Daily Dosing With Vitamin D Works Better
Than Taking it Weekly
GrassrootsHealth has recently released a new Webinar video after being inactive for 5 months. VitaminDAction's latest video was a long time in the making. It was based upon a research study that was published during December 2013.
The Natural Health Perspective tore apart their video in order to analyze what if anything was new about it. Anybody currently NOT dosing with vitamin D on a daily basis, such as using once a week or once a month dosing schedule, and especially nursing mothers should watch the entire video, which is shown below. In fact, nursing mothers might want to seriously consider taking their vitamin D in multiple dosages throughout the day.
Their Dr. Bruce Hollis - Vitamin D Dosing Interval video was the latest addition to their series that offers an explanation as to why a certain segment of vitamin D research studies have produced NEGATIVE results. Briefly, these research studies published in prestigious research journals all managed to have used incredibly stupid dosing schedules in order to quote unquote assure dosing compliance. In short, infrequent and insanely large dosages of vitamin D in the range of 100,000 to 600,000 IU simply do NOT work to prevent cancer and other serious diseases even though they raise blood levels of 25(OH)D to the often recommended levels within a relatively short period of time.
Daily Dosing With Vitamin D Is Recommended
The reasons are simple.
Vitamin D circulates in your blood in three different forms.
Straight Vitamin D-3 has a half-life of only 24 hours. What you supplement with on a daily basis passively diffuses into cells globally throughout your body. However, when you fail to supplement on a daily basis, vitamin D-3 is simply NOT found in your blood, because it disappears after just 24 hours.
Your liver converts vitamin D into the prohormonal form of D or 25(OH)D. This is the surrogate marker used in the recommended vitamin D blood tests that test for vitamin D insufficiency. This form of D has a half-life of 3 weeks.
Your kidneys converts the prohormonal form of D into the hormonal form called 1,25(OH)2D. This form of vitamin D has a half-life of only 2 hours. This liver - kidney combination comprises your body's endocrine system, which is ONLY involved with calcium homeostasis or bone health.
What was NOT pointed out in the latest video from vitaminDAaction, is that within the last 10 years, it has been discovered that all the local tissue compartments of your body can likewise convert the prohormonal form of D into the hormonal form, or 1,25(OH)2D. This consists of the your body's autocrine, paracrine, and intracrine systems, which are responsible for all the really heavy health benefits of vitamin D, such as preventing cancer and influenza.
In conclusion, anyway that the public starts out dosing with vitamin D is better than doing nothing.
However, once you have become serious about maximizing your health benefits the Natural Health Perspective has concluded that daily supplementation with vitamin D offers considerable more health benefits than a weekly or monthly dosing schedule would.
For the most part, conventional medicine is responsible for giving their patients and research test subjects huge amounts of vitamin D once a year, every 6 months, quarterly, or even monthly. These infrequent dosing schedules have been found to work, however, ONLY for our body's endocrine system that is involved with calcium homeostasis or bone health.
This is a good time to remind everyone that vitamin D blood tests only test for a surrogate marker of vitamin D insufficiency. At least in the opinion of Dr. Hollis, the 25(OH)D that is circulating in your blood offers little or no health benefits for preventing cancer or any other diseases. However, the long lasting 25(OH)D is constantly being converted into 1,25(OH)2D that hangs around only for about 2 hours throughout your body, which presumably must offer some kind of a health benefit. Nevertheless, the data does suggest that the real health benefits come from daily supplementation with vitamin D-3, which apparently offers some kind of a direct health benefit. In his opinion, at least, monthly supplementation with vitamin D is useless, if you are interested in cancer prevention.
In particular, nursing mothers should be supplementing with vitamin D on a daily basis, otherwise their breast-milk will not contain any vitamin D due to it having a half-life of only 24 hours.
Please read our Nutritional Supplements Disclaimer.
References
- Clinical review: The role of the parent compound vitamin D with respect to metabolism and function: Why clinical dose intervals can affect clinical outcomes.
Hollis BW, Wagner CL.
J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 2013 Dec;98(12):4619-28. doi: 10.1210/jc.2013-2653. Epub 2013 Oct 8. Review.
PMID: 24106283
