Good to know one pill can protect against rickets (osteomalacia) and type II diabetes.

I wonder how much in the way of vitamins is rendered ineffective by irradiating and genetically modifying foods?

I realize scientists tell us the nutrients are there but how does modification effect our ability to absorb and utilize them.

vitamin D rocks! Since I work the night shift I don't get much sunlight so I started taking it. Now I hardly get sick anymore and when I do I get over it twice as fast. Finally something that works!

My doctor never mentioned this, however, it is probably due to his "high drug company commission".

Unmentioned is the fact that the medical industry have been inducing Vitamin D deficiency in a whole generation of people by advising them to avoid any exposure to the sun(light).

Obviously sunlight, is a major requirement for healthy life -- as it is unimaginable for life to have evolved without it, as one sees obviously in plants, but just as obviously, animals need it as well. 95% of the stimulus of the brain is light, and people deprived of it, are malformed and deranged (depressed).

One then wonders, what other medical advice is actually producing modern afflictions?

I found this out last year... my count was 11! Had I been a teenager, I would have had rickets... 50k units a week plus supplements in EVERYTHING, and it has taken me over 6 months just to get into the 50 range (100 is the optimum range)...

Low Vit D screws with everything in your body, immune system, and causes mental confusion... Life is starting to resume some form of normalcy lol....

I disagree that obesity and inactive are the cause of diabetes. It has everything to do with genes more than anything else.

If as much money was funneled from the government into diabetes as AIDS, it would have been cured a long time ago. But because one can not catch diabetes by having unprotected sex and spread by the people who don't give a sh*t if they pass it along becasue the government babysits and panders to them, the diabetic has to suffer.

Vitamin D functions as a hormone and neurotransmitter in some cases. When a person is deficient in Vitamin D, they often show signs of depression. I wonder... Depression leads to lack of motivation, leads to decreased exercise, leads to weight gain, leads to Type II diabetes?

Correlation is not causation, but maybe the mechanism could be worked out with a little more research.

I have found this vitamin D to be the best.

Low vitamin D3 has also been implicated in autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis. In many northern climates from September through May, the sun is too low for your body to synthesize vitamin D3. Ask to have your level checked. You should be 50+.

In six months, we will have a study saying that D3 has little to do with diabetes risk, followed a year later by a study saying that taking D3 supplements does absolutely nothing at all to help alleviate it. Followed by another that says diabetes drugs cause cancer and increased risk of heart attack, followed by another that tells you a portion of them are just as good as placebos.

Hmm...

You heard it here first.

There is some debate over what constitutes a "normal" blood level of vitamin d; I wish this article stated what value the research team used.

Our family started taking over the counter 2000 IU of D3 in June 2009 in response to H1N1 and have been taking it ever since. Everyone at work was sick with colds and flu in Feb 2011. Not me, even though we all use the same phones and computer keyboards and mice. I too think Vit D3 Rocks!

My endocrinologist and a second opinion, both advised that a post menopausal woman over the age of 40 (which I am) should have a level of at least 100. Once you drop below 50 it takes forever to get it back up to where it should be...

Some parents believe there is also a link between vit D and autism since the rates went up when we started to slather our kids with sun screen. There are also studies that show higher rates for kids born to higher income families (hence more likely to use sun screen I assume). I wonder if you could do a study between say Seattle and Denver?

I saw a doctor on TV a few years ago and he asked do you ever wonder why you get sick more in the winter than in summer. He said the answer was you're not outside in the sunshine as much in the wintertime so you get less Vitamin D and that's why you get sick more often in winter. That seemed to make some sense. I try to make sure I get plenty of sunshine just by walking places. I don't sit outside and fry in the sun because there is a history of skin cancer in my family. My own doctor is a great Vitamin D advocate.

This story is very interesting. I gave up about four years of my life to inactivity due to a badly damaged knee. I seldom went outside except for work. It was just too painful to want to go anywhere. I ate very poorly during that time because I would go to the grocery and grab whatever came to hand and required very little preparation and clean up. I couldn't be on my feet for more than a few minutes at at time most days and I live alone. Woven in and out of this scene is a separate chronic condition involving miserable muscle pain and extreme fatigue. I look back on those years as a long nightmare.

I finally was able to have my knee fixed, but recovery was long and painful. During that time I went to a rheumatologist because of my arthritis, and she found nothing else wrong with me, in fact was somewhat rude and judgemental of my predicament. She did, however, mention checking my vitamin D level and found it to be considerably low and prescribed a large one time dose of vitamin D. I may have felt marginally better, it was really hard to tell, and less than a month later I was diagnosed diabetic. I am, of course, way overweight due to all the indoor inactivity for four or five years so I thought it was no wonder I was diabetic.

It's very interesting now to see how my vitamin D level likely played into this. I feel much better now. My knee is healed and healthy now, my arthritis is under control, I take a daily dose of vitamin D (I live in a northern climate with long, dark harsh dreary winters), and my diabetes is controlled. I had a whole list of risk factors, but I wonder if I'd be diabetic now at all without the vitamin D deficiancy.

Talk about unintended consequences! Excessive vitamin D is the CAUSE of most chronic illness including diabetes because it is not a vitamin at all, but a seco-steroid hormone similar to prednisone that suppresses the immune system. The reason chronically-ill people seem to have low levels is that they are only measuring the 25-D (precursor form) instead of the 125-D which is the actual hormone. Supplementing with D is like throwing gasoline on a fire. Check it out at www.MarshallProtocol.com.

Took 60000 IU vit D for 3 months and my HbA1c level went below 6.0 for the first time in 5 years. Observed same for my 80 yr old father.

Don't agree with the causal logic : low vitD => depression => low motivation for activity => obesity => diabetes. Neither me nor my dad is obese nor low-motivated. Hence diabetes was unexpected, a big surprise.