SPECIAL EVENT ANNOUNCEMENT - VITAMIN D DOSE POLICY AND PUBLIC HEALTH

The dose the IOM got wrong. We aim to fix this. We are close.

The Institute of Medicine published vitamin D dosing recommendations that shaped clinical practice, prenatal care, and public health policy across the United States and beyond. Independent researchers subsequently identified a statistical error in the methodology — an error significant enough to alter the recommended intake by a factor of eight or more depending on the analysis. That error has never been formally corrected. The guidelines built on it are still in use.

The policy consequences run through pregnancy outcomes, newborn health, early-childhood immune programming, hospitalization protocols, and surgical risk stratification. Clinicians making decisions in each of those domains are working from guidance that was built on a flawed foundation. The researchers who documented the error have been saying so for years. The guidelines have not moved.

On May 21, GrassrootsHealth and IPAK-EDU are hosting a 2.5-hour expert panel to examine this directly — the science, the statistical methodology, the guideline history, and what the evidence actually shows when you read the primary literature rather than the summaries.

UPDATE - 11 AM PT, NOT ET.

Readers who have been following the vitamin D thread in this publication already know that the evidence on optimal serum levels looks very different from what the official thresholds imply. The gap between what 48 independent vitamin D researchers agreed represents an optimal range — 40 to 60 ng/ml — and what current recommendations are designed to achieve is not a minor calibration difference. It is a policy failure with measurable clinical consequences that the public has not been invited to examine.

This event is that invitation. Two and a half hours. One of the most consequential and least publicly scrutinized questions in evidence-based medicine. Open to everyone.

The question this event raises — why a documented statistical error in federal dosing methodology has gone uncorrected for over a decade — is one I will be returning to in the work ahead. The answer involves something more systematic than an oversight. That is the next piece.

Educational event only. No individual medical advice will be provided.