As I said in my earlier post: Don't go nuts on the Vitamin D. Nobody is going to overdose on 1000-2000 iu per day. Doctors give people 200,000 - 600,000 iu shots on a yearly basis sometimes! I'm a special case because I have MS, so I try to keep my blood Vitamin D level in the 70-80 range (100 is the upper limit of "normal"). I get tested every couple of months and adjust my intake. It used to be 10,000 iu / day but that put me right at 100, so I cut back. If you are going to take a high dose, you have to get tested regularly because Vitamin D overdose is very very bad.

The first thing we found out about Vitamin D is that is regulates Calcium. But we have found out lots more. This is not unusual. Most vitamins and drugs have multiple effects because of conservation of useful genetic code. That means when some gene code is useful for one thing in the body, you often find that same code in other genes that do other things. We also find a whole lot of common code across species. If some code was useful for a tiny nematode, that code survived mostly intact through evolution into other species.

Anyway, one thing we have found out about D is that it modulates inflammatory response. An aspect of that is that high-normal levels (like mine) are just about as effective as any current MS drug. These are not opinions. These are observed facts from multiple peer-reviewed scientific papers. The link I posted is a British doctor's blog. The study he references is a study of multiple studies, all peer-reviewed, with N in the thousands and p < 0.05. For you non-statisticians, that means the findings are very very solid.

Sorry about Karen, Jeff, but it's good they are giving her some. As for just getting a lot of sun, in Florida that could work especially if you are White and a nudist. Otherwise you might want to have your doctor check your level. A lot of people are Vitamin D deficient, especially in northern latitudes who get very little sun. Lack of Vitamin D from the sun is probably why MS is prevalent in northern parts of the world.