This is my most important blog posting and the one I probably should have first posted with. To explain complex subjects, like vitamin D3, in my blogs I am challenged by three issues. Those three are translating medical talk into what a nonmedical person can understand while maintaining the meaning, explain how medicine studies are not “facts” and keeping my posts short.
First to translate medicalize I often must widen the view to fill in the other surrounding details to give clarity. Medical scientists use complex terms that confuse and intimidate non-medical readers giving implied legitimacy. Even if you get past that you still have other barriers to understanding what’s the truth.
Second, most importantly and so often misunderstood is medicine studies are limited by what we know. I have written many peer reviewed medical studies, a text book chapter and a book, so I understand the process. But! If anything, I hope to get across how all these studies only give an outline of what is happening. Yes, these are “facts”, but they also can contain so many loop holes, what ifs and so often miss lead us.
See, there are exceptions, which is one of the most important points I am trying to get across. Like one of my medical school professors once told us half of what we are teaching you is wrong we just don’t know which half. He was and is right. See these studies often but not always inch us closer to the truth. Unfortunately, sometimes they take us away from the truth. Take two recent vitamin D3 studies as examples.
These studies show that vitamin D3 has minimal, no and even a negative effect on us. I wrote about this in several recent blog posts, how two large meta data studies, ones the critics of taking vitamin D3 would argue are two most important studies.
In fact, one of these studies, which I called the heart study, showed that higher blood levels were associated with a higher death rate. Both studies were correct. The science in many regards was flawless. The problem?
It did not consider of the fact that a high percentage of those people received their vitamin D3 from cod liver oil and that altered the study’s results. Cod liver oil contains, at doses needed to obtain those higher vitamin D3 blood levels, a toxic level of vitamin A. Thus, in the heart study, despite higher dosing and blood levels of vitamin D3 the negative effect of vitamin A significantly overpowered this small change in vitamin D3.
Then in both these studies and every other study I have found the doses of and blood levels of vitamin D3 were still so low. So low that despite what the study scientist claim were high doses and blood levels, to be essentially no significant difference from what they classified as low dose and blood level vitamin D3.
Third make my posts requiring only around two to read. Why? I, like you are bombarded with too much information. This dulls our senses, so we accept information as true that may not be. In the end I try to cut through this to try to make complex clearer. I assumed my intent was clear, as to what I was trying to accomplish in my posts but may not have been. So, to hopefully I clarify this today.
*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!
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