How Vitamin D Cures Autoimmune Disease - Video Dec 2025
How Vitamin D Cures Autoimmune Disease: Research, Dosing & Blood Levels - YouTube, 10 minutes
Transcript
Autoimmune diseases are becoming more and more common these days. Things like Hashimoto's, rheumatoid arthritis, or type 1 diabetes. And even though there's no single magic fix, one nutrient keeps popping up again and again in the research, vitamin D. That's because vitamin D is a powerful immune system regulator and many studies have linked it to very positive outcomes for the conditions that I just mentioned.
In this video, I will walk you through how exactly vitamin D affects your immune system. what doses the research used and the right co-actors to lower your autoimmune risk and calm down an overactive immune system. Okay, so to understand why vitamin E is so important for autoimmune conditions, we first need to talk about what it actually does in your body.
Most people think of vitamins as just little helpers that make enzymes work, but a vitamin D is a little different. Technically, it's more like a hormone than a vitamin. Your body can make it from sunlight, and once it's in your system, it gets converted into an active hormone called calcitriol. And this hormone talks directly to your cells, including your immune cells.
You see, your immune system has two big parts. The first one is called the innate immune system. This is like your body's frontline defense. It's fast and non-specific. It includes things like your skin, your gut lining, and special white blood cells that eat up invaders. Vitamin D boosts this whole system.
It helps your immune cells produce antimicrobial peptides. So basically natural antibiotics. This is important because a lot of autoimmune conditions can be triggered or worsened by chronic infections. If your innate immune system is weak, then your body might let infections linger and that ongoing inflammation can confuse your immune system and push it to attack its own tissues. So just by supporting your frontline defenses, vitamin D can lower the chances of those chronic infections that sometimes set off autoimmunity in the first place. The second part of your immune system is called the adaptive immune system. This is more advanced. It creates antibodies and remembers specific invaders so that it can fight them off faster next time.
This is also where things can go wrong. In autoimmune conditions, the adaptive immune system mistakenly creates antibodies against your own cells. Vitamin D helps here by acting as kind of like a break on the overactive immune response. It does this by lowering the activity of TH1 and TH17 cells.
These are types of helper tea cells that drive inflammation. They release inflammatory cytoines which are all high in many autoimmune diseases. On top of that, vitamin D also increases regulatory tea cells. These are the peacekeepers of your immune system because they tell your immune system to calm down and stop attacking your own tissues.
So, in simple terms, vitamin D helps shift your immune system from attack mode to peace mode. It boosts your defenses when they're weak, but also helps quiet them down when they get out of control. This ability to modulate or balance the immune system is exactly why vitamin D is so interesting for autoimmune conditions. Okay, that was the theory.
But what does the research say? A lot actually. Over the last 10 to 15 years, there's been a huge amount of studies linking low vitamin D levels to different autoimmune conditions. And let's go through a few of the big ones now. So, first we have multiple sclerosis. It is one of the most well-studied examples. It's an autoimmune disease where your immune system attacks the protective coating around nerve cells.
Researchers noticed a long time ago that MS is a lot more common in countries far from the equator where people get less sunlight. People living in Northern Europe or Canada, for example, have way higher rates of MS than people closer to the equator. Also, on top of that, for a lot of people who already have MS, higher vitamin D levels are linked to fewer relapses and slower disease progression. There is also strong evidence in type 1 diabetes, which is when the immune system destroys the insulin producing cells in the pancreas. One large study in Finland followed over 10,000 kids and found that babies who got regular vitamin D supplements had about an 80% lower risk of developing type 1 diabetes later in childhood. That's a massive difference.
Other studies show that kids with low vitamin D are much more likely to develop it than those with normal or high levels. Rheumatoid arthritis is another common autoimmune disease and studies have found that people with it almost always also have lower vitamin D levels than healthy people. On top of that, low levels have been linked to worse disease activity, meaning more pain, swelling, and joint damage.
The same exact pattern also shows up with lupus. People with it tend to have low vitamin D levels, and when their levels improve, their disease activity often gets a lot better. And finally, there's Hashimoto's. One of the most common autoimmune conditions related to your thyroid, and it's especially common in women. Several studies have found that people with Hashimoto's almost always have lower vitamin D levels, just like with all the other conditions. And some small trials have shown that supplementing it can lower thyroid antibodies and improve thyroid function over time. So, across the board, it's the same pattern. Low vitamin D is very common in people with autoimmune diseases and when we increase their levels, their conditions also improve.
With that in mind, how do you actually use vitamin D if you want to support your immune system and lower your autoimmune risk? I go over how to safely boost vitamin D levels in a different video that will be linked in the description. But generally, you want to first test your levels. So, your blood vitamin D, also known as your 25-hydroxy vitamin D, and most labs say anything above 30 is normal, but that's too low for most functional ranges.
Usually, something between 50 to 80 is recommended here. Once you know your baseline, and assuming that you're below the optimal range, start with a daily supplement dose. I'm very conservative when it comes to vitamin D supplements because even though it's a powerful supplement, it can quickly deplete things like magnesium and potassium.
So, I prefer to stick to very low doses, usually less than 1,000 IU per day, which is enough for me to push blood levels well above 100 simply because all my vitamin D co-actors like magnesium, vitamin A, and K2 were already topped up. Now, you probably think that is way too low, but keep in mind that your body doesn't need huge doses to respond to it if all the other pieces are in place. That's why I always say how much you absorb and activates matters more than how much you swallow. That being said, most practitioners work with higher doses. Here's an overview of the most common doses used in autoimmune research and what blood levels they were targeting. So for multiple sclerosis, we have a target of around 60 to 100 in the blood.
And in the studies, they usually used very high doses. So around 5,000 to 10,000 IU per day, sometimes even up to 100,000 IU per day. This is related to the Coimbra protocol where vitamin D is taken under medical supervision. When it comes to type 1 diabetes, researchers usually targeted blood levels around 40 to 60, usually with 2,000 IUs per day in infant prevention studies and 2 to 4,000 IU per day in children or adolescents with it.
For rheumatoid arthritis, we also have a target of 40 to 60 and 2 to 5,000 IU per day in participants who were only mildly deficient. and then higher doses such as 50,000 a week which comes down to around 7,000 per day in short-term loading studies where participants started out severely deficient for lupus same blood range so 40 to 60 and similar doses 2,000 to 4,000 IU per day in participants who were only mildly deficient and again 50,000 a week so 7,000 a day for those who started out severely deficient for Hashimoto's the targets here were 4250 in the blood, which is fairly low. And the doses used were a,000 to 2,000 for most participants or up to 4,000 in severe deficiency cases. And then we have inflammatory bowel disease, Crohn's for example. And here the blood targets were around 40 to 80. So a very big range. Same with the dosing.
You do have some that use 2,000 to 5,000 IUs per day, but also some short-term trials that use 10,000 IU per day. Again, I believe crazy high doses aren't usually necessary if you also fix your vitamin D co-actor deficiencies, but you have to decide for yourself. The most important co-actors again are magnesium and vitamin K2, and secondary ones include potassium and vitamin A. For immune support, zinc would also be very interesting because it plays a big role in your immune system. If you can also get some natural sunlight because it comes with more benefits than just vitamin D synthesis. and the skin can self-regulate, so an overdose is usually not an issue. All in all, vitamin D is definitely a very potent immune system regulator.
People with autoimmune conditions almost always have lower vitamin D levels, and higher levels are directly linked to better outcomes. Just make sure you don't go overboard, otherwise you will run into other nutrient imbalances down the line. Again, I will link my guide on how to safely increase your levels without side effects. So, make sure to watch that as well. Also, don't forget to check the video description for more free resources and my programs. They will help you if you're looking for step-by-step systems on topics like diet planning and chronic fatigue recovery and how to avoid the most common mistakes that I see beginners make all the time.