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Comment by typicalrunt | Hacker News Reader

In school, I was taught a mnemonic for fat soluble vitamins: DEAK. In other words, you want to "deke" [1] out of the way from these vitamins. You want to watch how much of vitamins D, E, A, K you ingest because they are fat soluble and you can easily overdose on them (unlike vitamin C). It's not a catch-all but it helps when you are taking vitamins.

[1] it's a play on words and a homonym, "deke" comes from hockey where you dodge or fake out an opponent to get around them. It must be the Canadian school system further injecting hockey into our lives. :)

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Then again, there have been several studies [0] that show that many people in the northern hemisphere are deficient in vitamin D and that the deficiency could be the root of serious health problems.

[0] E.g. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21310306

My doctor tells me that I'm low on vitamin D every time I visit and have blood work done. I try to get more sun, but it's kind of hard in New York.

True, for example half of Finns receive less than recommended amount of vitamin D. To combat this dairy and edible fat products have received vitamin D supplements since 2003. For example skimmed milk (the most popular one) would otherwise have very little D because it gets removed in the process along with fat. First you take it out, then put it back in...

Do you know if the RDA amount is kept up-to-date with current research?

For those of us who want an insurance policy, have you got any recommendations on what multi-vitamins to aim for (a particular brand, maybe that you take?) Are all brands equal?

All brands are equal insofar as you are most likley better off if you avoid them all. For example: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/07/the-vitami...

best insurance policy is to eat proper food. thats not snark, its just true. get a spreadsheet built in excel, and actually model a decent diet for ~7 days. its a very eye-opening experience. you can track calories, fat, carbs, protein and whatever else quite readily with online tools. While resturant food will be excluded (you would need basic recipe or key ingedient lists), soon enough you will understand just how much nutrients are in "real food".

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