The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Notes -
What is the recommended dose of vitamin D supplements? I've seen cited doses between 50 and 600 IU but I've read that this are actually severely underestimated.
As for buying supplements, can I just buy some random brand on amazon?
Just to add to the others - since I've gone from 0 to 2000 to 4000 and then 10000 IU/d, I've seen increasing benefits. I'm a lot more awake even with less sleep, for one. I want to say "more energetic", but that's a low bar for me. I also haven't gotten a cold since, but it hasn't been that long.
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I am having the strongest sense of deja vu..
Look, start at 5000 IU daily. Recommended daily intake is 7000 IU but that includes dietary sources and the 🌞.
I can't be arsed to hunt down the citations I provided last time, before the site was Thanos snapped, but 600 IU is, to put it bluntly, fucking useless. 50 IU? Does it come in homeopathic packaging? It ought to, ya know.
Go big or go home. Or better yet, we all go touch grass, it needs sunlight to survive so there should be some out there.
I read the comments of the previous week but then the Great Disappearing happened😂
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Dosing confusion is frustratingly common. Do you know how hard it is to cut a 5 mg melatonin pill into 16ths so you get the right amount?
This is the real shit.
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After a certain point it gets easier to crush and dissolve tablets in water and then pour it out. I don't know if that works for melatonin, but you could use a grinder and make a slurry in the worst case.
But melatonin dosing is god awful for the opposite reason as Vitamin D, as you seem to be aware.
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It’s hilarious that we as a society take far too much melatonin and far too little vitamin D, seeing as they both regulate sleep. I’ve found myself sleeping like a morning person (not tired for three hours if I wake at 7am) since starting on D before work. (I don’t take melatonin at all, and drop off within five minutes of bedding down.)
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At what point do you have to worry about taking too much? I was under the impression that vitamin D is fat-soluble rather than water-soluble, and so it takes longer for your body to get rid of any excess.
From my comment vanished into the ether, the typical recorded cases of excess Vitamin D supplementation (manifesting as hypercalcemia) involved 60k IU daily for several months.
You need to mistake them for gummy bears and have a real sweet tooth to end up going that far. I have never heard of such a case, all the seniors I asked have never seen one in recorded history.
It's an exceptionally unfussy medication, that's not going to happen naturally, the only issue is with people being prescribed uselessly low doses, which is sadly far too common.
Which somehow doesn't prevent The Establishment here in Finland treating it like something where going even slightly over the official recommended (ridiculously low) dose causes immediate and strong side effects.
It's the same thing with protein supplements. It's always about how "So and so many grams of protein is all you could possibly need or benefit from. Remember that there is no reason whatsoever to ever get more."
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Wow. So the 10k IU (250 mcg) D3 I take daily is almost certainly no big deal? Maybe skip a day or two each week?
It is about as safe as it gets when it comes to something you can ingest.
If you want, you can get a blood test every few months to see if you're within the normal range and adjust accordingly, but I would not worry about it.
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Yes, you convinced me last time. Interestingly it seems hard to find good estimates for the IU you get by spending time in the sun. One estimate says that with near full body exposure (so a bathing suit) you get 10-20,000 IU from the midday summer sun in 30-60 minutes. But obviously that isn’t the default. How much do you get if it’s just your face being exposed? How about the winter sun? Online evidence is pretty vague. I’ve increased my daily supplement dosage in winter to 6,000 IU for now.
You're asking the wrong person, I spend an entire day in a closed window climate controlled hospital and have blackout curtains at home. I haven't seen the nuclear fusion reactor in the sky for a good while yet.
Besides, it's also affected by things like skin tone and sunscreen use, getting firm figures is difficult, and the advise for supplementation is universal, at least in the UK. I would expect it to be a factor largely irrelevant when it comes to dosing.
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I would also like to know the answer to this. I just started taking 5000 IU personally. Since many people take 10,000 IU for years without issues that seems to be a safe amount. A white person would get at least that much (and possibly much more) from a pre-modern amount of sun exposure.
High levels of Vitamin D in the blood are correlated with all sorts of positive health outcomes, but so far data on the value of supplementation has been mixed. It's quite possible that these studies are using too-low levels of supplementation. 400 IU?! What is that - a supplement for ants?!
Another possibility is that sunlight might produce a higher level of bioavailable Vitamin D or that sunlight has other unknown benefits which are correlated with Vitamin D but not caused by Vitamin D. For that reason, I deliberately tan during the summer months, taking care not to burn or to get sun on my face and neck.
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