Why does it take weeks for vitamin supplements to affect our blood results?

Question

I read that if you go take a blood test that shows you have low vitamin D, you need to consistently increase your vitamin D for like 8 weeks for it to show up on your next blood test. Why is that? Whereas if I take a shot of vodka, it will be in my blood in 30 minutes?

In: 16

Answer 1

Someone can elobare on this, I’m sure. My tboughts are that some vitamins (A, D, E and K) are fat solubles. It takes time for your body to accumulate these vitamins.

Maybe you can go on with your search with this input.

Answer 2

Three main reasons:

First, when you have vitamin D deficiency, you don’t have too little vitamin D in your blood right now. You’ve HAD too little vitamin D in your blood for a while, and that’s led to cellular damage and disrepair. The body can recover from that, but it takes time, and until it has fixed the problems, your cells will greedily gobble up any D they can get (yeah, I know what I said). This means your blood levels stay low until there’s a bit of a surplus. A lesser reason, though still important, is that when you take in Vitamin D, whether via supplement or sunlight, it takes a while to be processed by the body into a usable form, and that is a bit of a lag time on the effects too.

Second, when you take a shot of vodka, you don’t go from too little alcohol to still-too-little-but-closer-to-the-right-amount, you go from the right amount of alcohol to *too much.* This is an important distinction, because if you take Vitamin D supplements when you are already at a normal level, you *will* notice a rise in Vitamin D levels. That said, it won’t be within thirty minutes, and it won’t be as much as you see with alcohol. The former is due to the delay from processing it, and the latter is due to:

Thirdly, because you drink, way, way, WAY more alcohol than you take in Vitamin D. A 2000 IU pill of Vitamin D is about 50 micrograms. A standard drink contains roughly 10 grams of alcohol, though this will vary based on what your country considers a standard drink. That’s 200,000 Vitamin D pills to equal a shot of vodka. If you were to take that many pills at once, it will show up in your blood, but unfortunately the tests will have to be run by the coroner, because it’ll kill you.