000 units a day it was one study where they gave a healthy young adults 10 000 units of vitamin D for three months and there was no toxicity from that now you can't get toxicity if you take a lot more I mean and it can cause a problem but it's it's far lower than that you know we we um we think and in fact your level has to be over 250 even though the reference range on the labs has up to a hundred you know it doesn't really become toxic until about 250. so the real question is you know how much should we be taking on a daily basis and I think they're depending on you and your vitamin D level your sun exposure I mean I have a friend who lives on the beach and you know goes out surfing every day and his Vitamin D level is about 45 which is
therapy a 10 a 10,000 Lu light there be 30 minutes a day that also helps but the easiest way is just take vitamin D it's cheap it's in it's easy to take it's no side effects and it's easily available the range I usually recommend is two to 5,000 units a day higher doses you can take if you're very low you can take it's like filling up your gas tank you can just go full bore take 10,000 a day 20,000 a day and do that for a month or two and you'll be okay you want to fill up the tank it's a fat soluble vitamin but you want to be care careful to check and it takes about 3 to six months to correct deficiencies make sure you take it with food particularly fat which helps absorption also you want to take it with other supplements magnesium
well, it's not going to kill me. It'll bring my vitamin D levels up. I realize that's a bit of a coarse way to approach it, but I feel fine, and I'm still breathing and ambulatory. So, is that reasonable? 1,000 to 5,000 IUs for most people will be reasonably safe. Again, just assuming that people are going to just jump to it without the blood test. - Of course, I think that, if we look at the literature, the scientific literature, it is extremely hard to get hypercalcemia, which would be the major concern with really high levels of vitamin D3 supplementation. I mean, we're talking like hundreds of thousands of IU a day for a long time.
milliliter. Then you start getting into a pretty high range. Most people can take a supplement in the range of 2,000 to 4,000 IUs a day depending where your blood levels are at and keep keep their vitamin D levels within that, you know, 40 to 60 range. So, it's good to kind of do a annual vitamin D blood test just to make sure you're not taking too much or to make sure that you're actually taking enough to raise your levels into that sweet spot. And lastly, I just want to mention how vitamin D can support brain health. So vitamin D can enhance the removal of amalloid beta. This is a protein that's linked to Alzheimer's disease by promoting its elux from the
National Institute of Medicine set the tolerable upper intake of vitamin D at 4,000 international units a day. Since it's often difficult to assess how much vitamin D you should be supplementing per day, it's a good idea to routinely get your vitamin D levels tested. That way you can actually tweak the amount of vitamin D that you're supplementing per day in order to find that sweet spot of vitamin D levels that you want. One of the interesting things about vitamin D is that it has been shown to regulate the aging process. Telomeres are tiny caps at the end of
milliliter I do not have any vitamin D related snips known to hamper the production of vitamin D steroid hormone vitamin D insufficiency is common and the more time people spend indoors as during these times when many are sheltering in place the more vitamin D insufficiency and deficiency may occur but it is important to note that it is not good to take too much vitamin D the food and nutrition board of the Institute of Medicine conservatively set the tolerable upper intake of vitamin D at 4000 IU's a day for all adults and that is currently what I am taking the
for from 1960s all the way to the you know mid like 2015 and it's it's really it seems like 40 to 60 is a really good sweet spot for the lowest all cause mortality with vitamin D as I mentioned 4,000 I mentioned 4,000 I use of vitamin D a day because um that's the the tolerable upper intake for vitamin D so it's quite safe and um in general 1,000 IUS of vitamin D generally raises people's blood levels by about five nanograms per mil so the key is to just get get a vitamin D blood test do it you know after you're supplementing make make sure your your levels are adequate because again a lot of these single
amount right so what should we be taking correct uh not everybody needs the same amount you really before you start taking vitamin D as a supplement uh you ought to get your levels tested um you know when we make when we synthesize it from the Sun our skin basically makes what we need and it breaks down the rest it's really it's it's almost impossible to get too much vitamin D from the Sun although lifeguards can have levels of 150 that's am yeah so so and that's not toxic right I mean it could increase it increases calcium absorption um so I always like to recommend vitamin K2 for people that are in I mean especially at those levels um but with a vitamin D
people that are most at risk for vitamin D deficiency like we just talked about the the endocrinological societies recommend uh no more than 4,000 units international units per day um for supplementation now I've seen people personally that have gone up to 10,000 units a day and uh they've had their their levels checked and they were still within a reasonable range that we weren't concerned about toxicity now you can get 50,000 units uh tablets um uh over the counter and I wouldn't recommend going up that high but so in terms of what's the highest dose I would say around 4,000 international units
20 you need at least 3 000 to get up to 50 right and and you can see how you do but i think people need to measure it they need to check it and they need to make sure they're okay and if not take the right supplement and not the the kind that you often get from your doctor i hate to say which is vitamin d2 which is not an active form of the vitamin but vitamin d3 and you can get that over the counter now and you can get thousand units and others but you want to make sure you measure it right yeah i mean vitamin d2 is the plant-based form of vitamin d and vitamin d3 is the animal-based form it's bio-identical to what we create in our own skin so you always want to make sure that you're taking vitamin
necessarily help I mean most people are going to require a supplement to be above 50 I do I mean I live in Texas and our sun is a lot like yours and I'm in the Sun every single day and I don't even put sunscreen on anything but my face so my arms and legs I'm not you know shirtless usually but my arms and legs are constantly exposed and I think if I'm not supplementing vitamin D I'm lucky to be above 40 so I I I do supplement with 5,000 IU daily and that takes me to 50 to 60 um which
vitamin D I'm sorry that I'm blanking on the brand I can see the bottle but I'm blanking on the brand I take 5,000 IU of vitamin D why largely because this is one of those things where I think the risk is insanely low I think this is really a tricycle and I'm not sure what I'm picking up I think it's more than a penny I definitely think it's less than a gold coin it might be you know a $5 bill but I'd pick up a five if I was walking down the street and there was a kid riding a tricycle towards me and I saw a $5 bill I would pick it up I think that most of the studies on vitamin D have been very poorly done and we do need to do a podcast on this maybe this is something
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