11/18/22
So today we’ll revisit a topic we have discussed several times before but I do not believe there is nearly enough light (pun intended) being shone on it. If you’re not interested in spending fo whole minutes reading this, here’s the take home:
TAKE A VITAMIN D SUPPLEMENT.
I’ve been recommending D to my patients for many years, especially during fall and winter. I first wrote about this way back on April 29, 2020, just as this COVID thing hit its stride. The evidence was clear even then that a Vitamin D deficiency leaves one more susceptible to viral infections and COVID troubles. In that post I linked to this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwwTBF14Plc for all the data and details one would need to start taking D. I revisited the issue in December of 2020 in which I linked to a commentary published in November of 2020 found here https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/12/12/3642/htm the title of which is in part (my bold) “Vitamin D Insufficiency May Account for Almost Nine of Ten COVID-19 Deaths: Time to Act.”
The evidence for, at the very least, a recommendation from our overlords to take Vitamin D to help mitigate the effects of the evil coronavirus was ample and absolute, yet for reasons I will leave to your imagination, it was never mentioned. Oh, there was that one time in September of 2020 that Anthony Fauci said on an Instagram Live interview (whatever that is) (my bold) “If you are deficient in vitamin D, that does have an impact on your susceptibility to infection. So I would not mind recommending, and I do it myself taking vitamin D supplements,” but that’s about it. How come we never heard Fauci recommend D from the podium or on any number of his many mainstream media interviews? Why were we not hearing from everyone everywhere to take this dirt cheap, harmless supplement for which there was copious evidence (or at least very strong suggestion) of its beneficial effects? Could it be because there’s no money in it? Nah, that can’t be it…
Well now there’s a new study out published just last week entitled “Association between vitamin D supplementation and COVID-19 infection and mortality” in which we’re told “Mortality within 30-days of COVID-19 infection was similarly 33% lower with Vitamin D3…We also find that after controlling for vitamin D blood levels, veterans receiving higher dosages of Vitamin D obtained greater benefits from supplementation than veterans receiving lower dosages.” These authors found a clear dose-dependent relationship between serum D levels, how much D they supplemented, and a protective effect against COVID infection and death, which makes their findings pretty darn conclusive. You can read the paper here https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-24053-4 This paper is published by Nature which is still widely recognized as the preeminent science journal on the planet. Now to be fair and honest (after all, my name’s not Fauci) the actual differences in the supplemented group vs. the non-supplemented group were tiny: “…while the rates of COVID-19 infection followed by death within 30 days were 0.23% for the treated and 0.35% for the controls.” But if this tiny difference (twelve one-hundredths of one percent) was seen in say, a magical elixir that has made a major drug company tens of billions of dollars, EVERYONE in America would be pressured to guzzle Vitamin D by the quart. Hey wait, that is actually what happened…who’da thunk it? Except the actual difference in death between those taking the jab and those not is even smaller than the difference in this study. Oh well, moving on…
Anyway, these authors state “When we extrapolate our results for vitamin D3 supplementation to the entire US population in 2020, there would have been approximately 4 million fewer COVID-19 cases and 116,000 deaths avoided.” That would translate into about 350,000 less deaths throughout the whole pandemic simply by getting your Vitamin D level where it should be through an essentially free supplement.
So as I have recommended many, many times, if you live north of Atlanta you should be taking a D supplement during fall and winter. There is simply not enough radiation from the sun during these seasons for you to produce adequate D. You can get your levels checked if you want and you want your number around 60 ng/ml (the government’s recommendation of 20 ng/ml is ridiculously low). I supplement with about 4,000 IU per day, and I'm very comfortable with that, but as always, you do you.
I recommend and use Carlson Vitamin D3 with K2 like this:
For 30 bucks you get a 360 drop bottle. At two drops a day (4,000 IU a day) this bottle will last you the entire fall and winter. They also have formulations for kids. You can find them at carlsonlabs.com. I purposely did not include a link lest anyone think I somehow benefit from this recommendation. I have no affiliation with Carlson at all except I’m a customer so I get no compensation from recommending them. Again, my name’s not Fauci.
You should also be sleeping better, exercising, eating better and certainly in the spring and summer getting out in the damn sun to improve your overall health. Exposure to the sun is the only way you produce Vitamin D; there isn’t much in food and it’s a different form. And exposure to the sun even in fall and winter is still important for a myriad of reasons so get out there. Hey remember when our medical “experts” told us to stay inside in the spring and summer of 2020 and our government overlords were arresting people for walking in the park or laying on a beach? Good times. The facts that you make Vitamin D from sun exposure and every white blood cell in your body (your immune cells) have receptors for Vitamin D (it’s probably important to them) be damned. BE AFRAID AND HIDE!!
While these other recommendations are important, if dropping two drops of oil on your tongue every day is the best you can do, do it. It’s your life, nobody is coming to save you.
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