Most people supplement vitamin D, especially when they are sick, because they think it will make them better, but most studies on vitamin D only show a correlation with sickness, not causation.
What does that mean?
First, there is more than one kind of vitamin D. What gets tested at the doctor’s office is storage D. There is a test for active D, but that is very rarely done.
Storage D doesn’t do anything except convert to active D.
If you compare a storage D level of a bunch of sick people with the storage D level of a bunch of well people and most of the sick people have low storage D and most of the well people have normal storage D, it would appear as if low storage D is correlated with sickness.
That’s all well and good, but did the low storage D cause the sickness?
Correlation is meaningless if you can’t show a causative relationship.
Consider ice cream and shark attacks. These two things are correlated, just like storage D and sickness.
Does that mean ice cream consumption causes sharks to attack?
No, of course not!
People eat more ice cream in the summer because it’s hot. People also swim in shark infested waters in the summer because it’s hot.
Ice cream and sharks have no relationship except that they both occur more often in the summer.
In order for us to know if low storage D causes sickness, we would need more labs.
Low storage D is a sign of magnesium deficiency.
Magnesium is involved in over 3000 processes in the body and is required for everything vitamin D does, so a magnesium deficiency can certainly make us sick.
How do we know a lack of vitamin D is the problem rather than a lack of magnesium?
We would need to test RBC magnesium along with a storage D.
Since storage D doesn’t do anything, we would also need to know if a low storage D causes a low active D.
No studies have tested storage D with RBC magnesium and active D.
When I test those markers, I always find a low RBC magnesium and a normal or even elevated active D with a low storage D.
If active D is normal or elevated, that does not point to a vitamin D deficiency.
Vitamin D research is so biased that we don’t have all the information we need to understand what a storage D level is telling us.
Testing just a storage D is like testing just a TSH (thyroid stimulating hormone). It’s meaningless.
A question we need to ask is what happens when we throw vitamin D supplements at a magnesium deficiency?
Well, we are going to deplete magnesium even further (because magnesium is used up with nearly everything vitamin D does) and we are also going to deplete vitamin A because vitamin D and vitamin A are antagonists.
If we deplete magnesium and vitamin A we are not going to have enough bioavailable copper to turn oxygen into energy and prevent iron from causing oxidative stress and inflammation.
In other words, we are going to end up at some point feeling like crap wondering what the hell happened to our body.
Storage D and sickness are like ice cream and shark attacks. We need more information to determine what the relationship is and if there even is one.
If you need help figuring out why you feel like crap, just send me a message at annette@annettepresley.com and we can chat or schedule a free consultation at www.therevivedwoman.com.