Author: Jack Norris RD

Last November, rumors surfaced that there was a vegan vitamin D3. I’m still occasionally getting questions about it, so I decided to write up what I know.

It appears that these claims have originated with two different brands: MegaFoods and LifeGive.

MegaFoods

I could not find anywhere in which MegaFoods is currently claiming that their vitamin D3 is vegan, but it appears that at one time, someone was claiming that it was. Click here for a write-up about how it is not vegan:

Excerpt:

They say that their vitamin d3 is from S. cerevisiae, and technically it is- however, they actually take regular old vitamin d made from sheep lanolin that anyone can buy in stores, and they ‘feed’ this vitamin d3 to the yeast in order to ‘Biotransform’ the vitamin d3 into what they claim is an effective and bioavailable form of vitamin d3 that is easily ‘utilized’ by the human body.

If you go to their website, Mega Foods doesn’t claim that their vitamin D3 is vegan. A page at Amazon.com claims that MegaFoods’ vitamin D3 does not come from fish and that it is suitable for vegetarians, which I suppose is technically true if they mean lacto-ovo vegetarians who are willing to use sheep’s lanolin.

This site, Whole Foods Vitamins, sells MegaFood’s Vitamin D3 and explains a bit about it:

Vitamin D-3 DailyFoods is formulated with 100% Cold Fusion FoodState nutrients, developed by Durham Research, Inc.

I’m not sure if that’s important to know, but now we do. Moving on…

LifeGive Sun D

LifeGive Sun D is being advertised by two companies, UpayaNaturals and Alive Raw, as being vegan vitamin D3. They both say:

LifeGive Sun-D offers a superior, naturally occurring vegan source of vitamin D3 with vitamin D precursors from Shiitake mushrooms and rice germ ex-tracts. Sun-D offers supplies [sic] pure and powerful plant source of living and life- supporting vitamin D for preventing nutrient deficiencies, supporting good health and preventing the development of threatening health conditions.

On November 18, 2009, I wrote UpayaNaturals to inquire about their product and never got a response. However, a JackNorrisRD.com reader, who also wrote them last November, got a response from the company saying, “All the information comes directly from our supplier’s web page.”

I could not find any more information about LifeGive – the company or their Sun D product.

At this time, no one else knows of any way to create vegan D3 and I would say that this casts doubt on whether LifeGive’s Sun D is truly vegan.

In large, single doses, vitamin D3 may be more effective than D2; but in smaller, sustained doses, D2 appears to be as effective. It might take some time to build up your stores of vitamin D by taking D2. Here are my recommendations.

A study from Taiwan published in April indicates that people who eat breakfast are more likely to be at a healthy weight. This reinforces most of the previous findings on the subject.

One theory as to why is that skipping breakfast leads to eating more calories later in the day, but that doesn’t seem to be the case as breakfast skippers have been shown in previous research to eat the same or less calories. It seems likely to me that skipping breakfast slows down your metabolism.

It also could be that skipping breakfast doesn’t cause the weight gain, but is merely associated with something else that causes it. To adjust for this possibility, the researchers controlled for age, gender, marital status, educational level, income, smoking status, alcohol consumption, and exercise, and so differences in these variables between breakfast skippers and eaters should not account for the differences in body weight.

Thanks, Tom!

Reference

Huang CJ, Hu HT, Fan YC, Liao YM, Tsai PS. Associations of breakfast skipping with obesity and health-related quality of life: evidence from a national survey in Taiwan. Int J Obes (Lond). 2010 Apr;34(4):720-5.

On March 6, I posted that in light of new research, I was raising the lower limit of my single-dose B12 supplement recommendations from 10 µg to 25 µg. This was an extrapolation, but I just came across some new research to reinforce this change. A study from India shows that 10 µg of B12 in one single dose per day was not enough to lower homocysteine to ideal levels.

Details here.

Thanks, Tom!

I finally got around to getting a copy of the EPIC study I posted on here. The study showed that adding 200 g of fruits and vegetables per day decreased the risk of cancer by 4%. What the reports didn’t mention was that people who ate more than 647 grams of fruit and vegetables per day (the equivalent of about 2 cups of broccoli plus 2 1/4 medium apples) had an 11% reduced risk of cancer compared to those who at only 226 g per day (the equivalent of about 3/4 apple plus 3/4 cup of broccoli).

Here are the confidence intervals:

A new Mercy for Animals investigation reveals unbelievable cruelty at a dairy farm in Ohio.

After viewing the footage, Dr. Bernard Rollin, distinguished professor of animal science at Colorado State University, stated: “This is probably the most gratuitous, sustained, sadistic animal abuse I have ever seen. The video depicts calculated, deliberate cruelty, based not on momentary rage but on taking pleasure through causing pain to cows and calves who are defenseless.”

Link.

Thanks to a reader, Ron, who referred me to an abstract showing that vegetarians had lower muscle levels of carnosine, I have updated the VeganHealth page on carnosine and beta-alanine to suggest that vegetarians may very well be able to improve their athletic performance by supplementing with beta-alanine. Link.

Dear Jack,

I tried it and hardly any of my calcium tablet dissolved in that time. If this does matter can you recommend a vegan calcium supplement that will break down either tablet, powder or liquid?

Answer:

For some background, according to Advanced Nutrition & Human Metabolism (1999), the pH of the stomach is about 2.0. According to Krause’s Food, Nutrition, & Diet Therapy (2000), it ranges from 1 to 4. Vinegar tends to be about 2.0 to 3.0.

The New York State Department of Health has a web page Commonly Asked Questions About Calcium Supplements:

“Calcium must dissolve in your stomach before it can be absorbed in your intestines and then used by your body. A USP symbol on the label of a calcium supplement means that is it will dissolve in your stomach. If your supplement does not have a USP symbol, you can easily test it to find out if it will dissolve. Simply put the supplement into a glass of clear vinegar. This creates an acidic environment much like that of your stomach. Stir the solution occasionally. If the calcium supplement disintegrates within 30 minutes, it should dissolve in your stomach, too. If the supplement does not completely dissolve, choose an alternative calcium supplement.

“If you are taking acid blockers for indigestion, reflux or other gastrointestinal conditions, your body may use calcium citrate better than other calcium compounds. Acid blockers reduce the acid in your gastrointestinal tract that is usually required for calcium absorption. However, unlike other calcium compounds, calcium citrate does not require an acid environment for calcium absorption.”

I did a test with my Trader Joe’s Calcium Magnesium & Zinc supplement, which uses calcium carbonate – I broke one tablet in half and put it in 1/5 cup of apple cider vinegar. After 8 minutes it was completely dissolved.

The Office of Dietary Supplements at the National Institutes of Health has the following to say on their Dietary Supplement Fact Sheet: Calcium:

“The two main forms of calcium in supplements are carbonate and citrate. Calcium carbonate is more commonly available and is both inexpensive and convenient. Both the carbonate and citrate forms are similarly well absorbed, but individuals with reduced levels of stomach acid can absorb calcium citrate more easily. Other calcium forms in supplements or fortified foods include gluconate, lactate, and phosphate. Calcium citrate malate is a well-absorbed form of calcium found in some fortified juices [8]. The body absorbs calcium carbonate most efficiently when the supplement is consumed with food, whereas the body can absorb calcium citrate equally effectively when the supplement is taken with or without food [9].”

This New Scientist article, Omega-3: Fishy claims for fish oil, is good review and casts doubt on the need for omega-3 fatty acid supplementation. That said, I haven’t changed my recommendations for vegans who normally get way too much omega-6s and have lower blood levels of EPA and DHA.

Thanks, Matt!

Once again, I’d like to thank everyone who has purchased items at Amazon via of the links from my website! I really appreciate it and it does cover the web server costs of the site.

And I wanted to remind everyone else that you can support my blog by clicking on any Amazon.com link from the website and as long as you don’t navigate away from Amazon before you buy something, I will get a percentage.

Thank you very much!

P.S. Some of you have written me nutrition questions and I’m a bit behind but hope get to them all soon.

I just updated VeganHealth.org with a page on vitamin K. Some people have claimed that you must eat animal products in order to obtain one of the two main types of vitamin K. After reviewing the research, that does not appear to be the case. Click here to read more about it.

A month old now, but I finally got around to sending out a link to this article Ginny Messina wrote, Hexane in veggie burgers: little science behind the claims.

I am happy to report that we have updated and added a feature to the protein page at VeganHealth.org. If you scroll down to Table 3, you can now type in your ideal body weight, click Submit, and the table will show you how many servings of the listed foods it would take to meet the RDA for protein and the essential amino acids.

Of course, you shouldn’t get all your protein from just one food, but it can give people an idea of what might be required from various food combinations. It’s also not important for everyone to meet the RDA for protein; some people need less.

I’d like to thank Vegan Outreach’s volunteer, Jean B., for all the work she has done to make VeganHealth.org look nicer! She has been redoing the pages one at a time and I really appreciate all her help!

I just updated VeganHealth.org/articles/bones with the following tidbits:

Dr. Jacqueline Chan sums up the studies on vitamin D2 vs. D3, “Treatment for most of the studies finding D2 to be less effective than D3 were extremely large boluses given only once, whereas in studies finding them equally effective, the treatment was daily amounts between 400 and 2,000 IU.” (38)

Test Kit

The Vitamin D Council has partnered with ZRT Labs to make a discounted take-home vitamin D test kit available (for $65 as of April 2010).

Sun Tips

According to Dr. Jacqueline Chan, in order to make vitamin D, “The sun must shine directly on skin without being blocked by sunscreen, glass and most plastics. Glass and most plastics block UVB, the part of the spectrum that converts pro-vitamin D3 but allow passage of UVA which contributes to skin cancer.” (38)

Also according to Dr. Chan, increasing the surface of the skin exposed to the sun proportionately decreases the amount of time needed in the sun to produce the same amount of vitamin D. The duration of the sun exposure should be no more than about half the amount of time it takes for the skin to turn pink. (38)

I have also been getting the impression, based on hearing from people who have been supplementing and getting tested regularly, that it could take large amounts of vitamin D2 (1,000 – 2,000 IU per day) over the course of months to see a significant increase in 20(OH)D levels.

References

38. Vitamin D Update for Nutrition Professionals. Chan J. Vegetarian Nutrition. Volume XVIII, Number 1 and 2, 2009:1.

Although still well short of being an expert on this issue, I did some looking at research on PubMed to try to answer the question of whether tanning beds are a safe and reliable source of vitamin D.

A 2004 study found that tanners had much higher levels of vitamin D (and lower rates of vitamin D deficiency) than non-tanning bed users. They noted that to produce vitamin D, the tanning bed must emit ultraviolet B rays of 290–315 nm. This study did not indicate that they screened subjects based on the UV ray type of the tanning bed they used. A link to entire study is below (1).

I found another abstract that stated that most tanning “devices” emit ultraviolet A rays, which do not produce much vitamin D (2).

Finally, a third abstract below (3) suggests what a lot of others do, that tanning beds can cause skin cancer.

My opinion after checking out the research is that you can get vitamin D from tanning beds if you make sure the bed uses UV B rays of 290–315 nm, but you should probably not spend more than 20 minutes in them at a time.

References

1. Tangpricha V, Turner A, Spina C, Decastro S, Chen TC, Holick MF. Tanning is associated with optimal vitamin D status (serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D concentration) and higher bone mineral density. Am J Clin Nutr. 2004 Dec;80(6):1645-9.

2. Woo DK, Eide MJ. Tanning beds, skin cancer, and vitamin D: An examination of the scientific evidence and public health implications. Dermatol Ther. 2010 Jan;23(1):61-71. (Abstract)

3. Schulman JM, Fisher DE. Indoor ultraviolet tanning and skin cancer: health risks and opportunities. Curr Opin Oncol. 2009 Mar;21(2):144-9.

Article from Men’s Fitness. Link.

Thanks, Matt!

This abstract shows that exposing one serving (84 g) of post-harvest, white button mushrooms to UVB rays for 5 minutes resulted in their having 86.9 µg (3,476 IU) vitamin D2, which is well above the recommended daily intake.

So if you see mushrooms in the store labeled as having 100% of the Daily Value or RDA for vitamin D, it’s probably true.

NPR ran an article today, Fruits and Veggies Prevent Cancer? Not So Much, It Turns Out…

Excerpts:

“A huge nine-year study of diet and cancer, involving nearly a half-million Europeans in 10 countries, finds only a very weak association between intake of fruits and vegetables and cancer incidence. The study is in the current issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Those who get an extra two servings of fruits and veggies a day lower their cancer risk by only four percent.”

Not the best news, but at least it cuts the risk by 4%. I’m inclined to think this study is correct, that fruits and vegetables help prevent cancer, but not by a lot. Good news is later in the article:

“But meanwhile, there’s a pretty strong reason for everybody to continue eating lots of fruits and vegetables. It’s called cardiovascular disease. A 2004 study in the JNCI found that eating five servings of fruits and vegetables a day is associated with a 28 percent lower risk of heart disease and stroke, compared to people who eat fewer than 1.5 servings a day.”

Another good post by Ginny Messina on low-fat diets. Link.

Guest blog by Jeff Novick, MS, RD, LD/N
www.JeffNovick.com

Agave has become the sweetener of choice for many health enthusiasts. It is appearing on store shelves everywhere, in many new products and being promoted in magazines and cooking shows. One of the main benefits we hear is that it is lower in the glycemic index. Is agave really a health food and something you should be including in your diet?

No. To understand why, let us take a closer look at the issues surrounding agave.

Click here to read the entire article.

I just made the following VeganHealth.org update to Pregnancy, Infants, & Children:

In 2008, the American Academy of Pediatrics raised its recommendations for infants from 5 µg (200 IU) of vitamin D per day to 10 µg (400 IU). They stated, “It is now recommended that all infants and children, including adolescents, have a minimum daily intake of 400 IU of vitamin D beginning soon after birth.” (4)

4. Wagner CL, Greer FR, and the Section on Breastfeeding and Committee on Nutrition. Prevention of Rickets and Vitamin D Deficiency in Infants, Children, and Adolescents. Pediatrics 2008;122:1142-1152.