[Harpy August 29, 2012 at 5:06 am Post count: 184]

#1173417

Kimberly wrote:

Just a quick note to stress the importance of working with your doctor to get tested prior to adding a Vitamin D supplement. My own endo does this testing and has recommended supplementation in my case, but there can be toxic effects if you get *too* much Vitamin D (as is the case with most other vitamins/minerals).

Agreed,
Always get tested and discuss with your doctor if supplementation is required.

Just need to add that all of the Vitamin D toxicity cases that I have read about are from contaminated food products where there was an error in the fortification by factors of around 100’s or more.

Normal doses recommended are 1,000-5,000IU/day, for most people this is not much more than a maintenance dose and only stops their levels falling further, overall it is pretty poorly absorbed.
Supervised medical dosing has been done for long periods of time at between 10,000-50,000IU/day in trials on MS patients with no ill effects.
Mild toxicity has been seen around 75,000IU/day
Acute toxicity requires longer term doses in the order of 600,000/day

The skin (full body) can produce up to 20-30,000IU Vitamin D in a half hour sitting in the sunshine, but it is only slowly absorbed over a couple of days and a lot degrades or is washed off in our daily scrubbing.

Vitamin A is the bigger concern with toxicity, that’s one most people hear about where someone has just gone overboard and eaten liver for a week.