Weston Price did some good work on the menaquinones. I donât think, however, that the menaquinones had been identified as such when he used butter.
Your father may have been right to argue against synthetic manufacture some years ago. Synthetic cholecalciferol is likely to be used for most vitamin D3 supplementation and if people have taken large amount of vitamin D that is likely to be synthetic.
However, I am not aware of any current evidence that synthetic vitamin D3 is any materially different (apart from perhaps in terms of price) to vitamin D3 in Cod Liver Oil. Cod Liver Oil may include some 25 Hydroxy Vitamin D which would be good. However, that can be obtained synthetically as well and I make use of that.
There are rare examples of hypervitaminosis D. This will most likely be the synthetic D3 simply because it is cheaper and more common and to take that amount of cod liver oil would be quite difficult.
If 5ml of Cod Liver Oil is 400IU
To take 50,000 iu of Vitamin D would be over 0.6 litres of cod liver oil. I think probably drinking that would make someone queasy at least.
It would probably cost over ÂŁ10.
The 3000iu capsules I buy cost ÂŁ12 for a years supply. That is in total just over a million IU. Hence 50,000 iu would cost 60p (prices in GBP)
Thank you for finding a reference to the case of overfortified milk. I have read the original paper.
The dairy that overdosed people with vitamin D in the 1990s bought around 30 times as much vitamin D as they intended to and their measurement system did not work. The patients admitted from the home dairy had an average 25OHD level of 224 ng/ml (range 56-696) which is about 3 times the normal range. One 86 year old man who had hypervitaminosis D died of cardiac dysrhytmia (probably caused by the hypervitaminosis D. A 72 year old woman died because of infection because she was on immunosuppressants to treat her for hypercalcemia.
The dairy had 33,000 customers and the incidence rate of hypervitaminosis D was 5.76 cases per 10,000 people.
Milk in Massachusetts was supposed to have a maximum of 500 iu per quart which was exceeded by samples 70 to 600 times. So 35,000iu per quart to 300,000iu per quart.
Estimating therefore the dose if someone drinks half a pint of milk that would have been between about 9,000 iu to 75,000 iu. What we donât know, of course, is what levels of vitamin D were in the milk drunk by the people who got the overdose.
I would think the dairy would have noticed the cost had they been using D3 from a natural source.
