My 5 Docs colleague Lee Merritt, MD, has, like many of us, getting a lot of questions about Vitamin D ever since someone wrote a substack about how vitamin D was rat poison. Here is Lee’s rebuttal. She gave us permission to launch her shot over the bow and put at end to this nonsense. Here you go!!
As an Orthpaedic Surgeon who promotes 10,000 iu of Vit D a day, I'm getting pummeled about recent hit pieces about Vit D. But surprisingly Orthopaedic surgeons do know something about bone health and I suspect, to quote the secret agent substack author, “Sweet Jesus, we should know more than preachers about bone metabolism. !!” This crap about Vitamin D being rat poison—it's literally not true. D is not a rat poison. I'm making a debunking video. This is being spouted by people who do not understand the Labelling in the chemical industry. And this guy doesn’t understand basic chemistry or much else.
Cholecalciferol is natural in the body. It is how the body takes cholesterol (in a particular isomer) and with UV light converts it into 1-25 Vit D through your kidney and liver.
Rat poison is generally warfarin AKA Coumadin used in humans ALL THE 🤬🤬🤬 time for blood thinning and no newspapers have ever waged war on Coumadin. ( even though more people die from it than most drugs). Chemical grade Vit D is sometimes added to potentiate the action of warfarin because D sucks up the rats' anti-clotting K to some degree. But by itself it is not in any way toxic to rats. Try putting sugar coated Vit D in your garage and you'll have more rats than when you started.
This idiot Agent 167113--or whatever substack everyone is alluding to--has no clue about the difference between pharmaceutical grade, food grade, and chemical grade substances. To be put into food something must pass higher standards than chemical grade. So chemical ethanol-- ie drinking type alcohol,--even though it's drinkable and not toxic by itself is not approved for food or pharmaceutical use. So too cholecalciferol made for chemical processing applications would be labeled "not for food or pharmaceutical use". Since his example was Thermofisher (who does lots of basic chemicals for industry) the sheet he cited was exactly that.
Finally, the report from England that a man died from too high calcium due to Vit D overdose is-- in the words of Winston Churchill-- nonsense up with which I will not put. The guy died from cardiac and renal failure after two weeks in the hospital. I.e. he was on dialysis. I've never seen hypercalcemia from Vit D levels-- even over 120. But on dialysis they die in hypercalemia frequently because kidneys are a major part of regulation for calcium and they have failed. The quote by the "Associate professor" ( a title which denotes someone lower than a snakes belly in academia) demonstrates a total lack of knowledge of bone health. Even we dumb orthopods know better. Based on the studies done by the best bone metabolism guys in the world you need at least 5000 iu a day to prevent adult metabolic bone disease
So what's this about? It's about convincing people not to take Vit D which saved a lot of people in COVID. And the bad guys know it...
Lee Merritt MD
Orthopaedic and Spinal Surgeon
Don't Believe the Current Fear Campaign around Vitamin D