Too many supplements? Two signs in your appetite of too many vitamin D pills

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Vitamin D is crucial for your health, because it helps regulate the amount of calcium and phosphate in the body. It is also necessary for keeping bones and teeth healthy. If you are spending a lot of time indoors, the NHS suggests you should take 10 micrograms of vitamin D a day to keep your bones and muscles healthy. Over-supplementation of vitamin D, however, can be harmful and should be avoided.

You can take Vitamin D supplements as tablets, liquid or a spray, and they can be bought in a pharmacy.

Flo Health site says: “Since there’s only so much of the vitamin you can naturally take in from your diet and through your skin, an overdose is likely to be from dietary supplements containing the vitamin.”

It says that generally, “when you have consumed too much vitamin D, you’ll experience symptoms that will let you know that all is not well in your body”.

These symptoms include increased thirst and loss of appetite.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) says getting too much vitamin D can be “harmful”.

NIH suggests that very high levels of vitamin D are “almost always” caused by consuming excessive amounts of vitamin D from dietary supplements.

Nonetheless, you cannot get too much vitamin D from sunshine because your skin limits the amount of vitamin D it makes.NIH suggests that very high levels of vitamin D in your blood can cause excessive urination.

Other signs include nausea, vomiting, muscle weakness, confusion, pain, loss of appetite, dehydration, excessive thirst, and kidney stones.

NIH adds: “Extremely high levels of vitamin D can cause kidney failure, irregular heartbeat, and even death.”

Nonetheless, in April 2020, the NHS issued a statement, based on recommendations from Public Health England (PHE), that we should all consider taking 10 mcg/day vitamin D as a supplement, to keep our bones and muscles healthy.

This advice was issued largely because of the restrictions imposed by quarantine and lockdown.

Despite this, the NHS says that in summer months, the majority of the population will get enough vitamin D through exposure to sunlight and a healthy, balanced diet.

Between October and early March the NHS says we do not make enough vitamin D from sunlight, so you need to get vitamin D from your diet.

Dietary vitamin D is available in foods such as oily fish, cod liver oil, red meat, fortified cereals, fortified spreads and egg yolks.

In the UK, milk is not fortified with vitamin D, so dairy products contain only small amounts of vitamin D.

The NHS notes that reports about vitamin D reducing the risk of coronavirus are not backed by enough evidence to know if this is the case.

“There is currently not enough evidence to support taking vitamin D solely to prevent or treat COVID-19,” it says.

Ultimately, if you decide to take vitamin D supplements this winter, it’s crucial that you avoid taking too high of a dose.

Taking too many supplements over a short space of time can lead to hypercalcaemia, explains the NHS. Hypercalcaemia essentially describes the body having too much calcium, which actually weakens the bones, and may even damage the kidneys.

You should avoid taking more than 100mcg of vitamin D in a single day, the NHS urges.

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