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  4. Obviously supplementation depends on individual factors, but for a rough guideline, taking somewhere between 2,000 and 5,000 IU can be a good place to start and retesting in a few months to see how that’s going, is that still a good idea?

Obviously supplementation depends on individual factors, but for a rough guideline, taking somewhere between 2,000 and 5,000 IU can be a good place to start and retesting in a few months to see how that’s going, is that still a good idea?

Chris Kresser: If, for whatever reason, testing isn’t available, that’s OK. I would start with the lower end of that, 2,000 IU. We’ve found some patients for whom 5,000 IU can shoot their levels up to 70, 80, or even higher in a relatively short period of time, and given the potential toxicity of vitamin D, I’m not crazy about that. We’ve had patients that have come in who have been on 5,000 IU for four or five years and they’re well above 100 because no one ever told them that they could take too much of it. So 2,000 IU, if you retest after 45 days, that’s pretty safe for most people, but the ideal is to test first and then tailor the supplementation based on that. The lower the starting value, the higher the initial dose will be, but that also has to consider other factors. If you are testing a black person who has a level of 25 nanograms per milliliter, they may not require any supplementation at all, and the way that you figure that out is by looking at their calcitriol and their parathyroid hormone.

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