Kelsey Marksteiner: OK, so this is the question I was talking about before that we’re going to talk a little bit more about the cod liver oil. Let’s kind of take this in little sections here.
I want to clarify first that when I talked about vitamin A and retinol and how I’m cautious about that, what I mean by that is I am cautious more so for litigious reasons than anything else. I’m not sure there’s really all that much to worry about with higher doses of vitamin A in pregnancy, but for my own practice’s well-being, I like to be on the more cautious side of that so that I’m not someone who’s going to get sued if a pregnant client of mine was taking too much vitamin A and her baby ended up having some problems or something like that. I just wanted to clarify a little bit there why I’m a little bit cautious, and that’s the only situation where I am that cautious. If it’s a man or if it’s a woman who has gone through menopause and there’s no risk of her getting pregnant, you can definitely go higher on the vitamin A. Just keep that in mind.
Then the next question here was, do you have any recommendations for a good supplement? With vitamin A, I think the one I use is from Pure Encapsulations, and it’s just vitamin A by itself. If you’re just looking for vitamin A, that could be a good option. There are many different companies that make just a pure vitamin A supplement, so you could use that. Or, like we were talking about before, you can use the cod liver oil. We looked at that, and that has 3,000 to 5,000 IU per teaspoon. With working with a pregnant woman or someone who can become pregnant at any point, then I typically like to keep it at less than 10,000 IU per day. You’re well within that with using a teaspoon or two of the cod liver oil.
This person has a blood result of 23 for vitamin D, which is low enough that I would definitely want to be treating that. I doubt that the 400 to 500 IU of vitamin D in the cod liver oil is going to be enough, but combined with that Thorne Research supplement that she’s taking, that could be enough. That’s 2,000 IU and then you get another 1,000 IU if you’re doing two teaspoons of the cod liver oil. I think that would be worth a try. That’s probably decent for getting her levels up to normal levels. I don’t know what else is going on with her other than the eye problems and keratosis pilaris, so if there are things that would make us want to have her on that higher end of the vitamin D spectrum, like an autoimmune disease or something like that, then it may not be enough to get her there relatively quickly. It depends on what else is going on, but I would say, most likely, that 3,000 IU of vitamin D total from the combination of those two supplements would be pretty good.