I called the Endocrine Society’s 2024 reversal the biggest shift I’d probably eveer seen. Vitamin D insufficiency gone, thresholds meaningless, stop testing healthy people. And now, Frontiers runs Christie et al., Vitamin D in the UK: an urgent call to redefine the threshold for deficiency. The ask is one number: move the UK deficiency line from <25 to <50 nmol/L.
Notice it never argues with the Society. It can’t – the RCTs are the RCTs. So it just moves the fight somewhere else. The Society shut the door on the low-normal band. This reopens it by calling that same band “deficiency.” The new “deficient” line sits exactly on the floor of the old “insufficiency” band the Society just threw out. Everyone below 50 gets relabelled. In UK Biobank, isn’t that more than half of adults?
The first pages are all rickets, seizures, osteomalacia. Sure, those are real, and I have never said otherwise. But that’s the trick – they open with mis-treated toddlers in Glasgow and close with a cutoff for sixty million people who feel fine.
They half-admit it themselves near the end: efficacy depended on VDR genotype, and “we will need to move away from using serum 25(OH)D thresholds as the only target.” Fine - so why demand a new one?
And then read who’s asking – Frontiers prints it in full:”
SC: Over the last 3 years received consultant fees from the Council for Responsible Nutrition UK CRN UK. ACT NOW Vitamin D's inception meeting was supported by CRN UK, including room hire, subsistence and travel expenses. TH: Over the last 5 years, received consultant fees from Noble Foods and an honorarium from Danone. TH's institution currently receives a sponsored PhD studentship from The Lakes Free Range Egg co. Currently instructed as an expert witness by a professional services firm in a tribunal matter concerning a nutritional supplement company. Trustee of the Nutrition Society charity. CR: Received consultancy fees during 2025 from the European Fruit Juice Association, Yoplait, General Mills, the UK Tea & Infusions Association, Tate & Lyle, Holland & Barrett, the Proprietary Association of GB, BBC Radio Scotland, the British Egg Industry Consortium, INRAE and the University of Reading. She also serves as a board member of Quality Meat Scotland, a public body. MH: Co-holder of two patents on the therapeutic use of vitamin D binding protein; honorarium and royalties as Editor-in-Chief of Feldman and Pike's Vitamin D. The remaining author(s) declared that this work was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
The inception meeting paid for by the supplement trade body. Two patents on vitamin D binding protein. Royalties on a textbook.
I’m not saying the rickets isn’t real. But do you understand the urgency? I can only speculate. The ground moved – an earthquake – and an establishment defending its liturgy. Fresh scary NDNS numbers, a government that still hasn’t answered its own 2022 call for evidence, and SACN sitting at 25 as the world’s outlier.
If you are a MD: please treat vitamin D deficiency where you find it, the child kept indoors, the elderly housebound or dark skin in a Northern winter. But don’t turn half the country into patients three weeks after the biggest society on earth said stop that.
Yea, yea. Nay, nay. The rest cometh of the trade associations.