well a warm welcome to today's talk Monday the 15th of May now I've just been reading a really quite interesting study indicating that the doses of Vitamin D that people have been taking are probably way too small now this is based on the idea that these authors are giving us that in a normal sunny day outside will produce 25 000. units of vitamin D a day now compare that to the current UK government a recommended amount of uh 400 units per day makes it look really quite laughable this is based on good evidence which is what we want at the end of this video We'll be asking why the authorities aren't keeping up to date with the evidence we have these medical researchers doing this research was supposed to be evidence-based and yet are we evidence-based well I'll leave you to answer that question are we evidence based are we fully up to date perhaps certain areas could do with updating in National policies now there's quite a few preparations that are really quite cheap and vitamin D is one of them uh big Pharma can't make a lot of money out of this now correctly many of you have challenged me and said well wait a minute vitamin D is actually quite expensive yeah we are being ripped off for vitamin D very often by some uh suppliers but if there was competition the point is there's no patent on it so lots of Manufacturers when we start taking more vitamin D as we will as the health benefits of this becoming controversible pretty incontrovertible now more manufacturers can start making it getting the right quality and that'll drive the prices down because it's not paid anyone can make it no any vitamin D any pharmaceutical manufacturer could make huge amounts anyway let's get straight on to the research really interesting stuff uh here's the original paper here now you can get most of this paper you can download quite a lot of this paper and it's so interesting um it gives quite a lot of the historical background if you read the introduction what happened back in the 1920s and 30s when people started realizing the importance of vitamin D for things like treating tuberculosis and psoriasis and rheumatoid arthritis they actually gave doses that were way too high like 10 times too high and that's why people became paranoid about the higher doses of Vitamin D so we went down to like minuscule doses but we'll look at that as we go through um stick with it because it really is very important this video I think daily oral dosing of vitamin D three to five thousand to fifty thousand units a day hospitalized patients and now these were patients admitted to a psychiatric facility often for severe mental illness but it meant they were able to monitor all the vitamin D levels of the patients that came in offer supplements and titrate it up so it's a really really good sample actually I think it's a very nice piece of research written up mostly by the psychiatrists concerned insights from a seven-year experience now this is published in steroid biochemistry molecular biology that well-known journal with a Snappy title but it is a serious uh peer-reviewed Journal I have no qualms about that at all um now this is carried out in Dayton and Cincinnati Ohio so it's published from the work order in the United States they say vitamin D is a hormone produced in the skin which is true it is in amounts estimated up to 25 000 international units a day so if we were like uh hunter-gatherers or living outside like we're supposed to or agricultural laborers or if I'm spending all day at summer in my allotment then I should be making about 25 000 units a day much higher than a lot of people think that is a really quite a large amount of vitamin D that's been made in this natural physiological situation which is probably a pretty good comparator to take the actions of ultraviolet be uh radiation as we know on the skin vitamin D deficiency is commonly authors say and we know that's true lack of a exposure to the sun present in very few food sources no it's not surprising deficiency is strongly linked to a increase in a multitude of diseases the authors correctly say and we've looked at some on this on this channel before I haven't prepared this so I'll see what I can remember immunity of course heart disease multiple sclerosis autoimmune disease colon cancer for sure low levels of vitamin D are highly correlated with colon cancer and probably prostate cancer and breast cancer as well we could go on if my memory was better but we've looked at quite a few examples a wide range of health conditions vitamin D is remarkably important for keeping good health and preventing disease several of which have been historically shown to dramatically improve with ultraviolet exposure to the skin like in the old days you'd put the TB patients out on the balcony or supplements can also be effective these diseases included now this is the examples that they give here asthma psoriasis the inflammation of the skin rheumatoid arthritis you know I've looked after patients in absolute agony for years with rheumatoid arthritis causing great deformities and eventually essential paralysis as the joints but basically sees up and the idea that I could have helped these patients Pain by giving them high doses of vitamin D and I didn't because we didn't know about it but why didn't we know about it you know this is not prehistory I'm talking about it just seems Such a Pity that these patients weren't helped with this very very safe very very cheap and efficacious intervention um very very sad tuberculosis of course as an infections infectious disease we know about bacterial infection of course we've looked at the potential efficacy against viral infections and we've looked at research that shows that people that are low in Vitamin D do get more viral respiratory viral infections influenza anyway that's been clearly demonstrated we'll practice in our Hospital have been routinely screened why aren't we doing this in the UK we should be screening everyone for vitamin D because it's so important and they were doing that from July 2011 to I think it was uh 20 or 18 that went through too offered supplement to correct efficiency 4 700 Admissions and most of them agree to it and of course we also know that vitamin D deficiency predisposes towards depression seasonal affective disorder so psychiatric patients as all patients as in all people can benefit from from this it's good to see that that was uh that was done vast majority agreed to supplementation typically patients had uh five thousand to ten thousand units a day that's 125 micrograms to 250 micrograms and remember the UK government guideline I think is is it 400 a day now it just makes it look completely laughable that we're advising such low amounts uh where they were giving five thousand to ten thousand a day 125 micro comes to 250 micrograms uh and now some patients due to disease concerns were given 20 000 to 50 000 units a day that's uh 500 micrograms to 1.25 uh 1.25 milligrams 1250 micrograms so really quite High daily doses um to try and treat particular diseases such as psoriasis and rheumatoid arthritis I think no cases of vitamin D induced hypercalcemia hyper high calcium in the blood that's what people worry about they add no cases I think this is important to emphasize some most patients are on five to ten thousand a day some patients are on 20 to 50 000 a day no complications at all none no no complications at all reported in any of the patients my clinical Improvement three patients with psoriasis who had the higher dose my clinical Improvement no adverse reactions now analysis of 1400 uh 418 in patients that they looked at recently they were there long enough to develop blood levels of 74.4 nanograms a meal so reasonably High it showed a mean vitamin D concentration level of 118.9 nanograms per meal this would normally be considered high but as we say no adverse reactions and the range in these patients was 74 to 800 so to 384. now here's the key thing in these patients who had such high levels of vitamin D the blood calcium the mean was uh 9.6 milligrams per deciliter and the range is uh that the range went from 10 8.6 to 10.7 and the normal range is normally 8.5 to 10.5 so this is quite acceptable now you do see variations in range a bit I take my normal ranges from Davidson's principle and practice of medicine so um I think we can be fairly sure that is the accurate normal range so basically we can say this is essentially within within range certainly not high enough to cause any problems now they also took a comparator group over the years of people that didn't take vitamin D they had an average level of a mean level of 27.1 so way way lower remember the average vitamin D levels in the people uh taking vitamin D were um 118.9 so that was the people taking vitamin D 118 uh the people not taking vitamin D it was uh 27.1 so way way lower now what about their calcium well it was 9.5 so the people on these huge doses of Vitamin D their calcium was 9.6 average mean which is okay uh people not taking vitamin D 9.5 so we can see basically it's the same there's no statistical difference between those parathyroid hormone levels now parathyroid hormone is a hormone that's released in response to low calcium levels the D3 uses it was a 24.2 the non-d3 users was 30.2 indicating that the non-d3 users were actually um releasing some uh some parathyroid hormone parathoma to try and keep their calcium levels up which I thought was interesting now in summary the the authors the author said this in summary long-term supplementation with vitamin D3 in doses ranging from five to fifty thousand units a day appears to be safe this is what the authors say conclusion daily oral intake of vitamin D3 ranging from 5000 up to sixty thousand in few cases for several years for several years was well tolerated in say unsafe in both our patients and staff so the staff government realized this was a good thing going on here and they they started taking it as well um so there we go there the conclusions I've placed all those in the uh in the um description of course patients and staff the mean vitamin D level blood levels in our patients appears to be taken taken around 12 months to Plateau so they were giving patients five to ten thousand units a day and it was still taking the vitamin D lovers went up for a whole year before they Plateau now that to me indicates that the vitamin D levels were so slow it took a year to get up to the levels that the body wanted it to to be at so five thousand to ten thousand units a day for a year before the levels plateaued out and how did they Plateau out um the average vitamin D concentration in the blood patients taking 10 000 units of vitamin D a day at 12 months uh the vitamin D was up to 96 nanograms a mil but then they carried on for another another what four months and uh basically the plateaued so it's 16 months up to 90. seven nanograms per ml again all with no adverse reactions reported at all currently considered upper limit is 100 nanograms a mil the question is given that we're supposed to be producing this 25 000 units a day when we're outside is this level accurate does this need to be changed by the medical authorities an interesting question no question at all in my mind that authorities Around the World Health authorities UK Health Security Agency or whatever Snappy title they have these days should increase the recommended amount of vitamin D the current recommended amounts in my view are way too low now of course I can't tell you what to take you have to see your own doctor it should ideally be titrated according to your blood levels currently I'm taking 8 000 units per day with 200 micrograms of vitamin K two that's what I'm taking can't tell you what to take you've got to see your own doctor for that I am not your doctor um but does this need to be changed up the way well it would appear so from this data now did these authors have any conflicts of interest well the authors had no conflicts of interest to disclose were they funded by some external hugely Rich greedy corporate organization as certain preparations may have been advocated for by the research was performed without external funding when oh when are we going to start using inexpensive preparations where there's evidence of efficacy why aren't governments around the world changing their recommendations based on evidence like this and and much more evidence that we could have cited um really quite hard to explain actually um it's obvious why corporate interests aren't advocating because they can't make any money out of it but I don't care I want to improve my health and your health that's what this is about let's let's get back to the evidence that shows us how to do this the knowledge is there the political will with a large p and a small P probably is not quite there yet that needs to change do look at this article for yourself because you can you can read the whole introduction and it tells you about the historical development of kind of how we got to where we are at and is remarkably interesting so there you go vitamin D recommendations May well be really quite low let's hope our highly qualified highly paid uh chief medical people and scientific people start reading the latest research that would be good thank you for watching