Vitamin D: Don’t Overdo a Good Thing
Came across a sensible article on vitamin D supplementation today. Thanks, Jeff!
Vitamin D: Don’t Overdo a Good Thing by Tod Cooperman, M.D.
Excerpt:
“It seems that initial reports led some experts to ignore the recommendation of the National Academies’ Institute of Medicine, which says that only people with vitamin D levels under 20 ng/mL are deficient. Instead, these experts argued that people need to maintain levels which are at least 50 percent higher–30 ng/mL….Further feeding this frenzy have been clinical laboratories — which profit from more vitamin D tests. When you get a vitamin D test back, the “normal” range shown next to your result often extends up to 100 ng/mL (which is actually far beyond the normal range), leading people with levels in the 20s, for example, to believe they needed more vitamin D.”
September 28th, 2015 at 7:45 am
My yearly laboratory blood work lists the reference for vitamin D of <20 to be "deficient" with <30 to be "insufficient" based on the recommendations of the Endocrine Society.
Seeing this caused me to drastically increase my vitamin D supplementation to increase my blood levels from the teens to mid 20s after one year and nearly 50 after two years. I noticed my mood becoming more irritable with higher blood levels, so I drastically cut back supplementation and also switched back from D3 to D2. My levels thankfully dropped to around 40 last year and around 30 this year.
I should be in the IOM normal range of 20s now and am relying on limited sun exposure and your recommended levels of supplementation with D2 to maintain my levels. I feel safer in this normal range and my mood is back to normal, too.
September 28th, 2015 at 8:31 am
I just found this article that IOM committee members wrote to disagree with the Endocrine Society’s vitamin D recommendations: http://press.endocrine.org/doi/10.1210/jc.2011-2218
I wish I would have seen this back in 2012 so I could have been satisfied with my vitamin D levels in the 20s.