Vitamin D: New way to treat heart failure?. It's been in the news so I figured I'd point to Think Gene's roundup. It seems in the health sciences occasional fads for miracle-nutrients show up, so take it all with a grain of salt. I'm less interested in Vitamin D's relationship with late in life ailments such as cancer and heart disease as I am with its more global impact on immune function, because it is the latter which has the most evolutionary impact (most people done breeding by the time heart attacks and cancer take their toll).
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I started taking 2,200 IU of Vitamin D. It's bad if you have dark skin and live where there's less sun, but it's also bad if you have pale skin but are a night person.
Let's see if I have this right? It sounds like, from multiple reputable sources, that the USRDA of 400iu is inadequate. This number rooted in prior simplistic determination of the knee in the graph between detectable disease and assumed nominal health.
So 400iu is likely not enough for a lot of people. I hear recommendations of between 1000iu and 3000iu. How was this determined. How does this break down by skin color and exposure to the sun? Stress, immunological burden?
Is there any upper limit, toxicity?
The immune system is just the bells and whistles evolution added on top of the wound response, which is triggered by heart disease. Just because you think of "oh heart disease, that only happens to old people" doesn't mean it's not intimately linked to ailments with higher selectivity factors.
The Vitamin D- immune system connection is exceptionally cool... I'm just not sure the heart disease connection isn't part of the same story.
oh, i don't mean to pooh-pooh it's importance. rather, i'm more interested in its relationship to more common but low level diseases.
Dunno about Vitamin D, but Thiamine is a vitamin medically approved in heart treatment.