How One Disease Changed What We Know About Medicine - Twice 

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Junk DNA is the nature equivalent of those times when there's like, a random tomato behind a wall in a video game that you can noclip into the wall to find sometimes, and you're like "Why is there a tomato here?" and the devs are just like "we don't know how it got there, but the game breaks if we take it out."

The problem is that people think just because a little is good they think a lot is better. And if it's natural it won't hurt you, not true. Arsenic is natural too. Arsenic is deadly, but is used to heal in tiny amounts in both homeopathic medicine and in some chemo but more is definitely not better!

I'm a bit disappointed the link between excess vitamin D and vitamin K2 deficiency wasn't mentioned. Vitamin K2 helps the body use the calcium properly after it's been created by vitamin D. So if you're deficient in vitamin K then supplementing vitamin D by itself will make the issue worse. The two work in balance.

This was very interesting. I recently found out that I’m missing 2 proteins in my DNA. My oncologist explained it and I’m basically working with half of my immune system, which explains why I get sick so easily. I keep hoping that new discoveries and research (like CRISPR) will one day allow doctors to replace the missing proteins. 🙏🙏🙏

I had a problem with abysmal vitamin D in my adult years. Thought it was anemia but instead, my vitamin D levels were single digit. I was immediately given 50k supplements to be taken once per week. Was nice not having to fight for 30min just to wake up and not constantly be hungry, depressed, and weak. Edit: spelling

You need to also have vitamin K2 to move blood calcium into bone. If not you get calcified arteries and kidney stones.

That voice in my head reminding me “hyper-, meaning high and -emia, meaning presence in blood. High presence in blood.”

I remember our professor drilled that too much is twice as dangerous as too little and I eternally grateful for that

It turns out the Header and End Bits _do_ mater as much in DNA as in File and Network Packet formats!

Absent one most important fact: There has never been even one case of hypercalcemia or any other problem associated with Vitamin D₃ (cholecalciferol, the form produced by sunlight). It is harmless even in massive doses of millions of units. The problems arose with Vitamin D₂ (ergocalciferol) which is found rarely in the modern world.

Vitamin K is often used in tandem with Vitamin D because it helps shuttle calcium into to bone and not the rest of the body.

In my language, rickets is called "English disease". IDK how that happened.

Disease when humans think we're in control of our own history: "I'm about to mess up this man's whole life"

I, apparently, can’t get enough Vit D. When I was at my lowest, I felt like I was dying. Now I’m on 5KIU a day just to keep it up. My body definitely doesn’t make it.

A student at my late dad's school had naturally too much calcium. He was hot all the time. Mid winter only needed a sweater to stay warm. No idea how he was medically treated. This was years ago.

Darker skinned people living in further northern and southern latitudes will also be at risk of lower vitamin D levels due to the melanin reducing synthesis.

That is why there is a saying that goes: Extremes are always bad, even for good things. But it is a relief to know that they knew how to solve these diseases better.

There's been some debate in the scientific community regarding whether the 400 IU recommendation is based on bad math - literally off by a factor of ten for some adults I personally take a 5,000 IU daily as an adult but I was diagnosed with very low vitamin D about 10 years ago. I'm so pale that once equinox has passed I can't get any sunshine without a layer of serious sun block on (already got burned once this year because I forgot about my neck.) My vitamin D levels once dropped as low as 12 ng/dl, when the recommendation is a minimum of 30 ng/dl. 5K IU daily is my magic number for keeping it at normal levels. This is also partly a consequence of having genes that were meant to be a few latitude parallels above where I actually live. I'm sure the ancestors that lived in the snowy frozen north and ate salmon every day had no problems maintaining vitamin D. But again, I'm an adult, not an infant. 400-600 is probably plenty for a small human!

When I was a kid in the 1950s it wasnt uncommon in my northern England home town to see old folk with short bowed legs. My mum told us about rickets when we asked about them. And as the eggs from which we all grow are created when our mothers are conceived the health if our grandmothers directly affects our own health. So many if these diseases caused by our environments take at least a couple of generations to die out? Someone with more knowledge on this than I will be able to correct or add to this

Kind of appreciated the visuals on this one, esp showing the calcium deposit in blood vessels. This also happens to anybody whose kidneys have quit working - without proper kidney function your body doesn't filter out ANYTHING (or well, okay, the liver can take up some of the slack). Main thing here is, vitamins - like D among others - when we take, say, a multivitamin pill, those always have more than we "need" in there, to make sure that enough of the various vitamins survive being digested, etc etc etc. And in normal bodies, the excess just gets filtered out by the kidneys. (And that's why you might have really intense color to the urine if you're taking lots of B complex.) BUT. Without that filtering, all of those vitamins just hang out, and everything goes wonky, even more so than it was already from just not having kidney function. Calcium and phosphorous normally "cancel each other out," but without the vitamin D you can't actually make enough mineralized calcium to do that, leading to too much phosphorous compounds; but if you try to make up for that by (for instance) drinking more milk, then you have a good chance of going the OTHER way and having too much calcium! Calcium deposits in blood vessels can mean a stroke, and too much phosphorous can make your heart stop. It's TERRIFYING when you're first trying to learn and navigate the incredibly specialized diet needed to stay mostly healthy while on dialysis.

What about vitamin K2 as a prevention of hypercalcemia?

I am a 70 year old Brit and was brought up on that milk, cod liver oil and a malt extract - Virol and i thank God and the NHS for that.

Good video. I accidentally gave myself a little "calcification" from too much vitamin D. I got a tiny pinhead sized lump and thought it was cancer. Doctor said it was fine. I stopped taking 5000+ iu of vitamin d.

Hyper, meaning high. Calci, referring to calcium and emia meaning presence in blood. So, high calcium, presence in blood.

Wow you never stop to find new interesting things to tell us, nice job and thank you SciShow

I've been deficient in vitamin d for like 4 years now when I stopped having food with fortified vitamin D (cereal, bread, and milk)

Am I the only one who was bracing themselves to hear about tuberculosis?

04:09. "... but if the error is something else ....well ... meh." lol

"It's possible to have too much Vitamin D." Oregonians: "Doubtable."

To sufferers from sarcoidosis (a rare orphan disease) like myself, vitamin D can be extremely dangerous.

My dad keeps his powdered wood glue in the same milk tin that's in the thumb nail ,it looks just like powdered milk as well 😂😂😂

Always interesting, thank you.

Wesley Crusher vibes with that sweater. Here for it

Great info!

wow learned some new stuff from this, cool stuff. thanks for sharing

Thank you Brilliant❣️

Thank you. Well explained!

This is applicable to elders too with over consumption of supplements specially fat soluble vitamins that gets stored in the body. Anything in excess is,........

Every time I think I understand DNA I learn one more thing and I’m reminded I know nothing.

I wish I started Vitamin D supplementation earlier. I fractured my finger from Touch Rugby back in highschool and was definitely malnourished. (Through a fault of my own, no one else's)

It’s perhaps worth mentioning that the daily recommendations by most Governmental health authorities is still based around what is needed to prevent rickets in children, not what is required for an optimum immune system for a child, or certainty for an adult . It’s such an important Vitamin (it actually functions as a hormone), for the entire body’s physical and mental well-being, that it shouldn’t be dismissed, or ignored because “I eat a healthy diet”. Personally, I’d recommend people get their levels checked before any supplementation, if they can, as that provides a baseline to work from. Doing a test over the Winter will be the most useful, as that’s when D levels in the blood will be lowest. There are home tests available, if you can’t get it done by your Doctor. In the UK, a blood prick home test costs about £30, so not expensive, and results are usually back within two weeks. However, if that’s not possible, there are many videos available which go through Vitamin D levels of deficient, insufficient, sufficient, optimum and toxic, and suggest levels of supplementation based on various criteria, such as age, ethnicity, geographical location etc, as well as what should be taken with the D to safely optimise its use when higher levels of D are taken.

I had a chronic deficiency last year and got prescribed 1000IU tablets per day for 4 weeks and then 1 tablet per week for 3 months after that. It sounds like a lot but you gotta make sure it's appropriate to your circumstance

I have very low levels of Vit D but whenever I take the Vit D that my doctor prescribes I always feel like there is a chemical imbalance in my body because I am often agitated for whatever reason so I instead of taking vit D everyday I take it every 3 days. I even told my doctor about this but she says that she hasn't heard anything like it.

National Dried Milk was a favourite of mine as a small child, sprinkled on rice pudding. I wonder how I made it until now! But I never had Rickets.

Great video

Thank you

Seeing this right after finding out that I have a vitamin D *deficiency* is funny timing.

High doses of Vitamin D are only a problem if you're deficient in Vitamin K2. K2 takes the calcium out of the blood and brings it to the bones.

I sunbathe my mushrooms after I cut them for a meal for about 10 to 15 minutes. Being that we are cousins, sunlight helps mushrooms also produce vitamin D.

Vitamin D should always be taken with Magnesium rich foods to avoid the accumulation of calcium I like hemp seeds or peanuts, just a handful eaten right before I take my Vitamin D pills or I just drink the milk versions

Well, yknow its always like this in medicine and there still are a lot of "idiopathic diseases" or "we dont really know how this came to be a disease" because many illnesses are multifactorial and involves several genes

I love the mid-century modern shirt!

I've had it up to here with these rickets!

Rockin' that Wesley Crusher shirt! NICE!

That hypercalcemia instantly registered to my brain as: Hyper - meaning high Calc - meaning calcium Emai - meaning presence in blood I may be watching too much Chubbyemu 😂

I want to talk about a very important thing vit d suplemantations does not do same effect as producing due to mechanism that produce vitd in the skin modulate certain nuerotransmitters and vit d storage, synthesis and usage. Basically just one dosage of uvb makes vitd synthesised in the liver peaking in 7-10 days released only when needed so it does not cause hypercalsemia nor reduce vitd absorbtion while only %50 of the vitd suplemantation gets into liver remaining parts goes around in the body actively cause calsifications in organs and vessels(take k vit if you use antibiotic or probiotics to make your guts produce vir k. So the calcium goes into bone rather than other organs or calsify vessels) plus hypercalsinosis Unfortunately it causes skin cancer but this can be mediated with carrot oil plus 15 spf since vitd threshold is lower than skin damage therefore this will actually increase vitd absorbtion since you wont get tanned and your skin wont damaged.

you guys should make more merch for example a hat i would def buy!

This is making me think of other research in the negatives of too much vitamin D. One of my friends specializes in HIV research and published a paper about how too much vitamin D can lead to worse health outcomes from people who suffer from HIV. The mechanism was a bit different and dealing with that vitamin D is fat soluble, but this is definitely fascinating stuff.

Thanks

I just rode my bike out to the beach to get my first big dose of vitamin D for the year. Nice to come home to this video afterward.

Please make a video on the DNA stuff you didn't mention in this video, it's very fascinating!

Mind blown!

Hi Stefan!

So...we are just software running on code that was directly pushed to prod without testing. That explains a lot.

I know there are charts and studies to tell us when an overdose is dangerous. But are they based on how much is ingested in a short space of time or by now much is consumed over the entire day? And does the difference matter enough to be worth keeping in mind?

fascinating

Could you please make a video on charcot-marie-tooth disease

As my mum always says “anything with too in front of it is bad, “too much” “too little” etc.

Good to hear the mystery of the D explained.

The "thanks, I guess?" got me :D

Can people with the cyp24a1 mutation take mk7 to side-step the kidney disorder? Or is the only hope to keep the Vitamin D3 lower?

You didn't explain how mis-folded mRNA could make proteins get bent up as well... Fascinating topic!!!

What a nice thumbnail to see after I just took 2 vit D tablets 😅

Love from India.

Awesome

Several years ago at an annual physical my doctor told me my vitamin D was low and I said "Am I going to get Rickets?" She didn't think that was as funny as I did.

Wish I had too much vitamin D, instead I need to get bloodwork every few months

In the 1950s in France, all school children (from 5 to 17 years old) had to swallow a tablespoon of cod liver oil every day, given by the school. the reason was that this oil is full of vitamins and other trace elements deemed to be very beneficial to the development of children. the problem is that there was also a problem of excessive dose, but also, and above all, a problem of taste! ! in addition to being an oil (and a rather thick one), the qualifiers given for its flavor are VERY VERY far from positive. the children's ordeal ceased when they realized that it could have harmful effects far superior to the beneficial ones

I’ve had it up to here with these damn rickets

Can you do a video on Ehlers Danlos Syndrome

Anyone else getting Wesley Crusher vibes from Stephan’s shirt?

There are kids in Britain today with scurvy. How did we get back to scurvy?

It is useful to understand how vitamin D affects calcium levels in the body. I have lived my life generally at mild risk of hypocalcemia--evidence for this is that I get muscle cramps rather easily (especially if I need to boost my electrolytes), and a mildly-calcium-depleting saline solution administered into my body to replace a blood donation can send me into a hypocalcemia attack if I have not pre-emptively raised my blood calcium level prior to the blood draw. I also recently passed a couple of calcium oxalate kidney stones, which my urologist told me are formed as a result of not having enough calcium in your bloodstream to balance out any oxalate contained in your food. I don't eat a particularly high amount of oxalate-rich foods, and I never have. So, clearly I need to study calcium in the body more, in order to understand and better manage my condition. I never thought of myself as having any sort of vitamin D deficiency and my doctors in the past have never said that there was anything particularly notable about my bone health. I've always eaten fortified foods and, while I enjoy a lot less sunlight than most people, my very pale (melanin-lacking) skin is said to make it easier for my body to process the first phase of Vitamin D (from the food) into the second phase (photosynthetic product). I do not experience the winter depression which most people feel after going with reduced sunlight exposure for several weeks, so I had always just assumed that I must not be craving sunlight because my Vitamin D levels must be fine. I have had some sort of undiagnosed musculoskeletal condition which has made me have a posture mismatch from everyone else which I can't fix, and my performance in various physical stretches is often highly different from most others. For example, I cannot get anywhere near to being able to touch my toes without bending my knees (I scored WAY below the 0 mark in a physical exam at school once), but I can quite easily and comfortably press my thumb against my wrist which I have only occasionally seen anyone else be able to do at all. I had never considered a link between this condition and my vitamin D levels until recently, but my doctor ordered me a nutritional blood panel and it came back saying that I was a bit vitamin-D deficient. I still don't know if I was just low on the day I came in, or if I have an actual deficiency, but the latter is seeming increasingly likely with deeper analysis. My doctor ordered me to increase my dietary intake of vitamin D which I am trying to do, but I suspect I'm actually going to need more sunlight. 😝 We'll see if I can make that happen. 🖥 ⌨🖱

Never even knew about this

Catching Rickets is bad while catching crickets is fun.

I was born in 1953 in the UK and remember those large blue and white National Dried Milk tins.

The math history course sounds soooooo interesting to me

Neat.

And in the future humans will realise that a lot of what we thought was fact at this moment in time will also turn out to be incorrect.

But also props and thanks to those annoying asshats who keep asking "but, why though", with that desire to understand driving further investigation and greater discovery.

Does this link to heart disease?

This is why 2000% of your daily recommended allowance for vitamins is a bad idea, GNC.

I guess I can be glad my mother mixed dry milk and corn syrup, for my formula. Lol...

Can you do a video on the MTHF-R gene mutation and the diet needed to great it? Would love to have more info than Google gave me on the history, all the ways this mutation can express itself, maybe what causes it and the statistics of it...

I don't know what the name of it is exactly, but about a decade ago, I was told that I have a genetic condition which, among other things, inhibits my body from processing vitamin d correctly. As a result, even though I had a relatively normal diet as a child, I developed a mild case of rickets, which resulted in a lot of expensive dental work as an adult. Once the drs were able to track down the problem I was prescribed a weekly dose of 50,000ius of vitamin D (which, I understand is much higher than the usual reccomended dose) and since I've started the regimen I've had much fewer problems with my teeth.

Is it tuberculosis?

Generalizations are dangerous because they can lead to sloppy thinking and erroneous conclusions. This report is good in that it encourages careful consideration in supplementation. At the same time, vitamin D deficiency is also real. I am maintaining a blood level of about 70 to fight my cancer- this requires an intake of about 10,000 IU of supplemental D3 daily. I would NOT recommend this for a child! Use common sense, and MONITOR! And D2 is NOT a wise choice.

If you take 10,000 IU of vitamin D a day from birth until you are 80 years old then at the end of that period you will have consumed about 1.5 teaspoons of vitamin d. 10,000IU is 250 micrograms.

So protein-coding DNA is the C code that gets compiled into executable instructions and junk DNA is the makefiles? Of course it's super important and gets impossibly bloated, the project has been in development for eons!