Old mate Roosh, at http://www.returnofkings.com/71884/you-are-most-certainly-deficient-in-vitamin-d has made the bold claim, that most of his readers are deficient in Vitamin D.
Roosh is a controversial figure to say the absolute least, and its a little surprising he took time off writing about pimping techniques from the 30's, and whats wrong with western women today, to write about nutrition and supplementation.
I cant... really get into the politics of anything that comes out of Return Of Kings, it's beyond the scope of this blog... and I'm honestly not really sure what else I can say.
He gets about 40-50k unique young men a day at his site, so regardless of politics, he is a big deal when we're talking about Nutrition, Exercise Science and general Gym Culture.
On to the meat of the article!
The first, biggest and most alarming claim of the article is that we are most certainly deficient in Vitamin D!
This is a big claim, and we will look to what the science says.
To avoid claims of cherry picking, I chose the study that reported the highest rate of Vitamin D deficiency. (Prevalence and correlates of Vitamin D deficiency in US adults, Forrest & stuhldreher)
Every scientific claim to a health benefit that can be relied upon would have a Vitamin D level below that of what this study calls deficient.(50nmol/L)
We have a convenient graph:
The graph is pretty telling, and is the part of Roosh's article closest to the truth.
You're not "almost certainly" vitamin D deficient, but there's a 40% chance if you're American that you are.
Of course, the study included American Hispanics and African Americans. Their rate of Vitamin D deficiency is about double that of whites, because of that there Melanin blocking the sun from the skin. They almost certainly are Vit-D deficient, 70-80% are.
30% of whites were deficient.
However, there is somewhat of a balancing act to consider when thinking about taking a Vitamin D supplement.
The healthy range for Vitamin D is considered 30-80ng/ml. The range that first starts giving you health problems like hypercalcemia is ~150ng/ml. This disease will give you kidney stones, weaken your bones and just generally fuck your shit up, fam.
The upper limit, as in the most you can possibly take before running the risk of getting sick is ~3200IU.
(We'll use the Australian guidelines, because the CDC is an underfunded shithole.)
Generally only ~200IU is enough to prevent VitD deficiency, but american guidelines have a higher recommendation, so fuck it, we'll go with them:
Source: NIH
If we look at how to hit this number with food, its pretty easy:
The TL:DR of the above table, is of course that if you're taking a fishoil supplement, drinking milk, eating fish sometimes, you are almost certainly doing fine for Vitamin D.
As a young man reading Roosh, you definitely should be working out regularly, eating fish, drinking milk etc as part of a general strategy to get jacked.
If you take a few Vitamin D caps a day on top of a healthy diet, you really do run the risk of going over.
If your lifestyle doesnt suck and you go outside regularly, and to meet the general healthy cardio recommendations, and you should be, unless you're a beta who works out on a treadmill, you're fine for Vitamin D.
Finally, Roosh closes out his article with a claim that he takes 5,000IU a day. This might make him sick one day. Don't do that.
