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Comment by chartpath | Hacker News Reader

Everyone on HN always says they are taking like 10x the RDA and it's the only thing that makes them survive the winter, blah blah blah. Intentionally hyperbolic, but not far off.

Every time I try just 400 IU per day for a week it makes me dizzy and woozy. I eat plenty of meat and veggies with K2, and nuts and fish with magnesium. Vitamin-D containing foods like milk, eggs and fish are totally fine. I can bake all day in the sun and don't burn easily.

There's something different about synthetic D3, and I wish I could get all the benefits that people here claim.

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> Every time I try just 400 IU per day for a week it makes me dizzy and woozy.

I guarantee that you're consuming more than 400IU of Vitamin D in your regular diet. You can consume almost double that amount just by eating a decent sized salmon filet.

I doubt the miniscule amount of Vitamin D (10 micrograms) in your supplement is causing your problems. It's possible that you're allergic to the capsules themselves, or fillers, or something unique to the supplements.

> I eat plenty of meat and veggies with K2, and nuts and fish with magnesium. Vitamin-D containing foods like milk, eggs and fish are totally fine. I can bake all day in the sun and don't burn easily.

If you're getting plenty of Vitamin D from diet and sunlight, you don't need to supplement. I know the popular sentiment will beat the drum of "more is better", but it's not true. The goal is to get Vitamin D levels into an optimal range and keep them there, which, despite internet opinion, is entirely possible on a healthy diet with light sun exposure.

Paul Stemets, a mycologists, had worked out a way to get button or shitake mushrooms to generate a lot of vitamin D. You simply expose them to sunlight for about a "day" (and no more). (Unfortunately, I wish there were more detailed study on this; how many hours of sunlight are we talking about? Is it latitude dependent?)

My point is that there are ways to generate supplemental vitamin-d without having to go get synthetic supplements.

There are plenty of foods that are high in Vitamin D without resorting to specialized mushroom farming.

I know Paul Stamets is held in high regard in certain circles, but be careful. He's a personal brand builder, first and foremost, and many of his claims range from dubious to pure pseudoscience. Even though he's become a figurehead for mushroom research, his own line of supplements is notoriously inferior to many other products on the market. Fun guy (hah) to listen to on podcasts, as long as you don't take him too seriously or get hooked by his disguised sales pitches for his products.

The mushrooms produce vitamin D2 though, not D3.

A small fraction of people have trouble absorbing it, another fraction don't handle the supplements well. Pretty rare however.

Have you tested your level in the winter? You may not need it.

I've been taking 5k a few times a week and haven't been sick longer than a day for perhaps a decade.

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