Jeff Huseby says: taking more than 5,000 IUs of vitamin D at one time makes my teeth sensitive.
Got a vitamin D test recently it had me at a deficiency level. So it can't be because
I've had too much. I would take more at a time to get my level up faster, but I can't. I'm assuming
it's affecting my calcium homeostasis somehow and that manifests as tooth sensitivity. But
do you know if there is any literature discussing this or do you have any ideas why this might be?
Well, I can only offer you guesses, but the first thing that I would say is, are you using the
testing algorithm outlined in Testing Nutritional Status: The Ultimate Cheat Sheet? Because
if you look at that, you'll see that my approach to testing vitamin D status is more sophisticated
than what is used by almost everyone else.
And so if you're not measuring PTH and you're not measuring calcitriol at a minimum,
then I don't think that you should be so quick to interpret that you're in a deficiency state.
Now that said, off the top of my head, I don't really know why vitamin D would directly cause
tooth sensitivity, but, and I'm not a dentist and so I don't know everything there is to know about
tooth sensitivity mechanisms, but a couple of things that occur to me.
So one thing that would occur to me would be that you could be depleting
your vitamin K levels and you could be worsening your tooth calcification.
But another sort of opposite thing that could be relevant is if you are getting some slight
hypercalcemia that maybe that is impacting the nerves in your teeth in some negative way.
And if I could make my guess a little bit more wild than that, I think it's conceivable that
if you are getting some kind of slight hypercalcemia that your body could
possibly adjust to that with slight alkalinization to try to control the ionic calcium level. And
that that might, the acid-base disturbance, might also impact the tooth nerves in some way. But I'm
heading pretty deep into speculation land here. So I guess the way I would approach that would be
first of all, make sure that you're getting your PTH and
calcitriol levels tested at the same time as your 25(OH)D.
Not a bad idea to throw in total and ionic calcium and phosphorus in there, just for good measure,
and make sure that your interpretation of 25(OH)D is actually supported by those other measurements.
Second thing would be what happens if you co-supplement with vitamin K,
vitamin K2, can you, can you impact this? So it's not just, you also, you also have to consider
other interacting nutrients. So particularly the other three fat-soluble vitamins,
I guess K2 would be at the top of that list. Then second tier in that would be A and E,
and then third tier would be magnesium.
And then other things could come after that. But I would play around with what happens if
you tweak the ratios and co-supplementations in there. Can you prevent that effect?
But I would do that after making sure you're characterizing your blood tests correctly.
All right, thank you Jeff, for your question. Hope that helped.