Vitamin D Recommendations are Set Too Low

Post #702

If nutritional recommendations for vitamin D are set too low — as is true for the official government recommendations on vitamin D in the UK — then you end up with too much risk for things like sepsis:

Here is the 2016 update for vitamin D recommendations in the UK:

NOTE: Of special note right above the bold heading where it says Review of DRVs, the mean serum active vitamin D level is 45.8 nmol/L (18.3 ng/mL). Notice how that puts the UK average into the second bar of the chart at top — so that the average UK risk of sepsis is triple or more than what it needs to be.

And here is a 2021 update of UK recommendations, still recommending a paltry level of active vitamin D of 25 nmol/L (10 ng/mL) — a level associated with > 6 times the risk of sepsis. The blue highlight actually shows the lowest (severe deficiency) cutoff in the USA of 30 nmol/L (12.5 ng/mL), while admitting the UK threshold is even lower:

If anyone is to blame for high death during COVID, it would be governments which fail to incorporate the best scientific evidence on how to use nutrition to keep people alive and well.

Is it true that we have “pandemics” — or is it more true that we have times when the average vitamin D level puts you at three or more times the risk for infection? Do you more properly call that a pandemic, or a vitamin deficiency?

Reference

Kempker JA, Panwar B, Judd SE, Jenny NS, Wang HE, Gutiérrez OM. Plasma 25-Hydroxyvitamin D and the Longitudinal Risk of Sepsis in the REGARDS Cohort. Clin Infect Dis. 2019 May 17;68(11):1926-1931. doi: 10.1093/cid/ciy794. PMID: 30239610; PMCID: PMC6522683. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6522683/