Comment on Rational Health Optimization

Wed, 22 Sep 2010 18:43:01 GMT

Judging by the karma of knb's critique (which I still think is barely topical) It seems like many people would like the post more overall if it didn't have that one citation, which was pretty tertiary to the main article's point. I'll take your advice, and at some point either update it as I get new evidence or write a follow up.

I'd proper change the citations to make them more relevant to the main points. For instance, one big study of vitamin D found that levels within a certain range (higher than our current norm) were associated with reduced mortality, and levels too low or too high increased mortality. I've only seen one big study that shows little effect of vitamin D, and that was for cancer, although it only found a negligible effect for overall cancer mortality, even though colorectal mortality in particular was significantly reduced. I may overstated the cancer effect of vit D.

Another wierd thing is that sun exposure doesn't seem to reliably correlate with measured vit D blood levels. One suspected culprit is soaps washing off the vit D in sebum before it can be reabsorpted. I'm not sure if this has even been studied much in humans yet.

Discuss