so is it really that safe to take 10,000 IUS of vitamin D every single day that's what we're going to talk about did you know that every single cell and tissue in your body has receptors for vitamin D and yet there's actually still no medical consensus or agreement on what a vitamin D deficiency really is so I even think a better question than is 10,000 iuse of vitamin D safe we should ask is it actually safe to be deficient in vitamin D the great majority of the population is deficient and they have all sorts of problems ranging from a lowered immune system to arthritis to autoimmune problems and inflammation depression high blood pressure and most of the research that came up with the rdas for vitamin D I think roughly it's about 600 IUS were based on preventing uh rickets things like that but not therapeutically to address all the other issues like autoimmune problems and severe infection actions so there's a couple very important things for you to know number one vitamin D toxicity is very rare okay that's number one number two the symptoms for vitamin D toxicity are almost identical to a vitamin K2 deficiency in other words do you really have too much vitamin D or just not enough vitamin K2 vitamin K2 addresses two proteins mainly and they mainly have to do with the transportation of calcium so D helps the absorption of calcium from your gut into your blood by a factor of 20x and then vitamin K2 dries that calcium from the arteries into the bone so two big functions of vitamin K2 is keeping calcium out of the soft tissues not just the arteries but the joints the kidneys the lungs other tissues as well as making your bones really really solid and I'm talking about dealing with osteopenia or osteoporosis you can't fix osteopenia and osteoporosis with vitamin D vitamin D doesn't even prevent fractures vitamin K2 is the key nutrient so when I did a deep dive in this I think I found the main confusion with Vitamin D toxy it has to do with this thing called international units it's this confusing measurement of vitamin D so what actually is an international unit is it actually a measurement of some mass or volume or weight or something the answer is absolutely not it's an arbitrary number that was agreed on from some committee so I'll give you just a couple examples if we take one international unit of vitamin E that would come out to 67 milligrams now what about one international unit of vitamin A well there's two types of vitamin A well you have the precursor to vitamin A which is beta katene and then you also have the actual uh bioactive form of vitamin A which is retinol so check this out one international unit of beta carotene equals6 micrograms and one international unit of retinol equals. 3 micrograms one international unit of vitamin D equals 025 micrograms that's like a quarter of 1 milligram so you can see it's very confusing and I think they're trying to get rid of it and you know just the sound of 10,000 IUS sounds like a lot but you're dealing with just a quarter of a microgram you see the big problem with vitamin D is there's a lot of barriers to entry to absorption skin color the darker your skin is the harder it is to absorb vitamin D your age how much weight you have if you're obese insulin resistance how much stress you have if you have any type of genetic issue that is blocking vitamin D which is very very common that's a big barrier you also have where you live the latitude on the planet you also have the season I mean one really interesting thing about vitamin D if you go to PubMed and you just type in seasonal diseases wow you're going to find all sorts of fascinating research related to vitamin D or even latitude diseases massive amount of data also the more unhealthy the liver is or your gallbladder if you have the gallbladder removed and you don't have the bile to absorb it that could be an issue or if there's inflammation in your gut that you can't absorb it so there's a lot of barriers for this vitamin D to go on the body so if you're like me it's kind of a hassle to go get a prescription for vamin D go to some like lab core and get your blood drawn to get a blood test there's a much better test it's a home test it's a blood spot test and I use this company right here Omega Quant it's a blood spot so basically it's a way to take a pin prick of your blood put it on this little piece of paper stick it in this kit send it to them they send it back I don't have to get a prescription I don't have to go to lab core to get my blood drawn it's really really convenient uh so I contacted this company and they wanted to know if I wanted to be an affiliate I said no but I would like my viewers to get a discount on this test so if you click down below there'll be a code uh you'll get the discount not me I'm not going to get an affiliate commission and that way you can save a little bit on the test but there's over 53,000 the last time I checked studies in vitamin D in Pub medet alone crazy amount of research and vitamin D uh is intimately involved in your immune system and I just want to mention one part of the immune system called the t- helper cell the t- helper cell helps to regulate and make sure that we don't attack our own tissues it's kind of like differentiating self from non-self and if there's confusion in this area and this cell can't work potentially you can develop an autoimmune disease which is your own cells or your own immune system attacking itself and it just so happens that vitamin D is a big responsibility of making sure that cell works I mean even inside your immune cells they have the ability to convert the inactive to the active form of vitamin D so you can imagine how important this is and another point is that we've been told to stay out of the Sun in the summer right use sunscreen hats and coats and just cover ourselves I mean this is like an interesting thing to look at I mean it stirs up a lot of controversy because everyone knows that the sun is bad but is it really well you're thinking about skin cancer right have you ever heard of the skin cancer Paradox so despite the sunscreen despite staying out of the sun skin cancer continues to increase we assume that it's coming from the radiation but really is it vitamin D has a protective element against melanoma so if the sun's Rays radiation were really responsible for this then we would have seen a decrease in cancer not an increase also vitamin D is really important for your lung okay it helps to modulate um your immune system to make sure that that immune system is not overreacting or under reacting so it's really good for anything related to lung like COPD asthma things like that and there's also doctors that are well recognized that will recommend taking 50,000 IUS of vitamin D at the first sign of a cold or flu symptoms let's look at this chart right here this is based on some data I'm going to put all the links down below but we have the amounts or doses of Vitamin D a million we have 300,000 100,000 30,000 and 10,000 okay and this is not scaled but you can see that these are in weeks and this is the amounts so we have one week three week 10 week 30 week 100 week how many weeks are in a year 52 right so that's going to be right here so this is about a year right here so check this out you can see the toxicity level right here you'd have to take a 100,000 iuse of vitamin D for a period of time before it becomes toxic but what I want you to look at right here is this line right through here this actually is considered safe if you adjust for the co-actors in other words there are certain nutrients that vitamin D uses to help um prevent complications like vitamin K2 which I've already mentioned like magnesium and zinc so these three nutrients are very important to take with your Vitamin D it doesn't even have to be taken exactly with it at the same time but uh sometime around you just want to make sure you're not deficient in these because all of these help to make vitamin D more active and prevent the toxicity effect don't want to forget about increasing water too because one potential Toxic effect could be kidney stones but if you're drinking minimally two and a half liters of fluid per day you can very easily prevent kidney stones and keep your um your urine diluted so these calcium Stones don't develop despite if you have high levels of calcium in the urine now what should a normal level of calcium be okay when you get it checked should be between 90 and 100 nanomoles per liter or there's another measurement you can uh use which is 35 to 40 NGS per milliliter okay so depending on what lab you're using and what units so I hope you feel a little more comfortable about with vitamin D taking 10,000 or even more I have a really good um summary of what I just talked about in a two-page document if you want to download it for free I put the link down below check it out