Vitamin D Article Review
We have found vitamin D supplementation to be a huge help with our own battles to keep our immune system operating at the best level we know how. Vitamin D is, of course, important for several other systems including bone, muscle health, brain health and more. In my reading, I often run across published articles about important topics and I know that just about everyone would like to know what these articles say without spending an afternoon with each one trying to understand it.
This blog is a summary of:
The article begins discussing VDD or vitamin D deficiency. Many researchers talk of the epidemic of vitamin D deficiency. In other blogs I have discussed reasons for this deficiency and one possible mechanism is interference with vitamin D production and utilization from herbicides like glyphosate (RoundUp). Also the typical western diet is often poor in vitamin D and in higher latitudes, getting enough UV exposure from the sun isn’t practical.
Vitamin D has to be converted to an activated state in the liver and other tissues. One enzyme is called cytochrome P450 (CYP450). Some people have deficiencies in CYP450 so will need even more vitamin D to work with. There is more to the story but to avoid too much complexity, I will leave it there. Just know that a healthy liver and healthy kidneys are key players.
As of this writing, Pub Med shows over 41,000 studies referring to VDD. And that is just looking at the deficiency. Looking at vitamin D in a search, we find over 100,000 articles. This amount of interest is encouraging as it shows how many researchers are spending time and energy trying to understand something as basic as vitamin D.
So what is the hubbub? Vitamin D is more accurately defined as a hormone, that is a regulatory compound that is produced in one part of the body but is used to stimulate action in another group of cells or tissues.
Which tissues depend on this healthy level of vitamin D and the healthy conversion of D to usable forms?
-Bone. Vitamin D used for optimal mineralization via calcium and phosphorus handling
-Immune Function. Helps to reduce proinflammatory cytokines. Helps with killing of microbes. Helps with movement of chemicals. Helps with elimination of damaged cells.
-Cancer-Vitamin D inhibits cell proliferation, inhibits formation of new blood vessels (important for cancer growth) and helps control metastasis.
-Cardiovascular Disease. Helps reduce fatty acid absorption. Helps formation of lipoprotein lipase. Inhibition of vascular smooth muscle cell proliferation and also inhibits vascular calcification. Reduces oxidative stress, reduces inflammation and reduces clots.
-Type 2 Diabetes. Modulates beta cell growth and differentiation. Enhances secretion of insulin. Increase insulin receptor expression. Enhances insulin-mediated glucose transport.
-Neuroprotection. Regulates neuro growth factors. Protects against toxicity of nerves. Reduces oxidative stress.
-Muscle Strength and Mass. Vitamin D is important to maintain skeletal muscle. This appears to be especially true in people 65 years of age and older.
-Blood pressure regulation. Vitamin D has been shown to act on vascular tone in its action on the RAAS (renin-angiotensi-adosterone system).
Some common problems with vitamin D research are:
-Everyone has some vitamin D so you really can’t have a control where one person has the active compound and others don’t.
-Most studies where vitamin D is added don’t consider the amount needed to get a response. A dark-skinned person living in Norway will need a different amount than a light-skinned person in Mexico City.
-Most studies don’t bother to test the baseline blood levels and treatment levels are not monitored. Therefore, a person who is grossly deficient will need large doses to elicit a meaningful response and someone who is marginally deficient wouldn’t show any change. Studies rarely take these factors into consideration but make confident conclusions about their study anyway.
-Some studies use D2 which needs an extra step in conversions than D3 introducing yet another misleading paper.
-Designing a vitamin D study is therefore more difficult than a drug trial.
At the time of this writing, COVID-19 is still around and is somewhat on people’s minds. This paper spends a couple of pages discussing studies of hospital admissions and vitamin D. Studies tend to agree that with adequate levels of serum vitamin D, the risk of a severe case of COVID was about 3x less likely to result in cases requiring hospital admission. Those with vitamin D supplementation had improved outcomes in general.
The paper concludes: Considering that universal testing for vitamin D is not possible and is expensive, in everyday clinical practice it should be advisable to give vitamin D
supplementation, which is cheap, well-tolerated, and easily available. In research settings, a holistic approach when studying the effects of vitamin D supplementation, such as evaluation of the whole vitamin D endocrine system, rather than only of 25(OH)D levels before and after treatment, the use of adequate and physiologic vitamin D dosing, control-
ling for the amount of vitamin D supplementation subjects on the placebo arms may receive, and sufficiently long follow-up are some aspects that need to be carefully considered in future studies.
To state this simply, vitamin D supplementation is easy and relatively inexpensive. Take your vitamin D.
2025
