Vitamin D Fraud

Why are people lying about vitamin D?

I'm tired of reading unsubstantiated garbage about cholecalciferol. I've tried to engage with them but they respond with irrelevant comments like “There's no sunshine in vitamin D”.

I'll start with Agent131711, whose “articles” get quoted by this brigade. I use the word “brigade” deliberately.

Agent 131711 opens his article headlined “Vitamin D is rat poison.” with a picture of some factory somewhere. So what?

Does he want it made in a three-bed semi, in a jungle, or some kind of sea-shack?

Irrelevant.

Remember this is a supposed exposé on vitamin D.

Then he makes an issue of the chemical name for D3. Why? Everything has a chemical name. Even the components of what passes for this person's brain cells have chemical names. So what?

Irrelevant.

He then prattles on about di-calcium phosphate. This isn't cholecalciferol so whatever he writes about is...

Irrelevant.

After pages of irrelevancy the writer moves on to microcrystalline cellulose.

The pattern is emerging, as you will immediately realize this also has absolutely nothing to do with cholecalciferol.

Irrelevant.

Having skipped past cholecalciferol, magnesium stearate is now discussed. You guessed it. This isn't cholecalciferol either.

Irrelevant.

Next up is silica.

Irrelevant.

Finally, after more pages and pages of pure irrelevancy we finally get to read the great thinker's opinion about cholecalciferol. By now, of course, the reader has been scared by page after page after page of hyperbole about a whole bunch of chemicals which bear no relationship WHATSOEVER to cholecalciferol. But the reader is now conditioned to expect more of the same…classic.

The headline for this exposé is “vitamin D is rat poison”.

So what?

Cholecalciferol CAN be used as a poison to kill rats, so can warfarin, so can many, many other things, but cholecalciferol is a generic and cheaply made chemical, so why not use it to poison rats?

What has this got to do with humans?

The basic premise of this hype is...

Irrelevant.

But it continues, so must I.

Paracelsus knew centuries ago it is the dose which makes the poison, not the substance. This is basic toxicology, which some people seem to forget at their convenience.

Individual susceptibility is a factor which requires some thought, but at the level of cholecalciferol ingestion, not a lot of thought.

The writer makes a thing of the pure chemical being labeled as dangerous/toxic, etc. most pure chemicals are just so:

Breathing pure oxygen will kill you. Shall we ban that? Mind you, oxygen is easy to say so it must be safe?

Drinking too much water will kill you, but we still drink it. Like everything in life, it's a choice about whether to deliberately become a candidate for the Darwin Awards.

A single grape can kill a dog, but we still eat grapes. It's just not RELEVANT.

The human body produces hydrogen peroxide at a cellular level but we don't drink neat hydrogen peroxide.

Now we get to the astonishing claim cholecalciferol contains chloroform. I followed the link to the MSDS identified in this article. It's from ThermoFisher Scientific.

There is, indeed, a paragraph 3 stating the ingredients. The MSDS which I downloaded (using the front page shown above) has this ingredient listed: (9,10-Secocholesta-5,7,10(19)-trien-3-ol, (3.beta.,5Z,7E) with a CAS number of 67-97-0.

This chemical is otherwise known as 25-hydroxycholecalciferol: the major circulating metabolite of vitamin D3 in the human body.

Moving on, there is NO chloroform, which has the CAS number of 67-66-3, as anonymously cut & pasted into the text of the Agent131711 article.

The subsequent cut & paste regarding ingestion is also not from the MSDS on (9,10-Secocholesta-5,7,10(19)-trien-3-ol, (3.beta.,5Z,7E).

Presumably it's from an MSDS on chloroform. It's source is not identifiable. Only Agent131711 can answer this.

How can the author cut & paste TWO wrong sections about the wrong chemical from the wrong MSDS?

If makes one furious to think, doesn't it?

But it makes the whole chloroform thing...

Irrelevant.

Not to mention very questionable.

Why would the author deliberately try to convince the reader a vitamin D3 supplement contains chloroform as an ingredient?

I'm calling the author out as a complete fraud and see little point in continuing to critique a transparent hatchet job from someone who has quite obvious intentions to mislead and prevent people from safely self-medicating.

This is a simple fact which blows this whole deceitful diatribe out of the water.

When UV light strikes the human skin, in the presence of necessary co-factors such as the nasty cholesterol thingy, a chemical is produced which is vital to life and the proper functioning of the human body. This chemical is considered by some to be a pro-hormone as well as a vitamin and is absolutely essential to life.

It's known as cholecalciferol.

Yep! Humans synthesise (that horrid word) cholecalciferol endogenously every single time they step out into the sun. Yes, it can be used to kill rats, but if WE don't have any we are dead.

Where's the story?

The fact cholecalciferol can be used to kill rats is utterly irrelevant to human production/ingestion. Agent131711 should retract this factually incorrect and seemingly fraudulent article immediately.

Read the article, download the MSDS in question so you can see for yourselves.

Before someone criticizes me for not continuing my dig through this drivel, once I found the fraudulent cut & pastes regarding cholesterol it seems obvious there is NOTHING Agent131711 writes which can be trusted.

His articles, from the very first word require forensic analysis and every cut & paste requires checking for veracity.

I examined another of his diatribes where a photo is cut & pasted from a professional vetinerary magazine to depict intestinal cholecalciferol toxicity. What Agent131711 doesn't tell the reader is the photo is of an unidentified animal gut resulting from the mistaken ingestion of rodenticide bait. There is no mention and no RELEVANCE to human consumption whatsoever in a 100% veterinary manual.

I don't have the resources to keep on about this individual but I do know for a fact the work is either totally incompetent or deliberately fraudulent.

Either way, it is exposed and this should be the end of it.

It won't be, of course.

Addendum:

I noticed a little strapline in one “article” about vitamin B containing cyanide.

a) there is no such thing as vitamin B. It's a stupid thing to write.

b) I can only assume he refers to cyanocobalamin, one form of a group of compounds referred to generically as B12.

This is another baseless scare story which, frankly, doesn't deserve writing about. Do a Google search on this - plenty of eminently qualified biochemists have debunked it.