Vitamin D Expert: The Supplement World Is Giving The WRONG Advice!
In a Nutshell
A neurologist discovered that vitamin D is actually a hormone, not a vitamin, and that indoor living has created widespread vitamin D deficiency causing sleep disorders, headaches, and chronic pain in young people. The solution involves raising vitamin D blood levels above 60, then taking B50 complex for 3 months to restore the gut microbiome that produces B vitamins naturally, followed by a multivitamin until the body resumes self-production. This approach restored normal sleep patterns and eliminated symptoms in patients with conditions like daily headaches, postpartum depression, and sleep apnea.
These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
The vitamin world is giving the wrong advice. If you do not know what you're doing with them, they're just as dangerous as any drug you could put in your mouth. Supplementing with vitamin D is not the same as being outdoors because we absorb it through our skin. What we've been told is don't ever let the sun touch your skin. When we're deficient in this vitamin, our brain actually forgets how to sleep.
As a neurologist, billions around the world have a sleep problem, but no one's treating it. The usual sleep treatment is behavioral like blackout curtains, go to bed at the same time. That is not something that's helped the people who wind up in treatment. They've tried all that already. Clinical experience includes taking care of 28-year-olds who just had a stroke. Strokes are associated with being old and having diabetes and hypertension and heart disease, but this is occurring in young people.
A whole bunch of sleep studies were done because some exciting things were found by accident that turn out to have to do with vitamin deficiencies and deficiencies that have developed from being indoors too much. The effects of being indoors are being felt like obesity. There are no obese squirrels in the backyard. The only obese animals are cats and dogs that are kept inside. Most of the sleep disorders are really linked to the gut, the microbiome. One of the interesting things learned was that vitamin D is a hormone. There was a mistake made in calling it a vitamin.
Viewers will get a completely unique and new way to look at why they are not sleeping well or why they have medical problems. The goal is to come away with the impression that they want to find out if their brain chemistry is normal or not normal for sleep.
Clinical assistant professor of neurology at Stanford University Hospital. Neurology residency at Harvard Medical School. Grew up in California. Became a biochemist and then became interested in medicine because biochemistry is being applied to humans in medicine. Became a physician, then went into neurology. By accident somebody insisted that they wanted a sleep study in 2004.
Became a neurologist, then became a doctor, and then fell in love with sleep. Since leaving neurology practice, started an online business where work as a sleep coach. Estimated to have affected another 5 to 6,000 people through a workbook that outlines a series of steps based on brain chemistry, not on behavioral approaches that are all over the internet.
The first experience was with women who had headache. One patient said the drugs being given hadn't worked and wanted a sleep study. She had sleep apnea. She was young and thin. She did not look like a fat older male with a fat tongue, which is what was being sold at that time. The people with sleep apnea have a fat tongue. It gets in the airway and they need to wear a device over their face at night that blows air up their nose. She put on the CPAP device and came back two months later. Her headaches were gone. She'd had a daily headache for like five years.
It worked because headaches are really a brain stem function problem. It's a biochemical problem. Maybe it's allowing her to stay in deep sleep longer and she's making the chemicals that allow her head pain switch to go into the off position, which is where it's supposed to be. It's supposed to be off until somebody hits you in the head and then it turns on. Hers is just turning on spontaneously all the time. A whole bunch of sleep studies were done in young healthy females who had daily headache. They would frequently say something like, "I wake up at 3:00 a.m. and I can't go back to sleep. I wake up at 3:00 a.m. and my sleep is lighter after that. I wake up at 3:00 a.m. with a headache."
A little Mexican lady who comes in from northern Mexico, now living in Texas with her kids. She had never had headaches until she moved up. There was a beach house in Mexico for a period of about 14 years. Would go down there and think about what's going to happen to these people that have sleep apnea who don't have any electricity and they're living in palapas that are made of sticks with a thatch roof. They're still doing the same thing that they were doing 2,000-4,000 years ago. You can't tell if the little old people are 60 years old or 80. They might be 90. They're not fat. They're not tired. They're great grandfathers. This is about living outside. Humans were meant to live outdoors like every other animal. We have decided that we are special, but we're not special. Our biochemistry is like every other animal.
These inputs are coming all at the same time while puzzling over these sleep studies. The first gal had sleep apnea, but most of the women that were sent for those studies, they did not have sleep apnea or come back on the front page would say no significant apnea. There was a significant score - how many times do you stop breathing during the night. Then the next part is what do they have that's wrong with them. That came about a year and a half later when the pulmonologist says, "I don't know if you've noticed this, but your population has a really unusual finding. Most of them have delayed rapid eye movement sleep, no rapid eye movement sleep, or they have rapid eye movement sleep apnea, meaning they only stop breathing in rapid eye movement sleep."
Rapid eye movement sleep is called a hypnogog. On the bottom axis is time. On this axis is a representation of what phase of sleep you are in. When we enter sleep, we go through what we call two lighter stages of sleep. The first phase that we enter is wake. Couple of times this person woke may not even be aware that they woke up, went back to sleep. We enter sleep in light sleep one and light sleep two. These are called that because when the sleep experts started studying this in 1970, that's relatively recently. You could easily awaken someone out of these phases. It has a certain brainwave pattern generates. Then they go into a phase that's called deep sleep or slowwave sleep. Everyone who has a sleep tracker device which is very common these days is now becoming familiar with having this much deep sleep, this much rapid eye movement sleep. Deep sleep is really in the sleep industry called slowwave sleep because the brain waves are this slow big pattern. We always go through a couple of light sleep phases and then we go into rapid eye movement sleep and then we go through light sleep phases and then we go to deep sleep.
The pivotal question asked the pulmonologist: why would my patient have stop breathing - that's what apnea means. Why would they stop breathing only in REM sleep? It was thought this was an anatomic problem. The pulmonologist said, "Well, we get the most paralyzed of all in REM sleep." The response was "paralyzed?" Every animal, including fruit flies who we're doing sleep studies on, get paralyzed in sleep. We get the most paralyzed in rapid eye movement sleep. When this part needs to get repaired, it gets paralyzed, too. That means you have to have an anatomy that stays where the tube that you're trying to breathe through stays open while you are unconscious and trying to repair everything in this area.
The part that's white is called the brain stem. This part is actually fully in control when you are asleep. There's a little switch up here that goes "boop. You're not conscious anymore." The brain is still extremely active. In fact, the waveforms that they record from up here look the same in rapid eye movement sleep as they do in wake, suggesting that all sorts of things are happening. You wake up abruptly because some noise happens and you're in the middle of a dream. You're traveling. You're flying. You've got huge colors going on. Your brain is extremely active during this time, but you're not aware of it. The brain stem is running your heart rate, your blood pressure. It is paralyzing you. This is where the autonomic nervous system comes in. The sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system are centered right here. They are meant to be the automatic driver of all the processes that you use during the day and they run sleep. This process is fully run by the brain stem.
The sympathetic is called fight flight. The other one the parasympathetic is called rest and digest. It also is experienced as a state of calm. It is also what happens when we have an orgasm. There are things that are happening in the brain stem that feed back to why do they fall asleep. Why do the guys fall asleep on top of her? Probably because it actually might increase the likelihood of fertilization. Maybe it has a survival risk. These are all unconscious things that we don't connect together. But once you get into the parasympathetic nervous system, it turns out that the parasympathetic and the sympathetic are also very involved in what's happening here. The basic idea is the first half of the night, and we've also broken it into 1 2 3 4 5 cycles usually of about an hour and a half. The first half of the night till about 3:00 a.m. is mostly run by the sympathetic side, which is the fight or flight side. When you're well balanced and you have a completely normally operating brain stem, you will have a couple of branches of REM sleep.
Patients did not have any REM sleep at all in the first half of the night. In fact, they might have been lucky to have a little half an hour between 4:30 and 5, if at all. The second half of the night from 3:00 a.m. to 7 a.m. is run by the parasympathetic side. If you look at it in a certain way, you could say maybe they've lost the parasympathetic driver for the second half of their night. Seeing all these sleep studies that did not have this phase of sleep, they're actually one-sixth of the amount of REM sleep they should have. As going back through all the sleep studies, realizing don't we kind of do mood in REM sleep.
When trying to link the comments that patients have made and the drugs that were given to them, realizing anti-depressants have been given to this group of young, healthy women with headaches because they frequently say, "I'm in a terrible mood." So, they can't remember. Isn't there a body of literature about memory being made permanent during REM? Yes, memory is linked and mood is linked. If I'm allowed to go back to sleep, if I have the proper brain chemistry to allow me to fall back into REM sleep, I will wake in a better mood. Those are the sorts of things that the patients will tell you if you ask about it and if they're able to fall back to sleep. Because the group did not have sleep apnea and could not wear CPAP masks. What's wrong with them? Why aren't they in this phase of sleep? This is a neurology problem. This is not a pulmonologist. This is not about breathing. This is about this brain stem and what is the chemistry of this?
Going to the anatomy and then finding out what are the cells in this brain stem area that make us paralyzed. Asking that question because it was figured out that the women who are struggling with sleep and getting headaches have less of this REM sleep which is associated with being paralyzed. The question then asked is what are the chemicals that help us become paralyzed. What are cells that take us into these, what is the chemistry of that? Since focused on biochemistry, there's actually a deficiency in a neurotransmitter that our moving doors means that we've lost a neurotransmitter that we must have to be normal humans. The reason why they don't know it is because there are no drugs that duplicate acetylcholine. There are no drugs. But ultimately what was found out together was that vitamin D makes the enzyme or the protein that makes a certain reaction happen that makes acetylcholine. Acetylcholine is the neurotransmitter, the chemical that the autonomic parasympathetic side uses. We hear all the time about epinephrine and norepinephrine or adrenaline and noradrenaline. That's what happens when somebody rear ends you. Your blood pressure goes up, your heart rate goes up. That's all dominant here. If you're wearing a sleep tracker, you'll see that there's a measure of what's called heart rate variability that goes up as the parasympathetic becomes dominant, as the rest and digest.
All of the messages that we have to increase the heart rate or decrease the heart rate or to have a bowel movement or be constipated or to digest our food, those are all eventually run by a chemical and our body and our brain use these chemicals to send messages. This is actually a chemical deficiency state that happens when you move indoors. Sunscreen, computers, and air conditioning all started in the 1980s. The reason why it's not as evident is that being alive before the 1980s, there were two kids in a class of 300 that were overweight. They didn't go on diets. They didn't have any trouble sleeping. They weren't on anti-depressants. The things that weren't common when a teenager that are common now are striking for those who are this age because we know it wasn't like that. What we've been told is it's toxins in the food. It's that we aren't doing it right. If you say I'm not doing it right, then you should be able to tell me how to do it right. And that's what a lot of these podcasts are about. How do I change what I do so I can feel rested and be at the peak performance of my life? That interests a lot of people. There would be a claim that there's a deficiency state in the background that you can actually fix and you can fix it, but it's through vitamins. And our ideas about vitamins are wrong. Completely wrong.
We've been taught that vitamins are not important or vitamins are very important, but they're easy to use. They'll never hurt us. You just take a certain like who's your recommendation? What's the vitamin D recommendation dose that this guy's given out? We've been told things that are actually not true. And medicine hasn't taken responsibility for the fact that this is the core of biochemistry. It was done by physicians. These original research articles in the 40s and 50s that the word vitamin was used was done by medical experts. It's unfortunately been given to the government to give recommendations. It should never be in the hands of the government. The government doesn't know anything about our biochemistry. So the supplement industry at the moment is a mess. Dramatic things happen to patients that are not what was expected. Vitamins are a form of biohacking. They're just as dangerous as any drug you could put in your mouth. If you do not know what you're doing with them, bad things will happen to you. And unfortunately, frequently those bad things are the same thing you had before you took the vitamin. Therefore, you should pay attention to what you're feeling. The pathway that's been built has a second half that's a journal. You have to keep notes of what's happening to you.
How many people are experiencing sleep problems? Billions. It's around the world. There are sleep study centers in every country that has electricity, in Germany, in Japan, in Brazil, and they're all publishing how abnormal the studies are. This is not what it looks like. They rarely send out an article saying that we have less REM because they don't have an answer for why. Just happen to be the only one currently on the internet that has a different way of looking at it. Vitamins are linked to sleep issues. It's typically put on the sleep mask and close the blinds and make sure it's cold in the room.
There are many dogmatic statements that are being made about genetics and sleep that are not necessarily wrong, but they're also not necessarily right. Having the same training that you get from Matt Walker. He's doing animal training. We say dogmatic things based on certain studies that we do. And then patients don't behave that way. Patients turn out to, you know, this person has been working to take this to an extreme. So the chronotype story is you're either an early bird or a night owl. What is being taught is that that is your genetic makeup. Although there are genetic mutations that lead to certain timing of sleep, it turns out everybody doing this vitamin stuff with would revert back to fall asleep at 10 and wake up at 6:00. Even the people who were working nights their whole life. This woman that is being seen who is on disability now because she got a terrible disease that is believed is because she worked nights when she is at home on disability for several years. That she's still caring for her for that disease. She's still sleeping during the day. Why would she sleep during the day? And now there are a whole run of patients who say, "I guess it's because I always work nights." It turns out that humans really can't work nights if they have normal brain chemistry. Why? Because we're day hunters. We are supposed to be asleep in the night. And that is our biochemistry. There are lots of animals that are designed to be awake at night. Owls. That's why they use that as a symbol. And if you do the right thing with their chemistry, and if you insist that they spend more time outside, then they actually revert to falling asleep at 10 p.m. and waking up at 6:00 a.m. It's very difficult to operate, unless you're international, to be falling asleep. There are people who fall asleep at 4:00 a.m. and wake up at noon. That is a very difficult problem to operate within the normal population because the rest of the world doesn't operate that way. And when you think about it a little bit, we actually have certain standards on when we start work and when we end work. And that's the same all over the globe. So there were things that happened that surprised and they became consistent. And that's what made thinking, you know, this is around the world and it happened at a specific time. There are many diseases that started to be reported in the middle 80s. People aren't aware of it because they think it's normal now, but ADD, ADHD, depression, things that are affecting childhood development, fatty liver, certain things like increase in diabetes, the things that were diseases that had been described, they're all some of them are old diseases that have increased in incidence, but some of them for the first time, fatty liver was first described non-alcoholic fatty liver first described in the 80s, ADHD is similar. So during the time that don't know why we have this epidemic, still thinking toxins because that's what we've been told, pesticides, glyphosate, and then we get into the area of vitamin D and how did finding out about vitamin D? Why was being sort of forced against will to step into the vitamin D politics, which is a horrible morass?
The first is let's call her Maline. She's 32 years old. She's a redhead. That turns out to be important. She's 100 pounds overweight. She just had her first pregnancy three years ago. And she had been told that because she had endometriosis and polycystic ovarian syndrome, that she would never get pregnant. But she got pregnant. She's very happy about that. She had gestational diabetes, which means she had diabetes during the time that she was pregnant with her son. And now she is pretty much a wreck. She has daily headache, which is why she's seeing the doctor. She's on about nine drugs. She has several kinds of pain. She has a terrible pain down the front of her leg that she's been told is endometriosis, growing on one of her nerves. She has terrible burning in her feet. She has terrible reflux. She poops once a week. She feels like she has to get up and go to the bathroom several times a night. She thinks that's why her sleep is so
A female patient presented with daily headaches and chronic pain. Initial treatment focused on symptoms while overlooking potential common underlying causes, partly due to assumptions about weight and lifestyle. After a sleep study revealed sleep apnea, she began CPAP treatment, resulting in improved sleep and feeling better overall.
A second patient named Natalie, a tall, statuesque triathlete with Italian heritage, also presented with daily headaches. Despite being athletic and spending significant time outdoors swimming, she developed sleep problems after giving birth to her son two years prior. She experienced inability to return to sleep even when her son slept, postpartum depression, and gestational diabetes. Despite following paleo and keto diets and being well-informed about medical advice, her sleep remained abnormal and she developed daily headaches.
An 18-year-old preparing for college presented with daily headaches and a sleep study showing complete absence of deep sleep phases. Every 15 minutes, her brain attempted to enter deep sleep but woke to light sleep repeatedly. The sleep study interpretation indicated a brain stem disorder of chemistry that could lead to stroke within 10 years. The physician noted having treated 28-year-olds who had suffered strokes, challenging the association of stroke exclusively with older age, diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease.
Over five years, sleep studies were conducted on anyone willing, including children, parents, and patients with every neurologic illness. All studies showed abnormalities, leading to the conclusion that diseases occur because sleep is not restorative. This perspective questions why medicine does not view health through the lens of nightly repair systems designed to completely repair the body every night, referencing lymphatic drainage processes discussed with Tara Swat.
Medical training focuses on asking questions about the presenting symptom, such as burning in the feet, creating lists of diseases causing that symptom, then prescribing drugs. When no drug reverses the condition, medications are given to numb the pain. This approach plasters over cracks rather than investigating root causes.
Understanding glymphatic drainage profoundly impacted the relationship with sleep. Georgia Gibson, a colleague who works very hard, received an emoji reminder about sleeping to "wash her brain." The concept involves cleaners that emerge during sleep to clean up the brain, scrubbing it back to normal. Without adequate sleep, buildup of waste occurs, potentially leading to disease.
An 18-year-old patient returned after headache medication improved her headaches but left her tired. A B12 level was profoundly low, showing as abnormal. Previously, B12 levels had never been tested in headache patients despite headaches comprising a large part of neurology practice. B12 recommendations and blood tests were initiated for all patients with sleep studies, though they continued not sleeping well unless sleeping pills worked.
A patient mentioned her doctor found low vitamin D and prescribed it, resolving her wrist pain. This prompted vitamin D level testing alongside B12 in approximately 500 patients between September and December 2009. All patients had low vitamin D levels. Two patients on CPAP with headaches reported that after taking vitamin D for a month, their sleep improved and headaches disappeared.
PubMed searches for "vitamin D and sleep" yielded no results in 2009. Searching "vitamin D in the brain" led to articles by Walter Stumpf, who had published for 30 years showing vitamin D receptors in a stripe along the back of the brain stem that paralyzes people during sleep, and in clock nuclei determining sleep timing and transitions. These areas contain vitamin D receptors, indicating vitamin D's role in sleep regulation.
Patients with sleep disorders and neurologic problems had vitamin D levels in the low 30s and below, within the 30-100 normal range. The question emerged whether a specific vitamin D blood level could improve sleep.
Walter Stumpf's belief system describes vitamin D as the hibernation hormone, allowing animals to adapt to winter when food is scarce. It lowers thyroid hormone and metabolic rate of all cells. Stumpf published articles from 1982 onward about brain stem involvement, postpartum depression, infertility, and obesity, predicting epidemics before sunscreen became widespread in 1985 and air conditioning increased indoor time.
A phone conversation with Stumpf confirmed the clinical observation made sense given vitamin D receptors in nuclei controlling sleep transitions. When vitamin D goes very low, the brain forgets how to sleep.
Vitamin D is unique among hormones because it enters the cell nucleus, binds to DNA via special vitamin D receptors, and causes expression of specific proteins. One such protein is an enzyme called choline acetyltransferase that makes acetylcholine. This traces the pathway from receptor to enzyme production.
Sixteen years after beginning vitamin D treatment in 2010, the science remains phenomenal but doctor recommendations have not changed. The Endocrine Society, as hormone experts, should address this since vitamin D is a hormone, not a vitamin. The classification error occurred because vitamin D is made on skin through sun exposure. Animals lick their fur to absorb vitamin D, but humans and domesticated pigs are bald, making skin absorption the primary mechanism. Salmon contains the salmon's vitamin D, not human vitamin D, similar to how eating salmon does not provide human estrogen.
In the early 1980s, medicine decided vitamins were for lesser humans, pushing vitamin D over-the-counter. This proved beneficial as the lay public learned their health connects to vitamin D after following doctor recommendations for sunscreen and avoiding sun. The original recommendation was to avoid sunburn, which does age skin, but this morphed into never letting sun touch skin.
Beyond UVB (which makes vitamin D), the sun provides multiple wavelengths of energy including infrared that the body uses biologically. Medicine's conservative nature dismisses new ideas like hyperbaric oxygen and infrared, sometimes threatening medical licenses.
All medical knowledge represents human-made stories based on data interpretation. Every belief system contains blind spots requiring flexibility when new information emerges. The current belief system treats vitamin D as a vitamin, creating political fights within medical literature.
Medicine requires control groups receiving placebo versus study groups receiving fixed doses like 4,000 IUs, without measuring blood levels, time of year, or sun exposure. Hormones require blood level monitoring because the body maintains tight ranges where too much or too little both cause problems. The Endocrine Society's 2004 recommendations acknowledged inadequate studies relating dose to blood levels achieved, yet concluded doctors should avoid vitamin D testing and recommendations entirely.
Every person needs a unique amount of vitamin D. Fixed recommendations like 5,000, 10,000, or 20,000 IUs, or 100,000 IUs monthly, do not account for individual variation. Patients report improved sleep when levels reach approximately 60 or higher. The approach of treating only one variable proved false, as medicine typically uses drugs with single mechanisms.
Dr. Steven Gundry describes his initial approach to treating patients with vitamin D supplementation as matching the drug to the complaint, similar to how he was trained in conventional medicine. Within six months of implementing vitamin D therapy, patients began returning with new complaints including widespread joint pain, prompting referrals to rheumatologists for autoimmune disease evaluation. Two female patients developed burning sensations in their hands and feet, accompanied by headaches, after two years of vitamin D treatment.
The doctor became concerned that vitamin D supplementation was driving increased utilization of other nutrients, potentially creating secondary deficiency states. A patient presented with a book titled "The Pain-Free Promise of Pantothenic Acid," which described how pantothenic acid creates coenzyme A, responsible for cortisol production. This resonated with the doctor's own experience of developing buttock pain that prevented sitting during patient consultations.
The referenced research from 1950s studies conducted in a laboratory adjacent to the Iowa State Prison demonstrated that blocking pantothenic acid (B5) for two weeks produced four specific symptoms: insomnia, gastrointestinal complaints including bloating, abnormal gait described as "puppet-like," and burning sensations in hands and feet. These findings aligned with the symptoms observed in vitamin D-treated patients.
Dr. Gundry initially prescribed 400 milligrams of B5 along with B100 complex supplements. While some patients experienced agitation and insomnia at this dose, others who reduced to B50 formulations reported resolution of pain and improved sleep. The doctor himself experienced worsening restless legs syndrome with the 400-milligram dose, which resolved upon discontinuation.
The clinical observation revealed that B vitamins have specific optimal amounts for sleep regulation. Both deficiency and excess of B5 can disrupt sleep, with excess acting like caffeine. Patients who had been on vitamin D for two years showed profound B vitamin deficiency requiring higher initial doses, while newer patients responded to lower B50 doses containing 50 milligrams of each B vitamin.
The discussion addresses patients who began vitamin D and co-supplementation between 2020-2023, achieving blood levels in the 60s before discontinuing supplementation. These individuals later presented with burning hands and feet, often receiving diagnoses of lupus or other autoimmune conditions rather than recognition of B vitamin deficiency states. Current literature states B5 deficiency doesn't exist because it's present in all foods, but this fails to account for microbiome-dependent production.
All eight B vitamins were originally described as bacterial growth factors, produced by bacteria and absorbed by humans. The normal human microbiome consists of four major bacterial groups that maintain commensal relationships, with each group requiring at least one B vitamin while producing at least one. Only 2% of approximately 200 bacterial species inhabiting the human gastrointestinal tract from mouth to anus have been identified, though genetic footprints exist for all.
Dr. Gundry initially assumed vitamin D would correct IBS symptoms and promote weight loss, but these outcomes did not occur despite increased exercise. Research from 2020 during COVID-19 demonstrated that vitamin D supplementation can positively alter bacterial populations in stool samples. The combination of vitamin D and B100 provided eight bacterial growth factors necessary for restoring normal microbiome composition.
The treatment protocol involves providing B50 for three months to jumpstart the microbiome, then discontinuing to allow natural production to resume. Extended supplementation beyond three months led to patients feeling "old" upon waking. Probiotics alone are insufficient because bacteria require specific growth factors to reproduce effectively. The bacterial population functions like a river, with complete turnover occurring within 12-24 hours, necessitating continuous growth factor production.
The natural process involves maternal transfer of vitamin D through breast milk along with eight B vitamins from the mother's normal microbiome, followed by sunlight exposure. This system has operated for 300,000 years in humans and 250 million years including dinosaur microbiomes. Modern lifestyle factors have disrupted this ancient relationship.
Meline, a patient taking 30,000 IU of vitamin D daily for four years, maintained stable blood levels in the 60s while experiencing significant improvements: resolution of leg pain, elimination of burning in hands and feet, improved sleep, resolution of depression, and discontinuation of three pain medications. However, she remained 100 pounds overweight, consistent with the observation that weight loss occurs only after completion of necessary repairs.
Patients require ongoing vitamin D supplementation due to insufficient sunlight exposure, with target blood levels above 60 for those with sleep or medical problems. Those who developed B vitamin deficiency after 2-5 years of vitamin D use require combination D and B50 therapy for three months, followed by transition to multivitamin dosing. The bacteria perform hundreds of additional functions including mineral metabolism (magnesium, calcium, selenium, manganese) and iron regulation through metabolites like reuterin from Lactobacillus reuteri.
Current literature claims vitamin D supplementation does not cause B vitamin deficiency, attributing concurrent deficiencies to shared root causes like poor absorption or restrictive diets. However, Dr. Gundry's research titled "Vitamin D deficiency changes the intestinal microbiome, reducing B vitamin production in the gut" proposes a direct mechanistic link. The theory suggests declining vitamin D production with aging leads to microbiome disruption and subsequent multiple deficiency states, explaining age-related disease patterns observed in populations from 1945-1985.
The hypothesis states that the parallel epidemics of abnormal sleep and abnormal intestinal microbiome are linked through vitamin D deficiency. Proper supplementation doses of vitamin D plus all eight B vitamins appears to return the intestinal microbiome to normal in 3 months. Reinstating the normal microbiome not only treats IBS symptoms, it returns the supply of B vitamins to their natural daily doses.
The B vitamins are neither inherently good nor unnecessary—they are good for the person who needs them and only until the normal source picks up again. Both sleep disruption and pain can be caused by large doses of B vitamins once the intestinal microbiome has returned to normal. The B vitamins are very biologically intertwined both in their intestinal production and cellular use. This suggests that B vitamins, aside from B12, were not meant to be used individually.
Returning to restorative sleep with normal supply of the building blocks of cellular repair has the potential to repair the pro-inflammatory state associated with atherosclerosis, as well as the hyperadrenergic state associated with hypertension, heart disease and stroke. Given the proper essential elements for normal sleep, the body is designed to repair every physical injury that occurs during normal daily use and may even retain a memory of long deferred repairs.
The hypothesis proposes that returning the body's vitamin D and B levels to normal allows the body to kick back up and start producing everything it needs. The scientific consensus states that there is not a link between vitamin D and vitamin B deficiency, claiming that vitamin D does not cause a vitamin B deficiency, but this hypothesis disagrees with that consensus.
An intermediary mechanism could exist, such as if taking lots of vitamin D disrupts magnesium production and the magnesium production impacts vitamin B. The situation is more complicated than discussed, arriving at co-enzyme A deficiency. Co-enzyme A is a very important chemical that runs mitochondrial health and the ability to make energy, and it is linked to all degenerative diseases.
Meline went back to work after treatment. Natalie got better, first with vitamin D like most patients—she started to sleep better but at the end of two years she stopped sleeping better. She actually lost weight, which was the case with several women who were postpartum who had complained about that. Natalie's interpretation was that someone who is less affected than Meline was—the D B50 combination, especially in the setting of being after pregnancy—is really all somebody who was relatively normal at the start of their life needs.
Natalie got better—her antidepressant went away, her postpartum depression cleared, her high heart rate normalized. Many women who are very interested in exercise and doing exercise had high heart rates of 110 or above sitting quietly and had not been like that before. Their high heart rates came down, and Natalie came back to being her normal self again.
Natalie only took vitamin B for 3 months, then did a multivitamin, and then eventually almost everybody needs to be off the multivitamin completely. If all of this happens spontaneously in every other animal on the planet, then supplements should not be necessary. The squirrels are not going to GNC to buy supplements. If there's a mistake made like moving indoors and giving back what is needed to get the normal microbiome, then the body should go back to supporting itself.
Natalie is back to being a triathlete and doing great.
The advice given to listeners is: one, do the behavioral cognitive stuff first—make the blackout curtains, do the whole thing. If you haven't done that with the eye cover, then go ahead and do that. If that's all you need, do not mess around with supplements. Two, if you've already done the behavioral changes, then go to the website, read about the ideas, or listen to the podcast, and see whether the ideas there feel like they apply to you.
The right sleep program is a process of taking vitamin D to a certain level, supplementing B12 if B12 is at a certain level below a certain level, taking B50 for 3 months, and then taking a multivitamin. This continues until the body says it might need more B vitamins.
The first 3 months, if B12 is low, B12 is taken as a separate supplement. Many multivitamins say multivitamin on the front but actually have the equivalent of B50 in them—they have 50 milligrams of all these B vitamins. The doses of these vitamins are extremely important for the way you feel every day. If you get it right, you feel energetic, perky, and wonderful all day. If you get it wrong, you feel awful in the same way you did before. You have to look at the back and learn some of the names of these vitamins.
The first step is taking all four of these. Then in the second step for a period of usually 3 to 4 months, B12 is still taken if B12 deficient, vitamin D is still taken and adjusted based on recommendations from D levels done every month. The vitamin D levels that doctors are doing are not accurate. A multivitamin is still taken.
After the three months depicted, if sleep is much better, the body will actually stop sleeping well again. The brain is asking for additional B vitamins. The sleep is a thing that once you learn how to use it and once you learn the concept that if in the third or fourth month of this program sleep gets much better and then in the sixth month it gets worse again, what you should take from that is the brain really knows how to do this. It was able to get to sleep from 10 to 6 with one brief wake up, went back to sleep, didn't get up to pee, has no pain when waking up, and feels energetic all day long. It knows how to do that. When it doesn't do it again two months later, the message is that the brain is asking for something else.
Supplementation is only good for you if there's something wrong with you that you're trying to correct. Keep a log of what happens to that thing because people tend to forget. All headache patients forget that they had headaches when they go away. This is challenging to a clinician because they come back and say they still have headaches, and then their husband says they were in Vegas two weeks ago and had no headaches at all. The response is that the headaches are back now. The view is that it should have fixed them and now it hasn't. This is a different belief system where the answer is the brain is asking for something. Interpreting what it's asking for is difficult but possible.
If you do not have something wrong with you, do not mess with supplements, especially D. Number two is keep a log. Read more. Think about it. Think about whether there are things that are bothering you. Number three: if there's something bothering you, then decide you're actually going to take some time and learn about a system which allows you to give supplements that lets the body be fully replete, which means fills up all the deficiencies. The final outcome will be great sleep, great repair, and doing things that will allow the body to prevent degenerative illness.
The question of going outside in the sun and having a better diet instead of taking supplements is addressed. The problem is that supplementing with vitamin D is not the same as being outdoors. There is literature by Stephanie Senf that says the vitamin D made on the skin is sulfated, which is different than supplemented vitamin D, and it has different behavior in the body.
There is literature showing that vitamin D is not the only thing made by UVB hitting the skin. What it is hitting is cholesterol, and that cholesterol has changed into D3. But there are probably 15-20 other chemicals that are being made at the same time. They are not being taken with that pill of vitamin D3. There is literature that has gotten attention in the last 10 years showing there are other things that prevent inflammation that do things to the skin that were actually being made by the sunlight that protects from damaging effects.
The question of why the prescription cannot just be improve diet is addressed. The fermented foods shown are good for the gut microbiome—kimchi, kombucha, yogurt, sauerkraut. Fermented food means eating rotting food, but bacteria are growing in there and secreting things like B vitamins and reuterin. They are making a yeast bacterial mixture. There is fungus growing, there are viruses, there are many microbiomes.
Eating bacteria means eating a food that has B50 in it, which is great. The reason supplements are effective is because there is no idea what the time frame will be for having that success with fermented foods. The step-wise approach with vitamins is the fast and easy approach. If you don't want to use supplements, going outside and including fermented foods would be supported as the healthier approach to all diseases.
Redheads have a bit of a superpower in their relationship with sunshine—they can make significantly more vitamin D. The redhead gene usually comes with freckles, which means there are only little tiny parts of the skin that have melanin. The redhead gene came about in the far north—Viking Scotland. Those places don't get much sunlight, which cleared out the blocker of the thing that collected that energy and allowed people who lived in very overcast environments to make D because the melanin didn't block the conversion to vitamin D.
If Scotsmen are moved to Texas and Oklahoma, where there are very high sun levels and it is very hot in the summer, they cannot tolerate the level of sun. There has not been enough time to adapt. Supplementing with D is not the whole answer. Supplementation in and of itself is not what is wanted. What is wanted is for kids to be outside much more. There are now new learning environments for kids where they're out in the forest.
Ninety percent of Americans spend close to 22 hours inside every day. Roughly 20% of Americans never go outside regularly, spending 24 hours indoors. Downstream from vitamin D, there is not just sleep disruption—there are lots of problems. Diabetes is happening in parallel with the sleep disorder. It is not caused by the sleep disorder. It has similar chemistry in the background.
Co-enzyme A deficiency affects a hundred things in the body. Co-enzyme A makes acetylcholine, which allows the whole autonomic nervous system to sleep or to react normally. It affects all of those things done when training, and it also affects cortisol levels. Co-enzyme A is required to make cortisol. Co-enzyme A is required to make melatonin.
The things linked to vitamin D are everything from bone disorders, autoimmune diseases, mental health, brain disorders, cardiovascular issues, metabolic issues, immune infections, and certain cancers.
Direct sunlight is required to make vitamin D on the skin, but the amount should be limited so the skin does not burn. If using a tanning salon with UVA, vitamin D is not being made from that. UVA will still tan but will not make D. Different kinds of beds exist.
Vitamin D cannot be made through a window. If outside and the sun cannot be seen because of clouds, vitamin D might still be made. Up to 80% of UV radiation still penetrates light cloud cover. On thick, dark, overcast days or dense storms, 70-90% of UVB rays can be blocked, making it incredibly difficult to produce any meaningful amount of vitamin D.
Lamps on desks do not provide vitamin D. However, there are many other wavelengths of energy received when outside. Infrared is one of the most important wavelengths—it penetrates the body several centimeters and gives energy to the mitochondria. Bodies are like little batteries that receive energy from sunlight, and this can be done sitting on a porch without being in direct sunlight.
Some people believe incandescent bulbs should be used on a lamp on the desk. The problem is that incandescent bulbs give rays of light. LED is an electron-producing light source which the government has suggested is better than incandescent lights. It is very difficult to buy incandescent bulbs. Halogen or LEDs are available now, and they do not give off infrared light energy. An incandescent bulb is the old school glass light bulbs that Thomas Edison used. It creates light by running an electrical current through a metal filament until it gets so hot that it glows. Because it relies on raw heat, an incandescent bulb behaves exactly like a miniature fire or a tiny piece of the sun.
Probiotics were tried with patients when starting treatment, and they had not corrected the microbiome. A probiotic is considered to have actual bacteria freeze-dried that are eaten. A prebiotic is different—it feeds the bacteria and they feed you. There are different things that are feeding the bacteria.
If changing to carnivore and all of a sudden belly gas goes away, the carnivore diet makes the bacteria very happy. If the next client is mostly plant-based, the way of thinking and helping them must change, because when feeding mostly plant-based, there is a different set of bacteria.
Humans cover the globe like cockroaches and are very successful with a hugely varied diet. The diet that works for each individual should be eaten. The original articles about vitamin deficiency states were in two groups that ate a pure carbohydrate diet. The claim for most people interested in healthy diets is that eating a fully carbohydrate diet sets up failure in a million different ways.
There were two incidences from the 1940s where the first vitamin deficiency states were described, and both turned out to be purely carbohydrate diets. One was in the Japanese prisoner of war camps and the Bataan death march in World War II where they had rice, rice, rice. They were outside all the time and not vitamin D deficient. They were discovered to have beriberi. Beriberi is an old disease described in Japan when the rice casing is taken off. They gave back meat and vegetables, and beriberi is described as heart failure.
Non-healing ulcers of the legs, bright shiny red skin, and burning in the feet are conditions seen frequently in elderly patients in US hospitals that are now ignored. The perspective shifts when viewing these symptoms through the lens of feeding bacteria a purely carbohydrate diet, which selects for bacterial populations that do not produce the B vitamins needed. This same lens applies to pellagra, a niacin deficiency that affected adults and children institutionalized in the southern United States in the 1930s and 1940s who were fed corn grits as their only food.
When someone has maintained a purely carbohydrate diet for many years while being D deficient, more aggressive interventions are likely necessary. This may include changing diet, incorporating fermented foods, and transitioning to a meat and plant diet. Sleep remains the best measure of whether recovery efforts have succeeded.
Sleep trackers can be used to monitor progress, though they are not perfect. Some individuals become obsessed with the data and experience anxiety when seeing low REM sleep numbers. Body awareness and listening to what the body says about sleep quality remains very important. When working with patients Meline and Natalie, sleep tracking was done through listening to their reports since sleep trackers were not available at that time.
Sunlight plays a significant role in sleep quality because it produces vitamin D, which can improve microbiome balance and help with better sleep. Vitamins play an important role in sleep, as demonstrated through thousands of patients who have been helped to restore healthy sleep states.
People diagnosed with narcolepsy or sleep apnea are told these are genetic conditions requiring specific treatments. Narcolepsy involves attacks of sleep where someone falls asleep during conversation. These conditions can be treated using the same vitamin-based approaches. Anyone can be sleep-deprived to the point of falling asleep mid-conversation by missing two or three nights of sleep. Medicine classifies these as diseases, but they represent the body falling out of its normal state.
People with specific diagnoses like sleep apnea and narcolepsy are unlikely to cure their conditions with going outside and eating kimchi. These represent end-stage conditions where the body has been severely affected. The human body was designed to handle different diets, getting up in the middle of the night, taking care of babies, traveling long periods, and other stressors experienced over 300,000 years. Some people lived to 75 years old 20,000 years ago, indicating this was achievable.
People recovering from severe sleep disorders experience changes during treatment. When they begin sleeping better at night, they may start having nightmares, which indicates they have reached REM sleep but lack perfect chemistry to sleep through the REM phase and transition properly to light sleep. There are transition states where people feel like they are getting worse before improving.
Narcolepsy can be cured using nicotine patches around the clock. Nicotine is the only drug that completely duplicates acetylcholine, which allows focus, attention, distraction, and return during the day, and controls the ability to concentrate. At night, acetylcholine allows entry into REM sleep. One patient completely cured her narcolepsy using nicotine patches after stopping smoking.
Tobacco has been vilified, but people with Parkinson's disease who smoked throughout the last 30 years have been shown to do better because Parkinson's disease is an acetylcholine deficiency state.
Industrialization first disrupted natural rhythms by moving society indoors. The true explosion of sleep disorders occurred in two modern phases: a medical boom in the 1980s and a digital epidemic in the 2000s. The 1980s saw formal recognition of sleep medicine and CPAP machine intervention, which diagnosed millions with obstructive sleep apnea. The medicalization transformed into a cultural crisis by the 2000s as sedentary indoor lifestyles deprived people of natural daytime sunlight.
Sunlight exposure is vital because its high-intensity brightness resets the brain's master internal clock and suppresses daytime melatonin, establishing a biological countdown for deep sleep at night. Deprived of this anchoring cue and bombarded by 24/7 hustle culture and smartphones pumping blue light into bedrooms, society experienced a double-edged sword of too little sun by day and too much artificial light by night. The modern circadian mismatch culminated in an acute spike during the 2020 pandemic lockdowns.
AI is not affected by what the endocrine society says about vitamin D and provides raw data. When asked what Dr. Gmanac thinks about whether sun exposure is the whole story for sleep, the response indicates that while the pineal gland makes melatonin for the 10:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. cycle, vitamin D has receptors in the brain stem. This represents the edge of a big change where ideas about sleep will become available in beautifully written form through AI.
Most sleep disorders, including sleep apnea and narcolepsy, are related at their basis to vitamin D and multiple substances made by the microbiome. The microbiome and D deficiency are closely linked, with hundreds of substances playing a role in sleep switches being supplied by the microbiome. A damaged gut is a major hidden driver of poor sleep because the melatonin pipeline starts in the gut, manufacturing the calm-down chemical occurs in the gut, and the cortisol alarm system is linked to the gut.
The microbiome-sleep connection operates as a bidirectional loop where a bad microbiome causes poor sleep, and poor sleep alters the microbiome. While anatomical issues like narrow airways cause sleep apnea and light mismatch from lack of near-infrared light play significant roles, fixing chronic insomnia often requires healing the gut just as much as fixing bedtime routines. The lack of near-infrared light is considered too unconventional for mainstream medicine to discuss.
The best day in recent memory occurred in Sevilla during very hot weather after traveling with a husband for three or four weeks. The day involved sitting outside underneath an umbrella with little misters, playing canasta together, representing a marvelous circumstance of simply hanging out and having a pleasant time together rather than focusing on accomplishment.
Dr. Gmanac's website is located at drgmanac.com without a period after DR. A YouTube channel contains a series called "Sleep Chats" with 50 episodes covering topics such as whether a right sleep program will help carpal tunnel syndrome.
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