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Introduction: Common vitamin D deficiency symptoms
Today I'm going to give you 11 really bizarre, wild vitamin D deficiency symptoms. Now, of course, most people know the usual vitamin D symptoms: lower back pain, depression, high blood pressure, inflammation, autoimmune diseases, things like that. But I will guarantee you do not know these.
I'm going to break this up into two sections. The first part of this video is for the person who wants bare-bones information and doesn't want anything too tactical. The second part of the video I'll go into the science behind it, the mechanism behind these symptoms, and the underlying reason why they develop in the first place.
You have about 25,000 genes in your body, and 10% of those genes are greatly influenced by vitamin D. Not to mention, when you get your blood tests for vitamin D, they're only showing you the inactive vitamin D. They're not showing you what's happening in the cells, and so the blood levels of vitamin D do not correlate very well with the vitamin D that is in your cells.
There is an active suppression of anything positive about vitamin D in the news and in medical research, because it directly competes with the top-selling drugs. I got up and presented this data to the top vitamin D researchers in the world, all assembled there. It was vicious. The attacks were: how could vitamin D not do this, how could you say this? I said I'm just presenting the data that we have assembled. You're walking on, guys, careers that have spent their whole career doing this stuff, and they never conceived that this could be true. So let's dive in.
11 surprising vitamin D deficiency signs
Number one is head sweating. Typically you'll see this in infants, but you can also see it in teenagers and adults. If you notice a child or yourself sweating more in the head, suspect a vitamin D deficiency.
Number two is sweating more at night, even if your temperature is cool. This can also show up as your pillow being moist in the morning. So excess sweating, especially at night, is a sign of vitamin D deficiency.
Number three is mood swings: a person going from a condition or emotion of happiness down to feeling irritable, then angry, and then sad. Vitamin D controls the regulation of your mood and heavily influences emotions, and this has a lot to do with how vitamin D affects your brain. If you notice yourself or a loved one roller-coastering with these emotions, it could be a vitamin D deficiency.
Number four is procrastination, being backlogged, and just not feeling productive. It's pretty wild that someone's motivation is connected to a vitamin D deficiency.
Number five is panic attacks. In other videos I talk about panic attacks being a vitamin B1 deficiency, and it can be, but there is a vitamin D connection as well. A panic attack is a very severe fear or a very high anxiety condition, and it definitely relates to certain hormones and neurotransmitters like serotonin. But for those people out there who have panic attacks and resort to drugs, they might want to consider trying high doses of vitamin D3. I've done videos on certain breathing techniques a person can do as well, like breathing through your nose, and I will put that link down below, but don't forget vitamin D.
Number six is achiness in your pelvis, in your lower back, in your hips, and in your upper legs. Vitamin D is intimately connected with the formation of bone, and one symptom of that is literally pain, but not sharp pain. This achiness is on the inside of the bone, because that's where you're losing bone on the inside. It's sad, because it's so easy to fix, but you would have to take higher amounts, not lower amounts. I'm talking about 10,000 to 20,000 IU at least. If you have any concern about 20,000 IU of vitamin D3 being toxic, I just want to let you know that being out in the sun in the summer for 40 minutes will give you about 20,000 IU of vitamin D3. Is that toxic? No. 100,000 IU of vitamin D3 taken over months is when you get into the toxic effect, not 20,000 IU.
Number seven is loss of muscle strength. Vitamin D has a direct effect on calcium itself, and without vitamin D, calcium is going to be deficient in the muscle. Calcium allows the muscle to contract, but it is also involved in the production of muscle itself, so without vitamin D and calcium you cannot create muscle. We also get weakness within muscles that control power and strength, primarily your legs and your shoulders. On top of that, vitamin D also controls and regulates pain.
Number eight is stiffness, which usually occurs in the knees and in the fingers. This definitely relates to inflammation, but it also has to do with what vitamin D does to your cartilage and your collagen. You might find that when you stretch backwards and create tension on the cartilage in your breastbone, you feel stiffness in that area as well, and that can also affect breathing.
Number nine is chronic fatigue. This has a lot to do with the little energy factories in your cells, called mitochondria, and how important vitamin D is to support those little factories. If you don't have enough vitamin D, you just can't make energy.
Number 10 is that your ability to think quickly is diminished. Basically, you have too many applications open on your desktop computer, but related to your brain.
Number 11 is that it's very difficult to be satisfied when you eat a meal. It could be that the food is nutritionally empty and you keep eating to get these nutrients. It can also be certain things in the food that cause you to be addicted, but if you're low in vitamin D you're just not going to feel satisfied, and you will definitely have a tendency to overeat.
Now that you know the general information, let me give you another layer of this data on each point, which is actually very interesting.
Number one, head sweating: there's something different about the head versus the rest of the body as far as sweat glands go. We have a lot more sweat glands in our head than in other parts of our body, and it affects the autonomic nervous system, causing this excess sweating in the head. This also relates to number two, night sweats, but there's something else going on with night sweats. Vitamin D suppresses an overactive immune system. Think about the immune system and all the things that happen. One would be a fever, which is a normal response. When you're deficient in vitamin D and have a slightly overreactive immune system, this whole mechanism of sweating is controlled by a tiny computer chip in your brain called the hypothalamus. When you have a vitamin D deficiency with this overreactive immune system, it triggers excess sweating to compensate for the immune imbalance. One aspect of this is a fever: your body is generating more heat, and with that comes more sweat to compensate. It's all coming from a vitamin D deficiency.
Number three is mood swings. When we come up and down on this emotional roller coaster, your adrenals are involved. The adrenal gland, starting with the hypothalamus, pituitary, and adrenal, is on this HPA axis, a circuit going on. When you're vitamin D deficient, cortisol goes up. I don't know if this is just because it's trying to help you get rid of inflammation; I don't know about that. But with a vitamin D deficiency you're going to have a dysregulation of this cortisol pattern, and if you have too much cortisol it's going to put you more into a different emotional state.
Number four is low motivation. In the brain there is a little center, a tiny nerve bundle, which is quite fascinating. It's called the nucleus accumbens, and it is the heart of a lot of things, including addictions. It runs on dopamine, and yes, dopamine is involved in addictions, but it's also a neurotransmitter involved with motivation, reward, doing things, getting things done, that type of thing.
Number five is panic attacks, a high-level anxiety, a very strong fear. From a physical standpoint in the body, panic attacks are related to a structure I talked about in the brain called the amygdala, which is more like an adrenal in the brain. It regulates fear, and it needs vitamin D. Several things are going on. We have serotonin, which is kind of like a happy hormone, and vitamin D is necessary to balance these two things.
Number six is achiness in the pelvis area, in the lower back, and in the upper thigh muscles. This relates to a condition called osteomalacia. Osteomalacia is a severe vitamin D deficiency that affects the calcium in the bone. Vitamin D deficiency is the number one cause of osteomalacia, and this is basically where the bones become very soft. I think this is going on on a massive scale in society right now, and there is a subclinical version of osteomalacia. I think I had it in high school because I was eating poorly and I knew I had a vitamin D deficiency, and I started getting fractures, but the bones were soft and certain proteins were not developing as well. You have to realize that vitamin D controls calcium absorption by about 20 times in the small intestine. In other videos I talk about the two systems of vitamin D: one controls calcium, and the other is the non-calcium system. You can check the vitamin D in the blood, and if you test it, chances are it's going to be pretty low, probably 30 or less, in which case you just need to start taking vitamin D3, and I would take a lot of it, at least 10,000 to 20,000 IU per day until your levels are a little higher. For this bone problem you could probably get away with taking it sporadically, like once a week, if you want to do that, but I wouldn't do that if you had the problem.
Number seven is loss of muscle strength. Why? Because vitamin D controls calcium, and calcium controls the contraction of the muscle. If you're missing calcium because you don't have enough vitamin D, you can't contract, and what's going to happen with that muscle is pain that's kind of all over. It's hard to pinpoint; it's just achy.
Number eight is stiffness, mainly in the knees and the finger joints, because the cartilage needs vitamin D and is not getting it, so it's going to be more inflamed in the weight-bearing joints. Your knees could be affected, and the hips as well, but if you use the computer a lot or your fingers, you're going to notice it in the fingers. This can definitely lead to osteoarthritis. Vitamin D is essential for maintaining cartilage, ligaments, and tendons. Think about this: your ribs attach to the sternum with cartilage, so you're going to notice it right through here too. This is why stretching is so important to keep the rib cage open, because it will tend to be contracted, inflamed, and pull you forward, so you end up with bad posture and a hunchback. You not only need to take vitamin D, but you also need to do a lot of stretching to reverse that.
Number nine is chronic fatigue syndrome. There are two different reasons for chronic fatigue syndrome. One is that vitamin D controls the number of mitochondria that are produced, the energy factories, so you'll have fewer mitochondria and less energy. Without vitamin D you'll have dysfunctional mitochondria. The second reason is the immune connection. If you are low in vitamin D, certain viruses will come out of remission and become active. The Epstein-Barr virus especially will start to come out of remission and become active, and one of the symptoms it produces is fatigue. So it's not that you have a full-blown infection, but you get certain aspects of that infection, like chronic fatigue. Nearly 100% of the people with this reactivation of the Epstein-Barr virus, or chronic fatigue syndrome, had it come after a severe loss, the loss of a loved one or a job or something like that. But it could also be a vitamin D deficiency, which, by the way, means if you have a vitamin D deficiency and go through a loss, that stress is going to hit you a lot harder. You just need a lot of vitamin D. I would take 50,000 IU of vitamin D3 every single day to pull yourself out of chronic fatigue syndrome.
Number 10 is mental sluggishness or slowness with decisions, where thinking and focus are distracted. Vitamin D has a profound effect in the front part of the brain, which is kind of our relay system, and even communication between one neuron and the next needs vitamin D3.
Then we get to the last one, feeling satisfied. Leptin tells the brain that you're full. If you don't have enough vitamin D, it's not going to work that well, and vitamin D helps make leptin work better. We also have insulin. If you don't have enough vitamin D, insulin doesn't work as well and you're going to be hungry. Insulin allows nutrition to go into the cells, so if you have insulin resistance because you're low in vitamin D, you're not going to be satisfied. Just by taking vitamin D, insulin becomes more sensitive, and you start getting more fuel and more nutrients to the cells.
I hope this helped you understand these bizarre, unusual symptoms of vitamin D deficiency. Start taking vitamin D, and make sure you also take magnesium, vitamin K2, zinc, and B6 as the cofactors to prevent any issues and to help it work better. Thanks for watching, and I will see you in the next video.