Although most people take vitamin D supplements without any problems, it’s possible to take too much. This is called vitamin D toxicity. Vitamin D toxicity, where vitamin D can be harmful, usually happens if you take 40,000 IU per day for a couple of months or longer, or take a very large one-time dose. Vitamin D is fat-soluble, which means your body has a hard time getting rid of it if you take too much. When you take large amounts of vitamin D, your liver produces too much of a chemical called 25(OH)D. When your 25(OH)D levels are too high, this can cause high levels of calcium to develop in your blood. High blood calcium is a condition called hypercalcemia. The symptoms of hypercalcemia include: In some rare diseases, you may be at risk of hypercalcemia even if you have low vitamin D levels and haven’t taken much vitamin D. These diseases include primary hyperparathyroidism, sarcoidosis and a few other rare diseases. See our Hypersensitivity page page for more information.
A blood test to measure your 25(OH)D levels can tell you whether you have too high of vitamin D levels. If your 25(OH)D levels are above 150 ng/ml this is considered potentially toxic and potentially harmful to your health. You know if your 25(OH)D levels are toxic by a blood test to measure calcium. If calcium is high and 25(OH)D is high, then you are getting too much vitamin D. Very high levels of 25(OH)D can develop if you: If you have taken this much vitamin D, seek medical attention. Your health providers will get your calcium and 25(OH)D levels tested. The current recommended daily allowances for vitamin D set by the Food and Nutrition Board are conservative, so you don’t need to feel worried about toxicity if you take more than their recommended daily allowance. You can find out more about daily vitamin D supplementation on our page, How do I get the vitamin D my body needs? Have you taken more than 300,000 IU in the past 24 hours OR have you been taking more than 10,000 IU/day for the past three months or longer?
The more you weigh, the more vitamin D your body can handle; the less you weigh, the less vitamin D your body can handle. The above cutoffs of 300,000 IU in 24 hours or more than 10,000 IU/day for three or more months apply to average adult weight (125-200 lbs). So, how do you know if your child has gotten too much vitamin D? For children that weigh 25 lbs or less, more than 50,000 IU in 24 hours or 2,000 IU/day for over three months is too much and potentially toxic. For children that weigh between 25 and 50 lbs, more than 100,000 IU in 24 hours or 4,000 IU/day for over three months is too much and potentially toxic. For children that weigh between 50 and 75 lbs, more than 150,000 IU in 24 hours or 6,000 IU/day for over three months is too much and potentially toxic. For children that weigh between 75 lbs and 100 lbs, more than 200,000 IU in 24 hours or 8,000 IU/day for over three months is too much and potentially toxic. If your child has taken too much vitamin D, seek medical attention.
If your level is greater than 150 ng/ml, this is considered too high and potentially toxic. Seek medical attention if you have symptoms of hypercalcemia (listed above). If you do not have symptoms, consider lowering your level. Please see our pages on 25(OH)D reference ranges and our page on how to get the right amount of vitamin D: If your level is not greater than 150 ng/ml, then you are not potentially toxic in vitamin D. Please read our pages on vitamin D levels and how to interpret your results: Editor’s Note: Dr. Lee Hieb is a new columnist with WND who debuted last week. Check out her archive, so you don’t miss her first, eye-opening column! No one said it better than Michael Crichton – who, in addition to being a best selling author, was also a physician. During a lecture at Cal Tech, he said, “Let’s be clear: The work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right.
The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.” The medical community has always been subject to “group-think,” but in recent decades we have become the leaders. Numerous physician-scientists have been ostracized, defrocked, de-licensed and in some cases driven to self-destruction by a medical community that has embraced consensus in science. In essence, “We don’t care about your data; we all agree you are wrong.” I once had a paper rejected from a major spine journal with a one line denouement: “Everyone knows you can’t do that.” With time, ultimately, truth prevails, and renegade but correct physicians are vindicated – but not in time to save those patients who die from the mistaken consensus. Today, this “group-think” is depriving people from some of the best and cheapest medical treatment available – supplementation with adequate Vitamin D3. Vitamin D deficiency has been associated with childhood rickets – a bone disorder – for over a hundred years.
And it has been known since the 1970s that those living on the equator, regardless of particular locale, have lower rates of multiple sclerosis, colon cancer and depression. But more recently, many astute observers have discovered that low Vitamin D leads to many other disorders, including cardiac arrhythmia, breast cancer, adult fractures, dementia, heart attack risk and even diabetes. Most recently, studies have demonstrated that higher levels of Vitamin D improve longevity and are beneficial at preventing influenza – even better than vaccination. Studies showing beneficial effects of high vitamin D levels are quite convincing. They not only show a correlation between low Vitamin D blood levels and the problem, but show improvement in the disease or prevention of the condition when levels are raised up through supplementation. As an example, it has been shown in the laboratory that heart muscle does not contract well unless adequate Vitamin D is present. An Italian population study showed that low Vitamin D was proportional to atherosclerotic plaques (clogging of the arteries).
Furthermore, a Japanese study of dialysis patients demonstrated that correcting Vitamin D deficiency significantly lowered death from heart attacks and heart disease in general. These are only a few of the rapidly expanding body of literature supporting the role of Vitamin D in multiple disease prevention. But to achieve the positive effects seen in many diseases, blood levels need to be in the range of 50 to 100 ng/dl, not the 20 ng/dl that laboratories report as the lowest range of “normal” (how labs determine “normal” is the subject of another column). Specifically in the case of breast cancer, if one achieves blood levels above 55 ng/dl, the risk of breast cancer is diminished 85 percent. It is the observation of many, many practicing clinicians that 1) most patients test in the low 20s, and 2) 400 iu of Vitamin D a day – the government recommended daily allowance doesn’t raise the levels at all. Studies of equatorial inhabitants demonstrate that some of the longest-lived people on the planet obtain 30,000-40,000 iu of Vitamin D (specifically D3) a day from the sunlight – nature’s source of the vitamin.
Given that, it is not suprising that supplementing 10,000 iu a day of Vitamin D3 has been shown to have no adverse effects. As an Orthopaedic Surgeon, I deal with bone disorders daily, and have long been interested in this topic. I quit testing for Vitamin D levels in untreated people after every one of my patients tested in the low 20s. I only tested my husband because he was convinced that golfing in Arizona 18 holes, six days a week would raise his level. It did not – his level was 22 ng/dl. As a final fact, D3 supplementation is cheap. For less than $12 a month you can easily take 10,000 iu of Vitamin D3 a day. Now, given all this, what would you do? I, for one take 10,000 units of Vitamin D3 a day. I have done so for over 7 years, and my levels of 55 ng/dl are barely in the optimal range of 50-100ng/dl. I recommend the same to all my patients. But I must warn them that the government, via the Institute of Medicine and the FDA, disagree and believe people should take only 600-800 iu a day.
Now it doesn’t take a medical degree to figure out that a cheap treatment that has such potential upside with so little (if any) downside is worth doing as real preventive medicine. But the government consensus – developed by intellectuals who feel they are infinitely smarter than we are, and should be able to make our choices for us – is that there is no evidence for the beneficial claims.If they emerge from their collective basement, they will find pages and pages of references. Do a simple Google search. Or just read the newspaper. Besides frequent articles in medical and general science journals supporting Vitamin D3 supplementation, there are monthly news stories about this rapidly advancing science. Sadly, the government doesn’t just want to discourage you from taking extra Vitamin D, they want to prohibit it. Senator Dick Durban, D-Ill., in 2011 introduced a bill (innocuously labeled the “Supplement Labeling Act”) which would so over-regulate the supplement industry that they could no longer supply products such as Vitamin D3 at a cost affordable to the average consumer.