How much vitamin D should you use?
The Dietary Reference Intakes for Vitamins is a good source for understanding how much you need and how much vitamin D you can safely consume every day for the rest of your life:
It is important to note that these levels regard all sources of vitamin D, including food sources, supplements, and water.
We recommend that you experiment within the range between how much you need and how much you can safely take every day for the rest of your life. This will ensure self-experiments with vitamin D that are likely very safe and hopefully enable you to get the most out of it to help you feel and perform at your best.
What time of day should you take vitamin D?
There is no data on what the optimal time of day for use of vitamin D is. There is no evidence that vitamin D impairs sleep if taken before bed-time, except for one single well-conducted self-experiment by Gwern. He found that vitamin D negatively impacted his sleeping patterns if he took it just before going to bed, but not if he took it in the morning.
Which foods are rich in vitamin D?
The top 10 foods highest in vitamin D are [9]:
- Crimini (Chestnut) Mushrooms (Exposed to UV Light) (31.9μg vitamin d/100g mushrooms)
- Salmon (16.7μg/100g)
- Fortified cereal (8.3μg/100g)
- Fortified tofu (2.5μg/100g)
- Eggs (2.2μg/100g)
- Fortified milk (1.3μg/100g)
- Fortified soymilk (1.2μg/100g)
- Fortified yogurt (1.3μg/100g)
- Fortified orange juice (1μg/100g)
- Pork chops (1μg/100g)
Other than from food, how can I get more vitamin D?
Supplements are available almost everywhere were supplements are sold, and skin exposure to sunlight will lead to increased bodily production of vitamin D.
There’s a need for more high-quality scientific information about the safety and effectiveness of Vitamin D. Specifically, there’s a great degree of individual variance in how people respond to nootropics in general and Vitamin D in particular. This means that if you use Vitamin D, you may not experience the same effects as those that were seen in scientific studies on it.
It is currently largely unknown what factors play a role in whether a nootropic will be effective for a person.
While we wait for science to explain who is likely to respond to which nootropics, patient self-experimentation with nootropics that have been found safe and effective in placebo-controlled studies in healthy humans is a proven strategy to feel and perform better with the help of nootropics.
