When the third supportive pre-print paper was released in late April I started my elderly mother on a D3 supplement. As more papers came out in May I started my whole family on it. I read up on dosing and it's pretty hard to overdose unless megadosing over a sustained period of time and negative reactions/interactions are rare. We've been supplementing ~5k to 10k IU daily (total, incl any multi-vitamins) depending on age/body weight (note: IU is not the same as mg). We also try to get 20-30m a day of actual sun exposure when possible. N=1 but so far no one in my family as gotten CV19 or even had any ILI symptoms despite some probable exposure.
I got my blood run last month and my D3 is at 89mL (normal range is ~30-100 on my provider's test). While dietary supplementation is shown to be effective in studies, keep in mind that some experts believe sunlight generated D may be absorbed differently in ways that might matter, so getting some of both is ideal if possible. Sunlight supplementation scales with exposure duration * skin area * intensity, so less time can be partly offset with more area and/or peak time-of-day. Latitude, altitude and significant particulate air pollution can also matter. Also, be aware many common types of window glass in homes/autos as well as some sunblocks can reduce or block UV types which may contribute to the benefits.
Of course, the usual warnings about consulting your medical provider and more of a good thing is not always 'better' apply, so be careful not to over do it. Although rare, some people who have megadosed huge amounts over long time periods (usually many times 10k IU daily) have built up potentially problematic amounts of D3.
I wouldn’t worry too much about sunscreen. Don’t have the link, but I remember reading a study that sunscreen had pretty much a zero 0% effect on Vitamin D levels, because most people wear way less sunscreen than they should, and the left over areas that people miss still produce enough.
From a doctor I've heard you only need to go in the sun for about 10 minutes a day and you'll get all the vitamin D you need, but food also gives you it.
> Of course, the usual warnings about consulting your medical provider and more of a good thing is not always 'better' apply, so be careful not to over do it.
For anyone who is curious, the NIH's daily upper limit for adults of Vitamin D is 4000IU https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/VitaminD-Consumer/ . (I assume that mrandish already knows this, this is for others' benefit).
Yes, thanks for adding this. You are correct that I was aware of that as I discovered it in my hours of research deep-diving multiple govt agency published recommendations and the original peer-reviewed papers and meta-studies they are based on.
I should have included it as it's something people should know. As you likely already know, there is a lot of excellent research on this topic and, as is often found, there is a range of recommendations within a broader consensus of credible expert groups. Different govt agencies and relevant professional medical associations have released official guidelines in different nations and timeframes. Some find the 4k IU upper threshold may be somewhat too low based on more recent research data (a few, mostly older ones, are even lower than 4k).
All generally agree adverse consequences are rare and that it's not usually possible to get "too much" D from sunlight alone since it's naturally regulated in otherwise healthy people (but other non-D potential negatives from excess sun exposure still apply). Overdoing dietary supplementation is still possible since D can build up over time in the body if sustained supplementation dosing dramatically exceeds an individual's needs and natural clearing rate (which can vary based on age, mass, health condition, gender, complexion, ethnicity, some medications, etc). There are also a small number of individuals who seem to be unusually sensitive to sustained excess D supplementation but this also appears to be rare.
As always any substance, even H2O, can cause adverse reactions if consumed in substantial excess of a given individual's tolerance and clearing rate. Given the primary audience, I was assuming (perhaps naively), HN readers were more likely to actually do the necessary due diligence to verify and appropriately adapt any generalized advice for their context.
Regarding D3 dietary supplmentation in light of current CV19 concerns, I suggest everyone considering it as part of their risk mitigation approach still balance the likely benefits against the possible risks on an individual basis. IMHO, supplementing an otherwise healthy child would be unnecessary and likely inappropriate unless medically advised.
My mother is in her 90s, overweight, pre-diabetic and walks only with a cane. So, based on her weight, age, gender, conditions and elevated risk of serious harm from CV19, I suggested starting on a somewhat higher D3 dose and we've gradually tapered it down over months to avoid any excess buildup. As an additional precaution, I've also had her supplementing K2 because sustained excess D3 supplementation can effect the relative balance of these for her. I also took photos of the labels of her current supplementation (calcium, multi-vitamin, etc) and checked the literature for the combined total amounts for adverse potential interactions. All while keeping her gerontologist apprised at every step via email on what she's taking and our reasoning. To ensure she's taking the supplements correctly I check in with her specifically about the supplements every week. I also have taken over buying the supplements and have automatic subscriptions being delivered at the appropriate frequency as well as getting her a daily pill minder to help ensure she doesn't forget and miss a dose or double dose by accident. I'm also having a variety of healthier prepared hot meals that she enjoys delivered to her on a regular schedule to assist her in weight loss and sustaining a more balanced diet.
Hopefully, everyone exercises similar diligence as good health is only partly in our control, so we shouldn't leave that which can so easily be managed to chance. However, even positive steps toward good health must be balanced in light of individually unique risks, preferences, priorities and life satisfaction. There are some things she could be doing to be healthier but sometimes she makes a conscious choice to not adopt them. Simply being alive isn't always the same as living as happily as possible. It's her life and she should live it as she chooses (self-autonomy can be vital to happiness too). I try not to chide her on health choices but rather to ensure she's able to make fully informed choices (which sometimes includes the choice to not choose). There's a fine line between caring concern and being overbearing. I never want to slip into implying she bears a duty to live her life (or stay alive) for the benefit of those who love her. That means supporting her freedom to fully enjoy the few 'guilty little pleasures' that she chooses - especially in the twilight of a life so well-lived. Anything less wouldn't be returning the unconditional love she has given us.
except 4000 IU for adults is still far from useful, that's sufficient maybe for small children and teenagers, not for adults
> 1000 IU for children <1 year on enriched formula and 1500 IU for breastfed children older than 6 months, 3000 IU for children >1 year of age, and around 8000 IU for young adults and thereafter.
I orderered up some 2000IU vitamin D3 from CostCo for my elderly Dad in May. He's pretty much housebound at the moment with underlying health conditions, so I figured it couldn't hurt and might help.
I remember that there also was the result that supplementing does not help if you have covid. So to me it looks just like correlation and not causation (old sick people do not go out often and have less vitamin D. Probably same reason while you can find health benifits for alcohol: sick people stop drinking )
You missed this from late August. Rct, calcifediol administered to hospitalized patients. Absolutely massive effect on ICU admission.
There have been three RCT I know of. Another calcifediol study showed a big impact. An oral supplement study on hospitalized patients did not. Presumably because oral supplements take a while to change levels whereas calcifediol does not.
Studies seem to be mixed. I've had a hard time finding any that looked at individuals who supplement. Most seem to focus on vitamin d at infection onset or during critical care which is too late. Vitamin D takes about a month of loading for it to have an effect. The one study I did find had a very small sample size.
There are several studies where vitamin D works (amazingly well), and one study where it does not.
But in the study where it does not work, it's an oral supplement given after hospitalization. Oral vitamin D takes a while to elevate blood levels so the fact that such regimen doesn't work, doesn't prove much.
Actual experiments for causation take more time. The abstract itself addresses this: "Given the dynamics of the COVID-19 pandemic and the proven safety of vitamin D supplementation, it therefore appears highly debatable and potentially even unethical to await results of such trials before public health action is taken."
I guess the real question is whether you'll wish you had been taking vitamin D if you get Covid-19. While this could end up being placebo, there's some compelling evidence that you have everything to gain and nothing to lose.
This is because of the lag time of Vitamin D. It takes six weeks to change your levels. Since the course of Covid is lower than that, it's generally not helpful if you start supplementing after getting it.
There are enough "long hauler" cases where you still should, though.
>In other words, in an observational study design, it cannot be excluded that VitD deficiency represents a surrogate marker for a general micronutrient deficiency, which in turn reflects only the patient’s overall health status.
From the authors of one of the cited papers. I.e. if you are in generally poor health already, COVID-19 is more likely to kill you.
As someone with a constant vitamin D insufficiency I'd like to remind people that absorbtion is very difficult - you have to take it with a fatty meal!
> The presence of fat in a meal with which a vitamin D-3 supplement is taken significantly enhances absorption of the supplement [1]
I read an article a few years ago that postulated that Vitamin D itself (whatever it is) was only part of the Vitamin D story. Essentially, sunlight confers benefits that are associated with Vitamin D, but Vitamin D itself may not be the cause of those benefits. And so, supplements are not sufficient. Does anyone know enough to comment on that generally, and regarding COVID?
Yes stories like this pop up all the time for lots of different diseases. There has never been a statistically significant large result observed. There's no way 90% of people dying from Covid would be saved by vitamin D supplements.
> There's no way 90% of people dying from Covid would be saved by vitamin D supplements.
Why?
I’m not saying the opposite is true, but there is evidence for a inverse relationship between respiratory infections and vitamin D levels. We should all believe things for reasons, what reason do you have for discounting the possibility?
Sunlight exposure stimulates nitric oxide production, which lowers blood pressure. High blood pressure is a significant risk factor for COVID-19. I suspect there might be a causative relationship.
MDPI follows an author-pays model, which incentivizes it to accept all submissions instead of publishing only good-quality work. In fact, this publisher is highly suspect, as it has allegedly pressured peer reviewers to accept low-quality work for publication in the recent past:
I would treat this paper with, at most, the same skepticism as a preprint. Vitamin D supplementation is so easy and inexpensive, that if this correlation is truly that strong, I'd expect to see it in The Lancet or Nature or any one of the other mainstream journals.
Up until a very short time ago, humans spent most of their time outside, and sunscreen did not exist. Now we spend nearly all our time inside, and many of us wear sunscreen whenever it's really sunny.
And there's a serious correlation between low vitamin D levels and COVID-19 fatalities.
We haven't proved causation yet, and we might never, but given the previous three points, there's every good reason to take vitamin D.
My problem with this line of reasoning is that people without the relevant expertise will think it means "Vitamin D supplementation protects me from COVID-19," start taking the vitamin, and stop engaging in other behaviors that reduce their risk of exposure, like social distancing and mask wearing.
I see this in infosec all the time. People think, for example, "I'm running antivirus software; I'm safe," which they'll use to justify all sorts of risky behavior that could (and sometimes does) lead to a security breach. They don't understand that antivirus software only reduces the risk of a security breach, never eliminating it, and it only works on certain kinds of attack vectors.
The same goes for vitamin D. Sure, lots of people are deficient, and the current evidence-based medical consensus is that people who are deficient should supplement. And maybe there's a weak correlation with COVID-19 infection/mortality risk, but people who aren't experts might misinterpret that and think they should hang out with their buddies in the sunshine or something equally risky while we're in the middle of a pandemic, instead of following the other bits of the current evidence-based medical consensus, which tells us to stay away from one another and to wear masks over our mouths and noses, which we know will greatly reduce virus transmission rates.
> hang out with their buddies in the sunshine or something equally risky
Spending time with people outdoors, especially in sunshine, is not risky, and for regions with serious outbreaks is an ideal way of finding compromise between keeping people isolated when indoors and allowing people some much needed social interaction.
I'm from Melbourne Australia which is just coming out of one of the longest/strictest lockdowns in the world, and all the evidence has been that letting people have some social interaction in the outdoors is beneficial to people's mental health and not a contributor to viral spread.
Our state has completely eradicated the virus. Zero cases for nearly 5 weeks, with 10-20k tests each day, from 700+ cases per day in July/August.
The outbreak was painstakingly contact-traced, transmission patterns modeled in great detail.
The transmissions were indoors; initially in workplaces and homes, then it tore through aged care homes.
Transmission outdoors just wasn't a factor. The government still imposed limits on how much outdoor interaction could happen, and mandated masks after things got bad, but the number of outdoor transmissions didn't change; it was always insignificant. Indoor contact was clearly the driver.
To be fair, the facts here probably don’t contradict your point much; severe restrictions were imposed, and adhered to by our largely compliant population, including significant limits on outdoor contact (exercise with only one person outside one's household for up to one hour per day) and requirements for distancing and mask-wearing.
Incidentally, Melbourne is the only large city in Australia that has cool/dark winters and a high incidence of Vitamin D deficiency, and was the only city to have a major covid outbreak. The other (warmer/sunnier/higher Vit D) cities didn’t limit outdoor contact at all, and had no trouble preventing outbreaks.
> Although results of an observational study, such as this one, need to be interpreted with caution, as done by the authors [1], due to the potential of residual confounding or reverse causality (i.e., vitamin D insufficiency resulting from poor health status at baseline rather than vice versa),
You need a control group with vitamin D deficiency but no other health issues to prove the hypothesis. They are just stating there's a correlation worth looking into.
MDPI also publishes some high quality work, in remote sensing serious labs do publish good work in their journals “Forests” and “Remote Sensing”. You are right to be skeptic, though. They have very lax review processes and will publish anything that looks like science because their incentives are screwed up. Pay-to-publish for-profit OA is just as bad as closed-access IMHO, and in some case it’s worse when the publisher is a non-profit professional organization.
I somewhat agree, but many traditional publishers have an optional "pay for OA" model and more and more funding providers require OA. For journal publications, we (in the EU) almost always have to pay. However, MDPI is particularly aggressive in its editorial practices and marketing tactics. In my community, we sometimes publish "smaller" works there: when early-career researchers get to guest edit a special issue in an MDPI journal and we want to support them; i.e., we sometimes fall for MDPI's marketing tactics ;-)
It's best to have journals that are owned by the community, but these take time to grow into venues that administrators respect: we can publish some work there, but it's not enough for building a competitive academic CV.
Considering this article: it's just a comment, and to me it looks like something an expert can easily tear apart. A well-established researcher wouldn't publish such a comment in an MDPI journal (as one of the other comments suggests).
I think that easy and inexpensive treatment methods are getting very skeptical reception by the medical community. My sense is that this is the training from the medical school, which in turn, is influenced (to a degree of course) by the pharmaceutical companies.
I think the inexpensive treatments are abused by many different actors because they carry little or no cost to develop, thus there is reason a to be sceptical.
For example you can find a lot of supplements that claim to cure various cancers and many have been proven to have no effect. People even claim that objects or they by themselves cure diseases.
If not much money or effort has been put into a 'treatment' you have reasons to sceptical, don't you think? It's like working in the financial services and someone is trying to sell you a $10 e-book that will make you rich in 1 year. It could do the trick but I bet you would be sceptical.
Testing/clinical trials usually cost a lot and even if the treatment it's not great, at least you have some hard data that you can rely on.
I had a similar success with taking magnesium to control restless leg syndrome. As some people no doubt remember there are a few speciality drugs ( which you see TV commercials about) that are designed to treat RLS, but I have found that regular magnesium supplementation works very well. I have even done a few inadvertent 'tests' by forgetting to take it with me when I travel that has reinforced the role it has in helping my RLS.
Yep. I noticed that concurrently with regularly taking magnesium (for other reasons) my semi-regular (5/year?) effectively vanished. Not sure it’s causal but I don’t care — they’re gone.
What was the process by which you found your self-treatment regimen? I've heard of magnesium's role with muscle clenching, what do the other things do?
Had a LOT of muscle aches. Took it for a few weeks. Aches went away. Mostly stopped taking it.repeat every few months.
Later on I started hearing from many sources to try it for migraines.
Realized my migraines had been ebbing and worsening a lot.
Got serous about taking it. About A 50% reduction In severity. Had multi hour ones 7 days a week. Can’t walk kind.
Dentist suggested a mouth guard for TMJ.
I looked up videos on it. Found a massage one, found a bad trigger point. 3 days later it eased up. Poof migraines almost completely gone.
I tried basically everything.
Elimination diet to find troublesome foods, etc.
Prism glasses, etc
The thing is, this is very personal. No one knows you better than yourself.
I wish people were allowed to just experiment with different solutions. Sign a paper saying that you take full responsibility and they're not obligated to treat you and that's it.
Some people live in areas that good doctors left a long time ago.
I'm not sure what value you think your point has, especially as the OP wasn't attempting to detail their entire medical history.
Yes it could just disappear, but for some migraines are a chronic issue and the meds for it are preventative and not a cure.
I'm not sure if you've dealt with chronic illnesses but I can tell you from experience that a lot of us regularly attempt to come off our meds to see if anything has changed 'underneath' the drugs, as often the drugs have other side effects that make it hard to tell what's really going on.
It's highly likely then that the OP has indeed tested to see whether their migraines have just gone.
It's also odd when people defiantly state that we don't make medical decisions based on anecdotes when clearly all medical decisions were once anecdotes that were then tested for efficacy and became best practice.
The most clear recent example of medicine catching up with annecdoatal evodence for me is severe epileptic using diet manipulation to manage their condition when prescription medicine did little to nothing as a preventative.
I'm certainly not arguing against trying different treatments and self-experimentation. If had a chronic illness I'd do the same.
I'm arguing against the experience of anyone person being applicable to anyone other than that one person. That why we have the FDA and randomized controlled trials. There are so many confounding factors that unless you test a treatment under very strict conditions, there is a very good chance you observed is completely unrelated to the treatment. Hell, drug manufacturers run trials and fall into that trap all the time.
You can search my comment history under both this handle and Mz. It goes back more than 11 years.
I've spent nearly 20 years getting better when that's supposed to be impossible. I've done so while dirt poor and even homeless for several years. What I've spent to get better is a drop in the bucket compared to the millions my condition is supposed to cost under conventional treatment while merely slowing your slow, gruesome, torturous death.
No one's interested and I've been thrown off of various forums over the years and been openly hated on and called a liar, teller of tall tales and insane.
No wants it because no one will get rich off of it. No one wants it because I'm a former homemaker, not a physician or scientist. And no doubt several other reasons, none of which I can really fathom.
The world basically agrees with you, turns a blind eye to any and all evidence to the contrary and actively tries to silence people like me.
I think it’s more about prescription drugs versus otc drugs.
Prescription drugs need a prescription because they have potentially dangerous side effects. Often you don’t get a wanted effect without potential side effects.
OTC drugs are usually extremely cheap (hence why you could think the medical community dislikes cheap medication). The fact that you don’t need a medical professional to get them makes them a target for the alternative medicine crowd.
In the end it’s also the fault of patients for simply asking for simple cures. My doctor uses every occasion to tell me that I should do more sports, but that would mean that I would actually need to put effort in my health.
> Prescription drugs need a prescription because they have potentially dangerous side effects
Or, more likely, someone just decided they should be prescription only. Why are melatonin, gabapentin, piracetam prescription only? Paracetamol will kill you in the right dosage, yet it's OTC. Hell, you can overdose on vitamins and minerals/metals, too.
It's like a game for the industry, at the expense of a minority who have to suffer from only having access to bad doctors.
There's no such thing as an "immune booster". The immune system is incredibly complex and nuanced, and there isn't a knob (or 10) that you can tweak to turn it up or down. It exists in a continuum of largely understood configurations, and it can learn and adapt (not always with good results). If anything, "boosting" it as in turning up immune activity is usually terrible (think auto-immune disorders, inflammation, cancer).
The "misinformation" people are battling is about a) unsubstantiated health claims and b) the fact that supplement manufacturers don't need to provide any evidence or follow any regulations regarding what's actually in the supplements. That means they can say they're selling e.g. Vitamin C but it's just sugar.
Not at all, preprints are very important because the publishing process can take many months. In fast moving fields (e.g. COVID research) working with preprints is vital if you want to do cutting edge research.
Also, an actual peer reviewed paper came out recently that showed giving vitamin d to covid patients upon admitting them did not decrease death rates. I'll look for the link but it was front page here like two weeks ago.
(Can't find the HN discussion link at the moment, unfortunately -- it didn't point to that particular link!)
Worth noting that this RCT was for bolus supplementation of Vitamin D3 at some point in their hospital stay, and excluded patients already supplementing with D3.
There's nothing contradictory in it. It may take several months to restore normal Vitamin D level from the state of deficiency, so it's very long process. On average much longer than typical Covid duration.
Proper Vitamin D level should be reached _before_ contact with the virus. Then the data would be valuable and helpful. Theirs data doesn't show much, imho.
The Lancet or Nature don't exactly have stellar reputations anymore. Source reputability should not be weighted heavily when assessing new information in our information environment — this is a very outmoded, maladaptive norm.
It's unfortunate that it is not simple to get regular tests for vitamin and mineral deficiencies. The whole process seems to be stuck behind the doctor appointment firewall. This might be one of the reasons why Theranos was so readily believed. As the quantified self movement that gained popularity around the same time showed, there's an appetite in certain segments of the population for this type of testing and tracking but the process isn't very transparent and often expensive due to it being a profit center. Make it a simple yearly subscription where you can stop in at any time at a clinic like a CVS Minute Clinic, get a blood sample drawn, and then get your results a couple of hours later. Maybe a limit of once a month or once every other week depending on your needs. Only if something is out of standard range would you need to involve a doctor. It would also be good for your next annual checkup to have an entire year's worth of such data.
I've often wondered if it would be economically feasible for blood donation banks to do this as a perk/incentive for giving blood.
Every 6 months or so, you donate blood and as part of the process you get run-of-the-mill bloodwork report emailed to you a few days later.
You'd have to make sure you weren't creating an incentive for sick people to donate blood just for the lab work, but otherwise it seems like it would be an excellent perk for donating blood.
I wonder if the business model could be a free or nearly free blood / genetic test for people. Each time you donate, you select either one genetic test panel or one blood test panel. The organization uses the money saved / earned from the blood donation to pay for the test. Possibly it also requires signing off on providing information to a research study as an additional revenue stream to pay for the testing / subsidize the creation of new panels.
I'm guessing this may not be economically feasible though. Additionally, you have the issue that people who can't afford health insurance would be literally selling their body for healthcare. Strictly speaking, it might be better than the alternative, but it's still not good that it's even necessary to consider something like this.
Seems like that could easily work places with universal healthcare. Very little incentive to donate for free lab work when any medically necessary lab work would be done for free anyway.
And second that, would happily donate in exchange for curiousity-fulfilling bloodwork.
The comment I replied to was suggesting doing these panels as part of donating blood as an added incentive, but was worried that people would intentionally donate while unhealthy in order to receive free lab work.
I said that isn't a problem places where medical lab work already has no cost, as no one would be incentivized to donate blood just to receive lab work.
Not sure where this got lost along the way since this is one of two comments effectively replying to the same misunderstanding.
I think the key is “medically necessary”. If I went to my doctor in Canada and said “can you run a panel of genetic tests” he’d say “no, that’s a waste of money because you don’t have any other risk factors”.
There are fairly silly exclusions to donating blood. I was recently (but apparently no longer, thanks to new rules?) blocked from donating blood because I spent too much time in Europe. Would be unfortunate to gate this care on such eligibility.
You were probably blocked because of variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (AKA human bovine spongiform encephalopathy AKA human mad cow disease).
The US recently removed the block for this on:
• people who were stationed with the military or lived on a base in Europe from 1980-1996, and
• people who lived in Europe for five years or more from 1980 to the present, except for two exceptions. Those are people who lived in Ireland or France for 5 years or more cumulatively from 1980-2001, and people who lived in the UK for 3 months or more cumulatively from 1980-1996.
Canada, New Zealand, Poland, Finland and the Czech Republic have similar rules, according to Wikipedia.
When I'm feeling ill or need a test I call a friend of mine who is a nurse practitioner in another state. She has a ballpark idea of my current health, enough info to fit on an index card. Then she files a script with the pharmacy or writes me a prescription for a blood test. The whole thing is done in 5 minutes. In fact, the whole thing is done over iMessage.
Firewall is the perfect term. Everyone knows the industry is ripe to be turned upside down in the absense of a public option. What surprises me is that Walmart and Amazon still haven't attacked it head-on.
You can get blood tests without a prescription - or at least
without a nurse friend, by just paying a fairly small fee and going to a local labcorp/quest diagnostics.
e.g. privatemdlabs.com (I'm not recommending this site - just giving it as an example. Though I have used it before without issue, there may be other companies providing better/more competitive services in this field)
Even beyond that in almost every state you can order your own labs via websites like OwnYourLabs, PrivateMDLabs, RequestATest, etc. OmegaQuant also offers an at home vitamin D test.
And I'd instantly not trust it because providing the service for a nominal fee would be so much less of a money printing scheme than providing the service for a nominal fee, but then once the fee had established trust using that transaction as a sales vector for all kinds of snake oil that's supposedly exactly what you need according to the results. Unfortunately there are many good reasons to burden the medical economy with all these stifling regulations. The quest for the least bad system is a permanent struggle.
Why not make it simple? I donate blood every 2 months. They tell me cholesterol and if I have c19 antibodies. Why not other important health indicators?
What's the reason? Maybe not share it but double check that the reason is still valid. The criteria changes pretty frequently. They always need more blood.
To be fair, I do understand that universally fatal, untreatable, undiagnosable, undetectable diseases with unknown incubation periods are scary, and I understand that blood donation is an amplification factor for blood borne diseases, hence the caution.
>AFAIU you can’t donate blood if you’re gay. At least, I saw some segment on Anderson Cooper where he claimed that was the case.
That's not actually true. There are some restrictions if you're a man who has sex with men, but you're certainly not permanently barred from giving blood.
> There are some restrictions if you're a man who has sex with men
This is a weird way of phrasing it. More accurate would be: You may not donate if you are a man who has sex with men. The only way to donate is to 1) stop having sex with other men and 2) wait 3 months.
I'd say "you can't donate blood if you're gay" is a pretty close approximation.
>I'd say "you can't donate blood if you're gay" is a pretty close approximation.
As an approximation, yes. But that also includes bi-men, as well as women who have sex with bi men.
As such, your formulation also lacks precision, something you took me to task for (despite my link to actual data) in the previous sentence of your post.
Personally I think it's a dumb restriction given the advances in blood testing, but I don't run a blood donor program.
That said, those who deal with blood and blood products to be given to other humans tend to apply broad filters for donor acceptance. Note all the other restrictions in the the link I posted.
While extensive blood testing is the norm these days and the sensitivity of such testing is much better than it used to be, I imagine that being so picky about donors is much more about maintaining the integrity of the blood supply than being biased against any particular group -- even if it might seem that way.
Especially since the lack of screening/testing in the past caused a huge amount of suffering and death[0], including my own brother in-law, and through his exposure to tainted blood products, my sister as well.
Please note that such tragedies (with Hepatitis, HIV and other blood-borne diseases) are most certainly not the fault of donors.
Understanding the history[1] of these issues provides a lot of context (as it does for most things we do) for what we do today WRT the blood supply
There's a reason medical tests aren't made easily accessible. The science of when regular testing something helps is complicated. If you test for things that are rare you might cause more harm than good by doing mass testing, because you might overwhelmingly treat people with false positive test results.
There's a lively debate around various cancer screening initiatives, which often don't have any good evidence that they overall do more good than harm. The same mechanisms are true for lots of other medical tests.
Ultimately a medical test should be treated like any other medical intervention: Only do it if you have scientific evidence that it helps the patient.
I agree with you on "detection tests" (not sure what a Dr would call them) - but checking for vitamin deficiencies would be more of a preventative type test, and everyone should have those probably once a year or every X years, but that would lower insurance profits, so they don't happen in the US anyway.
I usually use Ultalabtests.com to order my own blood work, but it pays to comparison shop even at an individual test level.
Being familiar with what tests I need to run and what the acceptable ranges are, there is literally no reason for me to go through the doctor appointment firewall anymore.
Around/after Thanksgiving, many of the online test mongers discount tests heavily, so it's not a bad idea to stock up for the year on lab work orders, as they don't expire.
Most online providers give you the choice of labs to use.
I get an annual every year for around $150 and can request any test that I want from my doctor. I don't think this is something you need to test more often than that unless you have huge swings in your diet. Obviously if low levels of something are detected there are follow ups. I was actually low on vitamin d (by quite a lot) and started taking supplements. However, I do wish it was easier to get medical tests as you suggest without a doctors orders.
In a clinical setting when you know what you're looking for, blood tests are great. Randomly running panels on yourself, you'll have a hard time distinguishing signal from noise. Or even worse interference. Say, taking high doses of Biotin is known to interfere with many tests.
By all means, I'd rather have that data on myself than not. But I can see why the doctors wouldn't be too crazy about it.
I know, right; imagine if Theranos were actually legit. It'd be amazing. Something like that will probably come someday from some people who have more than just an idea and a zealous propaganda strategy. Current medicine, like a lot of fields, will probably be seen as incredibly immature in the next century.
I would call my lovely Poland less and less a civilised world, but even here I can test whatever I want whenever I want in at least two big networks of private labs. I go to lab online shop, buy what I want (vit D costs ~$13), download a voucher with qr code on my phone, go to the lab and 5 mins later I can go to home. I have an account on their web app, later that day I have results and can compare it to all my previous results too, each thing with nicely visualised historical data on diagram.
If you don't tell us where you live, it's not such a useful feedback item. In many (most) places in Asia, you can walk into any clinic and order whatever tests you want if they are reasonable and exist. For alot of tests the results could be available later that day. You do pay, but the cost is usually minimal compared to say the US.
I've been telling family and friends to take vitamin D supplements since the first of these kinds of studies came out. The data is hardly conclusive (case control bias, affect of supplementation vs natural production, etc), and the abstract here even points that out. However, there's nothing to lose...especially this time of year.
I must admit I was completely ignorant of the effects of Vitamin D deficiency on common illnesses such as the flu as well as how unbelievably common that deficiency is for people living in much of the northern hemisphere. Will it cure COVID19? No. But do I think there's a decent chance it will improve my outcome while simultaneously improving my ability to fight off other viruses.
I am honestly completely shocked that we haven't seen governments and the media increasing people's awareness of this issue.
The problem is that vitamin D absorption is one of those things linked to ethnicity. It is very basic and undisputed science that lower melanin in skin = higher vitamin D absorption. No European educational institution or government wants to publicise research highlighting that ethnic groups indigenous to the northern hemisphere are more suited to the natural environment they are endemic too, and less likely to have vitamin D problems. Of course, the Vitamin D deficiency in people unsuited to non-indigenous European residents will naturally disadvantage them over time in nature.
To give balance to reinforce that i'm purely speaking from a scientific-rational viewpoint, in Australia the government is trying to discourage people from being in the sun at all due to Australia (primarily european ethnic) having one of the highest rates of skin cancer in the world, due to also not being suited to their natural environment.
From there is the following study which concludes “ Greater risk of severe COVID-19 in Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic populations is not explained by cardiometabolic, socioeconomic or behavioural factors, or by 25(OH)-vitamin D status” — so part of the reason this viewpoint isn’t getting more traction is simply that it doesn’t seem to be true
The parent comment here said publicise, not publish. The studies will go ahead, but you won't see the mainstream media putting this on the front page.
The reason is that it's too sensitive. Look at the massive argument and tension that was generated just from someone pointing out that certain skin types are not suited to certain environments (melanin skin to north europe, non-melanin skin to australia) - nobody who values their political or academia career will want to touch this one, so the problem will get worse and worse, silently. It could even end up impacting educational and career outcomes in certain parts of the population that would appear to be racial characteristics because the science impacting those traits is a forbidden subject... which ironically makes people more racist.
“Socio-economic inequality means we're more likely to catch the virus, while our biology means we're more likely to die”
Literally just the first link that 10s of Googling found.
> from someone point internet out that certain skin types are not suited to certain environments
That’s because this is a crassly overloaded dog whistle statement.
“Ethnic minorities should supplement Vitamin D in winter” and “pale people should wear sunscreen in Australia” are in no way controversial or sensitive statements in science or academia or in the media. Trying to morph those into an argument that black people “aren’t suited for” Northern Europe is the racist, non-scientific bullshit people lose their positions for.
1.) At this point, it is not "recently invented". It is long term known.
2.) Vitamin D deficiency is affecting you negatively, but not enough to claim that people are "living in an environment they are not suited to". That is absurdly exaggerated claim, especially given all the various reasons why people in history died.
3.) Racism is causing way more suffering then overall vitamin D deficiency.
You're being uncharitable, which is part of the problem. These supplements are "recently invented" in terms of evolutionary history and it's not clear how well they work, compared to actual sun exposure.
"Not suited to" may be a contentious choice of words, but "not adapted to" is plain fact. Not being adapted to an environment confers disadvantages. Perhaps these disadvantages are minor, certainly in this case they are not lethal (in isolation), but from a healthcare perspective, they are important to take into consideration.
Consider that jumping at every opportunity to scold someone choosing their words unwisely does nothing to actually fight racism, but could indirectly harm those people you are intending to help. After all, why would a true racist care about the health outcomes of the races they ostensibly despise? Why would anyone risk investigating genetic differences in medicine, when the payoff is an accusation of racism by well-meaning but uneducated laymen?
> Why would anyone risk investigating genetic differences in medicine, when the payoff is an accusation of racism by well-meaning but uneducated laymen?
You are replying in a thread that above has a link to a great deal of race-specific research done on just Covid-19. There is a large amount of race-specific medicinal research. There is a huge amount of scientific research into medical and sociological factors that pertain to race. You will find it in seconds if you Google for it. Many standard heart-health guides will factor in your ethnicity.
To suggest there isn’t, and there’s some kind of conspiracy is just a form of tired “race realism” bullshit. Just more suggesting that “if we let the facts speak” we’d find some races are superior to others.
People are maladapted to live almost everywhere, which is why we wear warm clothes and sun protection. This whole thing is a racist trope to give cover to the idea that people of colour don’t “belong” in places.
I didn't mean to say that there isn't any race-specific research, but that there is a risk of being called a racist (or a "race realist") associated with doing such research, especially when it gets attention from sensationalist media and keyboard warriors on social media.
Therefore, if there is such a risk, it must have a chilling effect on actual research and on public health relations, even if doesn't outright prevent it from happening at all.
You are demonstrating that there indeed is such a risk, by suggesting that I'm one step away from proclaiming the superiority of the white race. You're not doing anyone any favors with that.
You won't see the mainstream media publicize any non-vaccine solution because they're in the business of fear-mongering and because they have a chummy relationship with big pharma.
There's a greater risk in Asians? Japan has had 20k deaths or 1 in 60k, vs USA which is currently at 1 in 1200
People always make up random excuses like
"Japan locked down more" No they didn't. In fact they've been practically unlocked since June.
"Japan doesn't test as much" That wouldn't hide a raise in the death rate overall.
"Japanese people wear masks" Restaurants, coffeeshops, and bars are full (yes, they are) and those people are not wearing masks. They do wear them elsewhere (trains, busses, stores, outside...)
In any case, that Asians are of "Greater Risk of severe COVID-19" doesn't seem to fit the facts at least in Japan.
“Asian” in the UK generally means South Asian. Either way you are arguing with the data collected in a study by stating a series of observations about a different country.
Bro, the exact website you quoted (not same page) has an entire section of information about melanin, ethnic groups, and vitamin D:
What is my skin type?
Skin types that are more sensitive to ultraviolet (UV) radiation burn more quickly and are at a greater risk of skin cancer.
All skin types can be damaged by too much UV radiation. Skin types that are more sensitive to UV radiation burn more quickly and are at a greater risk of skin cancer.
People with naturally very dark skin (usually skin type V or VI) still need to take care in the sun even though they may rarely, if ever, get sunburnt. The larger amount of melanin in very dark skin provides natural protection from UV radiation. This means the risk of skin cancer is lower.
Eye damage can occur regardless of skin type. High levels of UV radiation have also been linked to harmful effects on the immune system.
Vitamin D deficiency may be a greater health concern for people with naturally very dark skin, as it is more difficult for people with this skin type to make vitamin D.
FWIW, I've seen the NHS mention it quite a few times. Example:
> People with dark skin, such as those of African, African-Caribbean or south Asian origin, will need to spend longer in the sun to produce the same amount of vitamin D as someone with lighter skin.
> Furthermore, pointing out that people with darker skin are not adapted to live up north could easily be misconstrued as an anti-immigration stance.
True. That can easily happen. Reason enough to not push that angle, at least not directly. There are other ways of phrasing that.
Besides, for humans, there's no longer such a thing as "being adapted" to the environment, at least not in that limited sense. This is not an Earth versus Mars thing, it's just a matter of latitude.
If natural abilities were such a big factor, we wouldn't need clothes in Norway or Canada to survive in those places, in winter. But we do. Plus heating.
Humans are not "adapted" to live in all environments on Earth, at least not without tools, which includes clothing. So, if your skin is light and you are in an area with high insolation, cover up more and try to spend less time in the sun. Add some sunscreen too. If the skin is darker, do the opposite. Add some supplements as needed. Done. Adapted to the environment.
Furthermore, this article by two Australian academics, published in an outlet considered leftist, is basically about why Australians have such high rates of skin cancer, and includes the quote:
Why us?
Most Australians (and Kiwis) have the wrong type of skin for their environment. Basically, through migration, our two countries have been populated by many people with fair skin whose ancestors come from much less sunny climates. Lack of protective pigmentation leaves skin cells especially vulnerable to the DNA-damaging rays from the sun.
During human evolution, our early hominid ancestors in Africa lost their covering of body hair and developed pigmented skins, presumably as protection against the harsh tropical sun. With subsequent migration out of Africa into Europe, the protective benefits of dark skin became less important for survival and were likely a hindrance to effective vitamin D production. There was selective pressure for less pigmented skin with more distance from the equator.
In contrast, those who migrated out of Africa to Asia, Australia and the islands of Melanesia were constantly exposed to sunlight. So they retained their protective pigmentation. This explains why the recent European migrants to the Americas and Oceania arrived in the “new worlds” with skin types poorly suited to their new environments. This was in stark contrast to the well-adapted skin of the indigenous inhabitants.
The difference is that it's a shift in perspective. It's acceptable to say that white people aren't suited to live in Australia. It's not acceptable to say that black people aren't suited to live in the UK, for example.
The same website the OP links to, which is an Australian site, has a page that includes the text, "Vitamin D deficiency may be a greater health concern for people with naturally very dark skin, as it is more difficult for people with this skin type to make vitamin D.".
It's unclear why an Australian site would be going into the question of who is "suited to" live in the UK.
I mean, the low case rates could be due to the lockdowns, not sure about mortality rates unless you're comparing it to places where the ICUs have become overwhelmed.
> No European educational institution or government wants to publicise research highlighting that ethnic groups indigenous to the northern hemisphere are more suited to the natural environment they are endemic too
“The problem” is more likely to be the existence of studies finding low vitamin D in African people who live in African countries and American native people who live in America, making your theory that people should live where they came from pretty suspect as a solution.
As a public health message, “black people need to be careful about sunburn” has presumably been considered more important than “black people have low vitamin D”, because of the widespread false belief that people with dark skin are immune to skin cancer.
it's not like most people live in a natural environment these days anyway.. saying a modern human is rationality unsuited to a place is skipping over the part where the built environment most people live in is created by and for us, and who it suits is independent of latitude.
Wonder if there is also a connection with the declining popularity of cow's milk, which is typically fortified with vitamins A & D. In primary school, cow's milk have become less common due to increased awareness that different ethnic groups have different tolerances for lactose. Unfortunately, it appears the groups that would benefit the most from more vitamin D are also the ones most likely to be lactose intolerant, and thus not drinking the milk fortified with vitamin D.
> I am honestly completely shocked that we haven't seen governments and the media increasing people's awareness of this issue.
The fact that it hasn't been picked up by journalists and public health officials should rather be reason for you to be skeptical of early research cherry-picked by random programmers on the internet... the same people that were blowing up HN with hydroxychloroquine stories just a few months ago.
When I was reading it in the spring I was skeptical for exactly those reasons, but it quickly became clear with even the smallest bit of research that it was well accepted the Vitamin D deficiency was linked with worsened effects from common viruses and that the vast majority of people in my region were deficient.
Most of the people I've seen mentioning it recently have been medical and scientists on other sites.
In fairness what the media deeds important and accepts as truth is as cherry-picked by some random newsroom editor.
That's why you see things like the Iraq war everyday on tv and then never again. People are still blowing themselves up over there. There is always a bigger story with a greater theme that uses daily news stories to paint a broader picture.
People who seek out truth themselves are more likely to find it.
Yes. I won't be surprised if we eventually determine that advocating Vitamin D supplements would have been one of the most beneficial strategies we could have implemented. But it's a "drug", and therefore "unethical" to recommend without years of studies even though we know that it has effectively zero risk.
I don’t think that’s really the blocker here. Vitamin D supplementation is very low risk and the risks are well known. I’ve seen at least one study that I can recall saying exactly that—the correlation is there and vitamin D is safe and basically risk free so we should be supplementing it in at least the at-risk population immediately.
Not particularly. They tend to have faulty liver more often though preventing them from producing enough cholesterol, and need more to handle the general cell damage, so less remains in the skin to synthesize vitamin D...
You can overdose on vitamin D and it can have significant side effects.
More or less anything that can have a positive effect on your health can have a negative effect if done wrong. If something has no possible negative effects it probably doesn’t do anything at all.
You can overdose on water but we still tell folks to drink several glasses a day, because most people don't get enough. That a tiny few are sensitive or go nuts with it shouldn't stop helping everyone else.
There is a strong signal to noise radio when it comes to the positive effectiveness of vitamin D. It has the benefits of being a common deficiency and having substantial weight behind positive effectiveness, low negative consequences, and being easy to acquire.
People like the cure-all narrative, especially when even reasonable folk believe it has merit.
This site has a comprehensive index of almost all the studies on Vitamin D and COVID-19. Before commenting here I highly recommend that everyone at least read the abstracts of all the linked articles.
When this started circulating a few months ago my wife and daughter decided to get their blood tested (I was already taking regular Vitamin D supplements). They both showed with extremely low levels of vitamin D and have since started taking 2000 IU daily to try and increase their levels. It's so cheap and easy that everyone should be doing it right now. Even if you don't want to get your blood tested, I think going on a supplement _now_ is right for everyone. But I guess each person should consult their doctor if they're concerned.
Not only that, but a large fraction of the English-speaking northern hemisphere does not receive enough sunlight in winter months for the skin to produce Vitamin D.
I often arrive at our offices in the dark, and then leave after dark. In the meantime I'm in a windowed corner office but like others have said - filtered light. I take 10k IU's of vitamin D per day. Absent that, my natural (un-supplemented) vitamin D tests come back with a level about 20+ (30-100 being the desired range).
That's interesting, I was just wondering whether we get any benefit from ambient sunlight indoors. So you're saying 'yes' (a limited / very modest benefit).
But how much sunlight do you need in order to saturate your vitamin D production? If I'm indoors in a room with a lot of windows all day, is that good enough?
Authors controlled for age, sex. But I'd like to see additional control for race. Black people have less Vitamin D due to melanin blocking sunlight. And black people are disproportionately impacted by COVID.
So I'm now curious whether it's really Vitamin D deficiency that's causing the poor outcomes, or some racial socioeconomic factor that Vitamin D is simply a marker for.
Took a closer look at the study and the patient population was from a small town in Germany, Heidelberg. It'd probably be a fair guess that there's not a lot of variation in the patients' ethnicity so in this particular case controlling by race probably wasn't necessary.
This observation makes me more confident Vitamin D plays a role.
In any event, good to review studies for potential issues like this.
> Heidelberg [...] not a lot of variation in the patients' ethnicity
You'd be surprised. There might not be a lot of black people but Heidelberg is a university town and rather diverse. 27% are ethnic minorities, though only maybe 1% are black (4% Asian, 4% Russian/CIS, 3% southern Europe, 3% Turkey, 2% US-American, 2% Latin American, 2% Polish, 2% ex-Yugoslav)
> black people are disproportionately impacted by COVID.
Serious question: I thought the African-America community in America was affected by COVID-19 disproportionately due to blacks being more likely to be having comorbidities. Is that not the case?
That was the case early on, but the demographics most affected are changing. There are probably many factors at play, but early on it was suggested that comorbidities and the higher proportion working in the service sector made black and Latino people overrepresented.
That's likely also the case, but aside from the melanin-vitamin-d angle, there's been some work suggesting a genetic susceptibility to covid for people with significant recent SSA ancestry.
On the other hand it seems a major genetic risk factor for COVID-19 is inherited from Neanderthals, and that should be less common among Sub-Saharan Africans.
It probably is the case, but comorbidities are being ignored in favor of crisis-exploiting political narratives as to how systemic racism is causing disproportionate impact to African Americans. However, it is worth noting that comorbidities are also an issue more broadly across the entire American populace. Obesity rates are above 40%. And so is vitamin D deficiency. And in fact obesity worsens vitamin D deficiency (https://www.livescience.com/26961-obesity-causes-vitamin-d-d...).
Precisely. Black is no more important than a descriptor than say eye color or hair color in relation to covid. The reality is black population in the US are more obese than the white population, which is a major comorbidity, hence the higher death rate from covid. Meanwhile in Africa there is a much lower death rate than blacks in the US, as well as a lower death rate than Americans as a whole.
Africa has dramatically lower rates of obesity, a younger population, less asthma, less air conditioning, and as a sibling comment notes, the people get more sun exposure, hence Vitamin D.
Everything we know to track with high mortality, Africa has less of. They also have very little testing, so the infection rate is unknown and somewhat irrelevant, since few people are ending up in hospitals and dying.
High. This past winter here was one of the coldest ones in more than a decade. South Africa is also the only country in Africa(south of the Sahara) that really tests.
Yeah, so this is a notable bit of nuance. Black people in Africa likely tend to get a bit more sun exposure compared to Black people in northern territories e.g. Europe, US, etc., so it wouldn't surprise me if Vitamin D deficiencies among Black people in the US and Europe are much more prevalent.
I've always wanted to ask someone personally: why is the fact that African nations haven't been overrun by COVID-19 surprising?
I mean, I live here and I'm certainly very pleased that we've had such positive outcomes. But the constant tone of surprise from foreigners was funny at first but is now mildly annoying if I'm being honest; not you, obviously, but I've read one too many op-eds that seem somewhat upset that we aren't dying in droves.
AFAIK it's basically demographics. Younger, less obese overall, not stuffed with industrial trash food over decades resulting in less comorbidities.
Also, if the vitamin D angle holds, Africa is probably pretty well positioned on that front. I would REALLY like to see COVID ICU numbers in regions with a significant marine/fish diet versus others.
(Although, imho, nutritional science is largely opinionated guess work with no basis in reality but an incredible ability to sell books off it).
I mean, I for one wouldn't be so bold as to claim that people are less sick here. For example the vast majority of my country is a holoendemic area for one of the world's deadliest diseases (malaria).
Although, speaking of which, it seems nearly certain to me that there could be an interaction between malaria [antibodies] and SARS-CoV2, but very few people indeed seem interested in researching that. Oh well
The unspoken assumption is that everything else being equal african countries should have been impacted at least as much as other countries, but probably more impacted for having less intensive care units per inhabitant.
But everything else is not equal, is it? Ignoring material conditions is "assume a spherical cow in a vacuum" levels of bad analysis.
Even at that, using intensive care unit counts as the metric worth paying attention to in a public health crisis seems rather off; public health is and should be the domain of the community, not of the hospitals. To be fair, "how likely are people to do what they're supposed to to protect their communities" is far trickier to measure than just counting hospital beds.
Sunlight gives us vitamin D and nitric oxide (which improves blood flow and reduces hypertension). Vitamin D is crucial for the functioning of our immune systems, and the 1000IU dosage of many supplements is laughably small. A light skinned person in a singlet standing outside at noon for 30 minutes will produce between 10,000IU and 20,000IU in their skin. I would recommend supplementing 5,000IU vitamin D while also getting some exposure in the morning or afternoon (but avoiding the sun when it is high in the sky).
The amount of UV exposure you get will differ significantly based on your latitude and time of year (and your skin type and weather of course). If anyone is serious enough to look into optimizing their sunlight exposure, I'd recommend playing around with these calculators to get an idea of what exposure is effective for you: https://fastrt.nilu.no/README_VitD_quartMEDandMED_v2.html
Recently there was article/paper on HN about specific UV light wavelength from LED diodes that can produce very good response without daylight, creating significant amount of vitamin D.
Different place. Skin is big area and the vitamin gets relatively slowly transported to liver for storage. On the other hand, eaten D3 is absorbed very quickly with a fatty meal and you could obviously damage your liver with it.
EPIC series of studies suggests dosage of 2000-3000 IU for all cause lowest mortality. (Europe, regardless of diet. Caucasian.)
pretty much whole Europe and whole India is vitamin D deficient, if you check actual studies, so no, unless you spend whole day naked in sun you won't get anywhere close to sufficient amount
this is great advice for the summer, but doesn't work so well in the winter, when the UV index is a small fraction of summer values and air temps are not conducive to skin exposure.
The big question is whether taking vitamin D supplements would address this, or whether having low vitamin D just happens to correlate with the real risk factors (sedentary, indoor lifestyle; unhealthy diet; obesity; etc.).
That’s the obvious question that’s specifically raised as unanswered in all of these studies.
But given the risks of supplementing vitamin D are about as close to zero as you can get it seems likely it’s worth the gamble that it’s a causal link.
If you’re right, various severely beneficial health effects and potentially protection from one cause of death. If you’re wrong... fewer beneficial health effects?
the new studies show that 2000 IU is very low for active adult person it should be more like 6-8000 IU, the recommended values by conservative studies won't even diminish vitamin D deficiency let alone bring benefits of having extra levels
If Vitamin D had such a major effect, I would have expected death rates from Southern Europe (Spain, Italy specifically) to be a lot lower than from Northern Europe (e.g. UK, Germany).
From my anecdotal experience people in Southern Europe spend a lot more time outside (in parts of Spain you can still go to the beach now, where I live there is snow on the ground...), and older people seem more active and able to live independent lives (i.e. not in a care home).
Of course this doesn't mean Vitamin D isn't at play. The one thing this pandemic has taught me is it seems there is very little we know about how it works :-) Maybe production from sun exposure in older people drops greatly, so the difference in sun exposure has little effect on overall Vitamin D levels.
There was a large difference between northern and southern Italy described in this paper (from June so maybe things have changed since then). Note that northern Italy only has a slightly higher population density that the authors didn't think was significant.
Getting sunlight in the morning, in particular, seems important. Even in winter months, I'll go outside for 30 minutes or so in nothing but shorts and do farmer walks, etc. and feel great throughout the day.
In winter, in the more northerly latitudes, being outside is not sufficient, because of the angle at which the sun ray hit, the skin cannot make vitamin D.
> At latitudes below 37ᵒN, UVB radiation is sufficient for year round vitamin D synthesis. At higher latitude, vitamin D is not synthesised during the winter months. In the UK, sunlight-induced vitamin D synthesis is only effective between late March/early April and September and not from October onwards throughout the winter months.
Not to mention at many of the places I’ve lived at high latitudes going outside for a half hour in shorts is likely to result in severe frostbite in the winter.
It was a very regular occurrence to hear the warnings on the news in the morning that it was cold enough to get frostbite on exposed skin in under a minute...
The morning exercise and cold air exposure alone is going to confer benefit, vitamin D aside. I feel better throughout the day if it starts with some form of exercise.
For 15 years, I've taken many supplements, which greatly varied over time, but the fixed ones, which I never had any concerns with were vitamin D3 (in the morning!) and chelated magnesium. At one point, I read warnings about high vitamin D levels, but I just lowered from 5,000 IU to 2,000 and I still have high, but still in the range levels.
Likewise I had a broad panel of blood tests for a few reasons and my vitamin D levels came back at the top of the range so I reduced my dosage to reduce the risk of a bad outcome.
I would expect the death toll to be lower in sunny countries and higher in north. Italy and Spain was hit quite hard, but that was maybe because of a older population. But if D insufficiency is a leading factor, should you not see more deaths in the “younger” population in less sunny countries?
Can't see the article. Did they control for obesity?
You have a single factor highly correlated with low vitamin D serum concentrations, ACE2 expression, and comorbidities associated with covid-19 mortality.
I heard a different major factor from frontline healthcare workers - obesity. A vast majority of deaths in in the major hospital near myself has been obese people.
Yes obesity is one of several confirmed risk factors. But this is a confounding factor for Vitamin D deficiency. Obese patients are more likely to be deficient because the hormone is fat soluble.
It's disappointing that most public health agencies have taken a defeatist approach and focused exclusively on preventing disease transmission. No matter what precautions we take a lot of people are still going to get infected so there should be equal focus on practical steps that everyone can take to improve their survival odds.
If those who are unhealthy or have worse dietary practices are experiencing higher fatality rates, why should the rest of us be subject to harsh lockdowns, restricted from gatherings, and restricted from patronizing businesses? This feels to be like more evidence as to why individuals should be free to assess risks and decide how they want to act. Those who are risk averse or unhealthy or vulnerable can self isolate indefinitely if needed.
There is not complete consensus, but a lot of the large deltas are due to Vitamin D being fat soluble - if you are deficient, you can take far higher doses for a while and they will be stored in your liver. But if you continue to do so once you are at good levels, it can do damage:
"Hypercalcemia, in turn, can lead to nausea, vomiting, muscle weakness, neuropsychiatric disturbances, pain, loss of appetite, dehydration, polyuria, excessive thirst, and kidney stones."
That paper's recommendations are 600IU RDA, and that it is safe to take up to 4000IU without supervision of a doctor (i.e. regular blood tests to make sure you're not overshooting recommended blood concentration).
and that "A daily intake ranging from 40,000–100,000 IU (1000–2500 micrograms), for one to several months, has been shown to cause toxicity in humans" (with several case reports).
While these are different, 4000IU, 6000IU, and 10000IU are well within an order of magnitude as upper limits of what you can tolerate without side effects ("upper limits" being more than RDA, but won't cause a separate medical problem)
I've seen some studies say that 5000IU or 10000IU is safe, differ a little bit about the normal RDA, but there's a ton of similar ranges.
The first vitamin D study showed that it reduced severe disease load by 96% (that is, if 100 hospitalized people would have been promoted to the ICU, but you gave them all vitamin D on first admission, 96 of them would no longer have to go to the ICU)
Transmissability scales with disease severity; further, to a certain extent you could argue that making every disease a mild case would be the same as ending the disease (because oh no, you got a cold). Vitamin D supplementation, at about $10 every 3 months per person, would reduce that by 96%
Meanwhile, the best vaccine being developed is claiming a 90% efficacy rate. Which means that if 100 people get exposed to covid, but they are all vaccinated, only 90 of them wouldn't get sick.
Vitamin D turns 100 cases into 4 cases. Vaccine turns 100 cases into 10 cases. Vitamin D is ridiculously cheap. Vaccine development is not. But when the time comes, I'm going to use both.
Get your vitamin D checked, if you’re spending more than 30% of your time indoors, Which probably accounts for most people here, your vitamin D is deficient. Anything below 50 should be alarming.
Just to add to this, hydroxy-25 levels alone are not enough. Hopefully everyone's doctor also advises them what is a normal level for a healthy person and understands that people that are obese or have insulin resistance will deplete D3, C and Zinc faster due to the heavy load on their innate immune system dealing with low grade inflammation.
Anedocte: after I gave up folling recomendations from doctors that were happy after I just got from 17 to barely 25, I kept taking vitamin D and I'm aiming at 50. Asthma, severe allergic reactions (due to auto-immune), overall better hormone levels...
While I don't think Vitamin D is a covid cure - I think it's appalling that Youtube has banned anything that discusses vitamin D and covid. Especially when there is so much science behind it, and so much more that we need to do to understand it and covid better. I know there is rampant misinformation out there, but I fail to see how this censorship serves the public interest - and wonder what benefits google has to gain from this. People are dying from covid - we need to be firing on all cylinders, not trying to make a buck off a disaster.
It's not always just public benefit. You have two choices:
1. Leave a video up published by a non-scientific person which has possibly harmful claims.
2. Take the video down, get decried for censorship, avoid spreading what we know is a problem right now: misinformation.
I leave option 3, policing content out of the picture. People mistake what is happening now as policing but really it's avoiding policing what they are doing now.
I am absolutely not on the side of just anyone with credentials being able to soapbox on platforms that don't want to spread misinformation whether it is or it isn't officially designated misinformation - better safe than sorry. I feel like I know the difference between band of fringe persons with Doctor in their name who have a controversial underdog belief and the official scientific sources for information.
I'm far more risk tolerant than that. "Safe" is a watchword for me that reflexively makes me doubt the argument. I have no problem with the idea of disclaimers, ratings, whatever, but give adults a choice to engage the open information dream that the Internet was/is.
At least when the government tries to police something we can grab onto it, debate it as a matter of policy, and there's a process to change that policy. With private companies trying to do the work of the government (if that really is the case, and whatever their reasons - fear of formal regulation, etc), it's far harder to manage. I'd rather have a clear conversation about the government's ability to censor speech than have a few oligarchs working as shadow censors on behalf of the government.
> I feel like I know the difference between band of fringe persons with Doctor in their name who have a controversial underdog belief and the official scientific sources for information.
Possibly true if you yourself had credentials. If not, don't be so sure.
The funny problem with this one is that your local "official" memo is different from a local official memo 50, 500 and 5000 miles away.
Do you believe you are at the locus of the best science? I have medical experts in my family all over the world... They disagree.
They also agree though that the media is leading everyone (including politicians) around like puppets. I.e. they can see nonsense in the media being spouted, because they are experts.
Just had the idea of explicit music videos. They always had the annoying disclaimer. Very hard to ignore and miss.
Why not just be transparent in there actions. Add an icon to thing they deem offensive to there ethics. Dump it from the Main page algorithm feed. And make the icon clickable to a page where it shows why you added they censored or tagged the content. People need to see this stuff go down in real-time and why it happens. But leave free speech intact.
Or make everyone pay for it then they can do whatever they want. Disappear anything Lol
I'm waiting for one of the big tech companies to end up getting sued for their self appointed role as arbiters of truth on all of human knowledge. Everyone hates politicians, even if not everyone hates the same politicians, so there's some appetite for tech companies favoring speech from one group or another. But now that they're wading into the territory of health, they're putting themselves into a precarious position, especially if some of their choices on what information they allow the public to see or not to see turns out to be incorrect.
Potential legal issues aside, the PR nightmare that would come from this if it turns out they've tried to suppress information that would have saved lives is going to be very ugly. Right now they're a spoiled kid eating whatever cookies they want because no one has ever told them no. Whether the stomach ache, rotting teeth, or parental wrath comes first remains to be seen but there will at some point be consequences for this overreach into areas they have no domain knowledge. They of course will act shocked that there is blowback and that their ever expanding intrusion into everyone's lives through information control ends up causing them harm.
Dr. John Campbell's videos are still there. He's been recommending vitamin D since the start. But he's a medical professional and he's not selling anything, which may have something to do with it.
I've watched many videos on YouTube about Vitamin-D and COVID. Admittedly those were all discussing reputable scientific papers so perhaps that's the distinction.
Relatively small sample and, considering almost half of US citizens are vitamin D deficient, you can't rule out boring correlation (and not causation).
EDIT: Why does HN have these downvote trolls? I was a bio major and was trained to critically analyze studies just like this. Skepticism is part of science. Why would you downvote my comment?!
Before the vitamin D link was so widely reported, I remember seeing a bunch of comments online (including HN) from people saying things along the lines of "We've been self-isolating at home since January, only bought things online, and STILL got sick!"
I'm not a professional and this is just me spouting ideas, but I wonder if this is one reason why America is so hard hit compared to Asia. Americans generally commute by car, stay in a massive building complex all day for work, and go home and stay inside. In Asia, a huge proportion of people commute by foot, train (which involves walking to the station), or scooter. Then they walk to a grocery store or restaurant to get some food. I wonder if those minutes of continuous sun exposure add up and lighten the severity of it.
That wouldn't account for places like Spain and Italy that are both sunny and more pedestrian friendly that were hit harder than the US though.
The theory that makes the most sense to me is that East Asia has had exposure to past viruses that were similar in nature but less lethal.
> Tatsuhiko Kodama of the University of Tokyo said preliminary studies show that Japanese people’s immune systems tend to react to the novel coronavirus as though they had previous exposure, and notes that there are centuries of history of coronaviruses emerging from East Asia.[1]
Asia is a big place. In some densely populated areas in Asia most people live in bubbles, moving from air conditioned condos to taxis/subways to offices and then malls. They spend as little time as possible in the open due to pollution, weather and a cultural aversion to tanning. As a result, vitamin D deficiency is very common.
Some examples for Thailand are included in this paper[1]. One study said this: "Soontrapa et al. [15] evaluated vitamin D status in a younger group of premenopausal women found the prevalence of vitamin D insufficiency to be 77.8%, which was as high as the rate found in elderly Thai women living in nursing homes."
There is lots of sun in Thailand, but people avoid it as much as possible, staying indoors and applying lots of sunscreen if they must go out.
you can sanity-check your suspicion by looking at the data across countries. peru, spain, mexico and brazil should be enough to show that your idea is probably not correct
I got my blood run last month and my D3 is at 89mL (normal range is ~30-100 on my provider's test). While dietary supplementation is shown to be effective in studies, keep in mind that some experts believe sunlight generated D may be absorbed differently in ways that might matter, so getting some of both is ideal if possible. Sunlight supplementation scales with exposure duration * skin area * intensity, so less time can be partly offset with more area and/or peak time-of-day. Latitude, altitude and significant particulate air pollution can also matter. Also, be aware many common types of window glass in homes/autos as well as some sunblocks can reduce or block UV types which may contribute to the benefits.
Of course, the usual warnings about consulting your medical provider and more of a good thing is not always 'better' apply, so be careful not to over do it. Although rare, some people who have megadosed huge amounts over long time periods (usually many times 10k IU daily) have built up potentially problematic amounts of D3.