Vitamin D Seems to Help If You Have Non-Alcoholic Liver Disease
Eating high-insulin-index food can do a number on your liver, even if you don’t drink much alcohol. (On which foods are high on the insulin index, see “Forget Calorie Counting; It's the Insulin Index, Stupid.” Many will be foods you already know are bad. Others may be a surprise.) But Vitamin D deficiency also seems to play a role in worsening non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. “Vitamin D for treatment of non‐alcoholic fatty liver disease detected by transient elastography: A randomized, double‐blind, placebo‐controlled trial” in the journal Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism reports results from a randomized trial on 311 non-alcoholic-fatty-liver-disease patients. The graph below shows the interquartile ranges for the Vitamin D and placebo groups. The study was reasonably well powered to demonstrate that these differences were unlikely to be due to chance.
This result adds to the evidence that Vitamin D deficiency is a serious issue that you should worry about. One reason Vitamin D deficiency is a problem is that the recommended daily allowance for Vitamin D was set at the wrong value. See:
Another possible contributing factor behind Vitamin D deficiency is that milk can interfere with the workings of Vitamin D. See:
In addition to helping reduce the severity of the symptoms of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, there are some hints that Vitamin D can help reduce one’s vulnerability to Covid-19. See:
In addition to a regular multivitamin, I take an additional 5000 IU (=125 micrograms) of Vitamin D each day (except when I am fasting the whole day). What I know of the appropriate dose is from “Carola Binder—Why You Should Get More Vitamin D: The Recommended Daily Allowance for Vitamin D Was Underestimated Due to Statistical Illiteracy.” It seems an easy way to avoid what may end up being an even longer list of bad things that happen as a result of Vitamin D deficiency.
For annotated links to other posts on diet and health, see: