r/bestof • u/Amazing-Persona-101 • 4h ago
[VitaminD] How did our ancestors survive without Vit D supplements?
/r/VitaminD/comments/1x4uc9t/how_did_our_ancestors_survive_without_vitamin_d/pgkguki/15
u/Independent-Drive-32 3h ago
I’ve never taken a vitamin d supplement to my knowledge. What am I missing?
9
u/lancer081292 1h ago
Nothing. The original post comes from a sub called “vitaminD” and any subreddit based on a very specific subject tends to be OVERLY obsessive about that subject. For another example just skim a skincare subreddit and you’ll find a number of people who insist that you NEED to bath in cold water and apply a cleanser and moisturizer specified to that part of the body and am or pm, at least a few times a day and reapply suntan lotion over your whole body regularly even indoors otherwise your going get permanently wrinkled and acne scarred skin by your 40’s if the skin cancer doesn’t get you first.
1
u/ThatGoob 15m ago
Sounds like a lot of work. Imma stick to my shampoo runoff and the occasional Dove soap.
7
u/Amazing-Persona-101 3h ago
Maybe nothing depending on your weight, skin color, age, etc. Getting a blood test is the only way to know if you are in the desired range.
3
u/Xeno_man 1h ago
Vitamin D.
But seriously, if you spend most of your time indoors, don't see the sun much, you could be experiencing exhaustion or poor mood like depression or anxiety. A simple blood test during a check up will tell if your levels are low.
Vitamins can help restore levels but a change of lifestyle with better food options and more sun exposure is a better solution.
7
u/silverfox762 2h ago
If we are talking about the last thousand years or so (after full time farming and city life began dominating life), museum collections of skeletal remains around the world are filled with examples of rickets and osteoporosis from vitamin D deficiency.
More efficient vitamin D synthesis is also why people with random gene mutations favoring lighter skin were more successful at passing on their gene pool in Europe and Eurasia in the last 6-8,000 or so. Within the tropics, darker skin allowed sufficient vitamin D synthesis due to the longer days and higher levels of UV from the sun. That efficiency, plus dark skin's resistance to skin cancer, is why dark skin remained dominant in subtropical and equatorial regions.
For most of human history in Europe and Eurasia (the last 40,000 years or so), people also generally lived next to rivers or where rivers met the ocean. Accordingly, they were more likely to eat a lot of fatty fish like salmon and trout, and/or fish livers rich in vitamin D. But in the last couple thousand years, wealth disparity can be seen in some some collections, with poorer populations showing more frequent rickets and osteoporosis.
1
u/BroBroMate 50m ago
Random gene mutations
Is why when the nuclear winter comes, only two species will survive, cockroaches, and us gingas.
1
u/Desk--Rabbit 1h ago
When humans changed from hunters to grain farmers they stopped getting as much vitamin D from their diet, apparently. That's when human skin colour got paler in northern countries, I have read.
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u/NeedsItRough 4h ago
I don't eat meat very often at all and I'm only outside for ~20 seconds 3-4 days a week on the walk from my work building to my car (because it's dark when I leave for work in the morning)
My Dr prescribed me vitamin d and I tried it for ~6 months, noticed 0 difference, and went off it (and still noticed 0 difference)
It's disappointing because I've seen several people saying vitamin d made a huge difference in their life and I was hoping it would fix my headaches and fatigue but it could have been a placebo and I wouldn't have noticed a difference.
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u/groundr 3h ago
Depending on what we mean by ancestors (as one example: if we look just at people in the US since its inception), life expectancy back then was half (or less than half) what it is now. While vitamin D is helpful for growth and development in youth, a lot of the active supplementation we see currently happens in people aged 50+ for a variety of reasons (body cannot process it the same, some shifts towards less natural exposure, bone density degradation, etc.).
So in other words, it was a problem so many of our ancestors never lived to see.
47
u/CheeseburgerBrown 4h ago
Sunlight and meat.
If you spend a lot of time outside, or you consume quite a bit of meat, you can meet your daily requirements without a wee pill.
In the far north where sunlight is lazy people like the Innu and Inuit ate a lot of meat for their D. In temperate climates peasants, which were most of us, got lots of outdoors time. In the tropics people’s skin blocked sunlight so they didn’t get too much D.