Why I Stopped Taking Vitamin D Supplements
Vitamin D supplements are a waste of money
Hi, I’m Aastha and thanks for joining Live Longer World as I parse through the snake-oil in longevity. On my health stack, you can see my exact collection of non-toxic health products I use (12 categories including sleep, fitness, clean water, lighting, air quality, non-toxic kitchen). For the full collection of 500+ health products curated by me, see Health Stacked.
In 2019, I was deficient in Vitamin D. Around the same time, I came across Dr. Rhonda Patrick who built much of her fame touting the benefits of Vit. D supplementation. She pointed to the associations between low vitamin D and cancer, heart disease, and worse COVID outcomes. Her recommendation was to supplement to reach the optimal range. Even today, it’s top of her list of recommended supplements1.
For 6 years, I religiously followed her advice by taking a high dose 5,000IU a day. A year ago, I learned how wrong she is.
Vit. D supplements recommendation is built on correlation, not causation. High Vit. D is linked to good health, and low Vit. D to poor health, so health practioniers jumped to the conclusion that “We should supplement people with Vit D.” Trying to discern between correlation and causation is in direct conflict with the ~$10 trillion global healthcare industry.
This is how Vit. D supplements became a thing: People learned that the sun is good, and sun produces Vit. D, therefore Vit. D pills are good. It’s a classic case of reductionist biology and poor logical leaps.
Recent evidence confirms it was correlation, not causation. A large landmark study showed how Vit. D supplementation had no effects on cancer, cardiovascular disease, stroke, or death from any cause. This does not mean Vit. D is not important. Natural Vit. D from the sun continues to be critical for good health.
Vit. D from the sun does not equal Vit. D from pills.
In this post, I will discuss:
The cause-and-effect mistake at the heart of it all. Why we mistook the messenger (vitamin D) for the message (sunlight).
The landmark trial that quietly broke the vitamin D story. 26,000 people, five years, and almost nothing to show for the pill.
What sunlight does that no pill can copy. The benefits that have nothing to do with vitamin D.
How to actually get your vitamin D, the practical, free, evolutionary way.
We have confused Vit. D as the cause when it is a marker
The history of how Vit. D research shows us how we made this mistake of confusing cause with effect. In 1980, 2 brothers Cedric and Frank Garland noted that people living in the south sunnier regions of the U.S. had lower colon cancer mortality. Back then, it was believed that the main benefit of the sun was Vit. D. So the brothers attributed the lower cancer mortality in sunnier regions to Vit. D. They attributed the “sunlight signal” solely to the “Vit. D signal”. This was a big mistake. We now know that the sun has many benefits beyond Vit. D production, and this leap from “sun helps with cancer” to “Vit. D pills help with cancer” was a logical fallacy.
Vit. D was a marker of people getting adequate sun. Not the cause of cancer protection.
This mistake got further perpetuated over the next 2 decades as observational studies linked low Vit D. to higher rates of cancer, cardiovascular diseases, stroke, infection. This was all based on correlation.
In 2007, there was one trial by a researcher named Joan Lappe that initially showed lower all-cancer incidence with calcium and Vit. D supplementation. But when the trial was replicated with cancer as the primary outcome they were testing for, the results failed to hold up2.
The 2019 landmark study that showed Vit D supplements don’t prevent cancer, stroke or cardiovascular disease
The VITAL study3 was the largest trial ever built to test whether vitamin D pills prevent cancer and heart disease. Nearly 26,000 healthy older adults, half of them women, a fifth of them Black, took either 2,000 IU of vitamin D3 a day or a placebo for just over five years.
The results? No reduction in cancer, cardiovascular events or death from any cause.
What if the pill dose was too low?
My first thought on reading the results of the study was that perhaps the Vit D dosage was low. But that doesn’t seem to be the case, because the Vit D. levels of the people who supplemented with it did in fact go up. Blood levels in the supplement group climbed from 30 to 42 ng/mL, squarely in the optimal range. So the supplement did work in moving Vit. D levels up. However, the high Vit. D from the supplements had no effect on prevention of major diseases. In other words, the supplement worked as they say - your Vit D. levels shot up, but with no benefit to health.
What if the pill didn’t work because most people had adequate levels?
Adequate levels of Vit. D are debated. Around 30 ng/mL or above is generally considered sufficient. However, optimal levels are seen to be between 40-60 ng/mL. Under 20 ng/mL is deficient.
50% of the population was in the sufficient bucket. Most people were not in the optimal bucket. So, the pill should have still helped the people in the adequate bucket. Importantly, 13% of the population were in the deficient bucket. And the pill did not help this group either! Even among the Black population, the pill had no effect. This matters because darker skin makes less vitamin D from the same amount of sunlight, so Black participants tend to run lower levels. They were the group most expected to benefit from a pill, yet they didn’t.
VITAL Study was not the only one to show Vit. D didn’t work
Even before VITAL, other studies like the Women’s Health Initiative showed no effect of vitamin D pills. And the same result has since been repeated by several more: the New Zealand ViDA trial, the Finnish FIND trial, and Australia’s D-Health trial.
In each of these, vitamin D had no positive impact on cancer, cardiovascular disease, stroke, or other chronic disease. FIND is worth singling out, because it used higher doses than VITAL, up to 3,200 IU a day, and still found nothing. So this isn’t a case of the dose being too small.
So why then do healthy people have good Vit. D levels?
Two reasons. First, vitamin D is a proxy for whether you are getting adequate sun. It’s a marker of good health, not the direct cause of it.
Second, the sun has many benefits that extend well beyond vitamin D production.
A big one is the release of nitric oxide when skin is exposed to UV. Nitric oxide relaxes blood vessels and lowers blood pressure, and this has nothing to do with vitamin D. Tellingly, vitamin D supplements have repeatedly failed to lower blood pressure, which is exactly what sent researchers looking for another mechanism in the first place.
We’re only now starting to uncover the many health benefits of the sun. Avoiding the sun is as bad as smoking, and worse than getting skin cancer! In a landmark study of nearly 30,000 Swedish women, the ones who lived the longest were the ones who got the most sun and got non-melanoma skin cancer!
How then did Vit. D pills become a cultural mainstream?
The poor logical leap I described above is a big piece of it. Sun is good, sun makes vitamin D, so vitamin D pills must be good.
But a huge part of it was the media narrative and one central figure: Dr. Michael Holick. He wrote popular books on vitamin D deficiency, and as chair of the 2011 Endocrine Society guidelines, he helped push the threshold for “sufficient” vitamin D up to 30ng/mL, above the 20ng/mL that the other major authority, the Institute of Medicine, considered adequate. Raising the bar like that reclassified a large share of the population as insufficient overnight.
I’m not here to argue whether 20 or 30 is the right number. The point is that he was the central figure in the rise of vitamin D, and a 2018 New York Times investigation4 later reported he had received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the industries that profited from it, including a major lab that sells vitamin D tests and the indoor-tanning industry. To be fair to him, he is also a genuine advocate for getting sun, which is more than most of his critics in dermatology can say.
How to get Vit. D practically and naturally
The best way to get Vit. D is from UV light from the sun. Modern dermatology has demonized UV light entirely and this is a big mistake. All the studies that were done showing how UV light can cause skin cancer were done using UV light in isolation and on mice that were stripped of melanin, the natural ability to tan. Even at peak UV, the sun never has UV light in isolation, and it’s only 2-3% of the sun’s rays in fact. However, this doesn’t mean getting burnt and sitting in peak UV, if you’re not primed for it. Here are 12 practical guidelines for safe sun exposure I follow, including points on sunscreen use, building sun exposure, food guidelines, and more:
Make sure to get morning sun as a warm-up. Morning sun and evening sun have almost no UV, and are rich in beneficial infrared. Some new research shows that priming your skin with infrared before UV exposure can protect you from potential UV damage. Just like you wouldn’t do deadlifts before warming up, don’t step out in peak UV if you’re not primed for it.
