Transcription
I'd like to discuss the common mistakes people make when they're taking vitamin D. Vitamin D is the most important vitamin because it's involved in over 10% of all of our genetics. It's a fat-soluble vitamin, which means that it absorbs better when you consume it with fat, whether it's MCT oil or olive oil or something like that.
The absolute most important thing to know about vitamin D is that it won't work unless you have enough magnesium. Thing about magnesium, it's the second most important nutrient because it's involved with 300 different enzymes. Magnesium regulates excess amounts of calcium that build up in your arteries. You don't want to just take any old magnesium because the one called magnesium oxide, you do not want to take that. It only absorbs like 3 to 4%, and you're going to get diarrhea usually if you take more than that. A better one would be magnesium glycinate. You take that in the evening, it'll help you sleep. You get like an 80% absorption. If you take magnesium citrate, okay, that's fine too.
The other side I want to mention about magnesium is that the more vitamin D that you take, the more magnesium is going to be required. Some people that take vitamin D, they react, they get a symptom from it, whether it's nausea, heart palpitations, muscle cramps, sometimes it's a headache. Realize that's probably just a magnesium deficiency because the more vitamin D you take without magnesium, the more magnesium your body's going to have to pull from the reserves. And if you're already deficient, you're going to be really deficient now, thereby giving you more symptoms, which might happen more in the early morning when you wake up because that's when you have the lowest amount of magnesium in the body.
Another mistake that people make with vitamin D is they don't take it with vitamin K2. Vitamin K2 is another co-factor, very, very important because think about it, vitamin D helps you absorb calcium in the blood, right? Well, K2 takes that calcium in the blood, drives it into the bone and your teeth. It keeps the calcium out of the soft tissues. What type of K2 do we need? The MK7 version is really good if you have a lot of calcium buildup in your arteries, and it's also really good for cancer, believe it or not. And the amount that I would recommend would be 100 micrograms for every 10,000 IUs of vitamin D3.
Next point is another co-factor, zinc. And one of the things it does is it helps you convert cholesterol into vitamin D. I would recommend if you're taking 10,000 IUs of vitamin D3 to take like 20 milligrams of zinc. Zinc does a lot. In fact, it's a co-factor for all sex hormones.
Next point I want to bring up is the mistake of not taking enough vitamin D3. If you take the typical recommended amount, which is between 600 to 800 IUs, it's not going to do anything. You need daily vitamin D3 of at least 6,000 to 8,000 to 10,000 IUs every single day. And that data is not really understood by some of these researchers. And so when they do studies, they might give the people in the study vitamin D once a week, or once a month, or even once a year. You're not going to see a lot of great results with that. On top of the fact that they don't like to publish positive things about vitamin D that are literally free, you can get from the sun. Dr. Michael Holick, one of the pioneers in vitamin D research, recommends 10,000 IUs every single day, and he talks about this, you're not going to get any toxic effects from that. Dr. Bruce Hollis also personally takes 10,000 IUs of vitamin D3 every single day.
A big part of the medical profession scares people about taking too much vitamin D3. They talk about the toxic effects. All it takes is a little fear like that to make someone hesitant. But if you look at the actual data, and I've done a serious dive into this topic, you would have to take hundreds of thousands of vitamin D3 every single day for months to develop a toxic effect. The point is that when we're talking about just 10,000 IUs, or even up to 50,000 IUs, and you're taking also the co-factors, magnesium, K2, the zinc, all three protect against the toxicity because it helps control calcium. And just as a side note on that, if you're taking high doses of vitamin D3 and you're drinking the water and you're taking the co-factors, one more thing you could do, you could actually just avoid taking calcium supplements and also foods that are high in calcium like dairy. These are all just precautionary things if someone needs to take high doses of vitamin D3.
Now, when I'm talking about high doses, I'm really talking about maybe doses over 30, 40, 50,000 IUs up to 100,000 IUs per day. Now, make note of this, I didn't say toxic doses, okay? I said high amounts. There's a big difference. And of course, I'm just giving you data to research. I'm not telling you to do it. Check with your doctor before implementing any of the things I am mentioning.
Another mistake that people make with vitamin D is taking vitamin D2. Vitamin D2 does not even come close to working like vitamin D3. You're going to need a lot more of D2 to achieve the effects of D3.
The other important thing to do is to actually get a vitamin D test. And when you get a test, make sure you take your last vitamin D like three days before the test so that way we can get a more of an accurate blood level of vitamin D3. The vitamin D in the blood is not the active form. So in other words, you could have this so-called normal vitamin D level and be extremely deficient in the active form of vitamin D deep into the cells.
Other points about vitamin D, if you're on statins, if you're on steroids, both of those things are going to inhibit your ability to make vitamin D and allow vitamin D to work in your body. Just think about statins, right? That's going to lower cholesterol. Where does vitamin D come from? It comes from cholesterol.
If you're going to get your vitamin D from the sun, realize that you're going to get it if you expose yourself between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. in the summer. Also, you're not going to get a lot of vitamin D in the early morning or the late afternoon. You really have to expose a good portion of your body. If you do that and everything is right, you might get 10,000 IUs of vitamin D3 in maybe like 20 minutes to a half hour. Make sure you don't let yourself get burned. Get slightly pink, go in the shade, and then the next day, keep working on a tan. A tan is really just an increase in melanin that allows this pigment to then protect you against the UV.
Another thing not to take with vitamin D3 is iron. They compete. If you're going to take iron, take it at a different time. The other thing is sunblockers or sunscreen. What happens is that most of the sunblockers will block a type of ultraviolet radiation called UVB, which is the type that you need to make vitamin D. But those sunscreens don't block the UVA, which is the stuff that ages your skin. So here you are protecting your skin by rubbing on this sunscreen when it's not filtering out the entire spectrum of ultraviolet light. It's only blocking your ability to produce vitamin D3.
Unfortunately, I hope you learned some of the mistakes and some of the things that you can do to correct those mistakes with vitamin D3. And if you have not seen my video, I did when I interviewed Dr. Bruce Hollis, you should check that out. It was fascinating, and I'll put that up right here.