[Bruce:] All your social hormones are controlled by vitamin D. You don't get enough...and vitamin
D is a special one because that goes to a hormone.
It's really more a hormone than a vitamin.
But it's a steroid hormone, just like estrogen.
And the nice thing about these steroid hormones is they bind to a receptor, which goes to
the DNA and recognizes 12 bases in the DNA, the 6 bases, 3 base spacer, and then another
6 bases.
And what that does is that's the telltale signature of estrogen or vitamin D hormone.
So it's a steroid hormone, and it's controlling a thousand genes, lots of them in your brain.
So if you're vitamin D deficient, you're in deep trouble.
[Rhonda:] Yeah.
70% of the U.S. population, you know, is
not getting enough.
[Bruce:] Yeah.
We're playing video games and watching TV, and we're not out in the sun, and we're in
our car rather than walking.
[Rhonda:] And then there's a problem with physicians not knowing what...you know, the
RDA right now for vitamin D is 600 IUs, of international units of vitamin D. That's what
people are required to take, you know, orally as a supplement.
But the question is, if you're very deficient, so deficiency is defined as 25-hydroxy vitamin
D levels precursor to the hormone, less than 20 nanograms per mil.
And it takes 1000 IUs a day to raise blood levels by 5 points, right?
5 nanograms per milliliter.
So if you're very deficient, you're still not gonna raise yourself up to a sufficient
level, which is considered 30 nanograms per mil or above.
And I think that there's a lot of difficulty in terms of, like, what's in the scientific
literature for people to figure out what is the optimal amount of vitamin D?
How much do we actually need?
And, you know, I think part of that problem is due to the fact that some of the things
that you've been mentioning, and that is people are looking at these short-term consequences.
Well, rickets, you know, bone homeostasis.
And that's really what most people and most doctors are looking at when they're thinking
about how to...
[Bruce:] We don't have rickets anymore.
But we do have rickets.
80 patients at Children's Hospital where I work came, the kids came in with rickets.
They don't get straight bones.
Well, rickets had been eliminated.
But they were all African-American women, who were nursing their babies, and they didn't
have any vitamin D. If you used formula, it'd have a little vitamin D in it.
So it's when we haven't eliminated rickets...though for a long time, doctors never saw a case
of rickets.
But you don't wanna just look at rickets.
You wanna look at these long-term proteins that are helping you live longer.
So, and that means changing people's thinking.
And so you look at all of vitamins and minerals, just one after another, some appreciable percentage
of the population is really deficient.
And nobody seems to care.
[Rhonda:] Right.
And then you get studies coming out, like the "Annals of Internal Medicine" publishing
papers saying, "Enough is enough.
You shouldn't even take your vitamin and mineral supplements because not only are they not
doing anything, but they're doing harm."
So...
[Bruce:] Rhonda and I agree that was a horrible paper, an appalling paper.
Because, see, the docs are all used to randomized, double-blind clinical trials, which makes
a lot of sense because if you test a drug in people nobody has it to start with, and
you're treating the whole population.
But applying it mindlessly, nutrition is stupid because if 90% of the population has enough
of vitamin X and 10% are really deficient, you wanna test it on that 10%.
Otherwise, you'll never see anything because you're diluting it with the 90% who has enough.
So you have to measure it.
And then as Rhonda pointed out, if you use the RDA for vitamin D, you're not gonna get
somebody into the sufficient range.
So what you need to do is measure it before and measure it afterwards.
And that's not a big deal, but people who publish papers, who don't do that, just pollute
the literature.