In a previous post I explained how vitamin D3 is a hormone. However, it is grouped with other substances called fat-soluble vitamins and this has caused many people to avoid it. In medical school during the minimal time (two minutes!) that professors dedicated to teaching us about vitamins they lumped vitamins A, D, E and K together as fat-soluble vitamins. All they essentially taught us was they were dangerous at doses higher than the RDA, showed us pictures of third world people suffering from the effects of overdosing on them and essentially made it clear that was all we needed to know.
This message worked for me and I avoided them until death was knocking at my door. It is understood by the general public as “common knowledge” that fat soluble vitamins are dangerous. With these two major influences I stayed away and so do those that trust the RDA. We think nothing of taking huge doses of water soluble vitamins, as any excess is harmlessly urinated out, but when it comes to fat soluble vitamins we are fearful and ignorant. Since they are “known” to be dangerous we do not actively try to educate ourselves on them.
Of course, I will be writing only about vitamin D3 today and not the others, so I am not implying the others are not potentially dangerous. When it comes to vitamin D3 this ignorance has enacted a large toll on our health because the “safe” levels are not.
I came across an article that explained how the RDA determines safe blood levels. In this article it states that blood levels up to 300 ng/ml were safe, but the experts arbitrarily chose 100ng/ml as safer. Up until recently , most labs still did use, and many still do, list this blood level as potentially toxic. The problem is that they chose 30ng/ml as an adequate level. It is not. With this low “normal” level, the implication that higher levels are bad, especially over 100ng/ml, has scared off healthcare professionals and patients alike.
In my book, Optimal Dose: Restore Your Health With the Power of Vitamin D3, I argue that 100-140 ng/ml is the ideal blood level to have your body turn on the Madison-HannaH effects and optimize your health. Anecdotally, in cases where people were accidentally overdosed with vitamin D3, the danger, hypercalcemia, resolves once blood levels drop below 400ng/ml.
*The information posted above is for educational purposes only. Always check with your doctor before initiating any changes in your medical treatment. If you do not, then The Two-Minute Health Fact, Dr. Judson Somerville, nor The Optimal Dose is responsible!
2 Comments
Supz · June 3, 2019 at 9:18 am
very nice post, i certainly love this website, keep on it
Daniel · January 21, 2024 at 1:12 am
Dr. Gominak’s work indicates we don’t harmlessly urinate out all the B vitamins we take in excess. There is a point where her patients need to stop taking the B’s she has them take, else negative effects begin to occur. Stopping them once the negative effects do occur ends the negative effects within a couple days or so.
If you haven’t already, you might want to check out her work, as it is in the same “family” of work as yours, and while you both have differing notions of D levels based on your different clinical experiences, both of you have found success with your similar but different D3 based approaches. I think you might learn something from each other that helps fill in some of the missing points you both admit to not yet having a complete picture of.