Institute of Medicine or IOM formulated their views on appropriate intake of Vitamin D not that long ago! The amount of Vitamin D that is optimal is more and more a hot topic. This is mainly because the rumor mill is repeatedly suggesting that most of North Americans are Vitamin D deficient! But worse, and as you will read later on, the IOM seem not to recognize their own clear mistake for our daily Recommended Daily Amounts or RDA!
If this is so then geographical location pales beside the enormity of the suggested Recommended Daily Amount Error! And is this nothing less than a Shocking Vitamin D Recommended Daily Amount Catastrophe?
This Web site has likened the Vitamin D deficiency to the Vitamin C deficiency of the 17th. century. When those that were away at sea, suffered badly from scurvy. Captain Cook solved that!
Imagine Captain Cook but today! As prejudice then is the same today! Merchant ship man, renowned explorer, finds key to solving scurvy! But he is not from the upper or upper middle class. He has the wrong accent. He succeeds through sheer ability! He also has a regional accent, and his lower class origins exude obviously. As indeed those revealing qualities still persist often to disqualify in severely class structured Britain to this day!
In my opinion, it was entirely because of Cook’s ‘impediment’ that the ‘snooty’ Admiralty had an instinctive negative and for the country a destructive bias. They were initially against any recommendations from Cook! Thus the reason it took so many decades for them to acknowledge his observations and inductions!
Indeed the inability to man the British ‘Men of War ships in the West Indies with full complements of crew may have contributed to the loss of the American colonies. However they, the Admiralty, learnt the ‘Limey’ magic, (Limey comes from Limes!), by the time of the Napoleonic wars.
Vitamin C resulted in full crew complements for British ships before the Spanish and French! Thus, at the Battle of Trafalgar the British under Admiral Nelson could out man and out gun the French with savagery! Believe it was three broadsides to one and with accuracy! Now you will rarely find this health concept preached!
But the Recommended Daily Amounts, or RDA of Vitamin D, you would think the IOM would get right! After all they are expressly there for the guidance of the general population! Their determination that most of us need only 600 International Units or IUs of vitamin D3 at 20 ng/ml. Now at least they get their type of vitamin right!
Many doctors for instance just do not understand the difference between D2 and D3. Believe it or not! You ask next time! They also reasoned that normal intake of daily foods would provide those levels! But a Shocking Vitamin D Recommended Daily Amount Catastrophe?
Two Canadian researcher types in 2014 challenged the RDA. They say there is a massive error in the IOM RDA calculations. Ten times out. Needs to be a recommendation ten times greater! This to my knowledge has budged nothing in the way of the RDA! But the implications are huge!
Just one example is me at the Vancouver Cancer clinic, following a series of melanoma excises. Luckily these serious cancers caught in the nick of time. Just enough safety margin. But the objective now is prevention. One key element to that is Vitamin D. This is particularly important in a Northern Climes. If you live North of Atlanta, Georgia, in the US., you just cannot make your own Vitamin D in your skin from about the end of October through to the beginning of March!!
We are unique in the animal world in that we actually manufacture Vitamin D just because it is so important! There is a right time to get it. Around midday! And there is a right amount. Only about say twenty minutes for white skinned people. Darker skins need much more, and that is the why for much of their deficiency!
Plus, and this is my throw away line. Alcohol will just immediately kill all the benefits of natural sun Vitamin D. So much for that beer on the beach or in Hawaii! Am not sure if it is legal there! But let us not even venture to that regulatory level. Unless people are given and know a good reason they will cheat anyway! BUT Vitamin D supplementation by any measure is important! And it does not help if information is wrong. Thus the question, Shocking Vitamin D Recommended Daily Amount Catastrophe?
