i actually bought a bottle of vitamin c while i was out shopping today because of this post, but the comments have made me want to get D, too.

are there vitamins that keep you from having crazy mood swings and being a bitch half the time? i need those vitamins. i also need some vitamins that will make me lose that last stubborn 15 pounds and also make it so that i can eat nothing but biscuits and gravy all day and be in perfect health. get back to me ASAP on that one.

The MS/vitamin D deficiency link is pretty substantiated. All of a sudden a bunch of work is coming out suggesting that high-dose D (2,000 IU on up) is really beneficial, and that previous recommendations have been kind of laughably low. I’ve seen one recommending 4,000 IU during pregnancy. I’ve seen some research on high-dose D significantly reducing relapse frequency of MS, by 50% and more, and some showing greatly reduced or completely cleared active lesions. You might find this personally interesting, because it appears to be doing something to slow or stop autoimmune dysfunction.

Blood concentrations of 25-hydroxyvitamin D at less than 50 ng/mL is suboptimal (although some say 30 and to that I say “bullshit”). I’m at 27, after a few weeks of high-dose D. I’ll get re-checked in a couple months and adjust my dose as necessary. A friend of mine told me that her doctor said she doesn’t even test for D anymore because everyone up here is deficient. So, yeah…TAKE THE D, FOLKS.

Also, D! I forgot about D. Kate, have you read any on the studies showing that a deficiency in D causes multiple sclerosis? That the PNW has the highest instance of MS in the world? I haven’t read much, but I was wondering if that were a fairly substantiated thing or if it was hooey.

I actually consume my fish oil in the form of fish, which delights me. As much black cod, small mackerel and salmon as I can consume. Of course, now I have mercury poisoning.

You know what book kind of blew my mind? The Shangri-La Diet by Seth Roberts. I read about Roberts on a lifehacker-type article and was totally interested, only to find out that the book comes off like a weird diet fad. But the actual science behind it is totally intense! Basically, he argues and presents studies that the tastier food is the more likely we are to gain weight. So that the calories of sugar are not even the problem, but the flavor is, because it’s telling the brain that this is a “time of fat” and to hold on to the calories. He has scads of rat studies showing that rats eating the exact same amount of sweet calories as rats eating unsweetened calories gained twice as much weight. And it doesn’t matter how they are sweetened. Bizarre! I love it. Things get shady when his “diet” recommends basically not eating as the solution to losing weight, but then he’s strikes me as an Asperger’s spectrum type scientist who can’t see the flaw in his logic. Meanwhile the rest of the world would like to eat more than one meal a day.