<<Disclaimer: Verify this information before applying it to your situation.>>
I posted earlier about my guess that vitamin D might be important in
healing from celiac disease - I found out that there is research being
done on a possible vitamin D/celiac connection!
So it would make sense for celiacs to at least take something like the
upper daily limit of 2000 IU per day. That's the largest amount people
are supposed to take without having their blood levels checked. The
problems from getting too much vitamin D, things like calcium deposits in
internal organs, aren't always easy to reverse.
I wrote an article for celiac.com's newsletter on vitamin D and celiac
disease. I did some more reading about it for the article and I'll tell
you what I changed from my original post to this list.
Mostly, it looks like the 400 IU RDI is very likely too low. The author
of "The UV Advantage", who was on the committee that set the RDA for
vitamin D, thinks people should take at least 1000 IU per day. 400 IU
per day will prevent you from having blatant deficiencies, but there are
likely advantages to taking more, like help for the immune system. I read
that people who spend a lot of time in the sun are likely to get about
10,000 IU per day. So 1000 or 2000 IU per day isn't a lot of vitamin D.
It would be very hard to get 1000 IU/day from food, so it comes down to
taking a supplement or exposing one's skin to ultraviolet.
I found that I have a reaction to pepper (pepper and salt pepper), which
I've been eating all along. I tried kava kava, I wanted to enjoy its
pleasant calm trancelike effect - not being able to use either alcohol
or marijuana because of my food intolerances, I'm very lacking in mild
recreational drugs - and I got more than I asked for. I got sick for 3
or 4 days. And kava is in the same genus as pepper. So I tried
eliminating pepper for a week, then I tried pepper. I got woozy. But
only for a day, and I wasn't very out of it. I went on a long walk. I
tried the same thing a second time, and I got sick again, so I'm sure I
have a pepper intolerance.
But, it's the first time that I've only gotten sick for a day from a food
I'm intolerant to. My shortest sick time otherwise has been 2 days from
a vitamin E capsule made from soy, which is a real trace. I ate a bunch
of pepper berries.
It could be that I just don't have much of a pepper reaction. Or, maybe
my food reactions are fading just because they fade away after a few
years, and I've been gluten free for 4 years now.
But it's also possible that the 2000 IU of vitamin D per day that I'm
taking, made by Pure Encapsulations, which I got from
http://www.organicpharmacy.com - is helping to ameliorate my food
intolerances. Lovely if so!
The author of The UV Advantage thinks that people who are diagnosed with
fibromyalgia may actually have vitamin D deficiency, because it may cause
osteomalacia which has fibromyalgia type symptoms. He says when doctors
aren't mindful of vitamin deficiencies, they may diagnose fibromyalgia,
because it's just a diagnosis you get when they can't find out anything
else wrong.
If you only want a bare minimum of vitamin D, I found out more about
food sources - fatty fish, oysters and sun-dried shiitake mushrooms are
all fairly good sources. But Dr. Holick, the author of The UV Advantage,
said they measured vitamin D in milk and a lot of it didn't have the
amount of vitamin D they claimed on the label.
Laura
Visit the Celiac Web Page at Http://www.enabling.org/ia/celiac/index.html
Archives are at: Http://Listserv.icors.org/SCRIPTS/WA-ICORS.EXE?LIST=CELIAC
|