UPDATE
Research published after this blog post was written finds that supplementing with Vitamin D, even in intravenous megadoses does NOT improve blood sugar or insulin resistance in any significant way. You can find citations to that research HERE.
Vitamin D may have some positive effects on heath, and I continue to take it, but it will not reverse any already existing autoimmune condition nor is it a diabetes cure. In fact, my own blood sugar stopped responding to Vitamin D within a week after I wrote this blog post.
If you found this page searching for help with lowering blood sugars, please check out this page: How To Get Your Blood Sugar Under Control. I hear every week from people who have used this technique to lower their blood sugars dramatically.
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Original Post
At my recent visit to the endocrinologist, the doctor suggested I add 1000 I.U. of Vitamin D to my daily regimen because of some recent data suggesting that it helps the body eliminate cells that have developed melanoma.
I followed her advice and started taking a pill every day around 10:30 when I take my metformin. A few days later I started to experience dramatic lows around 3 PM. Lows have rarely been a problem for me, as my body usually mounts an aggressive counterregulatory response at the first hint my blood sugar is dropping. All of a sudden I was seeing blood sugars in the 60s, and they were not resolving with the usual 2-4 grams of glucose. At one point as I battled a low I ended up eating 25 grams of Halloween candy and still only found myself in the 80s ninety minutes later.
It took me a few days to connect the lows with the addition of Vitamin D to my daily regimen. When I did, I started to read up on the relationship of Vitamin D to diabetes. It turns out that the relationship is a strong one, not only for people with Type 2,as a recent metastudy discovered--people with Type 2 appear to have low blood levels of Vitamin D and there is some suggestion that the combination of Vitamin D and Calcium may delay the diagnosis of Type 2, but also for people with Type 1. A Finnish study found that children who received Vitamin D supplementation appear to have a lower rate of Type 1 than those who did not.
There is also some data suggesting that Vitamin D may also be protective against Multiple Sclerosis, a disease that has long been known to be more prevalent in northern latitudes, as well as the data connecting it with cancer prevention.
The large dose of Vitamin D I am now taking appears to increase my sensitivity to insulin even though I am already insulin sensitive. It potentiates a dose as low as 1 unit of insulin, making it several times more powerful than usual. When I have skipped my insulin for a couple meals to see what the Vitamin D it might do when I don't use insulin (while eating very low carb meals) I did not experience the dramatic drop, but I did end up very slowly drifting down into the high 70s a few hours after dinner, rather than ending up in the 90s or low 100s as I would have expected to do.
I have read that it takes many months to completely restore Vitamin D levels to normal, so I'm going to keep supplementing and see what happens,though I'm thinking I might look for a lower dose pill and split the dose to see if I can avoid the dramatic drop all at once, as they are quite disturbing and leave me feeling jittery and off center for hours afterwards.
If you have had any interesting experiences with Vitamin D let me hear about them. I don't know if my sensitivity to Vitamin D is another of the things that grow out of my own, oddball form of Genetic diabetes or something that might be common among people with diabetes in general
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