So?? Completely irrelevant.
"And while some people may have spent more time outdoors back then, they tended to cover themselves head to toe with clothing. From reading the Little House on the Prairie books, I happen to know that it was not considered attractive to get tans back in the 1800s.
You don't have to "get tan" to photosynthesize Vitamin D. And I hardly consider the "Little House on the Prairie" to be scientific.
"My whole point is that, if you identify a bona fide nutrient shortage in your diet, you are far better off making up for it by adjusting your diet than by taking pills.
Sorry, but for Vitamin D, it can't be done. Photosynthesis, as I recall, generates the equivalent of 20,000 IU/day. Checking "high in Vitamin D" foods shows no way to reach that kind of level by diet.
"Few, if any pills, are actual supplements--they contain several times the RDA, whereas a true supplement would not even contain a full RDA, since the idea would be to make up the shortfall in your diet."
Since the main source of vitamin D is photosynthetic, and NOT diet, your argument fails.
"Unfortunately, people think that if, you need 20 mg of nutrient X to be healthy, it must be 1000 times as healthy to take 20,000 mg of it. That is simply not true."
A ridiculous exaggeration.
"In 10,000 years, some quite noticeable changes in human physiology have occurred. Teeth, for example, have been shrinking. People are larger. With strong selective pressures, it does not take long at all to observe evolutionary changes. I doubt it took anywhere near 10,000 years, in fact, to adapt to the lower sunlight levels reaching northern latitudes--where the native people are paper-white."
Neither you nor I know, and we have no way of knowing, how long those changes took, or the extent to which they took place. Homo sapiens of 10,000 years ago had teeth just like homo sapiens of today. You keep asserting a degree of certainty which simply does not exist in science in areas where we simply don't know the whole (or even a significant part) of the story. "Through a glass, darkly" is as good as it gets.
And likewise, we simply don't know what the optimal amount of many nutrients are, because we have not had the analytical (both chemical and statistical) to isolate and identify and quantify more subtle forms of deficiencies.
Sorry, but I'll keep taking my "D" supplements, and will likely increase the dose yet again to try to get my blood levels off of "bottom dead center". And I'll keep reading the peer-reviewed literature on the topic. As I said, "I" find the weight of evidence to be in favor of increased supplementation.
And my degree is in chemistry (PhD), with emphasis on analysis. And forty years of practice in the field has given me a much higher level of humility as to what the unknowns in science are. We know very little as yet. Your absolutist statements sound more like those of a new graduate than a long-term practitioner.
It's not irrelevant at all, considering that we have access to a far better and more varied diet now, and here are people popping tons of pills to try to... what? They heard that vitamins are good, and automatically assume that more is better. Which it isn't.
You don't have to "get tan" to photosynthesize Vitamin D. And I hardly consider the "Little House on the Prairie" to be scientific.
No, it's not scientific: it's the perspective of someone who actually grew up during the time. If you don't believe someone's memoirs of the time, you can easily go to museums and see the old pictures of people covering themselves against contact with sunlight. I point this out because you described people getting their vitamin D from spending tons of time in the sun outdoors--which obviously was not the case. You only need a few minutes of sunlight to fill your needs (unless you have a metabolic defect preventing you from adequately photosynthesizing vitamin D or you are dark skinned).
Sorry, but for Vitamin D, it can't be done. Photosynthesis, as I recall, generates the equivalent of 20,000 IU/day. Checking "high in Vitamin D" foods shows no way to reach that kind of level by diet.
Photosynthesis produces what you need, no more (because of biofeedback mechanisms, I think).
"Unfortunately, people think that if, you need 20 mg of nutrient X to be healthy, it must be 1000 times as healthy to take 20,000 mg of it. That is simply not true."
A ridiculous exaggeration.
Really? It's not that much of an exaggeration. Have you ever picked up a multivitamin supplement and looked at how much some of the vitamins and minerals exceed the RDA? This one provides 25X the RDA of Vitamin B-6, as well as several times the RDA of several other vitamins. Linus Pauling, a big advocate of the "more is better" belief, took 12,000 mg of Vitamin C, or about 160X the RDA, every day, and on occasion bumped it up to 40,000 mg (~533X RDA).
Neither you nor I know, and we have no way of knowing, how long those changes took, or the extent to which they took place. Homo sapiens of 10,000 years ago had teeth just like homo sapiens of today. You keep asserting a degree of certainty which simply does not exist in science in areas where we simply don't know the whole (or even a significant part) of the story. "Through a glass, darkly" is as good as it gets.
The tooth shrinkage is something I remember from genetics class. Apparently, the shrinkage has accelerated over the last 10,000 years. As far as other changes go, one only has to look up how long ago modern humans settled in various places and note how different they are from the "parent" groups to get an idea of how fast their evolution has occurred. These are not unanswerable questions.
Your absolutist statements sound more like those of a new graduate than a long-term practitioner.
It's been 9 years since I got my PhD, so I don't have quite as much "field experience" as you; however, I've never encountered any PhD who runs around acting like they essentially don't know anything, which you seem to imply is how I should express myself. I have not said a single thing which either is not verifiable (I verify with Google before I post), or which is not implicit in the principles of toxicology and/or biochemistry.