The miracle molecule, vitamin D

This is actually crazy. Vitamin D deficiency is a cause of almost every human disease and high vitamin D levels are a treatment to almost every human disease. If there was one thing that governments could do to save many people’s live, prevent disease, and create a healthier society, it would be to make it free and mandatory to take high-dose vitamin D supplements (around 10,000 IU) or make it mandatory to get full-body sunlight exposure.

The graphs below show correlation between vitamin D levels or latitude levels (indirectly vitamin D) and numerous common diseases.

Source: Vitamin D Wiki

These images are from Jeff Bowles. I’ve included only some of the graphs shown on his page. Read his great webpage for more.

The connection between health and vitamin D is mind blowing. While, yes, diagnoses are going to be lower in countries closer to the equator, we have evidence showing that vitamin D levels within a country has an absurdly strong correlation with major diseases.

Unfortunately, the NIH says that 20 ng/mL (which is far below the serum vitamin D needed to prevent many diseases as shown in the first chart) or higher is adequate for most people’s health. Similarly, the RDA of vitamin D supplementation is 600 IU for most adults. While this isn’t entirely wrong since this IS supplementation, not a replacement for going outside, setting an RDA like this makes people think that taking only a 600 IU pill a day is fine, especially since people are spending more times indoors and less time in the sun.

Ideally, you should be getting vitamin D from full-body exposure to sunlight, but there are compliance issues. But it’s worlds better to get it from a supplement than none at all. 5000-8000 IU of vitamin D will help get a serum level of 50-80 ng/mL. Something as simple as one pill has potential to prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths and diseases.

You could save hundreds of billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives from just forcing people to go outside…