that's complicated, living day-to-day & meal-by-meal puts you survival mode so nothing is really past the hour.
All anecdotal, duh.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17638508
I ultimately stopped it because it seemed to cause lower back aches. (Pretty sure, bone/muscle not kidney!) Every time I went on the D3, my back would start to hurt. That repeated several times, enough to suspect a pattern.
The cause may be similar to the itchy, tingling teeth.
According to this fascinating paper, Vitamin D can actually trigger the leaching of calcium out of bones, into circulation:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8147670/
After the abstract, find the section heading "Vitamin D mobilizes calcium from calcified bone".
But that is in very high, pharmacological doses. Not your 5000 UI per day.
You probably need to take vitamin d3 with k2 to avoid the calcium issues.
Edited to add link https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5613455/
That trial used a dynamically-adjusted dosage of a vitamin D3 supplement, where dosing was set as to keep blood levels within a target range of 40–80 ng/mL. IMO part of the reason this trial is showing better results than the previous clinical trials of vitamin D supplementation quoted in the above article is that vitamin D has bad effects if too low and too high. Adjusting the dose dynamically to achieve an optimal range gets you the benefits without some of the negative effects.
The very premise that loading up your body with "excess" vitamins beyond what you need is already pretty fraught. Building a house without enough lumber can lead to long term deficiency - but loading up a construction site with more materials than are needed shouldn't automatically be assumed to be good.
The reality is that the modern diet has already solved so many common nutrient deficiency diseases (pellagra and goiters were a shockingly common diseases 100 years ago) that maxing out on vitamin intake has become more of something like a speculative hobby than anything else.
It is almost universally recognized as good to do exactly that. It's better to have one planned extra trip to return excess materials (if they can't be used on the next job) than to have multiple unplanned trips when you unexpectedly run out of this or that.
One of my uncles asked why I’m budgeting for an extra $150 of material we won’t need. I asked him how much it would cost to get us all up here for another weekend to finish if we needed extra parts. The answer was “more than $150” and he understood.
It’s even more crucial to keep enough material on the jobsite when you’re running a project and paying $140 an hour for an electrician.
(Turns out the line to the gauge was borked, so it never turned off the pump, so the pressure built until it busted my pipes.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiamine#Biological_functions
Vitamin D is not but rather it regulates calcium and phosphorous metabolism.
Therefore, since we only have some weak circumstantial evidence, debates about how much vitamin D is good, and the same about other vitamins, will continue. As long as the uncertainty persists, it is safer to ingest somewhat higher doses of vitamins than those recommended, but not many times higher.
The conclusions of the article were that high amounts of vitamin D have been shown to be correlated with good health outcomes, but the supplementation studies could not reproduce the same outcomes, so it remains mysterious what factor was associated with vitamin D in the studies with positive effects and whether vitamin D itself had any role or its presence was just a coincidence.
I'm not sure what the ancestral iodine source might have been. Fishing villages perhaps along the coast? Hard to say how much coast was relatively populated given challenges of shifting shorelines and archaeological efforts. You can still reproduce laden with a goiter however, and that is enough to keep chucking malnourished humans somewhere on earth.
The iodine deficiency issues that haunted the Swiss (and Appalachia) arose from people settling down from nomadic lifestyles, in mountainous regions that easily were leeched of iodine by rainfall, and then farming that already leeched soil until there wasn't any iodine left at all.
You see these protein bars and some of them basically have a full days worth of the stuff and that is before your other meals come in.
There is the YouTube channel 'Subway takes' where people have about a minute to argue a point of view, usually very funny takes as well. There was one that was 'The Protein fad is basically an eating disorder for men', they aren't far off the mark with that.
This is such a bad take.
The current protein fad isn't being driven by men. Bros have been hyping protein and keto for over a decade.
The current "put protein in everything" fad was driven by women's social media, especially mom influencers. You're seeing the explosion in products women are more likely to shop for.
My wife started buying protein products after getting a flood of Reels talking up its benefits for children and women's health.
I don't know, USADA is about as conservative as it gets and they certainly recommend a shitload of protein for for individuals trying to maximize muscle protein synthesis https://www.usada.org/spirit-of-sport/when-consume-protein-m...
>You see these protein bars and some of them basically have a full days worth of the stuff and that is before your other meals come in.
For a 100kg man that would be like 220 grams of protein, must be one big protein bar.
OTOH, at least your username fits ;)
> Too much protein
However, too much protein is a lot, much more than most people will try to eat in normal conditions, because an important advantage of protein is that it is satiating, i.e. when you eat enough protein it is easy to eat less food and more seldom, without feeling hunger.
For example, I eat 2 meals per day, in the morning and in the evening, of about 800 to 1000 kcal each. If I ate more, I would gain weight rapidly.
When I was eating any kind of industrially-processed food, I could not eat so little, because I became hungry quickly. Now I eat only food that I prepare myself, from raw ingredients. In order to avoid hunger, the content of protein and fat is very important. Typically, each of my 2 meals includes 40 to 60 g of protein and 20 to 30 g of vegetable oil. This ensures that I will not be hungry all day.
That's an issue of too little fat, not too much protein. The question is whether, when your other nutritional needs are being met, an excess of protein is an issue.
It does not matter if most of the calories (i.e. more than two thirds) are provided by carbohydrates or by fat, as long as they are not provided by protein.
Fat was the solution for living far in the north because they did not have plant cultures that could provide carbohydrates.
Both the amount of fat and the amount of carbohydrates eaten in a day can vary in a very wide range without causing health problems, while the protein intake must be in a relatively narrow range to avoid problems. When eating fat with the right composition, i.e. from sources rich in essential fatty acids and in fat-soluble vitamins, something like at most 40 grams per day should be enough, so it is unlikely for someone to suffer from eating too little fat.
There's a lot of unknowingly deficient people out there who get benefits from supplements. But the benefits are limited by the upper bound of the deficiency.
The article opens with the observation that southern states had lower cancer rates due to solar irradiance. But then we intervene by taking pills. Why not try to absorb through the skin, even if it means something like a tanning bed?
Nobody will run that trial though because we've spent decades telling people the sun is dangerous and gives you cancer (both things can be true of course). Putting people in the sun every day would not pass ethics tests.
Also you cannot sell sunlight.
Don't give them ideas.
Australia has tried to explain sun safety here, taking into account that Vitamin D is best obtained from sunlight:
https://www.cancer.org.au/cancer-information/causes-and-prev...
I'd be interested to know a curve, i.e. at UV index 8, 3 minutes exposure, at index 6, 10 minutes exposure, etc. Maybe with a scaling for skin tone. It seems like either this kind of study has never been done (perhaps for ethical reasons) or else the information is not being disseminated. The latter seems to happen often in the medical space for paternalistic reasons, which honestly make sense for the broad public but it should be available for people to find who are motivated and have a deeper interest anyway.
And if link is allowed https://sci-hub.ru/https://doi.org/10.1093/ije/9.3.227