Open Thread for January 17 - 23 2014

niceguyanon

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

A bunch of QS people have observed that the timing of vitamin D supplements matters a great deal.

Matters for what?

Your links say that the timing of vitamin D intake affects sleep. Fine, but that's not really what most people take vitamin D for. There is a variety of claims for vitamin D supplements which generally have to do with bone health, viral infections, CVD, etc. I don't want to get into evidence for and against these claims, but are you saying that the timing of vitamin D affects these outcomes?

Looking at it in the most general fashion, the overall claim is that taking vitamin D supplements affect mortality. Crudely, you live longer. That may or may not be so, but do you think that timing of vitamin D ingestion would affect that? What evidence do you have? Sleep disturbance is a time-local short-term effect, it isn't obvious to me that it indicates problems with long-term consequences.

I do claim that the medical establishment is stupid for assuming that it's in the blood level.

Why? "Stupid" is a strong word. If your hypothesis is that timing matters but the blood level doesn't matter, what's the underlying biochemical mechanism? Is there any evidence that the right time in the circadian cycle is crucial?

Also, if you are taking vitamin D supplements wouldn't you be interested in your blood level? How would you know how much of vitamin D do you need?

If your hypothesis is that timing matters but the blood level doesn't matter, what's the underlying biochemical mechanism? Is there any evidence that the right time in the circadian cycle is crucial?

I see evidence that both matter to sleep. It seems that the blood level of vitamin D is linked to excessive daytime sleepiness. (Warning: the authors of this paper overfit the data, so you can ignore their conclusions about race and very low vit. D levels, but their data does show a negative correlation between serum vitamin D levels and excessive daytime sl... (read more)

-3ChristianKl12y

Why do you think humans sleep at all if sleep disturbance has no long term effects? I think it's fairly straightforward to think that humans do undergo processes that further health during restful sleep. After quick Googling http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK19961/ is a study that says so. [...] Bone health might be just about Vitamin D's role in calcium absorption. From the paper I linked above: [...] I can't find talk about viral infections on that page but I would assume that you can also make a case that a sleep deprived individual is at higher risk for them. [...] Investing tens of millions in experiments based on a hypothesis that you don't really test is stupid. To use the words of Feynman you could also say cargo cult science with Feynman used to describe the rat psychology experiments of his time. [...] When I say blood level I mean the level you measure when you give a individual a blood test every month and make a study based on that data. I don't mean the level you would get if you measure every minute. But I don't need to point to a biochemical mechanism to validate an empirical observation. Currently drugs get often designed based on an idea that you want to target a biochemical mechanism but when they do work, the work in mysterious ways that aren't exactly the way the people who designed the drug would have thought beforehand. Of course most of those drugs fail anyway. It's much better to focus on things that produce empiric effects than going to deeply into theory. But as far as vitamin D goes, there plenty of evidence that it can work as a hormone. It also a hormone that gets naturally produced at specific times as the sun usually shines at specific times of the day and not at night. [...] The empirical method. You can take different amount of vitamin D and see the effect on yourself. That means you have either good awareness of your own body, QS tools or both. Coming to your own judgments instead of trying to follow what some auth