LifeCare Chiropractic

The Best Chiropractic Care in Mesa, Arizona

Vitamin D Levels

Vitamin D: 6 Things Your Doctor Probably Doesn’t Know

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Health benefits of vitamin D
Health benefits of vitamin D

I know, I know. You already know everything about vitamin D (mainly because you ALWAYS read this blog).

Besides, your doctor has already checked your vitamin D and (almost assuredly) told you that your levels were low and you need to take 10,000 of prescription vitamin D once a week. Or maybe he or she just told you to run to the store and buy your own and take 1,000 IUs per day.

And, since you have heard that vitamin D does everything from protect you from cancer to making your lawn greener, you dutifully ran out and complied. But was this the best course?

Here are a few things to note that your doctor might not be aware of:

  1. If your doctor checked your levels, you can rest assured he or she is at least a decade behind the researchers who say not to bother—everyone’s low so just supplement everyone (with very few exceptions).
  2. While the labs say you should be over 20 ng/dl, this is NOT optimal. Optimal is recognized by vitamin D experts as being between 60-100 ng/dl.
  3. The prescription forms of vitamin D (which are usually vitamin D2, NOT the D3 form) just don’t budge blood levels very much. Don’t waste your time, money or health.
  4. If you’ve had your gallbladder out or have had bypass surgery, there is NO way you’re going to absorb a vitamin D that’s not emulsified (and few are).
  5. There are many factors that go into how much vitamin D you should take, but I can almost guarantee that, if your bloodwork has been low, 1,000 or even 2,000 ain’t going to get you to optimal. Most I have come across need 4, 6 or even 10,000 per day to get up to optimal levels.
  6. If you are at optimal levels, you’re in a very, very small elite group. Consider yourself a 1-percenter.

Despite, all the evidence and concern floating around everywhere about vitamin D, how could a mere 1% of the population reach optimal levels??  Before you think it’s unreasonable to think the number is so low, I can count on a single hand how many times I’ve seen patient bloodwork in the optimal range.

This particular study drives this point home. In it, researchers looked at 14,641 men and women aged 42–82 years who were living in England (arguably a less-than-sunny location). They were put into 5 groups based on their initial blood levels of total 25(OH)D (less than 12, 12-20, 20-28, 20-36 and more than 36 ng/dl). Here’s the details of what they found after following them for 13 years:

  • The average vitamin D levels was 23 ng/dl.
  • Participants risk of dying from any cause went lower as the vitamin D levels went higher than the lowest group (16% lower in the 2nd group, 28% lower in the next level up, 29% next and 34% lower risk of dying in the group with the highest vitamin D levels.
  • To put this into perspective, for every 8-ng/dl increase in 25(OH)D in the blood, there was an 8% lower risk of dying from any cause, 4% lower risk of having heart disease, 11% lower risk of being diagnosed with a respiratory disease and 11% lower risk of having a fracture.
  • There was, however, no change in the risk of total cancers (although I would not be surprised, given past research, if we saw a lower risk with certain cancers if looked at individually).
  • Those who had levels above 36 ng/dl where the least likely to die.
  • Less than 1% of the population studied had vitamin D levels above >48 ng/dl.

I think we could run this same study anywhere in the world and get similar results with similar percentages of protection as well as similar levels of very low vitamin D levels.

It’s time to take the 6 factors noted above and take action. In our office, we offer Biotics brand emulsified vitamin D that is ridiculously inexpensive (otherwise I’d be writing this from first class…). Most patients spend around $20 PER YEAR for a top-quality vitamin D and even have to share it with their family so that it doesn’t expire before they use it all.

THAT is a good bang for your buck.

Doctor, Why Is My Vitamin D Level Low?

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This is actually a very pertinent question and one I have asked many times.  Why are some many patient’s vitamin D levels very low despite good sun exposure.  I may have the answer.

When researchers first discovered that levels of vitamin D deficiency were darn near ubiquitous in our population, the initial thoughts ranged from particulate matter in the air blocking UVB light penetration to heavy use of sunscreen.

None of the ideas seemed to fit completely.  Sure, the average person lathers up with SPF 300 to walk to the car, but what about my patient who swam outside on a high school swimming team and still had a vitamin D level of 17 (optimal range 60-100) at the END of season here in Arizona?

Then I came across this particular study.  While it is a rat study, the concepts put forth could answer the question for at least half of the population.

The diabetic spectrum.

Yup.  Makes sense given that upwards of 50% of the population are on this trajectory, and the numbers are likely much higher.

Here’s how it works:

  • The diabetic spectrum, even in its early stages, is very damaging to the kidneys.
  • Studies have shown that, in Type 2 diabetic rats, there is a significant loss of vitamin D and vitamin D binding protein (a protein in the blood that holds vitamin D while it floats through the bloodstream) in the urine due to kidney damage.
  • This study confirms that the same problems exist in Type 1 diabetes as well.

Makes for some very interesting fodder, wouldn’t you say?  And, if this holds true in humans (and I can’t see any reason to believe that it wouldn’t) certainly goes a very long way towards explaining why so much of the population has low vitamin D levels.

It also helps to explain why so many patients have a hard time boosting their vitamin D levels despite high levels of supplementation.

Here’s some further musings…

Some have suggested that low vitamin D levels are not the problem, but rather, the body lowers the level of vitamin D in response to a disease state such as cancer.  Because of this, for someone with chronic disease, they should do everything possible to almost eradicate vitamin D in their blood.  I firmly disagree with this hypothesis and treatment approach, even having one patient who went through the protocol and got VERY ill from it.

But what if low vitamin D is just yet another marker of physiology gone haywire as our bodies move towards diabetes?

It would not be the first time that we have looked at a single marker (like cholesterol) and thought that low levels, by themselves, were important, rather than looking at the big picture.

This also means that all the doctors out there diligently checking vitamin D and recommending supplementation but not addressing other aspects of lifestyle (like living an anti-diabetic lifestyle) are, once again, missing the boat entirely.

An additional interesting note to this study. The researchers also looked at whether the addition of resistant starch (think fiber—or you can read a previous blog article on the topic by clicking here) could affect the loss of vitamin D through the kidneys.

Wonderfully, the resistant starch virtually eliminated all the vitamin D lost through the kidneys.  Given that the resistant starch in a higher fiber diet would go a long way towards avoiding or managing diabetes, it meshes nicely with the findings in this study.  Higher fiber, more anti-diabetic diet = higher vitamin D levels.  Not a bad outcome, regardless of how you look at it.

So, from now on, I know that, in those patients whose vitamin D levels just won’t budge despite strong supplementation, increasing the fiber in the diet and an overall anti-diabetic diet (my personal recommendations can be found in my free eBook by clicking here) will be strongly recommended.

Vitamin D Deficiency Treatment and Your Heart: 4 Points to Know

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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?