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Vitamin D Newsletter

Newsletter

Type 2 Diabetes

Mary from North Dakota writes:

Dr. Cannell:

My teenage son has type 2 diabetes. I started him on 5,000 IU of vitamin D a day about 6 months ago. Three things have happened so far, he started losing weight, his blood sugars improved, and his acne went away. I know you have written about diabetes and weight loss with vitamin D but I can't remember anything about acne?

Dr. Cannell replies:

I have had some reports that vitamin D cured acne but frankly, I didn't believe them. Then I ran across this 1938 paper entitled Vitamin D in Acne: A Comparison with X-Ray Treatment (PDF format). You can read the entire paper yourself and see what 5,000–14,000 IU per day did for these patients with severe acne. When I was a kid, I always wondered why my pimples got better in the summer and worse in the winter.

As far as vitamin D improving type-2 diabetes, in my experience that is the rule, not the exception.

As far as vitamin D improving type-2 diabetes, in my experience that is the rule, not the exception. How much it improves probably depends on how much vitamin D you give and how much weight the child loses together with his diet. Higher 25(OH)D levels prevent the disease but, so far, I am not aware of any randomized controlled trials showing a treatment effect. In the past, about half my type-2 patients were eventually able to go off their diabetic meds with proper doses of vitamin D.

Dr. Knekt, at the National Public Health Institute in Finland, just discovered that men with the highest 25(OH)D levels (>30 ng/mL) had an 82% lower risk of developing type-2 diabetes in the future compared to men with the lowest levels but no effect was found in women. And get this, in Finland the average 25(OH)D level for all 7503 people tested was 43 nmol/L, or 17 ng/mL. For men it was 18 ng/mL and for women only 15 ng/mL. And that was a representative sample of Finnish adults.

Page last edited: 25 July 2011