From Customer:
“Thank you so much for your reply. I used to go to an internal medicine doctor that helped me with panic attacks and depression, he put me on effexor for years. I started thinking, what would happen if you gave your body all the vitamins and nutrients that it needed, then see what if any pharmaceutical drugs I may need.
My doctor thought this was a bad idea, so I switched to a doctor that also was a nutritionist and he ran blood test and said that I need to take Usana, and at least 2000-4000IU of Vitamin D3.
Well it has seemed to work, I have been off all meds for years. Now I have found out my current doctor is on the Scientific advisory council for Usana and his wife is a distributor.
Not saying this is bad, but make me wonder if he is promoting it just to increase his sales? He told me it was almost impossible to get too much of the Vitamin D3, also started me on testosterone injections because me testosterone was too low. Said there was no supplement out there that can increase this. I have placed my second order of Total Balance Men's and first order of Male Rejuvenator, so far so good!”
I responded as follows:
Be very wary of testosterone injections! By taking testosterone directly it can potentially deactivate your own production of testosterone making you dependent on injections for the rest of your life. Personally I would never have them as the risks are too high.
I know that testosterone therapy is quite popular with many people and indeed with some Doctors because it can be a ‘quick fix’. The key is to do everything that you can to support your own systems to produce adequate amounts, AND, to also keep in mind that most men still continue to produce adequate amounts of testosterone as they age, but they end up with low amounts in their systems because a lot of it is converted to estrogen as they get older.
If you can reduce the conversion of testosterone to estrogen then you shouldn’t have a problem. I will be 65 this year and my testosterone levels are still at that of a typical man several decades younger, and all I do is support my organs with adequate levels of nutrients including those such as Chrysin which help inhibit the conversion of testosterone to estrogen.
We have this in Total Balance Men’s. Bear in mind that I have been taking it for years and that unlike testosterone injections it is not a quick fix, but it is a permanent solution.
With regard to the Vitamin D. I disagree with your Doctor if he is saying that you cannot get too much Vitamin D from supplements. The fact is that you can, as Vitamin D taken orally is quite different from that manufactured by the body from the sun.
Over the last couple of years, there has been a Vitamin D craze/fad with many people including physicians advocating ‘more is better’ when they are referring to Vitamin D supplements. They think that this will fix just about everything that ‘ails’ you. This I believe is a dangerous position as you can get toxicity from high doses of Vitamin D and it may upset other balances in your body which many forms of vitamins can do if taken in isolation and in excessive doses.
However, you can’t get too much Vitamin D when it is produced by your own body from exposure to sunlight. If this is what your Doctor is referring to then I agree with him 100%.
Vitamin D obtained from sunlight is able to be stored by the body in fatty tissues and any excess released during the winter time or other periods when it is needed. If you tried to get as much Vitamin D from supplements as you can get from regular exposure to the sun you would actually get quite ill.
So, try to get as much exposure to the sun, all over if you can as it will give you a lot of health benefits.
Some info on the safety of Vitamin D and in high doses:
VITAMIN D
Canadian researcher Reinhold Vieth, Ph.D., writes, "Published cases of vitamin D toxicity with hypercalcemia, for which the 25(OH)D concentration and vitamin D dose are known, all involve intake of greater than or equal to 1,000 micrograms (40,000 IU)/day. (T)he weight of evidence shows that the currently accepted, no observed adverse effect limit of 50 microg (2,000 IU)/d is too low by at least 5-fold." (Vieth R. Vitamin D supplementation, 25-hydroxyvitamin D concentrations, and safety. Am J Clin Nutr. May; 69(5):842-56. 1999.)
The Nutrition Desk Reference, Second Edition states that, for vitamin D, "The threshold for toxicity is 500 to 600 micrograms per kilogram body weight per day." (p 40) The US Environmental Protection Agency’s published oral LD50 for female rats of 619 mg/kg (Cholecalciferol (Vitamin D3) Chemical Profile 12/84. US Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, DC. Chemical Fact Sheet Number 42. December 1, 1984.)
500 to 600 mcg is the equivalent of 20,000 to 24,000 IU, per kilogram body weight per day. By comparison, this would mean that for an average (70 kg) adult human, toxicity would occur at an astounding 1,400,000 to 1,680,000 IU/day.
Yet misconceptions and misinformation about vitamins persist. Vitamin-scare articles are unduly popular with the media, sometimes even making it into the pages of the Wall Street Journal. On April 30, 1992, David Stipp reported that between 1990 and 1992, "a series of patients with vitamin D overdoses began turning up at Boston hospitals." Due to problems at one large dairy, some of the milk sold in Boston contained over 230,000 units of vitamin D per quart instead of the usual 400 units per quart.
One person subsequently died from drug complications, and the case went to court. (Tarpey v. Crescent Ridge Dairy, Inc., 47 Mass. App. Ct. 380.) "Essentially, this was a product liability action against the producer of dairy products, specifically milk which contained excessive amounts of Vitamin D. The plaintiff’s decedent purportedly suffered from elevated levels of Vitamin D in her bloodstream which required medication which in turn allegedly compromised her immune system, leading to her death." (http://www.dwpm.com/content/main/litigation00_news.php3)
This is the one and the only vitamin D-related death I could find confirmation of, ever, anywhere. And even this one was not directly due to the vitamin, but rather to side effects of medication.
The incident might well be taken as an unintentional proof of vitamin safety, even in ridiculously high overdosage situations. It is certainly noteworthy that 580 times the normal amount of vitamin D produced, at most, one alleged fatality. This borders on the extraordinary. Events such as this demonstrate that the margin for error with vitamins is very large indeed.
As a former university nutrition instructor, the classroom textbooks I taught with considered vitamin D to be perhaps the most potentially dangerous vitamin to chronically overdose on. If that is true, and there has been not even one confirmed vitamin-D fatality in the USA in over forty years, then all other vitamins are safer still. (Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine, 2003; Vol. 18, Numbers 3 and 4, p. 194-204.)
Rich Evans February 03 2012