Vitamin D Supplements Exposed

With Jim Stephenson Jr

Oct 14, 2024

Welcome to my Substack

This is an audio post with a transcript of my interview with Jim Stephenson who has over 20 yrs experience researching vitamin D. His findings are shocking.

‘I see it as false hope for people. There are a lot of people that have been looking for a diagnosis of why they're suffering from autoimmune disease or why they're sick and then they get this vitamin D deficiency label and then they start going down that road and taking a lot of what's really a powerful hormone and it's going to lead to a bunch of other imbalances in their body’. - Jim Stephenson Jr

Jim's Substack On Vitamin D

Before we start, if you are interested in Vitamin D UVB lamps here are three I have used.

The UVA & UVB spectrum are divided into these regions:

UVA: 315–400 nm
UVB: 280–315 nm - UVB makes vitamin D

1. Sperti

Company established in 1933. Emmits UVA and UVB 280–400 nm pretty much full spectrum

2. Chroma D

Next generation vitamin D home lamp

Wavelengths:

850nm NIR (near infra red) 40 watt
760 NIR 40 watt
670nm Deep Red 40 watt
630nm Red 20 watt
405nm Violet 30 watt (OPN3 & OPN5 Stimulation)
Narrow band 297nm UVB 25 watt (For Vit. D Production)
No UVA
~1000 IU vitamin D3 in 30 seconds in type II skin

Chroma D - Use Code DRSARA For 10% Off

3. Krypton EMR-TEK

Next-generation vitamin D lamp with red and UVA light

Red light at 630nm and 660nm

Near Infrared light at 810nm and 830nm *

UVB Narrowband (311nm peak) 72 watt vitamin D

Broadband UVA 340-400nm (365/370nm peak)

Krypton - Use Code DRSARA For 15% Off

When To Go Out To Get Vitamin D

New Circadian app to improve your health, get light at the right time, track your vitamin D and more….

Download and get a free trial with my code DRSARA

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Android

Interview Audio - Vitamin D Supplements Exposed

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Transcript

Jim Stephenson Jr 00:00

I see it as false hope for people. There are a lot of people that have been looking for a diagnosis of why they're suffering from autoimmune disease or why they're sick and then they get this vitamin D deficiency label and then they start going down that road and taking a lot of what's really a powerful hormone and it's going to lead to a bunch of other imbalances in their body.

Dr Sara Pugh 00:23

Shall we walk through the vitamin D sort of pathway because a lot of people don't know that there's activity, they don't know you can test for it, they don't know how vitamin D is made and what's the difference between what we make and what we buy in a factory.

Jim StephensonJr 00:38

People will actually take the D3 instead of letting their body make it and that will leave the 70 hydro cholesterol substrate. There'll be more of it left available to become cholesterol. So taking vitamin D is known to impact the lipid panel in a negative way for that reason right there.

Dr Sara Pugh 01:03

Hello and welcome. I'm Sara and today's video is going to be all about vitamin D and I have one of the world experts on vitamin D as a guest. So Jim Stevenson Jr. has been researching vitamin D for over 20 years.

Dr Sara Pugh 01:17

He has also published papers on this subject and he's regarded as one of the world experts in the field. Jim's drive to study vitamin D was after a family member was prescribed a very high dose of vitamin D for osteoporosis and it turned out that this made her worse and created other complications.

Dr Sara Pugh 01:35

This incident gave Jim the incentive to research vitamin D in detail, uncover bad studies as well as the financial incentives behind vitamin D supplementation. Before I hand you over to Jim I know based on the topic of this the vitamin D I'll get a lot of questions and comments about what to do in northern latitudes such as the UK or Canada and some of the northern states in winter when there isn't UVB to make vitamin D.

Dr Sara Pugh 02:04

If you've got enough storage D this will just convert into active D during the winter and you'll learn about this when Jim talks about it. At the end of the video I'll talk a bit more about the chroma D vitamin D making lamp the spurti and the krypton and just show you what they look like.

Dr Sara Pugh 02:22

If it's something you already know about I have experience with all three and if you want to buy a krypton or a chroma D the links are in the description and you can use code Dr Sarah for a discount.

Dr Sara Pugh 02:34

I've also put the link to spurti but you can buy them in all kinds of retail now even I think in Walmart and on Amazon. So I'll hand you over to Jim and his expertise now. Welcome to the channel Jim I've been really looking forward to talking to you about vitamin D for such a long time.

Dr Sara Pugh 02:52

Do you want to introduce yourself to everybody and let them know what we're going to be talking about today? Sure.

Jim StephensonJr 03:00

My name is Jim Stevenson and I've been researching vitamin D for, it'll be 20 years next year because somebody was diagnosed with a deficiency and almost everything that was wrong with them was blamed on that deficiency.

Jim StephensonJr 03:14

And that's what you see in mainstream is that it's the one thing that we might as well call vitamin D deficiency a syndrome because they want to link everything to it. There's not going to be a paper on most autoimmune diseases where they haven't measured vitamin D and try to blame it low level based upon the goal they've set for what's wrong with the people and it's just not realistic because they're measuring an inactive molecule of which there are several different forms.

Jim StephensonJr 03:47

And so it's just, I see it as false hope for people. There's a lot of people that have been looking for a diagnosis of why they're suffering from autoimmune disease or why they're sick. And then they get this vitamin D deficiency label and then they start going down that road and taking a lot of what's really a powerful secosteroid hormone and it's going to lead to a bunch of other imbalances in their body.

Jim StephensonJr 04:14

And it's in studies, clearly it's not working to fix people. They're getting hope from association based studies that look at the past and say this level of vitamin D led to this disease condition, but it won't reverse it.

Jim StephensonJr 04:29

It won't correct it, but that's what's driving the hope and causing the people to take the vitamin D in the first place.

Dr Sara Pugh 04:37

So with these studies, has anybody ever thought to just ask how much outdoor time they get, or is there something going on in the background? Because obviously a vitamin D supplementation is a big business, same as any supplement business.

Dr Sara Pugh 04:49

So is it bad science or is it financially driven?

Jim StephensonJr 04:54

Well, they try to look at that. The problem with when we go in the sun is that they've created the science to look like when you make a certain amount of vitamin D3 and then the rest just goes on and progresses to an inert substance, which isn't true.

Jim StephensonJr 05:10

It progresses to a substance, can revert back to D3, and then has a whole family, as I say, of molecules that actually do things, even though they don't act on calcium, which is what got their inert label in the first place, just because they don't mobilize calcium.

Jim StephensonJr 05:28

And I think a lot of people know now that the active form of vitamin D can really get them in trouble with calcium. So you want to be really careful with it. We wanted some of these other molecules that were abandoned as inert because they didn't mobilize calcium.

Jim StephensonJr 05:43

And when you research those molecules, you'll find that they actually do a lot of wonderful things. So those are the drugs that are making clones of them pretty much and treating autoimmune diseases with them.

Jim StephensonJr 05:59

And you can find that literature if you know what to look for.

Dr Sara Pugh 06:02

Okay, shall we walk through the vitamin D sort of pathway? Because a lot of people don't know that there's active D, they don't know you can test for it, they don't know how vitamin D is made and what's the difference between what we make and what we buy in a factory.

Jim StephensonJr 06:19

Okay, sure. We can start with the substrate that would make the vitamin D3 naturally in your body when you go in the sun, and it's a form of cholesterol, and it's what cholesterol is made from too. It's called 7D hydrocholesterol.

Jim StephensonJr 06:34

So the sun will act on that. The UVB range of UV light will act on that and alter that through a couple small steps to where it will actually become what we know as D3. People will actually take the D3 instead of letting their body make it, and that will leave the 7D hydrocholesterol substrate.

Jim StephensonJr 06:56

There'll be more of it left available to become cholesterol. So taking vitamin D is known to impact the lipid panel in a negative way for that reason right there. So once you have D3, whether you ingested it from a pill or made it in the sun, it's going to travel through the body, but it's going to travel in a completely different way if you made it in the sun than if you ingested it and went into the gut.

Jim StephensonJr 07:21

If you make it in the sun, it will be transported by its carrier protein, which is vitamin D binding protein, and that will take it to the liver. Your gut will also pick it up using LDL cholesterol, which is another impact to your lipid panel because LDL cholesterol can easily get you flagged and headed towards a statin treatment.

Jim StephensonJr 07:43

So then the LDL cholesterol will shuttle the D3 from the gut to the liver, and at that point, the liver will turn it into what they measure, which is 25 hydroxy D, hydroxy vitamin D. And right now we're talking about the D3 faction.

Jim StephensonJr 08:01

You could ingest a D2 faction, and it would be carried from the gut in the same manner with the same LDL cholesterol, go to the liver, and then be activated to a D2 form of 25D. From there, it leaves the liver headed to the kidneys to be altered to the active form.

Jim StephensonJr 08:19

That journey right there is where things get measured. So you have to keep in mind the liver had to make the decision to release the 25D into the blood that they're measuring in the first place. So it's in control of how much is in there.

Jim StephensonJr 08:34

Your body's in control of how much is in there. You can take a lot of vitamin D and push a certain amount through. Some people can. Some people's body has a real problem with that, and they can take a ton and hardly even see a change in their vitamin D.

Jim StephensonJr 08:48

So that active form made by the kidneys is the one that works with the RXR receptor and vitamin A to make what I call the chemical and biological warriors your immune response. That's the molecule of immune response that makes the things that the body decided it wanted.

Dr Sara Pugh 09:11

Okay, yeah that's really important because when I talk to people about vitamin D, I just try to simplify it and say storage D and active D. So what you've said is somebody could be hoarding a huge amount of storage D in their muscles or their liver and because it's a storage molecule it shouldn't really be in the blood anyway unless it's doing something.

Dr Sara Pugh 09:32

So straight away measuring just storage D would look like quite a bad marker just regardless of having an active form that for some people it might be in the blood some people it might be in the liver and you could have organs full of storage D and then people taking supplements on top and we don't know what happens next because what happens if somebody say thought they had they had pseudo low storage D and they took a huge amount of D supplements but there was already a lot of vitamin D in their livers in their muscles what could be some of the side effects of these supplements.

Jim StephensonJr 10:11

You're always messing with calcium when you're talking about D3, 2, 5D, and 1, 2, 5D, what we call the vitamin, the storage, and the active form. Because if you get enough of any one of those in you, it will spike your need for calcium in blood.

Jim StephensonJr 10:27

And when your body has a need for calcium in blood, it's going to find it and it's going to put it there. And if it finds it in the gut, that's still a lot of work for the body, but that's a lot different than if it has to go to bone to get it.

Jim StephensonJr 10:40

And then you're going to end up with osteoporosis, a human form of non fatal rodenticide, as I call it.

Dr Sara Pugh 10:49

Okay, that's pretty serious because osteoporosis is massively on the rise. You mentioned earlier that D and A pair together. What happens to the retinol, the vitamin A, when there's far too much D? What kind of effects could that have on a person?

Jim StephensonJr 11:08

Well, I do know that some of the literature talks about how the two compete for absorption, so you have that to begin with if you have a need for it. So if you were taking them together, you might not get or eating them together, which is the much better way to get it.

Jim StephensonJr 11:22

They might compete for absorption, and that could be an issue for you. And they're both fat soluble, so they're going to both be acquired in the same fashion with the LDL cholesterol and things like that.

Jim StephensonJr 11:34

And there's a lot of different forms of vitamin A, and the literature's changed over time. Right now, the form that we say works in the RXR would be called vitamin A5. I think that paper was written in 2016.

Jim StephensonJr 11:49

So there's a little bit of controversy of which vitamin A molecule is doing the work. But I wanted to talk for a second more about that 25D marker that they're measuring. In my research, I found 15 different forms of 25D.

Jim StephensonJr 12:08

And I've also found that in certain disease states, you will start to make different forms that they aren't measuring traditionally. And so the ratio of vitamin D that they're looking for, they might only be picking up half of the 25D molecules in your blood and labeling you deficient because your body's making one that isn't influenced in calcium.

Jim StephensonJr 12:31

We see this in children. We see this in diabetes and other things like that. The body is going to make a conscious decision to make molecules that don't influence calcium when it doesn't have a need for calcium.

Jim StephensonJr 12:44

So that's pretty important to recognize.

Dr Sara Pugh 12:47

Okay, so what else do you know about these other forms of vitamin D? Of what else do they do?

Jim StephensonJr 12:55

Well, they haven't really nailed down what the epimerization form one does. There's a sulfated, a water -soluble form of it, and then there's a fat -soluble form of it as well. What they do see is that when you supplement the children with it, they will have up to 60 percent of their blood in the epimerization form.

Jim StephensonJr 13:15

The papers I've read didn't differentiate between that in a sulfated form. I think that was just pointing to the fat -soluble form, but it was up to 60 percent of their blood to 5D, and they're being labeled deficient and being told to take more of your traditional D3.

Dr Sara Pugh 13:33

And when they were labeled efficient, did anybody measure their activity, the 1 -2 -5 dihydroxy, or did they just do it purely on the storage D? Notta Notta Notta

Jim StephensonJr 13:44

They just do it solely on the storage D. You pretty much have to ask in demand for a 125D test, and in the United States, they're pretty much trained to not test that. So we don't have a whole lot of data out there or data sets that show how it is in conditions and in disease states.

Jim StephensonJr 14:05

They just aren't measuring it. We know it's going to be high in granulomatous diseases like cancer, sarcoidosis, I think it's going to be typically high in almost any disease state. Therefore, what is the big question at the end of the day would be what do the people think that more vitamin D is for?

Jim StephensonJr 14:25

If the molecule that's active that's doing the work is already high. So that's the big question at the end of the day. We know there's a lot of people that are wanting to raise their vitamin D level, their 25D level, because of the association based studies showing people with lower have all these diseases, but there's no literature showing what would be the mechanism if it were to work, which it's not working in the studies,

Jim StephensonJr 14:51

but if it worked in the studies, what mechanism are they watching for to actually do the work? If we could go a few more decades just measuring 25D and playing games with associations and disease states, but that's not getting anybody anywhere.

Dr Sara Pugh 15:08

Yeah, exactly. So if we loop back to the active form, the 1 ,2 ,5 -hydroxy, I measured it using Quest because they freeze the sample and then when it comes to understanding ranges and what it should be, I think from following you for a while, is the active D meant to be twice the storage D or about one to one or one to three, but then if you see a really low storage D and something like 11 or 7 times more active D,

Dr Sara Pugh 15:39

that's sort of showing a disease stage because some people might have both results and then they don't know what they have active D and storage D tests, but then they don't know what they should be looking for and what's good and what's bad when they've got the correct tests.

Jim StephensonJr 15:54

Right. Well, first of all, it's good to just look at the 125D test by itself and just think about where it is in its range. Is it in range? There are a lot of people that is actually above the top end of the range.

Jim StephensonJr 16:08

I've seen two people level out of range low and one had hypo -parathyroidism and the other one had chronic kidney disease. So they both had defects making the active form of vitamin D. Other than that, I've never had anyone give me a lab that was low.

Jim StephensonJr 16:25

I think with one exception, another person who shared a lab and it was also a hypo -parathyroid situation. And these people take the active form of D because they need to have it. It's super important to have it.

Jim StephensonJr 16:39

So outside of that, I haven't seen it low. So you start there. When it comes to assessing the 25D number, you have to take a couple things into consideration. The season for the person and how drastic is that season where they live?

Jim StephensonJr 16:55

Sometimes it's just a little tiny dip. Other places, it's a huge change. And what were they doing? What is influencing their number already? Have they taken vitamin D in the past? Is it still part of that number for them?

Jim StephensonJr 17:10

So you have to take all that into consideration. But when you have someone like you just said, where they have seven times as much active D as the storage D, say like the person I began with, it was 11 and 76.

Jim StephensonJr 17:28

That's what I call a dysregulation. And there are papers written about that, a high 125D coupled with low 25D. There was exactly that paper written. And those are the kind of people that help drive that self -fulfilling prophecy where they think that the higher your level, the better.

Jim StephensonJr 17:52

Let's imagine that person with 11 and 76 is in a study on the Big C disease that we just went through or still going through. If they're in a group and that person, keep in mind that person started at 23 before they took the dose of the 50 ,000RX.

Jim StephensonJr 18:08

That's what dropped them to 11. Imagine that person went into a study and it was going to be a bolus dose, just like a prescription. And you give all those people the vitamin D, that person's dropped.

Jim StephensonJr 18:22

Some people's won't rise at all. But then there's the healthier people that aren't already having the lower 25D that will go up. And they'll credit all the good things with that 25D number. Driving home, the higher number is better.

Jim StephensonJr 18:39

But the reason that the 25D is higher in healthier people is because it's a negative acute phase reactant. That's super important to understand. C -reactive protein is a positive acute phase reactant.

Jim StephensonJr 18:55

It's going to rise in diseased people and sick people, people with inflammation. Well, the counter is true of the 25D. It's going to drop in people that are sick. It's a marker for illness, just like C -reactive protein is marker for illness.

Jim StephensonJr 19:10

They just go in different directions. So 25D should be expected to be low in sick people. It's a marker, not the cause. They're not burning through their vitamin D. It's not getting used up in the form of 125D.

Jim StephensonJr 19:24

That's not what is happening. The literature shows that those two molecules are not connected like that. They just don't correlate like that. So that isn't the situation. But to drive it home even worse is that the carrier protein, vitamin D binding protein, and albumin, which 15% of albumin carries around 25D, both of those are negative acute phase reactants.

Jim StephensonJr 19:50

So you have a triple hit to that system right there. So you should absolutely expect it to be low. And there's papers about this specifically saying that's why it's low with the C disease, the C virus.

Dr Sara Pugh 20:04

Okay, okay, I see. Yeah. So when it comes to what people should do next, say if someone's listening and they're getting ready for winter and thinking, oh no, I live in Canada or the UK, I need to start supplementing.

Dr Sara Pugh 20:21

Should they be checking their activity all the time? Because that should stay the same all year round, is that correct? And then the storage will fluctuate, just because in winter, people are just using up their storage.

Dr Sara Pugh 20:35

So there's no need to get in a big panic. What would you say about people entering in winter? And there's obviously, I won't mention names of influencers who are really hammering home, taking vitamin D and then doctors will.

Dr Sara Pugh 20:48

I was reading some labs yesterday and it even says in the vitamin D section, it tells people to supplement whether they're, it was a UK lab, whether they're deficient or not. So maybe if we talk about the level, how these levels change through the year and how not to get into a panic about winter and not to panic, you know, if your storage D goes down during winter.

Jim StephensonJr 21:12

Right. You know, you should expect your storage D, as they call it, to go down during winter because it has a seasonal variation because the D3, which a certain amount of it's always going to progress through, whether you're taking it or making it into the sun, 225D.

Jim StephensonJr 21:29

And so when there's no UVB in the winter and you're not making D3, it's naturally going to see the seasonal variation where it drops. Whereas the active form of vitamin D, the one that does the work, the goal, it doesn't have a seasonal variation.

Jim StephensonJr 21:47

And this is where people need to really stop, disconnect for a second and think we get sick in winter. In general, we get sick in winter. There's a couple exceptions. Polio was an exception. It was a June, July disease.

Jim StephensonJr 22:02

But other than that, we get sick in winter. It's tied to people moving from certain geographic locations because of school quarters, semesters, and absolute humidity and things like that. But we get sick in winter.

Jim StephensonJr 22:16

If our immune system were so pathetic that it actually took the winter off when we were going to get sick, we wouldn't be here talking today. We wouldn't be a species that even existed anymore. We would have perished eons ago the first few winters we went through.

Jim StephensonJr 22:33

So that's not how an immune system works. It would be a defective immune system that worked that way. And there's papers about this showing that there's no seasonal variation in it. And even if you were concerned about lower 25D, there are papers that show that people are able to pull 3 ,000, 4 ,000, 5 ,000 IU out of storage every single day during winter.

Dr Sara Pugh 23:00

Okay, where do they pull it out of storage? Is it fat and the muscle? Or where would it come from? They didn't have...

Jim StephensonJr 23:07

have it labeled so they choose that it probably comes from abundance of all those sources and the chief storage organ is the liver though and so the vast majority of it would come from there. It's a real disservice to us for them not to have figured out a way to test that there or to actually be following in all these studies what molecule it's becoming that would be hopeful to make things better for everybody.

Jim StephensonJr 23:31

Nobody's looking at that. We're pills and tests of vitamin D and nobody's getting well and we have study after study that says we need a new study.

Dr Sara Pugh 23:45

I was just about to ask you, in a perfect world, in the bitumen D world, what studies would you love to see done? What do you think are the three most important ones that should be set up and performed?

Jim StephensonJr 23:57

Well, I think that if, I think you would want to probably go ahead and look at what's gone on with the MS patients who have taken really, really huge doses and try to pick a few case studies that you think it really worked on and then use them as an example and do some radiolabeled molecules, see where they go and what they become and see what's going on with that because a lot of people feel hope in that MS Comrio,

Jim StephensonJr 24:26

I don't know if I'm saying it right, that that were from Brazil. So that's a big one that causes people to think that they can take a ton of vitamin D. And if you read his research, he says that he feels those people have an insensitivity to vitamin D.

Jim StephensonJr 24:45

It's not for the general population, but people do hold up huge doses from the MS treatments as if just anybody should go ahead and give that a shot.

Dr Sara Pugh 24:57

Okay, so it would be like radio labeling in a situation where a massive dose of supplements on a serious disease really helped people and find out what happened. Would you also look at the people in that MS study that the supplementation made them worse because there must

Jim StephensonJr 25:14

You'd want to see what molecules they were making that were hurting them. and I don't know a lot of people might know this... When you go on those MS protocols and stuff, they super limit the calcium and stuff like that, so that they don't get hurt by inputs of calcium, but you need to look at what's going on with their internal calcium, what's going on with their bone?

Jim StephensonJr 25:35

Are they shuffling calcium around? Stuff like that. There's not a whole lot of information, I haven't been able to find a lot of information about the scientific pathogenesis model that's being, you know, portrayed there.

Dr Sara Pugh 25:50

Okay, because back to what you said earlier about sometimes people just take things and they don't know what they're doing and why they're doing it, because I have seen a variety of cancer protocols and cancer studies where the vitamin D supplementation is vital for this.

Dr Sara Pugh 26:07

What's your thoughts on these studies and what those data

Jim StephensonJr 26:13

Most of the types of cancer, I'm sure that if you dig into the deep science of it, you'll find they have a way of blocking the action of vitamin D. They wouldn't express as many vitamin D receptors as they do if vitamin D was going to go there and kill them.

Jim StephensonJr 26:32

They express up to 400 percent more vitamin D receptors than healthy tissue adjacent to the tumors. And so if vitamin D was going to go there and kill them, you'd see it immediately. Others, they cease to express the vitamin D receptors.

Jim StephensonJr 26:51

Each cancer model is different, and there's different forms of cancer inside each model actually. So that's pretty complex, but it's not working. They run into hypercalcemia almost immediately trying to use a 125D molecule or one like that that influences calcium.

Jim StephensonJr 27:10

But the sad thing is that you can follow other pathways. Here's the difference. If the science is coming to you in your inbox and it's about the vitamin D deficiency, it's going to be fluff. But if you go out and you look at an image of the metabolism of vitamin D and pick a molecule you haven't heard of and you go and do guided research into it and look that molecule up on PubMed or any of the journals,

Jim StephensonJr 27:37

all of a sudden you may find, wow, this thing cures cancer. Why are we not using it instead of trying to make one like 125D that doesn't cause calcium issues? Well, because that was a natural molecule.

Jim StephensonJr 27:51

It's not patentable, so they're not going to do it. They'll try to make something like it, and there's probably something like it already. So that's the sad thing. We know which molecules will work that are natural on most of the cancers.

Jim StephensonJr 28:05

We know which molecules that are work that are natural on COVID, and some of them are vitamin D molecules. Some of them are in honey, but they're not made from 25D. That's the bad thing. We're so focused on 25D that we've already committed to a pathway that we know is going to lead to hypercalcemia and isn't working.

Jim StephensonJr 28:25

It's a failed model, in my opinion.

Dr Sara Pugh 28:28

Do you think for some people it's a placebo effect when they take these supplements? Because I've heard people say things like, oh yeah, if I don't take my vitamin D supplements up, my joints get inflamed.

Dr Sara Pugh 28:40

Is there a possible reason for that? Or do you think some of these things are placebo? Or do you think a lot of the use of vitamin D supplementation is just blindly, like people have got no idea what they're doing?

Dr Sara Pugh 28:54

Or do you think, I'm trying to even think now, if you ask somebody, why do you take it? Would you feel any different? They tend to not answer, whereas that example of that person who said, oh no, it helps my inflammation, is that possible that the supplement could do that?

Jim StephensonJr 29:13

It can do that. It absolutely can do that. We see that in the chemo trials. People are probably tired of hearing me say that. You give the placebo and they expect their hair to fall out and 65% of the time it falls out.

Jim StephensonJr 29:28

But this is a different kind of placebo effect because they're getting, they anticipate a negative thing and they bring it to them in the placebo effect. They could anticipate the positive thing that that chemo is going to work, whether it should or not, and then the chemo could work.

Jim StephensonJr 29:45

So now let's think about in the vitamin D's helping them world, they're expecting it to help. They're thinking the positive side of things. They're not expecting the negative side of things. So when I see people that are gung -ho about it, and I don't mean that to be a negative thing, it seems to help those people that buy in from the get -go, at least a little bit it seems like.

Jim StephensonJr 30:07

Whereas other people that are just like, well, I don't know, I'll try it. Those are sometimes the people that are reporting the negative side effects or not anything at all, no effect at all. So I think how they go into it in the first place, you're going to either embrace a placebo effect.

Jim StephensonJr 30:24

There's other things. There's other biological things that could be going on. You could be having a steroid effect like prednisone, something like that. You could be blocking another system that was doing something good.

Jim StephensonJr 30:37

I mentioned this yesterday, doing something good that was causing you to feel ill as you had a pathogen die off or something like that. And once you block that, you're not going to be experiencing the negative aspects of recovery, as they call Hertzheimer type reactions.

Jim StephensonJr 30:55

So it could be any number of things, but unless and until they start tracking the molecules, we won't know. We track the molecules early on. I don't know why we pretend like we're in the Stone Age now and it's just be so complex to figure out what's really going on.

Jim StephensonJr 31:11

It's almost like we don't want to.

Dr Sara Pugh 31:13

Yeah, that's why because the vitamin D business is too well established now. And like you said, there are cancer preventing or helping D derivatives, but like you said, they can't be patented, so there's no money, so people are not interested.

Dr Sara Pugh 31:30

Just back again to other effects, reports are touted with supplements. How does it influence appetite?

Jim StephensonJr 31:40

You know, I, there's not a whole lot of literature on that. You have to be really careful what you read in a paper that they say is driven by low vitamin D that's an association because you can just about get anything into a paper now, you know, joke about a bad haircut and stuff like that.

Jim StephensonJr 31:57

I've seen where they said it helped, they say it helps just about anything if they study it like that, but it doesn't fix a disease state or at least they'll say low and it contributes to everything.

Jim StephensonJr 32:10

It's, it's like if you're going to study fibromyalgia, you're going to measure vitamin D and you're going to say its impact on fibromyalgia. If you're going to study Parkinson's, you're going to measure vitamin D and you're going to say, oh, the people do worse this, but that's because it's a marker for illness once again, but it drives home that self -fulfilling prophecy.

Jim StephensonJr 32:29

But if you were measuring the 125D, you'd see that they aren't coupled, it's not low. If 125D, the active form, were the driver of illness being low or the driver of illness, its goal would have had to have been raised in 2010 along with the goal for 25D.

Jim StephensonJr 32:49

That doesn't make any sense. We only raised the goal for 25D. We had to raise the goal.

Dr Sara Pugh 32:56

Because you just said previously that really high activity is also a disease state marker, so trying to say more is better isn't appropriate.

Jim StephensonJr 33:08

No, it isn't. It isn't. It's your immune response molecule. That's why they have that kind of range, and you see a lot of people in the 40s. I seldom see anybody dip below the 40s. You know, 40, somewhere in the 40 seems to be a really good number to me.

Jim StephensonJr 33:24

That's what I see with people that are doing good. You can see with people that aren't doing good too sometimes.

Dr Sara Pugh 33:30

Oh right, so that's in the 40s for the active 125D. Because also the other big issue is there's a big massive debate about what the storage D should be and there's a little bit of sort of where did this number come from.

Dr Sara Pugh 33:45

Maybe if you want to talk a little bit about what, because we've

Jim StephensonJr 33:57

What it is is they used to have a goal, and I think I've said 12 and a half a lot, but I think the goal actually originally was 10 to 30, you know, but 10 being the bottom end. And they wanted to move it to 20, and that's actually what they said it at around 2008.

Jim StephensonJr 34:18

The Institutes of Medicine and New York Academy of Sciences looked at all of the research, and then they came up with a number, and then Halleck followed up with the Endocrine Society, and they actually said there was some statistical mistake, and there wasn't, and got it raised to 30 plus, and that's where we're at now.

Jim StephensonJr 34:40

So if you're below 20, you're going to get labeled deficient, and that would be 50 in animal. So 20 is in the NG, and then if you were 20 to 30 is insufficient, and so that's 30 is 60, I believe, in nanomole.

Jim StephensonJr 35:00

And if you're above that, it's okay, but some places they're shooting for 40 plus, 50 plus, 80 plus, try to hit 100. So there's a lot of people shooting for higher than that. And so that's all based upon associations, looking at who has what type of disease, and at what level, what's the highest level we see those people with that disease, and we'll call that the cutoff, and make sure you're above that 25D number for colorectal cancer,

Jim StephensonJr 35:29

make sure you're above that for Parkinson's, make sure you're above that for lung cancer. So it's all association based, we have no idea what those people's 125D was, their cancer, it would be probably triple digits.

Jim StephensonJr 35:45

So what is more vitamin D can do for those people?

Dr Sara Pugh 35:51

Yeah, exactly. Because there's too much data on one form and hardly any on the active form. Because, yeah, just because when you were describing the numbers, I think you went in because our units are in nanomolar and then you were saying that the bars moved.

Dr Sara Pugh 36:07

So it's now 20 to 30 nanograms would be all right. And now they're trying to get people, they're trying to say, oh, it should be up to sort of 80 nanograms. I think that's something like 250 nanomolar.

Dr Sara Pugh 36:22

So what's going to be the outcome? Or how is this going to, do you think it's going to get worse that this vitamin D obsession is going to get worse and people are just going to be taking higher and higher supplements?

Dr Sara Pugh 36:35

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Jim StephensonJr 38:11

I think because of the self -fulfilling prophecy piece of it, it's really tough because they're all publishing the same science that's all association -based. And no one's, if you're going to build your whole paper around a deficiency, you're not going to bring a bunch of labs in where those people that you're labeling deficient have sky -high active vitamin D and put that in your paper too.

Jim StephensonJr 38:36

I don't think you get published, but it just doesn't make any sense in a deficiency, especially if it's a paper that begins out, begins explaining how vitamin D works. Almost every paper on vitamin D deficiency will actually start out telling you how the vitamin D accomplishes what it does.

Jim StephensonJr 38:54

It'll mention the active form. Sometimes it'll mention how it works, heterodimerize with the RXR, but at some point it will point out this is the one that does it. And then they bait and switch back to a low 25D and then they don't ever go back and say, well, we already told you this is the one that's going to do the work and they'll never establish it's low and it's not going to be.

Jim StephensonJr 39:18

That's really not compatible with life. You know, you're not going to find it. It's just not compatible with life. You have to have that form of vitamin D and you're not going to be low in it. And I've talked about this before.

Jim StephensonJr 39:32

I want to mention this. It's the level of, let's say you go to the doctor and your vitamin D is 20. When the doctor, in our numbers, in G, the doctor's going to want you at 30 at a minimum. So let's say you start taking an amount of vitamin D, 2000 IU every day, and that gets you to 40.

Jim StephensonJr 39:54

And now you're at 40 and that's exactly what they want to see. You were deficient. We prescribed a fix. You're in this range. We're happy with you. But the point really is that that doesn't show any utilization of vitamin D.

Jim StephensonJr 40:09

And the reason I say that is because if the doctor's trying to tell you that 20 to 40 that you have in your body now, you're actually using and it's making your life better and it's fixing something.

Jim StephensonJr 40:20

Well, when you take it back away, you drop to 20. If your body needs 20 in G of vitamin D and you take it away, it's going to use the base 20 up and you're going to be at zero. It's just, it's just throughput.

Jim StephensonJr 40:36

That's all you're seeing is throughput of daily inputs of vitamin D. That's why they don't like bolus dosing. It really messes up the consistency of labs because it's all let go at once and the body does it a little different.

Jim StephensonJr 40:50

So you're really not seeing your body utilize any of that 25 D if you're able to up your lab just from taking it every day. That's not utilization. They can track it. They can radio label it. They can watch what it becomes.

Jim StephensonJr 41:05

They can see that it actually does something, but by and large, it's probably just leaving your body.

Dr Sara Pugh 41:12

Okay, so just to summarize what we've talked about, if people read a paper on vitamin D, it's just going to tell you that there's two forms, briefly mention the active form, and then when you look at the results, all they've done is measured the storage form and pretended the active one doesn't exist, and attribute all of anything to that number going up.

Dr Sara Pugh 41:34

Then secondly, all of the people that do this research all kind of know each other, so there's like a group of people, it's like that they're publishing to agree with each other, and anything that comes in, like you said, that's going to massively disagree with this, such as looking at active D, they just throw, they kind of throw that data away because it doesn't agree with the narrative.

Dr Sara Pugh 41:55

And then you were saying that the doctor might give somebody vitamin D to push it up from 20 nanograms to 40, but that patient might feel no different from being at 40 to 20, and then they take the supplement away and the patient's number goes back down to 20, and the patient still feels exactly the same.

Dr Sara Pugh 42:14

So is that sort of how this bizarre vitamin D narrative is working?

Jim StephensonJr 42:21

Right. But there'll be ones that go to their doctor that won't look at it like I do, and they'll think it's a wonderful thing. Hey, I'm deficient in vitamin D. They go home, they tell their family, and they may even get everybody in their family on it.

Jim StephensonJr 42:34

That's a pretty common thing when people find vitamin D. They want to spread the joy with their family and friends. And it's just, it's not a real thing. It's not. I do think there's one thing that might change this, and that's the fact that we have been ignoring the true storage form of vitamin D for a long time, which is the sulfated water soluble form.

Jim StephensonJr 42:57

And that's what I've, I went and did a deep dive on and found right at 50, a little under 50 papers on it across a little over 60 years. And that's a big deal. But that's a lot to get your head around.

Dr Sara Pugh 43:13

I think I wanted to ask about sulphated vitamin D because there's a whole different story to this because it's like sulphated cholesterol and DHEAS, which is DHEA sulphate, but they're kind of a completely different molecule because being water soluble and they have different properties so you're welcome to talk about sulphated D because I know that sunlight plays a role in sulphation but then there's going to be more to the story but I think it's important to educate people about this form as well.

Jim StephensonJr 43:44

Sure. Now I did run into them talking about the DHEA and the estrogen and the other sulfated forms of steroids and the literature did say that it's commonly known that steroids are stored in a stable sulfated form ready to become the form they need unsulfated to do the processes they're there for.

Jim StephensonJr 44:09

What I found really fascinating about vitamin D was that the body sulfates, if you could look at the mainstream focus of vitamin D as a four -step process, that being 70 hydrocholesterol, D3, 2 ,5 -D, and 1 ,2 ,5 -D, there's a sulfated form of every one of those molecules and a fat -soluble form of every one of those molecules.

Jim StephensonJr 44:36

Not just at one level is there a sulfated vitamin D at every one of those levels and the literature says that the 70 hydrocholesterol sulfate is made from the unsulfated the fat -soluble form. They say that at each level they're made from their own counterpart and then they return to their counterpart as needed.

Jim StephensonJr 45:03

But what was really interesting about this, the minute you mention water -soluble vitamins to people they're going to say well they lose your body immediately but that isn't true of these water -soluble sulfated molecules.

Jim StephensonJr 45:16

I don't know about DHEA and the others but the exact same carrier protein that carries around the fat -soluble vitamin D molecules carries around the sulfated water -soluble molecules. In fact the attraction to the carrier protein is identical so there's no competition for carriers here and if people don't know it that's what establishes the half -life on those molecules is the vitamin D binding protein not the molecule of vitamin D so they have the same half -life now too as well.

Dr Sara Pugh 45:50

Alright, so with a sulfated form, if you do a blood test, can it tell the difference between, or does it detect, does it not detect the sulfated form, or does it get mixed in with the reading? No, it doesn't detect it.

Jim StephensonJr 46:06

have to get a specific test. And this is stuff that isn't really available to us yet. I did have one person in my vitamin D group that had a test that they had been, two tests, they had been asking us about their two to five D tests.

Jim StephensonJr 46:23

And at the time I was really busy. When I finished this research and I had read about all these new types of tests that do eight and 12 different molecules, sulfated, non -sulfated, I took a look at what she had there.

Jim StephensonJr 46:36

And lo and behold, she had a fat soluble two five D test and a water soluble two five D test. Now let's imagine this was the United States and all they got was a fat soluble vitamin D test. This person's vitamin D fat soluble was 11.

Jim StephensonJr 46:50

That person would be on a 50 ,000 IU prescription immediately dousing their body with fat soluble molecule. What was this person's water soluble vitamin D level? 90. 90. So overall they were 101. They definitely were not deficient.

Jim StephensonJr 47:08

So that's probably what we're going to see. That's you see breast milk profiles that the water soluble dominates. So totally dominates like 95 to 5% in breast milk. In all the human serum profiles, whether you're pregnant or not, you're male, female, child, adult, there's more water soluble in everybody than there is fat soluble in the same counterpart molecule.

Dr Sara Pugh 47:36

Yeah, because this is massive now because people who are cottoning on to things now get D and active D test, but now we're saying actually that that's not good enough. We need really the sulphated forms if they're the predominant forms.

Dr Sara Pugh 47:51

So is there anything else to say about the breast milk and the sulphated forms and carrying on on this conversation?

Jim StephensonJr 48:01

These two things are really huge besides the carrier protein is the fact that supplementing does not alter your sulfated levels. So they're not going to be able to push that narrative that oh well let's at least get maybe you get both your levels up by taking vitamin D.

Jim StephensonJr 48:17

No, it doesn't get your water soluble up because that body's already seen that as the storage form to become the fat soluble. There's no seasonal variation in it either. So those two.

Dr Sara Pugh 48:29

Okay, because there could be people that have low storage, low active, but then they've got a huge amount of sulfated that nobody ever measures that are perfectly healthy and galloping about, because I've seen that, and there was nothing wrong with the person, because that's why I was asking you about what studies would you love to see.

Dr Sara Pugh 48:49

And I think looking at the sulfated form of vitamin D would be really fascinating.

Jim StephensonJr 48:56

Right. Yeah, they're going to need to track that through and see. Since it doesn't have a seasonal variation, the active form doesn't have a seasonal variation. That's probably the system that's maintaining you through winter.

Jim StephensonJr 49:08

You're clearly not low in either one of those important molecules. And again, you're not out of vitamin D. People act like 20 is out. I don't understand. It's all association -based. 20, people that have a level of 20 didn't do as well as people that have a level of 40.

Jim StephensonJr 49:26

Just association. But what was their active vitamin D? I bet you the people that had the 20 storage D had higher active D than the people at 40. They're sick. They're going through something. You know, we would expect them to do worse.

Jim StephensonJr 49:40

We just need to uncouple blaming that vitamin D for it.

Dr Sara Pugh 49:46

So are you saying that there could be completely, there are other factors totally separate to the vitamin D making them sick? Or do you think there is something to it? We're just looking the wrong way and at the wrong molecules and we don't look at the wrong ratio.

Dr Sara Pugh 50:00

It's a mixture of both that there's something huge to the vitamin D, but we're looking at the wrong thing. Plus, these people might, there might be some other pathway that's making them sick and it's nothing to do with vitamin D at all.

Jim StephensonJr 50:14

Right. It could be enzyme competition. If you're on a prescription drug of any kind, the first thing you're going to have to do is rule that out. See how that's assimilated by your body. See, if you can read a lot of good stuff about all the enzymes, it's pretty easy to read up on them and see what blocks them, what increases them, decreases them, including the natural things.

Jim StephensonJr 50:37

And you might be on two things that are using the same enzyme, and they may be competing with a natural enzyme. So you got to consider what unnatural things you're doing first and rule those things out.

Jim StephensonJr 50:51

But I think we're just looking at the wrong molecules. But I don't know why the body isn't, by and large, making the right molecules in the sick people. I can't say they got blocked in the first place by vitamin D.

Jim StephensonJr 51:08

I can't blame that. I think everybody has the potential to have a different type of hack, as I call it in them. You know, that's why I say look at your prescription drug. Is it blocking something? I really don't know.

Jim StephensonJr 51:22

I wish somebody would start radio labeling these molecules. And so we could see in the well people what pathways are being utilized. You can find a lot of interesting stuff, but not utilization. You can find which tissues express this.

Jim StephensonJr 51:36

You can look at protein atlases. You can see the potential for wellness, but they need to figure out why it's not happening. And that's what nobody's trying to do. They just want to tell everybody why they're sick.

Dr Sara Pugh 51:48

But also isn't magnesium involved in pretty much every step of this vitamin D pathway? So do you think people having different levels of magnesium is part of this story as well?

Jim StephensonJr 52:02

Some people, if they're truly deficient in magnesium, that could be an issue. I've seen the diagrams that show you where magnesium is used in the vitamin D activation steps. I don't know which molecule it's pointing to in magnesium because there's a lot of different molecules of magnesium, and that gets pretty complicated too.

Jim StephensonJr 52:25

But any of the co -factors could be an issue. It's really like we're being fed association science right now instead of real science. If they would do real science, then we would probably have some answers to those things.

Jim StephensonJr 52:42

But I can say this though. When I find a molecule, like yesterday I mentioned a molecule that does wonders in the body. When I find a molecule and I look at it and they have specifically looked at that molecule, they're able to accomplish stuff with those molecules.

Jim StephensonJr 52:57

And they're natural molecules. So we need to find out why they're not innocent doing what they do in the studies.

Dr Sara Pugh 53:03

Yeah, that's what I was interested in, of what's stopping the right molecules being made. And can you mention different medications and drugs? Are there any common ones or classic vitamin D disrupting medications or substances that people need to know about?

Jim StephensonJr 53:22

Glyphosate messes with CYP enzymes, for sure, in any of the steroid world, including the vitamin D world. I do know that one of those water -soluble 2 ,5 -Ds that I found is called a gluconoride. I'm probably saying it wrong, but it travels in bile back into the gut and it's the 2 ,5 -D arrival in the gut in case the body wants 1 ,25 -D in the gut.

Jim StephensonJr 53:47

Well, it's also a substrate to make some molecules to go through the body and immediately found out that those transporters are used by the statins. And so I think a statin's immediately, I think taking vitamin D can easily get you on a statin right away because it's going to mess up your lipid panel and you're definitely going to have more LDL cholesterol to shuttle the oral D you're taking.

Jim StephensonJr 54:11

And then once you get a statin in you, they're really just molecules of vitamin D. Grimes, David Grimes has done a lot of work on that. And they all have a different, there's a lot of different statins.

Jim StephensonJr 54:23

They all have different affinities to the thyroid receptors, just like vitamin D does. So once you're on any of those meds and it does look like, I'm sure that if the statins are using, the transporters are called oat.

Jim StephensonJr 54:36

I think it's organic, the anion, I don't know what the middle word is, but those are the transporters that are being stolen by statins that the gluconoride would make would be a substrate for. So now think about that.

Jim StephensonJr 54:53

There's nothing organic about statins. Why are they hitching a ride on your organic transporters? And those things take things to tumors and stuff like that. So that could be a serious blockage right there.

Jim StephensonJr 55:05

What if the substrate of the gluconoride is going to make an anti -cancer vitamin D molecule, but statins stole the transport.

Dr Sara Pugh 55:14

Okay, that would make a lot of sense. Are there any other ones that you know of or any substances that people use recreationally that might mess up their vitamin D? Because you mentioned glyphosate as a sort of household product.

Jim StephensonJr 55:31

Well, I do know that caffeine causes you to cease to express your vitamin D receptors in a dose -dependent fashion, which makes sense if you look at it as an insecticide made by plants, so it might have a way of blocking our body from expressing VDRs to detox it.

Jim StephensonJr 55:49

So that's a pretty simple one right there. There's probably going to be other things like that. I found that paper really fascinating.

Dr Sara Pugh 55:58

Yeah, that's the kind of thing I'm really interested in because lots of psychoactive things in plants and not for us, it's to get repel the insects. So yeah, that's that's interesting because also you mentioned something else that reminded me of a question because you were talking about how the vitamin D and the thyroid receptor have a relationship, but also doesn't the melatonin receptor and vitamin D have a relationship about molecules that can go into other molecules receptors or dimerization of different receptors.

Dr Sara Pugh 56:27

Maybe if we talk about that a little bit because that was really interesting what you said about the thyroid.

Jim StephensonJr 56:34

Yes. So that's in Amy, I don't know how to say her last name, ProL, P -R -O -A -L. She has a paper that talks about the attraction of the active form of vitamin D to several of the other nuclear receptors and it always has a higher attraction to the other receptors, which is odd, but its tight regulation would explain that.

Jim StephensonJr 56:56

But the minute that's gone, you'll lose your thyroid to it, things like that. But there's other natural molecules. Let's talk about Epstein -Barr for a second. Epstein -Barr makes three antigens, EBNA 1, 2, and 3.

Jim StephensonJr 57:12

All of those are the right shape to sit in the vitamin D receptor, but having a flare of Epstein -Barr will cause active D to be created in your body. So now it won't have its receptor. That's a perfect time for it to go and take the thyroid, glucocorticoid, adrenal, any of those other receptors.

Jim StephensonJr 57:31

So that's a displacement right there that can happen.

Dr Sara Pugh 57:35

Oh, I see. So, so that's part of when people have really high activity of why they're sick, it's because the activity is going into receptors that belong to a different ligand and then creating... Yeah.

Jim StephensonJr 57:47

They can't find their own and it also has been documented that when the vitamin D can't get to its own receptor it can't down regulate itself. So yes, not being able to regulate itself through its own receptor it would rise unabated until the body stopped to express the vitamin D receptors and it will reach a point where it does that.

Jim StephensonJr 58:08

It's called VDR deactivation and it'll cease to express vitamin D receptors and at that point the body's not going to release very much 2 ,5 -D from the liver. There's not really any purpose for it to go and get activated because we're not expressing receptors for it.

Dr Sara Pugh 58:25

Okay, and then on the subject of molecules going into other molecules receptors, what about melatonin and vitamin D? Is it true that it can go in the vitamin D receptor in winter or whenever?

Jim StephensonJr 58:38

that I the first time I heard that was yesterday so I need to look at that and I and I mentioned that I need to see which vitamin D receptor it went into. We've talked about the nuclear one today you and I with the rxr there's a membrane one and they are distinctly different proteins and so I'm really curious about which one it went to.

Jim StephensonJr 58:57

One's considered a rapid response receptor it happens in seconds to minutes whereas the pairing is a slow genomic response so that's news to me I haven't heard about that stealing that but I can tell you another swap out that we're seeing and so normally the rxr is the pairing with the vitamin D receptor sometimes the p53 protein which is the guardian of the genome protein usually protects you sometimes it can displace the rxr and there's a paper about that happening that I could send you oh yeah

Dr Sara Pugh 59:37

I know that'd be really interesting because the other thing I wanted to ask about that this is a game for more the public because they have an obsession with snips and vitamin D snips, what's the story with that?

Dr Sara Pugh 59:50

Are those just snips that have adapted based on where that their ancestors sort of lived or does it matter if people have got snips or watch the story there?

Jim StephensonJr 01:00:04

There's a few snips that I think matter, but they aren't going to be the VDR snips and the VDR one that's of concern. BSM, there might be one more letter in it. There might be four letters in it, but basically the BSM VDR one causes you to send the two five D's through to one two five D way too fast.

Jim StephensonJr 01:00:25

Those people are going to have a lot of 125 D's. So you definitely, none of them really want to take it, but absolutely with that one, that is seen. But when you read the literature on the snips and you see that they tell you the general population is low in vitamin D.

Jim StephensonJr 01:00:41

Just because you have some vitamin D snips doesn't mean you need to be taking vitamin D. What influenced your genome there, two things, the pool available genetics from your lineage, plus the photo period present at conception of your mother.

Jim StephensonJr 01:00:58

That's what passed on your what I call the MTHFR genome. And there's papers on that. It's meant to be an advantage. So if you're drastically different location now than where you were conceived, you might see something going on there that your body's probably going to adapt to epigenetics.

Jim StephensonJr 01:01:20

Yeah, I don't think you're locked into anything like that. I think the body's way too versatile. I look at the body like a well designed machine that will run on any oil, run on any fuel, has multiple pathways to accomplish the same thing.

Jim StephensonJr 01:01:37

This vitamin D water soluble sulfate system, if you were going to sit down and design it, I think you would design it like it turns out to be. It just makes sense when you see how it works. So I just think that we have become convinced that our body doesn't have the capability to take care of itself.

Dr Sara Pugh 01:01:56

Yeah, because I was going to say maybe there's all these snips, because isn't there like over 36 in this vitamin D system, maybe the body doesn't need it or it doesn't want certain forms of vitamin D and that's it's deliberately like down regulating the production of it and stuffing more and more and more supplements in is sort of overloading a system because with the snips, like you said, they're there to give an advantage.

Dr Sara Pugh 01:02:22

They're there for a reason for that environment. Because that's the other thing people get all panicked about is the snips. Oh, I can't make bit about vitamin D. But as you were saying, it's like, well, which form can't you make?

Dr Sara Pugh 01:02:35

Because I think with the snips, they're not particularly well understood or are they now or do they just focus on storage active and the receptor and they don't consider all these other intermediates.

Jim StephensonJr 01:02:47

I think everybody has their own different theory of how this stuff works. Like if you were to read Yasco's stuff on MTHFR or Ben Lynch's, they'd have different opinions of how to approach each snip differently.

Jim StephensonJr 01:03:00

There's a lot of time between the two of them studying that stuff, but still, yeah, I just, I think it's a niche that people get into and try to figure out, but I don't know. I don't know a lot of people making a lot of headway working on listening.

Dr Sara Pugh 01:03:17

Yeah, that's what I thought, because just for the people listening, because I know the kind of questions I get asked all the time that, you know, not to get in the panic if it looks like you've got some interesting snips other than the one you mentioned, and not to get into a panic about the about the winter and your snips and suddenly start taking a ton of supplement.

Dr Sara Pugh 01:03:36

Right. Yeah, because I want, just on the subject of, just so we can wrap up, because you've obviously been very generous with information and time, we haven't talked about one thing, vitamin D from food, and things like mushrooms, because they have a D2, and then things like salmon and liver, and what happens when we eat vitamin D that got made by the sun, because the animal was in the sun at some point.

Dr Sara Pugh 01:04:03

How is that different to the supplements?

Jim StephensonJr 01:04:08

You know, that's going to be your whole food stuff. There might be stuff there we haven't discovered and I just, there doesn't seem to ever be a problem with that. In fact, there were some studies that looked specifically at vitamin D, vitamin K, maybe magnesium, and they said when they used it from supplements, not only did it not help, they saw some harm.

Jim StephensonJr 01:04:30

I'll send you that paper, but they saw benefit from it being nutritional form. Actually, I'm glad you brought that up. I did want to talk about the mushrooms in the D2 world there today. Mushrooms are a world of D2, D3, and D4, depending upon the mushroom and their exposure.

Jim StephensonJr 01:04:50

But what I find fascinating is, we want to put them in the sun to have the ergosterol, if I'm saying it correctly, become the D2. Actually, any that doesn't get converted before you eat the mushroom, we have an enzyme that can do that.

Jim StephensonJr 01:05:05

It doesn't have to be done with UV. It's not the same reaction. It doesn't necessarily make the same thing, but we have a way to assimilate that too. But from what I've seen, the D2 molecules are amazing.

Jim StephensonJr 01:05:17

They are really amazing. There are active forms of them. I think that when people are on D2 prescriptions, one of the reasons it doesn't increase their 2 ,5 -D is because it doesn't go to a pathway that's going to make a 2 ,5 -D form of it.

Jim StephensonJr 01:05:32

It's going to make other like a 20 form of it, or a 17 form of it. There are some pretty amazing D2 molecules out there, so I definitely wouldn't hesitate to eat those. That's the only way you're going to get D2 or D4 is by ingesting it.

Jim StephensonJr 01:05:48

You make D3. Just think about it. Just broaden your horizons there. It's going to make completely different things. They're anti -cancer molecules and stuff. That's what I'm saying is that they fight diseases and stuff.

Dr Sara Pugh 01:06:02

Oh yeah because in Japan they use medicinal mushrooms like turkey tail for cancer and then the mushroom that grows somewhere is the Amanita muscaria, the fly agaric, that's something like a hundred times more vitamin D than others but then like you were saying there's probably lots of forms and then when we eat the salmon or the mushroom it's going to be a big mixture of biological forms not just one form like the supplement and then that's like you said well like we talked earlier a lot of the time with the food vitamin A comes at the same time and so does vitamin K and magnesium so it's like other things are coming along when you take it naturally from the mushrooms or the fish or the liver.

Dr Sara Pugh 01:06:47

Have you got anything else to say about the mushroom D2 and D3 molecules?

Jim StephensonJr 01:06:55

No, I would just say that they're very overlooked. And if you go and you target research on them, like the D4 molecule or something like that, or do a D2 pathway, you know, just do an image of that and see what molecules are made.

Jim StephensonJr 01:07:08

Once you start looking at those molecules, you're going to be asking yourself, why are we obsessed with 2 ,5 -D? Why are we not talking about 17 ,20 -D2? I don't understand, you know, and so we're just focused on little tiny nothing of the world of vitamin D.

Dr Sara Pugh 01:07:27

Yeah so with the mushrooms do they all make a lot of, in general a lot with a few exceptions they make a huge amount. Are there certain mushrooms that are culinary that are better than others at making vitamin D or are they all okay?

Jim StephensonJr 01:07:43

You know, I don't know that any are better than the others. I have a few posts on my Facebook about that and I put studies there with them and it named the particular mushrooms. So I will definitely get those for you so you can put them out.

Dr Sara Pugh 01:07:57

Oh yeah, y 'all people can look up because I think oyster mushroom or shiitake or maitake is, but I don't know. I think it's obviously going to depend where it grew, but just the take -home message is look into the mushrooms.

Dr Sara Pugh 01:08:12

There's a lot more to them and they have their own special vitamin D's that are unique to them. And that could be because sometimes people say it's things like the beta -glycans in the mushrooms that are doing the magic, but maybe it's not.

Jim StephensonJr 01:08:27

right? It could be any number of things. I always think of the minding your mitochondria, Ted Talk, by Terri Walls, where she says, eat this big old plate of vegetables and we know this in here is good for you.

Jim StephensonJr 01:08:40

But what about all the stuff we haven't discovered yet? The stuff we haven't discovered may be way better than the stuff we have discovered. So you just never know. I do think that when I looked at the mushrooms and I looked at the enzyme that converts the ergosterol, I think that also continued on a pathway that made an anti -cancer or some amazing molecule.

Jim StephensonJr 01:08:59

So there's two different pathways. You let it become D2 before it enters you. You let some of it come in as a substrate of D2 and you get two completely different pathways of D2 established in your body.

Dr Sara Pugh 01:09:12

Oh, yeah, that's fascinating. Because just before we wrap up, because I was going to ask about mitochondria anyway, because there are BDR receptors in the mitochondria, aren't there? Because how does, what's the relationship between vitamin D and mitochondria?

Dr Sara Pugh 01:09:27

How does it work? Why are the receptors in there?

Jim StephensonJr 01:09:31

I have never read a stitch of science on why they're there or what they do for it, to be honest with you. Nothing, which probably means that I should and it's probably super important.

Dr Sara Pugh 01:09:43

Yeah, I don't know. Off the top of your head, because I have my theory of why it's in there, what do you think it might be? Because some people like to speculate. I do, whereas other people are like, if the science is not out there, I'll just wait for it, and other people have their own theories.

Jim StephensonJr 01:10:00

Right. You know, I would think probably its role inside the mitochondria would be back to its detox world where it detoxes drugs and certain things like that. It's probably trying to keep a clean environment for all the transfer of electrons and whatnot that needs to happen in there.

Jim StephensonJr 01:10:19

Who knows? Maybe it's playing with iron somehow. I don't know. Trying to keep it a copper world? That's a really good question. I'm going to have to look at that. I'm thinking detox right off the top of my head.

Jim StephensonJr 01:10:32

I'm thinking it might have to detox something out of there.

Dr Sara Pugh 01:10:36

Okay, I know that's really interesting because always ask, you know, it's nice to sort of have hypotheses because then, you know, studies come from that. No, that was really interesting. So, yeah, we've gone quite long.

Dr Sara Pugh 01:10:48

So thank you very much for your time. If people want to find you and follow you, where is it? Because you've got a really good sub -stack and you've got a Facebook group. Where can people find you? And have you got a book or a paper?

Dr Sara Pugh 01:11:01

I know you just published a new paper.

Jim StephensonJr 01:11:04

I don't have a book, I just put out that paper on the water -soluble sulfated forms of vitamin D on substack. That's under my name, Jim Stevenson Jr. If you just look Jim Stevenson Jr. on YouTube, you'll find there's a lot of podcasts on there.

Jim StephensonJr 01:11:19

And then my page on Facebook, SeicoSteroid Hormone D, that's just the real name of vitamin D. Those are the three places and people can private message me if they want to. That's fine. I like to talk to people.

Jim StephensonJr 01:11:35

I like to see what's going on. It's important.

Dr Sara Pugh 01:11:39

Okay, great. So thank you very much for your time. I really appreciate it. I've been really looking forward to this for a long time. All right. Thank you.