Inspired by Carola Binder’s guest post “Why You Should Get More Vitamin D: The Recommended Daily Allowance for Vitamin D Was Underestimated Due to Statistical Illiteracy,” I take 5000 IU of Vitamin D each day when I am not fasting. (That is one very small pill. I buy them at Costco.) Two simple facts also reinforce for me the importance of Vitamin D:

1. Many diseases have worse incidence in high latitudes; something not so easy to explain by confounding factors other than the sunlight that produces Vitamin D.

2. Folks like me whose ancestors lived in high latitudes for a few thousand years are white, despite being descended further back from black Africans. The only plausible reason is that folks with darker skins couldn’t produce enough Vitamin D in places with weaker sun exposure. Vitamin D has to be a big deal to cause evolution of skin color that fast.

A friend recently pointed me to a website, vitamindwiki.com, that might go overboard in its advocacy for Vitamin D, but does marshal an impressive array of facts and citations that, properly winnowed, backs up this view of the importance of Vitamin D. I give links to three of its posts underneath the screenshots at the top of this post.

Among the supplements I take, I don’t take many vitamins. Indeed, as I’ll write about later, I worry that taking a multivitamin too often might help provide cancer the vitamins it needs and so foster cancer. But I do take Vitamin D supplements.

Appendix: Here is a post on another website on latitude and disease:

See also:

• Have We Gone Too Far with Sunscreen?

• Vitamin D Seems to Help If You Have Non-Alcoholic Liver Disease

For organized links to other posts on diet and health, see:

• Miles Kimball on Diet and Health: A Reader's Guide