Hypovitaminosis D

Your body was designed to produce high levels of vitamin D, but you’re depriving it. But is vitamin D deficiency treatment really a good and safe idea for your heart?

Coming from a natural standpoint, I would never promote the idea of using a single lifestyle change or a single supplement to impact chronic disease. That is the realm of medicine. Researchers will do a study on vitamin E or vitamin C to see if it can stop a heart attack. When the study does not show a protective effect, everyone tells each other that they KNEW that natural stuff didn’t work.

Natural approaches DO work. And it is the only approach that won’t kill you before it saves you. But it involves the small benefits across multiple lifestyle changes covering diet, stress management, targeted supplementation, exercise and environmental toxin avoidance. THIS is the heart of a functional lifestyle approach.

Now that I’ve clarified that, completely disregard what I just said.

Rarely, some natural approach or compound comes along that makes a huge splash in the prevention pool. Vitamin D has done just that when it comes to slashing heart disease rates in this particular study. While this was a small study looking at factors associated with 289 participants developing heart disease out of a group of 1783 when the study was started, the results were very impressive:

1. Women with the highest blood levels of vitamin d had a whopping 61% lower risk of developing heart disease (Tweet this).
2. In men, the risk was 24% lower.

I just find these kinds of numbers hard to wrap my mind around for a single natural treatment. Actually, in general, drug or surgical treatments never work this well either. Really–after undergoing vitamin D deficiency treatment, how much risk is left?

Skeptics will note that this was an observational study, not a controlled trial. Some would go so far as to say the low levels are actually a protective mechanism of the body in the presence of disease. While I will admit this may be a remote possibility, this would then assume that Mother Nature made a major snafu when she created a distinct mechanism for your body to form vitamin D at relatively high levels. This would almost ensure a quick death for our ancestors if that developed any type of disease. I just can’t envision this mechanism taking place. Couple this with a patient who went through a program designed to lower vitamin D levels and got very sick and I’m even less influenced.

Overall, though, this is yet another study that should push you towards your own personal vitamin D deficiency treatment program.  When you do decide to start, here are a few tips:

1. Skip the prescription vitamin D2 at 25,000 or 50,000 dosages.  I rarely see this prescription move blood levels more than 10 points or so.
2. Start at 2,000 IU and move the dosages up from there, depending on the specifics of your situation.  The 400 IU that you take in your calcium supplement?  Toss it.
3. Do NOT pay more than 40 cents per dose for your 2,000 IU.  That’s under $20 per YEAR.  There are very high quality vitamin D supplements at that price range.
4. Vitamin D deficiency treatment can be done once per week.  So, at 2,000 IU per day, you could take 14,000 IU once per week.

What are you waiting for?