Innate Wisdom Podcast

What It's About:

This conversation is part 2 of The Truth About Vitamin D. We are joined again by Jim Stephenson Jr, a Vitamin D researcher whose interest in the topic began after witnessing a loved ones’ health decline and D levels decrease even with supplementing huge amounts. Through his quest to help her, he’s discovered a TON that most people don’t know about their Vitamin D supplements - and probably should.

Listen to hear more about:

- How Vitamin D can potentially interfere with thyroid, progesterone, and other hormones
- How to support your Vitamin D levels naturally
- Nutritional ligands for supporting Vitamin D levels
- Do we need to use sunscreen?
- Do we need to wear sunglasses?
- What about Vitamin D lamps?
- The Vitamin D-Folate connection
- Vitamin D & blood sugar
- Supplements you can actually take to support Vitamin D levels

Transcript:

[00:00:00] Loren: So, to dive into a slightly different topic, I would love to talk about how people can support their overall Vitamin D metabolism. And I've read a lot of stuff from you around rosemary and sage and potentially other things. So would you mind talking about the connection between these herbs, what they do to support vitamin D and any other things that people can support themselves with, especially people who live in the more northern latitudes that are concerned about their vitamin D levels?

[00:00:38] Jim: So when it comes to living in the north, one thing that can always make it fair, let's say, is elevation increases the UV that gets through. So for example, Denver would have a lot more potential to make vitamin D than San Diego on the beach, believe it or not, because it's about 8% more efficient for every thousand meters you go up.

So you can always make up for that. Take a day, hike, go somewhere, and day hike and stuff. But when it comes to the big picture about vitamin D, you have to keep in mind that when you go in the sun, you can go in the sun and the key is to not burn. You can turn slightly pink as long as that goes away later. If it progresses to peel, that's a burn.

But the first part is really just putting your blood into tissue and letting it basically sun itself and gather photons to take it back into the body and then your skin will make a bunch of different molecules. We're not even measuring them. Some of them are sunscreens. They'll stay in your skin. They probably rise to the surface.

Probably is something valid about not always lathering. You know, if you're not soiled, you probably shouldn't use soap. When you have a skin flora to begin with that you want to maintain, so you wanna get reasonable sun and then let your body decide all those different molecules, it can make. And when you're getting sun for health, you want to forgo sunglasses.

I'm not saying forgo sunglasses all the time. You can get cataracts that way and stuff, but when you're focused on sunning your body for sun health, you don't want to have anything blocking. I'm not saying to look at the sun either, I'm just saying allow the light to be there and not be sheltered because that way the retina can then respond through your brain and your pineal gland and your all the ways that it can for the steroidogenesis and melanogenesis and the creation of melanin and the shuffling of it. 

So that's the most important thing when it comes to vitamin D. Not getting so obsessed about a two five D number, but to make it a point, think of getting reasonable sun like having a meal.

Think of it as feeding your body sunshine and nutrition. 

[00:03:08] Loren: I like that. I do think sun is definitely a really important part of just being a human being. It's nourishment, it's soul food, but also real food. Right? It is. So definitely some considerations. Latitude, super important, but also altitude and making an effort to get some sun for those people that live in super cloudy areas.

Would you say maybe investing in a vitamin D lamp would be important? 

[00:03:39] Jim: Yeah, it can be. I work in a hydroelectric dam and there are people that have a shift at a computer and they're trapped inside. When the sunshine outside would be making vitamin D, that's a really good candidate for a vitamin D lamp because you're not gonna mess with your circadian rhythms. 

I think it's best to get it when you're blocked from getting it, but when it's available so that your body doesn't start making vitamin D at 1:00 AM and then in two days you're out there at noon. I think there's some potential to cause some circadian rhythm disruption.

[00:04:13] Loren: Yeah, yeah, for sure. I have a vitamin D lamp and one thing that I do is I use it in the morning upon waking, and I try not to use it too late in the evening so that I don't create some sleep restlessness. Going back to the first part of the question, rosemary and sage, I just wanted to touch upon that. 

[00:04:32] Jim: Talking about the nutrition, like I said, getting in the sun is like a form of nutrition, so the vitamin D receptors, they also like nutritional, ligans, ligans, however you say it. 

And so 1, 2, 5 D is a ligand. So would rosemary be. Curcumin could be. So a lot of these molecules are able to go to our receptors. It's probably why Chinese medicine is so powerful, and we may never understand it, but the vitamin D receptors in a nutshell, there's two different ones.

We talked earlier about the nuclear one, which means it goes into the nucleus. That's the one that works with vitamin A and the RXR, the retinoid receptor. But there's another form of vitamin D receptor that's called the membrane version. It's on the membrane of the cell. It doesn't go into the nucleus, and that one uses a lot of nutritional ligans, like curcumin can go there, and that's a rapid response one.

There are a lot of different things in your body that can occupy a receptor, and that's where we get at things that have evolved to block Vitamin D. So getting back to Epstein-Barr, which we talked about earlier. So Epstein-Barr has three antigens that are the right shape to park in the vitamin D receptor.

I don't know which one that is. It's probably both of them, but there are certain molecules that if something has a higher affinity to a receptor, it will steal it from other things, and sometimes that higher affinity can be labeled. There's labels, antagonist, and agonist. Those are some labels you'll see, like vitamin D is considered an agonist of the VDR, the vitamin D receptor.

So when you have say, HIV, Lyme, or Epstein-Barr, and you have those antigens in your body, they will steal your vitamin D receptors, but other molecules can replace them by their antagonist action. So rosemary or curcumin contain an acid. I'm not gonna be able to say it. It starts with a C, but that acid has the right affinity attraction to the receptor that it will go in there and it will remove the Epstein-Barr or the HIV or the Lyme Spiro key(?) ligans from there. And so that's where you find those molecules being beneficial in the vitamin D metabolism. It was actually rosemary in my significant others' case, that got the level from 11 back into the thirties.

It wasn't vitamin D that did it, it was rosemary that made the body clear out some of the receptors, start to express new ones that then were able to attract and make vitamin D. So that's the thing about rosemary and sage is that they're vitamin D antagonists. 

[00:07:38] Loren: Wow, that's so interesting. Percumin too, so you mentioned, right?

Yes. If somebody were thinking about taking this to support their vitamin D metabolism or receptorship, would it be via a supplement again, or is it more of like a whole food approach or are both okay? 

[00:07:59] Jim: We started with the supplement and that's what worked initially for us, but the person that recommended it said, just infuse it in oil and cook with it, or just cook with it in general.

Doesn't have to be a whole lot. It's pretty potent stuff. Some of the supplements have really good resources, like really good citations, and I can send you the Rosemary Supreme supplement, the link that I have. And even if people don't use that, there's some great resources, citations in that article that they should read.

[00:08:29] Loren: Oh yes, absolutely. I think more the merrier on that for sure. One thing I would love to talk about too is the relationship between vitamin D and folate, which I've heard you talk about, especially because folate is such a top of mind for pregnant women, right? And I think a lot of people would be surprised to find out that there is a relationship between the two.

So would you mind elaborating on that a little bit?

[00:08:56] Jim: So when you go in the sun and you're getting hit bombarded with the UV rays, the big battle in your skin there with the melanin world is the body seeking to protect the folate from being degraded by the UV. And so that's why it will create or shuffle, move around the melanin.

It's to protect the folate. And so when you're in the sun making vitamin D, you're turning darker to protect your folate. So there's this fine dance between your body getting enough vitamin D and not degrading your folate to a crazy point. And that also gets at no sunglasses because that allows your body to work in the me noesis on the fly, as I say, because sometimes your body just is gonna rearrange the melanin that exists.

It's also gonna call for more, but that's not gonna arrive. That's it's gonna take time in order of days to arrive. So that's the tide of folate right there. This isn't about vitamin D, but I have studied folate because I have some MTHFR mutations myself. And the person that taught me about rosemary was actually interpreting my significant others 23 and Me results, and that was one of the things that came out of it was point this(?) to rosemary.

Rosemary wasn't necessarily found in looking at vitamin D per se. Rosemary's super healthy for you for a lot of other reasons. But when it comes to folate, you have to be really careful with folic acid. I went to Dr. Ben Lynch, I went to his folate seminar at the college over there because I wanted to learn more about it.

And so, not tied to vitamin D I would say you gotta be really careful with folic acid because it will become what they call unmetabolized in your body and it will hog the folate carriers and cause your body to think it has enough folate when it really just has a bunch of unmetabolized folic acid, which isn't the same thing.

I've learned what I can about folate, but I encourage everyone to learn as much as they can about the difference between folate and folic acid because folic acid does not exist in nature. 

[00:11:14] Loren: Absolutely, yes. This is a topic that I cover. I have a preconception course, and I cover this in depth because it's so important.

And if any students are listening right now, you know exactly what he's talking about, right? So, yeah, it is really important to know the difference. So back to vitamin D and folate, I have this question, what does that relationship mean for people with darker skin tones? 

[00:11:42] Jim: Darker skin tones became a rallying cry to prop of the vitamin D deficiency.

The darker skin, their skin, their body is just as intelligent as somebody else's. So I have some papers about treating people based upon their skin tone or just their 25 D number. When you have dark-skinned people, they normally have different levels of vitamin D binding protein, different mutations and polymorphisms in those carriers.

But when it comes right down to it, their bone health is better to begin with. So when you look at their two five D number, you have to look for those clinical signs of vitamin D deficiency and they aren't present. Most for what I've read, most bad health outcomes with darker skin people has a lot more to do with their access to adequate medical care than it does their skin color in the first place.

[00:12:40] Loren: That's fascinating. I'd love to read more of that. And would you say that their folate is more protected as a result? 

[00:12:47] Jim: Yeah, I would think so, because if you think about where you see the darkest skin, it's where there's the most sun exposure and it's really to prepare, if you're gonna be able to carry a baby to term, you're gonna end up with a defect, you're gonna end up with a cleft pallet, you're gonna end up with a tongue tie.

It's gonna affect breastfeeding. You're gonna have all these other shortcomings. So it's an evolutionary advantage for those locations. That darker skin, that's what it came out of. Neural tube defects. That's not gonna be something that evolution creates more of. It'd be the opposite of that. So the dark skin is just to protect the melanin, melatonin, It's to protect all that stuff. 

[00:13:32] Loren: Fascinating. So I would love to kind of backtrack to the topic of sunscreen, which you mentioned briefly. I have read that sunscreens, the kind that you get at the supermarket pharmacy, et cetera, even as little as 30 SPF can block somewhere around 90 to a hundred percent of our Vitamin D production.

Is that right? 

[00:14:00] Jim: That sounds right. At least a fresh batch of it would. Yeah, it pretty much just blocks the UVB, so you still can have a lot of bad UVA skin influence from it, you know? 

[00:14:13] Loren: Right. Yeah, I've read that too. So it's not even blocking the uva, which I think is the more harmful if I'm not…

[00:14:20] Jim: From what I read it is, Yes. Yeah. 

[00:14:23] Loren: So you're blocking your Vitamin D production, which you would get from the UVB. You're allowing the UVA, which is the more harmful to kind of have reign over you. Right. And then we're also putting on these chemicals that are also endocrine disruptive, so hormone disruptors and can be harmful. There's more research coming out recently where one ingredient, I forget exactly which one it was, but it was on some mainstream news site.

I was like, Wow, people are actually paying attention now. 

[00:14:52] Jim: Yeah, all those sunscreens are really bad news. Everybody that makes one also makes a colorectal drug or something like that. It's almost like they're hurting you to the outcome by blocking the benefits of the sun. Oh my gosh. 

[00:15:08] Loren: Yeah. So I guess for people with pale skin, you can tell me what you think, but I typically recommend, depending on how pale they're, cuz I have clients and students that are like white as a sheep and will burn after like 10 minutes of sun exposure.

So what I kind of try to advise them is kind of like you said, to get color. Not burnt, not so pink where you're gonna peel, but allow yourself to get some unprotected sun exposure, right in a very specific dose, and then you can slather up in your sunscreen of choice. I personally typically use mineral sunscreen, but I don't know if you have any other that you like.

[00:15:52] Jim: No, I haven't ever really turned to any of 'em. I know that people do talk about healthy ones. I'm pretty light skinned too, and there have been times where I can get really dark too, but as long as I do it over time, I don't end up peeling or have any of those issues. Plus, I think another thing that is really important is that some of the molecules that we're making that are then in our skin are actually sunscreens.

They're the natural ones that our body makes. Think of somebody who lives near the equator and doesn't have any sunscreen at all. Their body is absolutely making some sunscreen for them to be able to be out in that all the time. So for me, I've always had to revert to covering up. In my life, I really haven't used sunscreen, but a few occasions to avoid a burn, like maybe a certain rafting trip or something like that.

But in general, it was a person that was going to medical school that keyed me in at a graduation party. It was late in the evening, and she said, “Look at the people that are burned. And look at the people that aren't burned.” We were still playing volleyball and all the people that were burned already were the ones that had been wearing sunglasses at the ceremony that day.

And so that's where I started to really hone in on the letting the light get to your retina so your retina can do its job in melanogenesis and rearranging and keeping you from getting burned. And that's something they teach in medical school. So err on the side of you don't want to get cataracts. Probably want to just get your sun, your healthy sun and then move to a coverup and you could be something light the coverup.

There's a lot of coverups now. There's all kinds of them that are sunscreen themselves. There's scarves and hats and there's shirts, and so you can move to something and just get covered up because you can't make too much vitamin D, but you can definitely get too much sun and you can harm your skin from too much sun.

Especially because most sunscreens lighting the UVA through anyway. Even though you might not have a burn, you're probably doing a lot of bad stuff to your skin.

[00:18:05] Loren: I agree. I think the coverup is a great option. I also have read that washing your skin after you've had sun exposure will wash off some of the vitamin D that you've created.

Is that right too? 

[00:18:17] Jim: It depends on which vitamin D we're talking about. So like Dr. Mercola writes about how you can wash your vitamin D off. So the vitamin D that mainstream's focused on the 25 D that we're taking pills to increase, hopefully going to send increase, that D that's made that big pipeline, let's call it the major pipeline that D you cannot wash off.

Okay? It's made deep enough in the epidermis that it can't be washed off. But, that doesn't mean that the body's not gonna make something else out of the D three here that's gonna rise to the surface and protect you that you definitely could wish off. Plus, on your skin there are something called sibo sites.

They make something called sibo, and so that's one of the places that you could end up pushing off, but that's a minor amount of D three, but that might be a lot of other vitamin D molecules we don't talk about. We have trouble finding the literature, we don't read about it. So when it comes to using soap on your body, pits and groin is a good rule.

Unless you are soiled, unless you went in that you got mud on you, you got, if you don't have something on there per se that you need to wash off, probably should use a lot less soap on those other areas.

[00:19:42] Loren: Our skin, like you mentioned earlier, has its own microbiome too, and a lot of the washes, the body washes, they have different pH’s so they can mess with the pH of our skin. They can take off the flora that's already there and allow opportunistic bacteria to take over or kind of destroy our skin barrier integrity altogether, so.

[00:20:05] Jim: Since they're sulfated forms of vitamin D, which are water soluble, for all we know they're becoming this molecule called 20 O H D three, which functions as a sunscreen that might be rising to the surface from the sulfated form of vitamin D. And then you would definitely be washing it off of it. So, absolutely.

So we have to think about what we don't know and what we have yet to discover that nobody's even looking for. There's no funding to even look at that kind of stuff. So it's better to probably keep the soap off it as much as you can.

[00:20:40] Loren: Yeah. Oh, one day we'll have more research. Hopefully, right? Yeah. Okay, so a couple more questions.

I would love to talk about the connection between vitamin D and blood sugar, if there is one. This connection and the support of vitamin D supplementation or argument for vitamin D supplementation is made by a lot of experts and dieticians that attribute or associate vitamin D deficiency with gestational diabetes, but also on the other side, just people trying to balance their blood sugar and people that are into metabolic function also promote vitamin D supplementation for blood sugar control as well.

So very similarly unrelated people, but same kind of argument. Would love to know your thoughts on that. 

[00:21:33] Jim: So I think what'll end up happening in a lot of the literature, and I looked at some of those cuz those were those ones that you cited. So I looked at some of those and they're only looking at 25 D. So naturally the ones with the better 25 D are gonna have the better glucose control.

So a lot of that stuff doesn't necessarily bear out because they're not looking at the active form to make the associations with. But, getting back to what we were just talking about when it comes to sun, okay? In those other molecules that I found, and I found dozens and dozens of other vitamin D molecules in other pathways, a lot of those molecules are involved in your glucose and circadian glucose controls, and they are vitamin D molecules, but they aren't for the vitamin D receptors. 

And I don't want to get everybody buried in a whole lot of different molecules, but so when you go in the sun, there's a host of molecules that you make that are at play there with your glucose. And that makes sense because you gotta think about a plant for a second.

Plants have to control their glucose, okay? And they don't get to run in and out of the sun. They don't get to apply sunscreen. It just happens. So the molecules that can control glucose in us are gonna be sun derived molecules, just like they are in plants. And some of them are gonna go to retinoid receptors, some of them are gonna be considered vitamin D molecules, some of them are found in other nutrition, like uh, grape seed extract contains certain molecules that work wonderfully with glucose control. 

So I think, what they're looking at right now is just associations drawn on the healthier people. And at this point now with the goal, you literally could probably associate bad haircuts with vitamin D deficiency.

And I've said that before, I've read that somewhere. But because most of the world is deficient, you're gonna catch a lot of sick people in that deficiency. And it's just gonna be that self-fulfilling prophecy lesson until we get to everybody looking at the active form of vitamin D. 

[00:23:53] Loren: That's a great point.

Most of the world is defacto deficient just because of this range, but also there are a lot of sick people in the world too. Oh, there are. So at what point does functional or optimal, what point do we take that into account to? Lab ranges, I talk about this also in my course. Lab ranges, they factor in everybody, including sick people.

So that doesn't necessarily mean that you have the optimal range. It just means that you have an average of healthy and sick. 

[00:24:30] Jim: Yeah, and that's a very valid point. And sometimes the bottom end of a range, if you're right at the bottom end of the range, that's one thing. But if you're one point under it, that's supposedly life threatening.

So some of these ranges that they came up with are kind of suspecting in and of themselves to begin with. 

[00:24:48] Loren: Yeah, definitely thought provoking for sure. 

[00:24:51] Jim: I wanna add one thing here to the conversation real quick. So we talked about vitamin D, we kind of talked a little bit, or at least alluded to cofactors like you need magnesium.

And although we didn't say it, Boron’s another important thing. So you have all these things that your body needs. And you mentioned a second ago that lots of people are sick. And when someone is sick and they're on some sort of prescription drug, whatever it is, and a lot of people are on more than one.

One thing that people overlook on their quest to find health is that they don't really know how the drug they're taking impacts other things in their body. And the reason that matters is because drugs are broken down in your body by certain pathways, and a lot of them use the C Y P enzymes, okay? And so does vitamin D.

That's what activates it. That's what does all this. So if people are trying to figure out their health and they're already on a prescription, they need to understand that when that prescription was designed, that drug, that molecule is meant to get in your body and the people who designed that drug, don't care what natural molecules that is competing with.

You may have just found out that mushrooms contain this wonderful thing, or broccoli has this wonderful thing, or who knows what you're doing to eat right. You might have a prescription drug you're taking that is blocking many health benefits that you're striving to attain naturally. And so that's at play in all of these health related issues.

If somebody's on a single prescription drug, they probably already have some of their potential to really heal changed in some form or fashion. It depends on what drug they're on, what enzyme uses, but that's interesting stuff to look at. 

[00:26:49] Loren: That is such a great point. One of the things that I researched, or dove into in my vitamin D research is glyphosate's effect on vitamin D creation. 

Right? And now glyphosate, which is also known as roundup, it's a really common weed killer, but also used in conventional farming. So most conventional produce has glyphosate. A lot of conventional meat came from animals that were eating glyphosate sprayed grass, and that actually can affect our ability to create Vitamin D too, as well. 

[00:27:25] Jim: Right. Yeah. I've read a really good article and it said exactly which enzymes it impacted, and it's not just the vitamin D world, it's a lot of the steroid steroidogenesis in general that it messes with. Yeah, it is. It's pretty scary how that works. 

[00:27:41] Loren: It's so interesting. So you have medications, and medications too not only, you know, can they mess with the sort of enzymatic reactions in the body, but also they really deplete certain nutrients. So like you said, every medication's different, but for example, I was recently looking at my asthma medication. I was on asthma medications for 20 something years and I healed my asthma almost, who knows, over five years ago, and it depletes a pretty significant amount of nutrients and there are nutrients associated with the adrenal function of the body, which totally makes sense to me. But you also have something like the birth control pill, which depletes so many different nutrients like folate, like C, A, E.

We also have statins that deplete coq10, or actually suppress the creation of coq10, if I'm correct. So every medication has, you know, you're exchanging something. So it's probably a good idea to understand exactly what that exchange is so that you can get ahead of, or help mitigate that. 

[00:28:56] Jim: Right. It's really important that a lot of people, they're already on prescription drugs for something and then they're told it's all this vitamin D deficiency and so they stop looking for anything else and they start focusing on their two five D number and they make that their number one goal, and it's a false profit because their problems may have arose with their prescription drug, for example, you know, tons of people have gastric reflux. 

Well, most gastric reflux is gonna be a lack of digestive enzymes or a lack of acid in the stomach or both, but that's not the treatment. The treatment is, oh, you've got too much acid. We're going to give you things to block some of your acid. If you don't have good nutrition at the core of everything, then you're not gonna get better.

So most people are treating GERD wrong to begin with, and GERD’s like the pandemic in and of itself. Those drugs, every one of them is gonna use a pathway and a lot of 'em use more than one CYP enzyme. Some go through three, three alterations, three totally different enzymes and when you start looking, if you go to Wikipedia and look up a certain CYP enzyme, you can see the substrates that it uses.

You can see things that induce it, things that suppress it, and they'll list tons of drugs there, and they aren't even in the same class. You might have a statin right here and an antiviral right here using the same pathway, and some people are on both of them. And they're blocking the broccoli pathway, as I said before.

So when they design a drug, it's gotta be the front of the pack and they don't care who's knocked out of the race. 

[00:30:33] Loren: That's a really good point, and I'm glad you brought awareness to that cuz it's really important. We have all these hidden things that we might not think are creating or adding to our problems.

But they can be oftentimes, and treatments sometimes are backwards. , like the PPI GERD example you just gave. I get a lot of questions about whole food supplements. I'm a whole food supplements kind of gal. A lot of people are wondering what the difference is between vitamin D from cod liver oil and Vitamin D from lanolin, which is sheep wool, and why you would wanna take one over the other or not.

[00:31:16] Jim: The cod liver oil, as we talked about earlier, has vitamin E and D in there and it has it at a certain ratio, it's about 10 to one when it's natural, you know, 10 times as much vitamin A, and it's also oil from the liver of the cod fish. And so we have our own liver, and that's the chief storage organ for our vitamin D.

So it's more natural in the way it occurred in the first place. If we had our oil from our liver, it would probably contain vitamin A and vitamin D. So it's already been packaged by nature to begin with, whereas what we're doing with the sheep wool is it's not natural at all. First, I think we shave it all off.

Then we hit it with the light, and then they basically squish the vitamin D out of the hair fibers from what I understand. So it's concentrated because it didn't happen naturally in the first place. And so it's just different. But I could see how some people do get a little hung up on cod liver oil being much closer to a supplement than say, eating a salmon filet.

I'll agree with that. But what we might not know is what other vitamin D molecules are in the cod liver oil that the cod fish made. Just like I talk about, we make dozens and dozens of molecules of vitamin D. So, they're looking to just capture that one D molecule from the Lanolin D three, whereas whatever's in there discovered or undiscovered in the cod liver oil you're getting, they chose D three as supposedly what saved everybody from rickets. 

But if you look at the beginning of rickets, they didn't use pills at first to stop rickets. They put the cows in the sun, they put their feed in the sun, and they put the milk in the sun and they gave it to us. And yes, rickets went away, but also child labor laws came to exist and mandatory school terms.

And so we changed what kids were doing too. And by the time we started really using pills of D three, there wasn't any more rickets. So, Terry Walls says, Terry Walls has a really good video called Minding our Mitochondria about MS. And she says when you eat a big old plate of greens, you're getting the stuff we discovered, but more beneficial may be the things that you're getting that we have yet to discover.

And so that's my point with the cod liver oil. Who knows how many different Vitamin D molecules it truly has in it? Honey has five different Vitamin D molecules in it, so it just depends and it depends on what the creature was eating too, what the cod fish was eating, or any other creature that you're eating when you eat salmon.

Was this salmon eating? You might have been eating D two, you might be getting D two. There's just the whole range of things, but we're limited to think there's just this 1 2 5 D that we gotta get. We gotta get it up. That may not be what your body wants. 

[00:34:30] Loren: Wow. That's so interesting. I love that perspective too, that you might be getting, what's more exciting about that? About taking the whole food, especially with the cofactor, like vitamin A, which you've mentioned, you need to activate the receptor, the benefits that you're getting from that. We don't even know what they might be, but, knowing how powerful sort of nature is and the synergies between nutrients and the natural form of things, there's so much more benefit that we could be possibly getting instead of having tunnel vision, cod liver oil could be providing more broad spectrum support. There is what I'm hearing.

[00:35:11] Jim: Right, Exactly. 

[00:35:14] Loren: Awesome. Well, that was my last question for you, so we've made it to the end. This was so fascinating, such a fun conversation. Thank you so much, Jim Stevenson Jr. I really appreciate everything. 

[00:35:30] Jim: You're very welcome.

[00:35:30] Loren: So where can our listeners support you? Where can they find you and how can they support you? 

[00:35:39] Jim: So I have a Facebook page, obviously Sacco Steroid Hormone D, the real name of Vitamin D, and then I have a SubStack account under my name too, Jim Stevenson Jr. And those are the two ways I've been writing newsletters at SubsStack for a couple months now.

So that's it in a nutshell, and there's a lot of podcasts. If you go on YouTube and you search my full name Jim Stevenson Jr. you'll find this is probably my 13th or 14th podcast. 

[00:36:11] Loren: I've listened to many of your podcasts and they're always completely illuminating. So, listen, definitely go search 'em out.

Definitely join the Sacco Steroid Hormone D group if you're interested in learning more about a natural approach to vitamin D supplementation or hearing more alternative information. It's really fascinating and there's so many studies. It's a really rich group. Thank you, and your SubStack is also great. So I lied.

I have one more question. Okay. If you could provide our listeners one piece of advice that they can take action on today, what would that be? 

[00:36:50] Jim: It'd probably be the big picture of thinking about how to get all these things that we want in a healthy way. So with Vitamin D, we were just talking about the sun.

When it comes to a lot of nutrients, we automatically turn to a supplement, myself included, like quercetin and Zinc. These things that we've been told we really need to focus on. So what I would say is take the time to do research for the natural sources of all the things that you're getting in an unnatural way now, and I think you'd be amazed that you probably are covering a lot of the bases already, or you'll find that it's pretty easy to get things from nature more readily. 

When I first started wanting to take quercetin, I looked up what are the good sources of it? Well, I was already eating them. Same thing with zinc, same thing with copper. So there's no reason to act like things are so complex. We haven't always had a pharmacy to run to, a vitamin store to run to.

And just slow down and think about nature and how does nature do it and why does this make sense? I don't think today's world makes very much sense. I think that if we had the foods from around 1900 and we spent reasonable time in the sun and just had a better outlook, a better mental outlook on things would probably do a lot better in the first place.

[00:38:20] Loren: I think that's very wise and beautifully said. Nature is very bountiful too. So that's something to keep in mind. Alright. Well, thanks again, Jim Stevenson, Jr. Really appreciate it, and I hope everyone enjoys this episode. Thank you. Thank you.