Re: The Truth About Vitamin D: Fourteen Reasons Why Misunderstanding Endures
Sounds like you're supporting the axiom that The dose makes the poison.
Let's recap: You did "incredibly well" supping with D3 for a while. Then you took "larger and larger doses" and did much worse. This puts D3 in the category of things that are good for you, up to a point, then bad for you, like water, salt, magnesium, calcium, oxygen, ad infinitum.
Or put more accurately, there is an optimal blood serum level for Vit D, in all its forms, in ng/mL. To be below that isn't good, and to be above that isn't good either.
What's tricky, from what I can tell, is that if someone is woefully deficient for a long time, large daily doses are needed to get into the healthy range. But once there, in my view, the dose needed to stay there drops off precipitously. Much much smaller.
This is why the phrase "long term use" is so un-useful. Long term use at what dose? At any dose? What if someone gets up into the healthy range then cuts back to 2000 iu 3x/week? or 2x/week? or 1x/week? This makes sense to me, though unaddressed by the phrase "long term use."
What if blood tests could detect D in all its forms, and someone was deficient in all of them? Would supping still be a bad idea? I know, sunbathing is the ideal way. But that's another thing - for people up north in northern cities, the sky is overcast 2/3 the time and the temp is freezing 7/8 of the time. Wind, weakness of sun's rays... So skin exposure to the sun is just not workable.
The trouble is knowing what your blood levels are and monitoring them. Could well be that for some/most people, once they get caught up, D3 is more of a weekly thing, or monthly, if they haven't gone running for the hills from L-shaped bacteria.