For about a year, Amazon has blocked the ebook version of my newest book. The page says it is published, but anyone who tries to buy it is told it is "not available in your country." The paperback remains for sale.
The same thing happened to an earlier book of mine, on COVID: banned for three years, then restored, then its ebook removed again. It is still down today.
Two banned books are a story about censorship. They are also a clue to a larger story, one that has unfolded over eight decades: the suppression of vitamin D3, a nutrient the human body produces in sunlight, at almost no cost.
In the 1930s, researchers published high-dose vitamin D work pointing to intakes far above today's norms. Then, in 1941, the standard was fixed at 400 IU per day. That figure came out of a wartime nutrition drive whose goal was preventing babies from being born with rickets — not optimizing adult blood levels. It has barely moved since.
To put the figure in perspective, if thirty minutes of temperate summer sun on a light-skinned adult produces roughly 20,000 IU — about what you would get sunbathing at the U.S.-Canada border in summer — then 400 IU equals about thirty-six seconds of that sun.
Later researchers reworked the arithmetic behind the recommendation and found a statistical error. The corrected requirement came to about 8,895 IU a day — roughly 22 times the 400 IU standard. Whatever view one takes of that dispute, the official figure stayed small while the research pointing higher was ignored, dismissed, or labeled dangerous.
Wrong standards persist because they develop constituencies. Textbooks repeat them, doctors learn them, agencies cite them, and each citation becomes evidence for the next. Challenging the figure means challenging a chain of authority, not a single study — which is why the challenge so often arrives as a banned book rather than a revised guideline. Call it inertia, or call it suppression — the record shows that the larger evidence was buried or dismissed. Medical schools enforce the low figure by teaching doctors that vitamin D3 is terribly toxic at levels that are actually in the normal range for adult health.
From the late 1970s onward, public advice pushed Americans to block the sun: cover up, use sunscreen, stay indoors. The behavior that produces vitamin D became the behavior people were told to avoid. Deficiency became common. And the diseases that track with deficiency have exploded alongside it — obesity, autism, MS, many cancers, and autoimmune diseases. The relationship runs in both directions — heavier bodies need more vitamin D to reach the same blood level, which is one reason a single daily figure for all adults makes little sense.
Vitamin D3 is not, strictly speaking, a vitamin. It functions as a steroid hormone, regulating more than 2,700 genes, many of them involved in immune function and tissue remodeling. When levels stay low for years, the body remains in a defensive, energy-conserving state — ancient survival programs that never receive the signal to stand down. The thesis developed in my books is that most modern chronic diseases are those programs running without end.
Vitamin D does not act alone. Magnesium and vitamin K2 are cofactors in its metabolism, and modern diets are short on both. None of this appears in the official figure, which treats vitamin D as if it acted in isolation. A standard that ignores cofactors, body weight, and blood levels is not a scientific measurement. It is a habit.
D3, K2, and magnesium act as seasonal signals. D3 arrives through the skin, when strong summer sun hits it. K2 and magnesium arrive through the diet — in summer foods and leafy greens that are not available in winter. When winter comes, all three signals fade together, and the body reads the fading as a season of scarcity. That is the hibernation cue. And the modern diet has made it permanent: 80 percent of us are magnesium-deficient, and likely the same number are K2 deficient — K2 in food requires animals to eat summer grass, and most livestock today eat mostly corn, while magnesium in soils around the world is depleted.
Even the largest trial in the field illustrates the problem. The VITAL trial seemed designed to fail: It tested 2,000 IU a day — the equivalent of just 3 minutes of sun exposure a day — in a largely vitamin D–sufficient population. The trial answered whether a trivial dose helps people who largely do not need it. It did not answer whether correcting deficiency helps people who do. A trial designed around deficient patients would answer a different and more important question.
The COVID years offered a test. A Spanish hospital study reported striking results when patients received a fast-acting form of vitamin D. Rather than a large trial to confirm or refute the finding, the response from health agencies was dismissal and silenced. A nutrient that costs pennies a day and cannot be patented was never going to attract the trial a patented drug would. That is the incentive structure, and it explains more than any single decision does.
None of this requires accepting my conclusions. What it requires is open debate: Re-examine the 1941 basis with the full research on the table, fund trials in deficient populations, and measure blood levels instead of prescribing one figure for everyone. For readers, the practical step is measurement, not guesswork. A blood test shows where you stand, and a doctor can interpret it.
What no reader can do alone is change the standard. That takes the debate this article is asking for: open, evidence-based, and free from the veto of a platform or an agency. This column is not medical advice — talk to your doctor. It is an argument that an eighty-year-old standard should have to defend itself with evidence, like everything else in science.
The standard is eighty years old. It is time to put it back on trial.
Image: kie-ker via Pixabay, Pixabay License.
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