An 89-year-old retired businessman died from an “overdose” of Vitamin D supplements that did not warn about the risks of excessive intake.
David Mitchener from Oxted, Surrey, reportedly had fatally high levels of Vitamin D when he was brought to the East Surrey Hospital last year in May and was suffering from hypercalcaemia – a build-up of calcium in the body associated with taking too much vitamin D.
He died ten days later.
Just wanted to note that the USA has a massive (basically) unregulated supplement industry. Most vitamins and supplements are ineffective (at best) and unnecessary unless you have a deficiency.
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Is Oklahoma that bad with supplements?
I have a vague memory of hearing/reading/looking it up one time, but there was a law that was passed that changed the what triggers the USA’s Food and Drug Administration ability to police things like… umm… food and drugs. It made it so that the FDA couldn’t proactively/preemptively look into the supplements to check for quality, quantity of ingredients, adulterants, and efficacy. The bill was put forth by some political creature from Oklahoma.
Yet another example of Oklahoman exceptionalism
OOOOOOOOK-la-ho-ma, where the cranks go screaming down the range!!!
Most people in the developed world are vitamin D deficient though. And it’s even worse for melanated people as they live further from the equator. 30 minutes of sun exposure in the summer will give you over 10,000 iu of Vitamin D so that’s a good daily number to shoot for with supplements if it’s winter or you’re stuck indoors. Vitamin D and fish oil are the only supplements I take as all of the other essential nutrients are easily obtained with food.
Yeah I’ve always been weirded out about the phrase “FDA approved” since that implies that supplements and the like can be sold… Without approval? Surely that can’t be right? You can’t just put a bunch of pills in a bottle, call it a vitamin supplement and sell it without some pharmaceutical rigor. I heard someone say you basically could do that, and then at some point the FDA would crack down, but they couldn’t do it premptively. Never looked into it, because that sounded crazy.
You can literally make any claim as long as you slap on “Not FDA approved.”
I came across some crap that “treats” cancer, but it had a little star next to it. And at the bottom on the back of the label, you can see “these statements are not FDA approved”
That’s just wild to me. I feel like you should have to get approved before you are allowed to sell medicinal supplements.