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Children need much more vitamin D (especially if autistic or if they get sick often) image

Children need much more vitamin D (especially if autistic or if they get sick often)

Children's Health Podcast (formerly Autism & Children's Health)
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82 Plays9 months ago

Children's health consulting (autism, ADHD, gut dysfunction etc.): https://christianyordanov.com/childrens-health-consulting/

Get my book Autism Wellbeing Plan: How to Get Your Child Healthy:  https://amzn.to/43ah6yD

My new book, How to Actually Live Longer, Vol.1: https://amzn.to/3OnZJGl

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5541280/

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Transcript

Vitamin D Supplementation Journey

00:00:01
Speaker
Hi, Christian Jordonov here. So at the, it's March, the beginning of March, 2024. So around the start of the, just before maybe the start of the winter last year, 2023, can't really remember exactly when I bought this vitamin D and K supplement off of the Spanish Amazon here nearby. And it was basically, um,
00:00:31
Speaker
1,700 drops and let me get the calculator out while we're talking. So 1,700 drops and each drop was 1,000 international units. Now that is 1.7 million international units of vitamin D and basically
00:01:01
Speaker
We have gone, my family, three people, two adults and a toddler, we have gone through one of those bottles over the winter and we're now halfway through the second bottle. And myself and my wife have been taking supplemental oral vitamin D that I just had lying around. So, you know, have to use it up. Most of that.
00:01:30
Speaker
I have taken, right? So don't worry. I'm not giving my wife and my daughter hypervitaminosis or whatever.

Debunking Hypervitaminosis Fears

00:01:39
Speaker
But I think the fears of hypervitaminosis are implanted by perhaps people that run companies that sell symptom masking chemicals for profit and want us to be afraid of vitamins now.
00:01:58
Speaker
Are synthetic vitamins the optimal thing to use? No, they're not, obviously. We eat a very clean diet for the most part, but in spite of that, I still believe it's very important to supplement the diet. If you've been listening to my podcasts, you know that I am a fan of intelligent supplementation, high quality supplements.
00:02:25
Speaker
So what's my point here? I think if you if like when we when we had a when our daughter was born, I bought some vitamin D for babies and the daily serving size is 400 international units.

RDA Critique and Global Deficiency Discussion

00:02:45
Speaker
And basically this this
00:02:50
Speaker
This is just plucked sucked out of somebody's thumb, this 400 international units. It's estimated people just like these review boards or whatever committees they come up with these, a lot of these things are not scientifically based. These RDA's recommended dietary allowances came from largely from
00:03:12
Speaker
soldier populations, prison populations, basically they're designed to keep you barely alive, keep the slaves, the plebs barely alive so they don't kill over on the factory floor or when they're building the roads or whatever the hell when they're serving their masters in whatever capacity they are. That's what they're designed for. They have
00:03:34
Speaker
zero intention to to help you thrive or your child to. Grow and develop to their fullest potential okay so if you understand the value of vitamin D.
00:03:52
Speaker
I think it's important for us to talk about how much we should, are we taking enough, I guess. Because if we, so from my autism book, link should be down below in case you're interested in getting my autism book.
00:04:10
Speaker
I talk about the fact that they've studied autistic kids all around the world from China to Saudi Arabia to North America to Europe. And for the most part, I can't remember the numbers exactly, but a lot of them are vitamin D deficient or have suboptimal vitamin D levels. A lot of people
00:04:32
Speaker
in the world right now have sub-optimal D levels and a bunch of other vitamins. But that's besides the point, you know, trying to focus just on vitamin D because it's such a cheap thing to test for.
00:04:47
Speaker
It's so easy to address this deficiency and it basically can, addressing this deficiency can unlock a lot of other metabolic doors so other things in the body can start correcting themselves if your diet and supplementation is up to scratch of course.

Research on RDA Errors and Revised Intake Suggestions

00:05:09
Speaker
There's a study here that I just stumbled upon a few days ago, titled The Big Vitamin D Mistake. It is published in the journal of Preventative Medicine and Public Health 2017.
00:05:35
Speaker
And they're talking about Finland, right? So let me read you a little bit of the abstract. I'll just cut to the chase here. They basically conclude
00:05:49
Speaker
This, so this is, sorry, let me just start again. So basically, a statistical error in the estimation of the recommended dietary allowance for vitamin D was recently discovered. So that this was published in 2017. So it was discovered prior to that, obviously. In the correct analysis of the data used by the Institute of Medicine, it was found that rounding up here,
00:06:20
Speaker
Almost 9,000 international units per day was needed for 97.5% of individuals to achieve values of greater than 15 nanomoles per liter. Another study confirmed that 6,200 international units was needed to achieve
00:06:39
Speaker
75 nanomoles per liter and 9100 international units or let's say 9000 international units was needed to reach 100 nanomoles per liter. The largest meta-analysis ever conducted of studies published between 1966 and 2013 showed that 25 hydroxy vitamin D levels under 75 nanomoles per liter may be too low for safety and associated with higher
00:07:08
Speaker
all cause mortality, demolishing the previously presumed U-shaped curve of mortality associated with vitamin D levels. So to make a short story long, they say this could lead to a recommendation of 1,000 international units for children under one year on enriched formula and 1,500 international units for breastfed children older than six months.

Misconceptions About Supplements

00:07:38
Speaker
3,000 international units for children over one year of age and around 8,000 international units for young adults and thereafter. Actions are urgently needed to protect the global population from vitamin D deficiency. Now, some people think all supplements are a scam. You know, you hear crazy things like a colleague, Calciferro, is rat poison and so on. I think
00:08:05
Speaker
I think people that are of that sort of mentality are probably going to suffer long-term in terms of their health because think about it this way.
00:08:23
Speaker
Yes, in a perfect world, maybe we could derive all of our vitamin D from natural sources, some food, some organ meats, let's say, and maybe some milk and being out in the sun.
00:08:39
Speaker
Look at how we are when we go out into the sun. Most of us are fully clothed. So even if you spend three hours outside, you think, oh, I got so much sunshine today. And it's great that you got the daylight, the blue light from the sun and whatnot, and the infrared light and the firing for the red light and so on. That's great. But your skin that was exposed to it was maybe your hands or
00:09:07
Speaker
maybe your arms if it was warm and you're wearing a t-shirt and your face and your neck and you know if you're wearing shorts or maybe flip-flops or whatever barefoot then your legs maybe your lower leg so it's not like we're getting a lot of surface area exposed to the sun when we're out of into the sun and many of us don't even get an hour or two of daylight being out in the daylight in the sunshine that's insane right
00:09:35
Speaker
So vitamin D, while not the optimal solution, is a cheap and effective way to raise the level, which just has a lot of different other benefits in terms of calcium metabolism, the stress hormone system, and just a ton of different

Vitamin D's Multifaceted Role

00:09:54
Speaker
benefits.
00:09:54
Speaker
It's a hormone at the end of the day. It's almost a steroid, this vitamin D. It has a lot of hormone-like effects. Low vitamin D status, I heard, is a surrogate for thyroid function. When I looked at some of my clients that we have data on these things, vitamin D levels, thyroid function, and symptomatology, it does correlate actually low
00:10:21
Speaker
low levels of vitamin D correlate with more dysfunction, you know, hypothyroidism, weight gain and other various neurological conditions. So this study, so what's interesting here, just let me put my tin foil hat on for a second. In the introduction of the study, the author states
00:10:50
Speaker
The incidence of type 1 diabetes has been doubling every 20 years. In Finland, the recommendation for daily vitamin D supplementation was gradually reduced from 4,000 to 5,000 international units in 1964 to 400 international units in 1992. Why? What is happening? Why are we reducing
00:11:21
Speaker
recommended dietary allowances and so on. Why are we doing that? If anything, we should be increasing them. They reduced the one for zinc, I remember, for men at least recently in the last seven or eight years. It's kind of crazy, like the vitamin E, for example, part of the research for my book, How to Actually Live Longer Volume 1, which there's a link down below if you want to get it. This book series will add decades to your life if you implement the information.
00:11:48
Speaker
I guarantee it or your money back. As part of my research for the book, I saw that the vitamin E RDA in the States, basically, it's so low that even doubling it or tripling it now would probably not alleviate all the seed oil consumption because the seed oil consumption
00:12:16
Speaker
has increased many fold in the linoleic acid, which is one of the predominant omega-6 fatty acids. The concentration of omega-6 in the subcutaneous fat of Americans has gone up about two and a half fold in the last, I think, 60 years or so, 50 or 60 years.

Concerns Over Lowered RDAs

00:12:41
Speaker
A lot of these nutrients we're in dire need of, and the fact that they're reducing the recommendations is quite telling that they don't want people to be healthy. Okay, so never mind all that conspiratorial stuff, but for children, for babies and so on, the
00:13:04
Speaker
recommendation is 400 international units. Okay. Now with this paper, they're saying they're talking about a thousand for children under one, a thousand, 500 for breastfed children older than six months. So sorry, that's a thousand international units for children under one year on enriched formula.
00:13:23
Speaker
1,500 international units for breastfed children older than six months, 3,000 international units for children under one year of age, and around 8,000 international units for adults. So a lot of people, a lot of adults that take vitamin D, they'll take maybe 1,000 or 2,000. Some will take 5,000, but I don't think
00:13:49
Speaker
It's it's the majority taking 5,000. I think people think 5,000 may be a bit much, you know, you might get hyper vitaminosis or something, you know, you'll calcify and turn into stone or something like that. But I mean, like if these guys are saying kids over one year of age need 3000 international units, you know what I mean? Like, we really have to stop being
00:14:12
Speaker
A lot of these fears are, again, they're coming from the media and they're being pushed. They're basically sponsored posts, these articles, designed to instill fear about things that are nutrients.

Synthetic Vitamins and Metabolic Impact

00:14:26
Speaker
Right. Okay. I know it's synthetic, but if it's bio-identical to something, the body creates as part of a metabolic pathway and taking that, let's say, cholecalciferol, if that can then be
00:14:42
Speaker
put into that metabolic cascade or metabolic pathway and then it can be turned to other molecules and eventually to whatever other active forms of
00:14:54
Speaker
vitamin D, then it is a nutrient, right? Whether it's synthetic or not, doesn't really make such a big difference. The important part is that it's free of impurities. And ideally, we buy the cleanest possible supplements. So there's as little added fillers and whatever, which is why I mostly use my vitamin D is only colicalciferol and a tiny bit of vitamin K2.
00:15:24
Speaker
in MCT oil. So if you can, this is the stuff I would kind of look to get ideally. The nice thing about it is you can take it orally. You can also apply it to the skin and that really actually makes it
00:15:43
Speaker
easier for kids, so with my daughter, every two or three days this winter, after we bathe her, as I'm drying her, apply a few drops to the belly button area, and that absorbs really well to the skin, these fat soluble vitamins.

Topical Application of Vitamin D

00:16:06
Speaker
And then we also do vitamin E on the belly button as well, once in a while. So the nice thing is you don't have to then, your child doesn't have to take pills because pills generally, especially these veggie capsules, these high promelos, ideally the less of the stuff you take, the better. I know.
00:16:26
Speaker
It's not always possible if somebody needs some support, supplemental support for several months or so. Sometimes we have to make those trade-offs, right? But when it comes to small children or just children in general, the more of these topical things we can use, the better something that is, or something that you can put on the tongue without having to take
00:16:49
Speaker
pills, especially kids under five, six, autistic kids that don't want to, infants, toddlers, et cetera. And it's also, excuse me, it's easier for me to give my wife, just now she was having a snack. So I just came around with a dropper bottle and gave her, I probably, she's not gonna listen to this so I can tell you, I probably gave her 20,000 international units
00:17:15
Speaker
which would be four capsules of the regular supplements. So that's, you know, excipient free, a little bit of MCT oil, and there's less of this sort of mental block to take in it. Now I'm not giving that to her every day, so I can do that because it's fat soluble, it accumulates, you don't have to take it spaced out like B vitamins or whatever. You can do that a couple of times a week, and you can do that a lot more because as you can see, if we do the math,
00:17:44
Speaker
If these guys are talking 8,000 international units for young adults and older times seven, that's 56,000 international units. And that's what's interesting is if you go to your doctor, a lot of doctors, if you're deficient in vitamin D, that's roughly the weekly dose. They give you a vitamin D to address that vitamin D deficiency. I think it's about, it's 50 or 55,000, I think 50,000. And I think you take it once a week.
00:18:14
Speaker
It's interesting that that's where they were thinking of where these guys or this person that wrote the paper is recommending per day. So let me just do the math. So one of these bottles of vitamin D and K has 1.7 million international units of
00:18:44
Speaker
vitamin D. Let me do the math quickly, right? So divided by, let's say I took it for the last, let's be generous, 120 days, four months, right? Let's just do 120 days. So I, I've been taking about four, at least 14,000 international units
00:19:13
Speaker
vitamin D daily for the last, let's say four months or so. Could be more. It could be less daily over a longer period of time.

Personal High Intake Experiences

00:19:25
Speaker
But like I said, we're on the halfway through the second bottle and I've been taking the capsules as well here and there. So I think that's a decent, it could be between 10 and 15,000 per day.
00:19:36
Speaker
And a lot of people out there are taking zero or they're taking like a thousand or two thousand maybe four or five thousand and not even every day so. What's what's the have i noticed anything to be honest i feel pretty i've been feeling pretty good.
00:19:53
Speaker
All winter, no issues. From September until around mid-September to the end of January, I was heads down writing a book. So I wrote a book, researched, wrote, edited, published everything. I wrote that book a couple hundred pages.
00:20:19
Speaker
in four and a half months working with clients, you know, looking after my two year old. So I've been feeling pretty good, been putting in a lot of hours. And what's interesting is I didn't have not gotten even a sniffle all winter, not even a sniffle. Okay.
00:20:39
Speaker
And I didn't even take one day off. I've been busted by ass getting this book out. And then once I did that, I did three flights, a train, three flights to Mexico.
00:20:58
Speaker
It was overall traveling for 10 days. On the way back, again, three flights and a train. The last 72 hours in Mexico for this conference on Acapulco, I basically slept about 10 hours in the last three days. And I have pictures to prove how bad I look, right? So it took a massive toll on me and came back.
00:21:22
Speaker
You know, took me about a week to recover in terms of sleeping a lot and whatever still didn't get it didn't even get it haven't even had a sniffle and my daughter was.
00:21:32
Speaker
kind of sick a couple of times over the winter. She had two days of temperature while I was gone and a bit of a rash. My wife told me and then she had like another few days was not feeling too well. Other than that, since she was born overall, I think she's been sick four or five times total. Total. Okay. That's in two and a half years. My wife
00:21:56
Speaker
sick a couple of times, but not sick, just kind of feeling a bit over, you know, a few days, maybe three, four days. And that's about it. And I myself, since basically since 2018, I think I've been sick exactly five times. So I, I counted them because
00:22:13
Speaker
I think last year, once, maybe early in the year, in 2019, I had two days of fever after a flight. 2018, I wasn't sick at all, doing crazy detoxes, not liver flushes, but other detoxes and heavy metal and sauna stuff and whatever else.
00:22:33
Speaker
2019, just those two days. Then when my daughter was born the first year and a half, I was sick three times. And that's about it in six years. So I think
00:22:46
Speaker
And I've had no other issues.

Nutrient Balancing Act

00:22:48
Speaker
By the way, I do take vitamin D with calcium and magnesium and vitamin K. I'm balancing all the fat soluble vitamins. I'm taking vitamin E in the form of liver a couple of times a week, sometimes more. So I am covering a lot of the bases. It's not just taking vitamin D. Nobody should just take one thing.
00:23:14
Speaker
like a woman in her fifties to prevent osteoporosis, they just put her on a calcium supplement. You know, that's stupid. You have to balance it with magnesium and then you have a bit of vitamin D to help with absorption. They have a bit of vitamin K to prevent the calcium calcifying soft tissues. So, you know, the vitamin K helps to get into the bones. I mean, there's a ton of different moving parts. And that's the whole idea.
00:23:40
Speaker
Why I offer a health consulting service to help you or your child navigate these things so it can take three, six months and with more complex cases, we can work for a year and we can really iron out these things. And once I teach you how to do all of these things,
00:23:57
Speaker
then you will know what to do for life, right? Not that you will know everything, obviously, but you will know enough to take good care of yourself. You'll know what to avoid, what to do. You will have the habits. I'll help you navigate things in the kitchen, buying groceries. You will know which supplements because I show you what's a good supplement, what's a bad supplement. You understand all of these things and the rationale. So it's not like
00:24:24
Speaker
It's like the old adage, teach a child how to think, and you set them up for success. Don't just teach them what to think, right?
00:24:38
Speaker
Yeah, if you do need help on that front, feel free to book a free intro call with me on the website, link will be down below. But I just want to get back to the vitamin D question here. So with children, if your child is two, three years old or four, five, or whatever, you,
00:25:04
Speaker
Okay, let's just handle the child question first. If your child is like two, three, four years old, five, six, thereabouts, I seriously wouldn't be afraid of giving them a little bit of more vitamin D, especially during the winter. These RDAs, again, are preposterous. Again, there's zero intention to create thriving human beings with this stuff.
00:25:31
Speaker
They're just covering bases so you don't have people killing over dying left, right, and center. And then everybody's like, why isn't the government doing something to prevent all of these things? They're just barely keeping people alive so they can extract taxes and whatever else. And pharmaceutical companies can keep them strung along until they kill.
00:25:53
Speaker
work, pay your taxes, and then retire, live a couple of years and perish. That's kind of the, meanwhile, they just extract value out of you at every corner. So with our kids, I think,
00:26:08
Speaker
All of these fears are overblown. Now, am I gonna give my two and a half year old daughter, you know, eight ounces of liver every day of the week for weeks and months on end? No, of course not. She gets a tiny little bit of piece of liver. And what I've noticed is if we have liver, let's say Monday, and then again Wednesday, and she ate a decent amount,
00:26:33
Speaker
If I give her liver that week again, she might have a bite or two. Sometimes she completely refuses it. I don't want to sound too woo woo, but it feels like they intuitively know if they've had enough, right? So this vitamin A hypervitaminosis, I really, I doubt you can
00:26:56
Speaker
achieve that if that's the right word to use. I doubt you can achieve this in even weeks of eating a lot of liver. I really think these things with vitamin D and vitamin A
00:27:12
Speaker
You really have to overdo it for a very long time. It's not like the body just would absorb things. I've had certain amino acids. I don't want to get gross here, so I won't elaborate too much, but I've had certain amino acids that I will take supplementarily.
00:27:31
Speaker
that after taking them for a while, it would seem like my body would reject them because I could smell them in the toilet, if you know what I mean, after going, because they had a peculiar smell out of the box or out of the pack, and you'd get that same smell when you would go after a while.
00:27:53
Speaker
And then you would take a break and then you wouldn't get the smell. Not if you overdo it, but if you take it for several grams for a few weeks, you might get that again. So the point there being is the body won't just absorb things from the gut really nearly. It knows what it needs. It knows what to reject, right? It's the same with minerals. Yes, you can overdo with the minerals.
00:28:24
Speaker
manganese, copper, iron. But there are checks and balances that will prevent that from occurring to an extent. Obviously, we shouldn't do stupid things. We shouldn't be overdoing things. But giving your child, if these guys are saying 3,000 international units per day, that's per day.
00:28:47
Speaker
And we're talking all year round, right? Giving your child a little bit of extra vitamin D over the winter months, especially if you're like in the UK, Northern Europe, North America, USA, Canada. If you're in these countries,
00:29:06
Speaker
I know how, because I've lived in Ireland, I know how little sun you get. Like you could literally go two weeks without seeing the sun in Ireland. We would wake up, it would be dark, you would get into the office. And then when you get out at five o'clock out of the office, it's already dark. And then you hit the pub and you know, you have a few pints of Guinness and all is well because ethanol
00:29:35
Speaker
some of its effects are to activate the GABA system. So that's the gamma-minobutyric, the inhibitory nervous system. So that can really help you feel good and give you some of those effects that you would from
00:29:53
Speaker
from other means, like being out in the sun and out in nature and whatever else. So I really think part of going off on a tangent here, I apologize, I really feel like a big reason why folks, let's say in Ireland, drink a lot is because it's a coping mechanism to cope with the lack of sunlight.

Sunlight's Impact on Well-being

00:30:16
Speaker
Because after moving from Ireland to Portugal,
00:30:24
Speaker
The change was phenomenal with myself and my wife. I feel like she felt it even more because she felt the Irish weather was really getting her down. I was kind of used to it. I was there 14 years total. She was there, I think, about three years before we moved to Portugal. But you really feel it, right?
00:30:47
Speaker
You can replace the sun, that's for sure. But again, I'm trying to, a big part of what I'm trying to do at the moment is provide people solutions to modern problems. So modern problems need modern solutions, right? So with adults, I would have zero problem
00:31:16
Speaker
Not that I'm telling you what to do or I'm not recommending anything for you to do, right? Always talk to your doctor, listen to your doctor about absolutely every single thing, okay? And never deviate even for a second from what they tell you because doctor knows best, okay? But I will have zero problem if I identified as a doctor or I was a doctor or something like that,
00:31:45
Speaker
telling someone 5,000 international units a day of vitamin D is perfectly reasonable.
00:31:52
Speaker
You want to check your levels, right? It costs like 30 bucks, at least here. I'm sure it could be even cheaper in other countries. So check your levels. If they're suboptimal, if they're below the middle of the range, talk to your doctor, get a vitamin D supplement. And if you're going to get D, get a bit of K2 with it and balance that. They synergize really well. I think it's such low hanging fruit, especially
00:32:19
Speaker
If you have some kind of condition or your child is autistic or has any health issues or you have any health issues or you're more on the older side, it basically applies to everybody.

Health Risks of Low Vitamin D and Modern Lifestyle

00:32:33
Speaker
Low vitamin D levels basically are a reliable mortality predictor. I mean, if you start digging into it,
00:32:43
Speaker
how many conditions have a low vitamin D as a factor, you'd be quite surprised. And again, it's not that surprising given that how little sun we get and how little skin is exposed while we're out in the sun. When you look at that, of course, it all makes sense. I assume back in the day when we were naked Ooga Booga people, cave people,
00:33:12
Speaker
I assume we weren't in the sun all day because you probably want to hide in the shade. But just by default, we were getting a ton of sun. And we have really removed ourselves from one of the major aspects of
00:33:31
Speaker
our environment. So we've changed our environment drastically, right? And we've taken away something that is necessary to create a vitamin slash hormone in the body through the skin. So unless we add that metabolite in that pathway so the body can continue producing that,
00:33:52
Speaker
unless we do that we're kind of screwed because this thing is involved in so many things never mind just the immune system and everything else but just anything you can think of I think the vitamin D is involved in so we really have to start
00:34:07
Speaker
taking care of the low-hanging fruit. A year supply of the stuff costs probably 20 bucks. The test costs 30 bucks. So for 50 bucks, you could solve at least one problem super easily if it's an issue for you, right? So yeah, I think I'll leave it there. Thanks for tuning in. I'll talk to you on the next one.