Vitamin D Supplements Are Rat Poison

What if everything you’ve been told about “vitamin D” is wrong?

What if “taking” a D supplement is actually harmful to your health? (Despite short-term improvement of symptoms, due to it being a steroid?)

If you really reflect on this discussion, rather than dismiss it, you  may end up reconsidering all isolated, synthetic nutrients. But today, let’s just take on supplemental “vitamin D3.”

I know my tackling anything that people take commonly will launch a controversy, so if you want to go deeper on this topic, I just did an interview with Jim on my Vibe podcast.

You’re Not Testing the Right Form of Vitamin D

Let’s take a high-level view of the vitamin D conversation. In the simplest of terms, the form of vitamin D that gets tested in the lab is not the one that gives you the important immune benefits you’re looking for. 

Here’s a key sequence that will put things into perspective: 

• Vitamin D3 The form we “take”

• 25D The STORAGE form (the one we test)

• 1,25D The ACTIVE form (the one we actually need)

That last one will shock you. Because they don’t test for it — and you’re highly unlikely to be deficient in it. (And supplementing with D3 won’t fix it in any case, and will actually make things worse.)

Your liver converts the vitamin D3 you get from the sun (or from food or supplements) into 25D, which is an inert molecule that can’t protect you from any disease or condition. 

This “storage” form (25D) lies fallow in multiple locations throughout your body (including your liver, fat, muscles, and bones), waiting to be activated. For this to occur, it must travel to your kidneys for a second conversion into 1,25D, the active form, which is the “molecule of immune response.” 

Together with vitamin A, the active form of vitamin D produces the chemical and biological warriors that comprise your immune response (things like macrophages and killer T cells). 

Put simply:

The storage form that everybody frets about cannot do a thing to protect you from disease. 

It has to be converted into the active form in order to do that. (And taking vitamin D supplements inhibits that important process).

Further, when you’re told that you’re deficient in vitamin D, that assessment is based on the storage form. 

Science assumes that most everyone is “low” in vitamin D … based on the wrong test! 

But it’s a false assumption: people who are low in the storage form virtually always have plenty of the active form that protects us from disease.

Jim Stephenson had 250 people test for 25D and 1,25D, and only TWO were actually low in the active form, 1,25D. Two out of 250. These were likely mostly people who were told by a healthcare professional they were “low in D.”

How does that match up with your being told, since 2010, that 80-90% of the world is chronically low in D? More on that in a minute.

In fact, you may be shocked to find you have high 1,25D once you finally get it tested. Here you’ve been trying so hard to increase your 25D, after being told you’re “low”--but what has that done to your 1,25D level?

A low 25D lab test may correspond with chronically poor health, or “co-morbidities,” but it isn’t an indicator you need to take D3 pills.

I’ll mention another couple pieces of this puzzle that has millions of people swallowing lots of D pills. 

(Hey, ever notice that nobody tests you for vitamin K? Which you get from your green smoothie, by the way, and no, I wouldn’t run out and get a K pill. You’re also not tested for vitamin E, for that matter. Or vitamin A. Think they’re not important? K, E, and A are actually critically important.)

What They Don’t Tell You

Your D3 supplement is worse than useless — it’s harmful, in multiple ways.

It may give you a short-term steroidal effect — thus all the studies — but virtually everything you’ve been told about the pills your doctor tells you to take, and the tests they run on you, is false.

It’s not even actually true that you need to religiously sunbathe for 20 minutes, as naked as possible, during specific hours of the day (as the biohackers promote), to have optimal D.

But do get outside and get in the sun. Gardening will get the job done. Going for a walk in a t-shirt and shorts will get the job done.  

In fact, just a few minutes of daylight (not even necessarily sun, as we can make D on cloudy days) on your hands and face are sufficient for most people. 

Side note: consider skipping the sunglasses. Your eyes need exposure to the sun. And that doesn’t mean you stare at the sun. Just being outside without blocking the sun, sometimes, is helpful to your eyesight and your overall health in ways that science doesn’t entirely understand. 

I also hypothesize that the fact that I don’t need prescription glasses at age 56, despite my mother and daughter both having vision problems—may be related to the fact that I just refused to wear corrective lenses since I was first told I needed them, at age 20. 

At age 40, after allowing my eyes to strengthen themselves naturally, without a crutch, and sometimes I make fresh juice rich in carotenoid antioxidants (like beets and carrots)--I was diagnosed with “better than perfect” (20-20) vision.

This is not medical advice; you should do what’s best for you; this is just something to consider.

At this point, you already know more about vitamin D and sunlight than your doctor does, having read this far. Doctors are trained in a specific way: they believe the narrative they’re told, backed by “research” that is is very much industry funded.

Your functional medicine practitioner may even private-label a D3 supplement and really not want to lose that recurring revenue.

Wherein you take their supplement, and your lab results might show a higher level of 25D, which doesn’t help you be healthier, but it does keep you taking vitamin D. (You also might see your 25D levels DECREASE, after taking the pills.)

I don’t sell any D3 supplements, and I don’t have a different supplement to sell you at the end of this article. 

You may be writing me off as crazy right about now, and you may be thinking that thousands of doctors don’t lie, which is why, for those of you “fact finders” who want to go deeper, I’m recommending you listen to my interview with Jim Stephenson. 

If you’re a science geek, and want a deeper dive, listen to the a 2.5-hour video interview in Resources below, in which Stephenson thoroughly debunks, with evidence, a dozen arguments the vitamin D supplement industry puts forward to sell its product.

Please do some of this, before writing me an angry message that my challenging the vitamin D supplement industry is dangerous or whatever.

Who Cares If You’re Low on Flour If You’ve Got a Kitchen Full of Bread? 

Doctors measure only the amount of 25 hydroxyvitamin D in your blood (serum) at one particular moment, which is a tiny fraction of the 25D you hold. 25D molecules are actually stored all over your body, primarily in your liver, but also your kidneys, your bones, your skin, and many other tissues — but you’re told it’s all in your blood, because they can measure it in your blood. 

Jim Stephenson uses this analogy: 

• The storage form of vitamin D that you test can be likened to the flour in a canister in your kitchen. 

• But it doesn’t account for the 5-pound bag of flour in your pantry. 

• Nor does it include the multiple other locations in which you store flour in your house. 

• Then there’s the fact that you also have 13 OTHER types of flour in several locations throughout your home, not just wheat flour.

• None of which matters at all if you’ve got enough bread (aka the active form) already baked, to feed you for a month. 

In this analogy, the flour in the canister is the amount of 25D in your serum that blood tests pick up on. 

But the “flour in the canister” is only the tiny fraction of the flour you’ve got at home – the part that’s close at hand, for easy access, to bake bread. 

This is the amount of 25D that your liver has released and is on its way to your kidneys, where it will be converted into the active form we seek (the bread). 

One reason they check your flour inventory (25D, the storage form) to assess how much bread (1,25D, the active form) you have on hand is that the active form is expensive to test. Its half life is 8 to 12 hours, versus 3 weeks for 25D. So it has to be frozen, to be transported to the lab.

(That means that for issues around lab error, you have to trust the lab that draws your blood, and the lab that thaws and tests it—to get it right.) If you listen to my interview with Jim, you’ll understand why I have zero interest in getting the expensive 1,25D test.

And beyond that large bag in the pantry, you have even more flour stored in multiple places (the 25D stored everywhere else in your body). 

To further muddy the waters, you’ve got more than a dozen other types of flour stored throughout the house, which are also not measured. 

Your body actually makes at least fifteen unique forms of 25D, but your test detects only two of them: 25 (OH) D2 and 25 (OH) D3.

I’d wager your doctor doesn’t know this. Ask your practitioner a few polite quiz questions after you read this. That should be instructive. If she is defensive or stonewalls and gaslights you or doesn’t have an answer—you might now know more about the subject than she does. 

So even if 25D was the right molecule to test (which it’s not) — how valid would that “low” result be anyway?

Further, the oral vitamin D supplements you take provide only two molecules of the 19-molecule compound your body needs! They won’t give you any of the other D molecules that protect you from skin cancer and perform other healthy functions, like sun-derived vitamin D will.

Your body NEEDS those other molecules (and you must get them from the sun). There is no substitute for sun exposure. 

Seasonal Variation Is Also a Myth

Despite what we’ve been told, our “vitamin D” does not actually drop in the winter due to a lack of the UVB rays that create D3 in the summer months. It’s a fear mongering lie that sells billions of dollars’ worth of fake sunshine pills.

I get my D tested every March, at the end of winter. It’s always in the optimal range, for 20 straight years now, including when I lived in Utah, not just the 2.5 years I’ve lived in Florida. And I never took vitamin D. Not even throughout the plandemic, like most holistic-oriented people did.

Nor do I sunbathe at a specific time of day (or ever)—I just am outside at various times of day, two or three times a week. Wearing some clothes. (I confess to having a pretty bad “farmer’s tan” right now, at my shorts and tank top lines.)

What’s my point in bringing up that I get congratulated on my “optimal” D levels every year? To point out that 

1. You aren’t being well served by the pill you take (and in fact some people’s D levels go DOWN when they take the pills).

2. You don’t have to slurp down raw eggs or eat salmonand  other animal foods that contain vitamin D, or eat weird things like the lining of the eggs or the shells, to have a strong immune system.

3. Having a healthy gut and liver is key to this--and, well, everything else related to your health.

If you have really low 25D (for instance, a level like 15), Jim Stephenson points out that it’s likely that your body is battling some pathogens. Like Lyme or Epstein Barr. Or as Western medicine has been calling it lately, you may have “co-morbidities.”

A healthy gut and liver are at the root of being able to metabolize the steroidal hormone (not really vitamin) D, as well as many other nutrients.

(Which is best done by detoxifying twice a year, eating a whole-foods, mostly plant-based diet, and avoiding synthetic inputs, like pharma’s products. Maybe you’re not perfect on all those measures, but incremental improvement is improvement indeed!)

Your immune system isn’t as stupid as you’re being led to believe. If it were, the human race would have died out a long time ago.

If you measure the active form of vitamin D, you’ll see that your body doesn’t take the winter off, during the precise months we need it – when we actually get sick! Here’s the study: 

Source: https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article-abstract/53/1/139/2677695

Vitamin D Is Rat Poison 

So what’s up with the provocative subject line? Is it clickbait? Exaggeration? No. I wish it were. 

For starters, the vitamin D3 that we take (cholecalciferol) is the exact same chemical in rat poison.  Veterinarians know this, because family pets often accidentally ingest D-Con or some similar product meant to poison rats. 

The disturbing fact is explained away by telling us that the dose in rat poisons is much higher than the completely safe and effective “small” amount in our supplements, and that mice are different than humans. 

But neither of those rationalizations stands up to scrutiny. Because the doses of rat bait are actually very similar (proportionally) to the amounts in our supplements.

And indeed, we are different – as in, we’re much bigger. Taking that chemically synthesized product doesn’t kill you — not quickly anyway — but it can give you osteoporosis. 

And it actually suppresses your immune system. (You’re probably aware that if you take pharma’s steroids, they stay in your immune system, depressing it, for six months after the short-term benefit against, for instance, lung inflammation.)

(Side tangent: You know your mother was told to drink cow’s milk, and feed it to you — fortified by the same synthetic D, by the way. She was told it “does a body good,” she was told it’s needed for strong bones, so she probably fed it to you. So why is it that the highest dairy-consuming countries, the U.S. and Scandinavian countries, also have the highest rates of osteoporosis?)

The Benchmark For D Was Tripled in 2010

This one is also super controversial, since your doctor will tell you that even a level of 30 is urgently low. 

But until 2010, the standard for a healthy amount of “D” was 12.5 to 30. The radical change, to 40-60 being the “healthy range,” was based on dirty dealings involving Dr. Michael Holick of the Vitamin D Society in Canada, who happens to hold a patent on his own form of vitamin D and also vitamin D tests. (See References.)

That increase conveniently turned countless millions of people into “vitamin D deficiency” cases overnight. But conflict of interest is by no means the only reason to question this recommendation. 

Notably, they raised only the recommendation for the storage form and not for what that form becomes when activated. Which makes no sense whatsoever. 

Don’t take my word for it. Do a deeper dive into Resources on this blog post.

In reality, a level of 12 is no reason for concern. Moreover, it’s irrelevant … because 25D is the wrong molecule to test. And virtually nobody is deficient in the active form that we think we’re getting from the supplement.

Try to find a study in which the active form (1,25D) is deficient in people. Take your time; I’ll wait. Show me.

In fact, try to find any of your friends who get tested for D every year, who have EVER been tested for 1,25D, the one you actually need, and aren’t deficient in.

In fact, if you’re told that you’re low in vitamin D, it’s very likely that you have an excess of the active form – which results in a condition called “hypervitaminosis D” … in other words, the exact opposite of a deficiency.  

The only people who are low in (active) 1,25D have chronic kidney disease or hypoparathyroidism.

In this rare instance, they will need to supplement with the active form. Oral supplementation with D3 won't do them any good, because those conditions inhibit their ability to move the substance through the activation steps — from D3 to 25D to the 1,25D they need. 

The truth is that sick people don’t go low in vitamin D,  because their bodies make it on demand, in order to fight illness. Production of vitamin D actually IS the immune function in action.   

Supplementing Results in Overdose, Bone Thinning, and Kidney Damage

We are told that our bodies can make 20,000 IU of vitamin D in a day when we go out in the sun. So taking 5,000  or 10,000 IU orally seems harmless. (In fact, these are considered “low” doses, by many functional medicine practitioners.) 

However, when the sun creates D3, most of it actually progresses on to become “lumisterol,” or L3, an entirely different molecule than the one we get from supplementation, which has other pathways and does other important work in our bodies (like protecting our skin from UV damage).

But since there’s no sunshine in our guts, when we take oral D3, we end up with D3 in our blood and adipose (fat) tissue (which is supposed to hold the 25D storage form, not its precursor, D3). This is completely unnatural and has several consequences. 

One of the important ones is that high levels of vitamin D in the blood require high levels of calcium in the blood to match, in a specific ratio. So the vitamin D tells your body to absorb more calcium from your food, and now you have too much of both in your blood — the D3 that never belonged there at all, and the calcium that should exist there in much smaller amounts.

And the excess calcium, which gets deposited into your soft tissues, stiffens your arteries.

On the other hand, if you don’t take in sufficient calcium through your diet, it’s going to be leached from your bones.  This phenomenon is a significant cause of osteoporosis in today’s world, where everyone is blindly following the advice of well-meaning but misguided professionals who don’t know this information. 

I know, it’s a lot to take in: that your bones could be thinning from long-term usage of the vitamin D that your functional medicine practitioner has told you to take, for years. It’s a hard pill to swallow, that you didn’t actually have a deficiency in “vitamin D.” And that you’re actually harming yourself by supplementing.

What Do I Actually Need to Test?

To properly test your vitamin D status, your practitioner needs to run all these tests at the same time:

1. 25(OH)D (Storage form of Hormone-D): nothing over 21 ng/dL has any clinical benefit

2. 1,25(OH)2D3 (Active form of Hormone-D): should be no more the 1.5 to 2.0 times of 25(OH)D

3. Ionized Calcium blood test

4. PTH (parathyroid hormone test))

If your storage form of D is what they now call “low” but your active form is normal–you’re doing fine! 

(Even after learning all of this, I don’t get tested for 1,25D because the chances of my being “low” are…well, very low. Like 1%. In fact, much lower than 1%, given that I don’t have chronic kidney disease or hypoparathyroidism.)

If there’s no actual mass deficiency in “Vitamin D” levels, why would I worry about testing it?

Further, the ratio of the active to the storage form is more important than the numbers themselves. (The active 1,25D should not exceed twice the 25D storage form). Which is another reason that ordering just one of these labs is utterly useless.

I don’t trust that the lab results would even be accurate, given the potential for lab error — having to freeze the blood for test #2 above, to ship (an expensive hassle, and the labs don’t want to do it) — and given that virtually no one is actually low in D.

You’ll find that most doctors won’t order the 1,25D test, and insurance won’t pay for it (as I said, it’s expensive). So you’ll probably have to order it through a service like RequestATest.com, and pay out of pocket.

I hope this is useful. I hope you’ll share it with your practitioner, or at least ask him if he private labels his D3 supplement and profits by it. Or maybe just ask him to tell you the difference between 25D and 1,25D.

If he has no answer, you have your answer. About whether he knows much about this topic, or just does what everybody else is doing.

I also hope you can take “panic about Vitamin D level” off your list of things to worry about.

Remember to listen to my episode with Jim, here, and join his FB group Secosteroid Hormone D, where he has many resources on this topic you can learn from. Thank you to Jim Stephenson who is not compensated for his work exposing the frauds around “Vitamin D” and has no reason to do it, besides wanting to help people.

Thank you for your support of this channel. If you find value here, consider becoming a monthly subscriber for just $10/month. We’ll email you two blog posts every week. 

Resources

Secosteroid Hormone D – Jim Stephenson’s Facebook group (the “Featured” posts answer 98% of the FAQs.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/517807781731760 

How the vitamin D craze got started (which has nothing to do with real science, or health). 

https://www.facebook.com/notes/secosteroid-hormone-d/vitamin-d-shadowy-money-behind-it/1428856210626908/

The numbers don't mean a thing: When they say "Your D is low," no, it's not.

https://www.facebook.com/notes/secosteroid-hormone-d/fallacy-of-chasing-a-number/1431446280367901/

The assessment of D status that might be meaningful is never tested.

https://www.facebook.com/notes/secosteroid-hormone-d/vitamin-d-testing-ratios-there-are-2-measurements-of-d-status/1426429424202920/

How the whole D testing and supplementation thing is a scam.

https://www.facebook.com/notes/secosteroid-hormone-d/diagram-of-a-scam/1431427470369782/

(2 hours 34 minutes)

Scroll down the (long) video description to view a full time-stamped index of the topics covered in this video. It’s an advanced discussion, so don’t expect an introduction to the topics at hand. 

How the minimum vitamin D level got unnecessarily (and unscientifically) raised to 30

To hear the story behind the misguided 2010 increase in the recommended vitamin D level, you can advance this Telegram podcast to timestamp (01:27:05) and listen for 3 minutes https://t.me/gettinghealthy/1215.  

(This image shows how to display the playback controls on Telegram/desktop).