The Vitamin D Deficiency Epidemic

How to Boost Immunity, T Levels, and More

The easiest way to get healthier? Get adequate vitamin D. But what’s adequate? And what mineral is needed to make your vitamin D work?


There’s a direct association between vitamin D deficiencies/insufficiencies and mortality rates from health conditions like cancer, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes. (The difference between the two terms – deficiencies and insufficiencies – is just a matter of degree, like the difference between bad and sorta’ bad.)

For instance, without proper or optimal vitamin D levels, T cells don’t even put their pants on to do battle against infectious diseases, including cancer or pathogens like the coronavirus and flu. They flat-out don’t activate. Some virus or bacterium could float in and they’ll say, “Wake me when it’s over.”

The trouble is, it’s very hard to maintain adequate levels of the vitamin without supplementation (on Amazon).

Symptoms of deficiencies or insufficiencies, aside from an anemic immune system, include musculoskeletal pains often diagnosed as fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue syndrome, osteoporosis, bones that break too easily, weak or small muscles, low sex drive, low testosterone levels, hypertension, increased blood pressure, endothelial dysfunction, sudden cardiac death syndrome in athletes, and a long list of other undesirable stuff.

And it’s not just regular Doritos-eating couch potatoes that are being affected. Thirty-two percent of pro basketball players were found to be deficient, while 47% had vitamin D insufficiency.

Of NFL players, 26% were found lacking, while 47% had insufficiency. Deficiencies have also been found en masse in swimmers, volleyball players, taekwondo fighters, jockeys, runners, and, yes, even weightlifters.

Add to that a meta-study that threw 23 papers on vitamin D into a mixing bowl and found that of the 2313 college athletes included in their analyses, 56% had insufficient levels. Only 5% met the relatively anemic RDA.

What Does Vitamin D Do For Athletes?

Vitamin D is actually a pro-hormone and not a vitamin at all. When ingested, it has to be converted by the body into its active form, the hormone 1,25 dihydroxycholecalciferol.

Once that happens, it plays a vital role in various crucial functions, including protein synthesis, muscle function, cardiovascular function, cell growth, musculoskeletal regulation, and inflammatory response.

A few of those functions deserve a little more examination:

1. Vitamin D and Skeletal Muscle

When athletes have adequate levels of vitamin D, they exhibit better sports performance. They build strength easier and they have fewer injuries.

The vitamin actually regulates skeletal muscle by activating the expression of genes that modulate muscle growth and differentiation, particularly that of Type II muscle fibers. When there’s a deficiency or insufficiency of vitamin D, Type II fibers are scrawny little things. Put them on supplementation and they get bigger.

Vitamin D also, through a “non-transcriptional signaling pathway,” strengthens the interaction between myosin and actin (two muscle cell proteins) so that muscle contractions are stronger.

More generally, having optimal levels of vitamin D increases muscle protein synthesis, jump height, the production of ATP, and the overall capacity to perform both aerobic and anaerobic exercise.

2. Vitamin D and Athlete Lung Function

Low levels of vitamin D correlate strongly with reduced lung capacity. Optimum levels of vitamin D, however, ensure healthy lung structure, capacity, optimal oxygen exchange, and the ability to finish a task without wheezing like an old steam engine.

3. Vitamin D and the Athlete Heart

There appears to be a relationship – a strong relationship – between severe vitamin D deficiency and sudden cardiac death in athletes. Without proper levels, arteries get stiff, and atherosclerosis is a definite possibility. Your circulatory system starts to have the pliability of a cheap garden hose that’s been exposed to the sun for too long.

4. Vitamin D and the Athlete Nervous System

The vitamin has direct effects on serotonin and dopamine levels, which are vital to muscular coordination and the avoidance of fatigue. In severe cases, lack of vitamin D could even adversely affect balance.

5. Vitamin D and Doing the Nasty

Having sex obviously isn’t solely the purview of athletes, but having high(er) levels of the vitamin can increase circulating levels of estradiol, testosterone, FSH, LH, and DHEA in women in general, which, logically, can lead to them being more orgasmic, as long as all other conditions, like having some good “doin’ it” music playing softly in the background, are optimal.

Similarly, vitamin D supplementation has been shown, in at least one study, to significantly (53.5 nmol/l) increase testosterone levels in men.

Why Are People Deficient?

I don’t want to get into too much vitamin D chemistry and its formation, but suffice it to say we get vitamin D from certain foods we eat and sunlight. The trouble is that very few foods contain it besides fortified dairy products, eggs, mushrooms, and the livers of fatty fish.

As far as sunlight, every skin cell in the body contains the machinery to convert sunlight to a vitamin D precursor, which then undergoes two hydroxylations before it becomes metabolically active.

Unfortunately, but understandably, pretty much everyone is scared to death of skin cancer, so most people try to avoid any kind of exposure to the sun. If they do expose their skin to the sun, it’s often covered by a sunscreen with an SPF of about a billion.

Then there’s pollution, which further limits the amount of UVB radiation reaching the earth’s surface. You also need to consider the angle of the sun. In wintertime, vitamin-D-producing UVB rays don’t reach latitudes above 35 to 37 degrees (which is to say just about anywhere north of San Francisco, New Mexico, Arkansas, and North Carolina).

Lastly, there’s nature’s cruel sunlight/vitamin D paradox. Let’s say you choose to say to hell with skin cancer and forgo sunscreen. Okay, but any melanin you develop to give you a tan actually hinders UVB absorption, so much so that dark-skinned athletes need to expose their skin to UVB light up to 10 times longer than light-skinned athletes to get some adequate vitamin D production going.

Okay, What Do I Need to Do?

One of the oldest and most upchuck-inducing nutritional tropes is that “you just need to eat a balanced diet.” Okay, Boomer, go back to watching old CSI reruns on the Magnavox. It just isn’t that easy, particularly when it comes to vitamin D. The least risky approach is to supplement and, if possible – weather, climate, and latitude permitting – is to regularly expose your largely naked body to sunlight.

But there’s no definitive way to tell if you’re deficient or insufficient in vitamin D without getting a blood test. And even if you did get a blood test, there’s a broad range of medical opinions as to what’s “normal.”

The Institute of Medicine (IOM) believes that blood levels of 20 ng/mL would meet the needs of 97.5% of the North American population, regardless of stage of life, but that gives a big vitamin FU to the approximately 14.5 million people who constitute the other 2.5%.

Anyhow, to meet that 20 ng/mL level, the Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) is 600 IU of vitamin D for children and adults under 70, and 800 IU for those over 70.

The Endocrine Society, however, didn’t much like those numbers. They prefer that people – at least those people that don’t get adequate sunlight – take between 1500 and 2200 IU a day, but even that’s based on guesswork and is still maybe a little too conservative.

Most biohackers and renegade nutritionist types, me included, think you should definitely supplement vitamin D daily, even without any overt symptoms or the benefit of a diagnostic blood test. That being said, most of us think vitamin D levels should be maintained at 50 to 70 ng/ml, but how you do that and what amounts of supplementation/sunlight it takes to get there is highly individual.

My own general guideline is to take around 5,000 units of vitamin D3 a day. Some caution is warranted, however, since vitamin D is fat-soluble and sticks around in the body a lot longer than water-soluble vitamins.

Possible negative side effects of vitamin D “intoxication” include anorexia, frequent urination, nausea, thirst, vomiting, and possibly altered mental status and kidney failure, but you’d have to take a whole lot of vitamin D to have that happen, or too much of a vitamin D supplement with poor manufacturing standards.

That required note of caution aside, many people can’t get their blood levels up using the regular vitamin D capsules they picked up at the same place they buy toothpaste and canned soup. So, consider taking one with microencapsulated vitamin D3, like I-Well (on Amazon).

Studies show that this microencapsulated form is the most bioavailable and longest lasting. Its effects remain constant for up to 14 days, making it clearly superior to the oil-based vitamin D3 supplements that make up most of the market.

Get Adequate Magnesium to Metabolize Vitamin D

Vitamin D, regardless of how much you take, won’t do the things you need to without having adequate amounts of magnesium, too. Vitamin D just can’t be metabolized without sufficient magnesium. Without it, vitamin D would just hang around like some bum in front of a 7-Eleven, possibly leading to higher levels of calcium and phosphate, which could lead to a host of physiological and metabolic consequences.

Perhaps not coincidentally, most Americans, particularly athletes, are deficient in magnesium too. So it could be that the magnesium deficiency is the culprit, or at least one of the culprits, in what we perceive to be vitamin D deficiencies. I suggest doing it right and taking 400 mg. of magnesium a day. Ideally, use fully chelated magnesium, like that found in Elitepro (on Amazon).

IwellAmazon

References

References

  1. Uwitonze AM et al. Role of Magnesium in Vitamin D Activation and Function. J Am Osteopath Assoc. 2018 Mar 1;118(3):181-189. PubMed.
  2. Canat M et al. Vitamin D3 deficiency is associated with female sexual dysfunction in premenopausal women. Int Urol Nephrol. 2016 Nov;48(11):1789-1795. PubMed.
  3. Mousa A et al. Vitamin D supplementation increases adipokine concentrations in overweight or obese adults. Eur J Nutr. 2020 Feb;59(1):195-204. PubMed.
  4. Pilz S et al. Effect of vitamin D supplementation on testosterone levels in men. Horm Metab Res. 2011 Mar;43(3):223-5. PubMed.
  5. de la Puente Yagüe M et al. Role of Vitamin D in Athletes and Their Performance: Current Concepts and New Trends. Nutrients. 2020 Feb 23;12(2):579. PubMed.
7 Likes

Vitamin D protects against variants more effectively than booster shots

5 Likes

Totally agree with this article.
I am always leary of comments to product articles that say “I
Used this for a week and I’m getting the best gains of my life” and then I try it and nnever quite see that immediate response. However, I started supplementing with I well and elite minerals about twp month ago. I am a control member of Everlywell (which lets your pick one test a month to monitor a bio marker). I have been deficient or on the very low margin of vitamin d for well, in the low 20s, for as long as I have been testing (a few years). I added this recommended supplementation last month, and my first test after 3 weeks of incorporating iwell/elite minerals, my vitamin d reading was at 57. This shit works. Btw, I was using cvs/ Costco brand vitamin d3 supplementation daily for years, and always measured low. I’m a believer in this regimine.

3 Likes

Vitamin D via photosynthesis is the optimal route and it’s what humans have relied on for millennia. Besides the fact that sunlight provides many more benefits beyond vit D. There is even debate that the benefits of sunlight isn’t even the Vit D itself, rather it’s Vit D is just evidence of the procured benefits of sunlight. (See MIT Researcher Stephanie Seneff’s paper - Sunlight and Vitamin D: They're Not the Same Thing! | Foundation for Alternative and Integrative Medicine)

I think we tend to over think what’s natural and what our ancestors did to get us to where we are today. Just get sunlight (dose dependent) especially in the warmer months and stock your levels up of Vitamin D AND all the other benefits.

2 Likes

From their conclusions section of their abstract:

“Despite ongoing vaccinations, we recommend raising serum 25(OH)D levels to above 50 ng/mL to prevent or mitigate new outbreaks due to escape mutations or decreasing antibody activity.”

Get vaccinated and take adequate vitamin D.

3 Likes

Superb article, as always.
It is so CRUCIAL to get this out there and for people to get their D3 levels up where they need to be.
It would solve so many health issues AND prevent so many others.

2 Likes

Great article as usual. Is at night the best time take along with magnesium?

I think it is also worth a mention that Vitamin D toxicity is on the rise. Because too much of a good thing is still TOO much. In recommended amounts it’s great but, people are stupid and think… if a little bit is good, more will work better.

1 Like

Great article, i always tell people they should be taking vitamin D…I am surprised to see no mention of taking K2 alongside vitamin D, especially if your diet does not contain rich sources of K2… It is my understanding that without adequate K2, increased vitamin D supplementation results in calcium being deposited in arteries & muscle (you do not want it here) rather than being deposited on the bones…

5 Likes

It was interesting to me, several years ago, when my TRT clinic included injectable D3 along with my Test Cyp, HCG, and Letrozole. When I inquired about it, my rep said they wanted to make sure I got results. Never in my 37 year history of researching steroid cycles had I heard of this protocol.

2 Likes

Dr. Seheult (of MedCram) has highlighted studies indicating that much of the immune enhancement may, in fact, be due to intracellular melatonin.
Sunlight: Optimize Health and Immunity (Light Therapy and Melatonin) - YouTube

1 Like

The Vitamin D Paradox in COVID-19 and Why It Predicts But Doesn’t Always Protect - Medcram Blog

Thanks for the feedback!

Thanks much!

There are some indications that it’s best to take them together. That being said, I don’t. I take Vitamin D with a fatty meal during the day and magnesium at bedtime for its sleepy-time effects. I think the separation of a few hours is just fine.

1 Like

That’s absolutely true. Big fan of vitamin K2 here.

1 Like

Thanks for the increased vitamin d levels.

1 Like