What about - on a separate thought regarding the iron - isn’t having too much iron just plain dangerous?

Too much of any nutrient can be dangerous. You may find the Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_supplements to be a useful starting point. (Be cautious since it is Wikipedia with all the problems which come with it, but it’s a start.)

I don’t suppose anybody here has a link to a reliable source of information on the toxicity of nutrients when taken in excessive doses?

Equal Opportunity Curmudgeon - 12 October 2011 10:41 AM

What about - on a separate thought regarding the iron - isn’t having too much iron just plain dangerous?

Too much of any nutrient can be dangerous. You may find the Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_supplements to be a useful starting point. (Be cautious since it is Wikipedia with all the problems which come with it, but it’s a start.)

I don’t suppose anybody here has a link to a reliable source of information on the toxicity of nutrients when taken in excessive doses?

I don’t have one off hand but you need to keep in mind that most of that information refers to short term acute toxicity. As these studies imply ( and again there is no causal proof in the general vitamin study. The Vitamin E and Selenium study does suggest a causal relationship) is that some micronutirents even in moderate doses may have negative consequences that don’t show up for decades.

Equal Opportunity Curmudgeon - 12 October 2011 10:41 AM

What about - on a separate thought regarding the iron - isn’t having too much iron just plain dangerous?

Too much of any nutrient can be dangerous. You may find the Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_supplements to be a useful starting point. (Be cautious since it is Wikipedia with all the problems which come with it, but it’s a start.)

I don’t suppose anybody here has a link to a reliable source of information on the toxicity of nutrients when taken in excessive doses?

There are some nutrients much more dangerous than others. Before the advent of childproof caps, many toddlers were poisoned by their mom’s prenatal vitamins, specifically the iron. They often died.

macgyver - 12 October 2011 11:32 AM

I don’t have one off hand but you need to keep in mind that most of that information refers to short term acute toxicity. As these studies imply ( and again there is no causal proof in the general vitamin study. The Vitamin E and Selenium study does suggest a causal relationship) is that some micronutirents even in moderate doses may have negative consequences that don’t show up for decades.

I’d worry more about the fat solubles (ADEK) than the h20 sols.

Don’t forget about the trouble caused by excess amounts of the most prevalent H20 soluble mineral, sodium chloride.

Occam

Occam. - 12 October 2011 05:42 PM

Don’t forget about the trouble caused by excess amounts of the most prevalent H20 soluble mineral, sodium chloride.

Occam

Heck, and then there is the very serious and common problem caused by an excess of dihydrogenoxide!

Occam. - 12 October 2011 05:42 PM

Don’t forget about the trouble caused by excess amounts of the most prevalent H20 soluble mineral, sodium chloride.

Occam

Good point, the salts are important as we are largely electrical beings.

About vitamin D, I now take 10,000 IU/day per my reasoning here:

http://whyvitamind.blogspot.com/

I used to take 5,000 IU/day as wrote on this forum quite some time ago, but I’ve now convinced myself that 10,000 IU/day is better. This is, of course, not based on rigorously proven science, it’s what I think is the right thing to do given what we know. Testing calcidiol levels is pointless i.m.o. because there is as of yet not a shred of evidence that, say, 100 nmol/l is beter than, say, 250 nmol/l. It’s all conjecture based on the idea that low doses of vitamin D might be better than the natural dose of 10,000 to 20,000 IU/day that you would naturally get via Sun exposure were you still living like hunter gathers do in Africa.

We’re inappropriately applying a cautionary principle about high doses of vitamin D. What I’m doing is applying a cautionary principle about doses lower than 10,000 IU/day. So, if we don’t know what the right dose is, we should not use less than 10,000 IU/day, unless we really know that a lower dose is better.

Another thing is that research into relations between vitamin D and various diseases will not yield the optimal dose. It’s a bit like trying to find the RDA for fruits and vegetables by investigating the links between consumption of fruits and vegetables to various diseases. What would you expect to find? Of course, if you start to eat way below what’s optimal, the risk of getting some disease will start to get higher and at some point it will become high enough and manifest itself on a sufficiently small time scale that the signal will become visible in tests.

What would be much better is to test for health instead of illness. You could e.g.  take healthy young people, let them undergo a rigorous athletics training program while on different doses of vitamin D and measure the progress they make.

Count, the important thing for health isn’t how much Vit. D you ingest but how high your serum levels are. That said, 10,000 IU/day is a very high amount to ingest. (Even more so if you get regular sun). I’d urge that before you go too long with your regimen to make an appointment with your doctor and have a blood test taken to check your serum levels of Vit. D. It’ll probably be that you could get optimal levels (around 50 nmol/L; slightly less if younger, slightly more if older) with much lower daily dosages. And it’s possible that you are at a level which is not very healthy. Check the report I linked to HERE as well if it interests you.

If you’re determined to do it without scientific evidence, the question is why you would waste money on Vit. D pills at all. I mean, the only reason any of us have to be concerned with Vit. D is just the scientific evidence behind it.

dougsmith - 15 October 2011 06:00 AM

Count, the important thing for health isn’t how much Vit. D you ingest but how high your serum levels are. That said, 10,000 IU/day is a very high amount to ingest. (Even more so if you get regular sun). I’d urge that before you go too long with your regimen to make an appointment with your doctor and have a blood test taken to check your serum levels of Vit. D. It’ll probably be that you could get optimal levels (around 50 nmol/L; slightly less if younger, slightly more if older) with much lower daily dosages. And it’s possible that you are at a level which is not very healthy. Check the report I linked to HERE as well if it interests you.

If you’re determined to do it without scientific evidence, the question is why you would waste money on Vit. D pills at all. I mean, the only reason any of us have to be concerned with Vit. D is just the scientific evidence behind it.

Where I live, I don’t get any vitamin D from the Sun at this time of the year. I estimate what I get from the Sun and I supplement that to 10,000 IU per day on average. It’s not that I reject scientific results, but I don’t agree with the interpretation given to some results suggesting that 50 nmol/l could be optimal. Take e.g. a result cited by the IOM. In a study a huge dose of vitamin D was given to elderly persons (one off dose of 600,000 IU, if I remember correctly) and then one had observed that the incidents of falls increased sligtly. This was barely statistically significant, so it doesn’t even mean that there is an effect at all. To then say that not only the effect is real, but that this also implies that the serum dose reached by these persons of about 100 nmol/l is a good indicatior of what is above optimal for the average person, is a big stretch if you ask me.

Of course, I’m not a medical expert, but unlike in case of e.g. Global Warming, in this case there a re a lot of real (not fake) experts who have strongly disagreed with the approach taken by the IOM. This includes the previous IOM pannel, people like Dr. Vieth and many other experts. I find their arguments a lot more compelling than the rather weak arguments in favor of low doses and low serum levels. Note that the IOM has even disagreed with some of the authors that they cited., see here:

http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110706/full/475023a.html

The IOM was interested in a study Amling had published, in which he had measured bone quality and blood levels of vitamin D in the bodies of 675 people who had died in good health (for example, in car accidents and suicides)4. Amling concluded that an ideal level for the general population would be 75 nmol/L because everyone above that level had strong bones, and they therefore weren’t at a high risk of fractures.

The IOM’s mandate was to set the levels that protect most people, but not all. It found that Amling’s data supported a 50 nmol/L threshold (which had been suggested elsewhere in the literature) because at that level, only 1% of people in the study had weak bones. But Amling says that the IOM made a mathematical mistake: it should have looked at the risk of weak bones in people at or above a certain level, not in the whole population (see ‘Denominator dispute’). Instead of dividing the 7 people with weak bones and levels above 50 nmol/L by all 675 people in the study, he says it should have divided 7 by the 82 individuals with levels above 50 nmol/L. Charles McCulloch, a biostatistician at the University of California, San Francisco, who has no vested interest in vitamin-D thresholds, agrees: the panel should have found that 8.5% of the population above 50 nmol/L had weak bones, and therefore according to its goal of allowing no more than 2.5% of the population to be at risk, Amling’s data would support a higher level. “I’m very shocked they made such a basic mathematical mistake,” Amling says.

Another researcher whose work received a fair share of the IOM’s attention is Heike Bischoff-Ferrari, director of the centre for ageing and mobility at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. She published a meta-analysis in 2009 that pooled eight clinical trials testing the ability of vitamin-D supplements to reduce falling in elderly people5. In her analysis, participants who took daily doses of 700–1,000 IU fell less often than those taking a placebo. Doses below 700 IU made no difference.

When the IOM panel came to analyse Bischoff-Ferrari’s data, it decided to include different studies. It removed a study6 showing a benefit from doses higher than 800 IU because the study had focused on groups of about 20 people, which the panel considered too small. And it added a trial7 that Bischoff-Ferrari had excluded because it hadn’t been double-blinded. Once the IOM swapped trials in Bischoff-Ferrari’s meta-analysis, the evidence showed no benefit from supplementation. Needless to say, Bischoff-Ferrari and others disagree with the IOM’s decision.

But as I wrote in the previous posting, I don’t think you can find out what the optimal dose is by looking at diseases only. If you look at other studies, e.g. the paper: “The vitamin D requirement during human lactation: the facts and IOM’s ‘utter’ failure;
Bruce W. Hollis and Carol L. Wagner”, which can be read free of charge here:

http://www.vitamindwiki.com/tiki-index.php?page_id=1507

You see that something must be wrong with the hypothesis that 50 nmol/l and the corresponding low daily dose of less than 2000 IU/day. Thing is that we already know that babies do need at least 400 IU/day. Babies drink about 1 liter of breast milk per day. But 1 liter of breast milk usually doesn’t contain 400 IU, typically it contains far less than that. As is done in the study I linked to above, you can look at the vitamin D content of breast milk as a function of vitamin D dose you give to lactating women. What you find is that you need to give the lactating women 6000 IU/day to make sure the breast milk contains adequate amounts of vitamin D for the baby.

This is thus an indirect method to set a lower limit to the RDA, that doesn’t depend on a relation between vitamin D and illness (at least not for the adult, we use the baby for that). And this yields a lower limit of approximately 6,000 IU/day. The assumption here is that Nature has got the vitamin D dosage for babies correct.

In contrast, the current dogma seems to be that we know better than Nature. So, Nature got it wrong, we need to take low dosage, the dose you get from the Sun is higher than optimal. Then that leads to breast milk containing too low amounts of vitamin D, so we then need to give babies vitamin D supplements. Nature thus must have made another mistake.

Given the history of vitamin D research (as the article points out, the old upper safe limit of 2000 IU/day was totally wrong), I have zero confidence that we know better than Nature on this issue.

Count Iblis - 15 October 2011 01:31 PM

You see that something must be wrong with the hypothesis that 50 nmol/l and the corresponding low daily dose of less than 2000 IU/day. Thing is that we already know that babies do need at least 400 IU/day. Babies drink about 1 liter of breast milk per day. But 1 liter of breast milk usually doesn’t contain 400 IU, typically it contains far less than that. As is done in the study I linked to above, you can look at the vitamin D content of breast milk as a function of vitamin D dose you give to lactating women. What you find is that you need to give the lactating women 6000 IU/day to make sure the breast milk contains adequate amounts of vitamin D for the baby.

This is thus an indirect method to set a lower limit to the RDA, that doesn’t depend on a relation between vitamin D and illness (at least not for the adult, we use the baby for that). And this yields a lower limit of approximately 6,000 IU/day. The assumption here is that Nature has got the vitamin D dosage for babies correct.

In contrast, the current dogma seems to be that we know better than Nature. So, Nature got it wrong, we need to take low dosage, the dose you get from the Sun is higher than optimal. Then that leads to breast milk containing too low amounts of vitamin D, so we then need to give babies vitamin D supplements. Nature thus must have made another mistake.

Given the history of vitamin D research (as the article points out, the old upper safe limit of 2000 IU/day was totally wrong), I have zero confidence that we know better than Nature on this issue.

This really is a false argument. Nature doesn’t “get the dosing of vitamin D” wrong or right. Nature doesn’t do anything. Our bodies adapt to the environment and the materials that are available. That doesn’t mean that what we are adapted to is what is optimal for our bodies. Its simply the best adaptation that has developed so far for what was available. As such, the optimal levels may be significantly higher or lower than what is “natural”.

Keep in mind also that cancer and long life spans are really a non-issue when the processes of natural selection are working on these matters, at least from the standpoint that a long life is not always optimal to the survival of the species. So if your ultimate goal is to live as long and healthy a life as possible and avoid diseases like cancer, you may not always want to follow natures lead. An adaptation that is good for the species as a whole.. i.e. to make individuals that produce healthy offspring which survive long enough to produce more offspring and then die and get out of the way at the right moment.. may not be in your best interest as an individual. Certain levels of nutrients may have short term benefits but could be harmful in the long run ( i.e. they may make you strong and fertile at 20, but cause you to die a horrible death of pancreatic cancer at age 40) and yet that would be the level of the nutrient that may be selected for because its not important to the species whether you die at 40 or not. In fact it may be in the species best interest if you DID die of cancer at 40.

You give “Nature” too much credit. Its not an intellectual being, its a process of selection, an imperfect process, and one that doesn’t have your best interests as its goal.

Moderation in all things.  Our bodies use for example, phospnorus, magnesium, selenium, copper, zinc, fluorine, sodium, chlorine, and potassium.  If we become deficient in any of them we suffer.  And, if we take too much, or the wrong compound of them, we suffer.  Calling any of them “toxic” is, to my mind, simplistic.  We need to be more specific about both dosage and compounds.

Occam

Weight loss anyone?

vitals.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/10/19/8402061-natural-diet-pills-tainted-with-banned-prescription-drug

Write4U - 19 October 2011 08:33 PM

Weight loss anyone?

vitals.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/10/19/8402061-natural-diet-pills-tainted-with-banned-prescription-drug

I’m not surprised at this at all. These “supplements” all have Meridia in them which was removed from the market due to side effects. The supplement industry often sells adulterated pharmaceuticals under the guise of being a natural alternative. Red Rice Yeast Extract is a great example. I can;t tell you how many patients have told me they are taking this because they want to take something natural to treat their cholesterol. What they are actually getting is Lipitor. It occurs naturally in this stuff but its no safer than taking Lipitor. In fact its obviously less safe since there is no FDA regulation and no quality control. You have no idea what dose your getting when you take it and obviously people aren’t being monitored as they should.

I agree.  I used to take Lipitor until I developed a sensitivity to it - severe leg muscle pains.  A friend insisted that red yeast tablets would also lower my cholesterol and gave me six of them.  I figured, even if they were ineffective, yeast was innocuous, right.  On the third night, I was awakened by my leg muscles screaming.  I managed to hobble to my refrigerator, open the freezer, take out a hydrocodeine tablet, chew and swallow it.  It took about 25 minutes to lessen the pain.  The remaining three yeast pills went in the compost pile.  I hope they didn’t cause the earthworms any trouble.

Occam