Stop Taking Vitamin D Until You Fix This First

How can you overcome vitamin D deficiency on the carnivore diet without increasing your intake? Discover how the carnivore diet can improve gut health, insulin resistance, and chronic inflammation to improve vitamin D absorption and help optimize its benefits naturally.

Why the carnivore diet fixes a vitamin D deficiency without taking more vitamin D. People doing the carnivore diet report their autoimmune diseases clearing up. Their depression goes away. Their joint pain disappears. Some people even report handling the sun a little differently.

They get a tan easier and less burns. All of these conditions strongly linked to a vitamin D deficiency. But here’s the paradox. Beef, chicken, pork have very little vitamin D. In a typical carnivore diet, you’re dealing with probably 500 to 1500 IUs of vitamin D3 every single day.

Now, that’s a little bit better than the average diet, but it’s not a tremendous amount of vitamin D. So, how do you fix a vitamin D deficiency without taking more vitamin D? Most people think about a vitamin D deficiency as if you’re not getting enough vitamin D. So, they end up taking more and more. And then they get their blood tests and some people find they’re still deficient.

Let’s talk about why that is. Vitamin D does not work alone, okay? It’s dependent on cofactors that allow the absorption of vitamin D. And we’re talking about the big one, magnesium, vitamin K2, zinc, retinol, the active form of vitamin A. Then we have cholesterol, the raw material that helps you make vitamin D.

And you can take all the vitamin D in the world, but without these cofactors, that vitamin D is just going to be floating around in your blood, not really doing anything. On top of that, the vitamin D has to eventually go in the cell through what’s called the vitamin D receptor. There’s something called vitamin D receptor resistance, which is super common. And many times because the receptor is blocked for various reasons, you’re going to be deficient, even if you have normal levels in your blood. And And the other barriers are obesity.

The more obese you are, the less vitamin D is going to go in your body. The more insulin resistance you have, the less vitamin D is going to go in there. And then also, the more gut issues you have, the less absorption you’re going to have of vitamin D. And this is where the carnivore diet gets very interesting because it’s not necessarily supplying a lot of vitamin D. It’s supplying the cofactors that allow the vitamin D you already have in your body to go in the cell.

It’s also greatly helping your insulin problems, making insulin more sensitive, allowing more vitamin D to absorb. Not to mention the gut issues, and this is huge. Out of all the things that I think carnivore can help a person with, it’s the gut issues. In fact, if a person does have gut inflammation, they should do the carnivore diet for at least a couple months. Because with the carnivore diet, you’re eliminating a lot of things that can irritate the gut.

And also, you’re taking in a lot of the amino acids that actually heal the gut lining. And you need a healthy gut to absorb vitamin D. Meat, by the way, provides a highly bioavailable form of magnesium, way more bioavailable than plant magnesium. The problem with trying to get your cofactors from plants is plants have phytic acid, grains have phytic acid, oxalates, lectins. These are all antinutrients that actually block the cofactors that vitamin D needs.

Also, carnivore supplies vitamin K2. And vitamin K2 is the partner of vitamin D. They both work together in helping direct calcium. So, vitamin D helps the absorption of calcium in the blood, and then K2 takes that calcium and pushes it into the tissues, especially like the bone and the teeth. And then we have zinc.

Animal protein is loaded with zinc. If you are deficient in zinc, that vitamin D receptor is not going to work that well. And then we get to vitamin A, retinol. Egg yolks, beef liver, you need vitamin A for vitamin D to work. Retinol is only found in animal products.

And then what about cholesterol? Why do we need cholesterol for vitamin D? Well, vitamin D is made out of cholesterol. You have cholesterol in your skin, the sun hits your skin, it converts the cholesterol into vitamin D. If you’re not consuming enough cholesterol, you might not have the raw material to make your vitamin D that you need.

If your environment is off, everything else struggles. It’s like a fish tank. Pollute the water and the fish gets sick. You could feed them the best food, you can treat every single symptom, but if the water stays toxic, nothing recovers. The body runs on 10 signals like insulin, cortisol, inflammation, sleep quality, gut function.

Every one of them affects how you feel. But there is always one signal that is more broken than the rest, and until you fix that one, everything else stays stuck. I built a free 2-minute quiz that finds it for you. It tells you which one of the main signals is holding your body back right now. Click the link in the description, take the quiz, and stop guessing.

The cofactors are one part of the story, and I talked a little bit about this vitamin D receptor. This is really, really important. It’s very common to have vitamin D receptor resistance. And this is what puts people at risk for getting things like autoimmune diseases, asthma, depression, hypertension, etc. So, the question is, what does a carnivore diet do for vitamin D receptor resistance?

Well, you are at a massive level decreasing inflammation in your gut. You’re not consuming a lot of seed oils, which is automatically also going to bring down the inflammation and open these receptors because one of the things that keeps these receptors resistant is inflammation. And out of all the reports about the carnivore diet, inflammation is the number one thing that really goes down, especially in your gut. The other thing that really messes with this vitamin D receptor and downgrades it is past infections, Epstein-Barr virus, Lyme disease. Other viruses will all strategically shut down this receptor leaving you at risk with your immune system being vulnerable.

So, a lot of people ask me, what supplements do I recommend? Now, of course, I’m not biased with my own high-quality supplement line, but if you go to Amazon and type Dr. Berg supplements, you’ll find more information. So, when you go on the carnivore diet, you are flooding your body with ketones, and most people on the carnivore diet go through more autophagy. Autophagy is a condition where you’re cleaning up old dead cells, but you’re also cleaning up pathogens in the body.

That’s another function of autophagy. And in addition to that, as the gut inflammation goes down, your absorption for vitamin D goes up. There’s one thing that will stop the absorption, not just of vitamin D, but other nutrients, and that is inflammation in the gut. You’re also improving the gut bile salts, and bile helps to absorb fat-soluble vitamins. But not only that, we also have something called SIBO, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth.

This can also interfere with your absorption of vitamin D. Bile will actually kill off the microbes in the small intestine and help reduce this SIBO, as well as candida. And one of the things that candida lives on is refined carbohydrates and sugar and things like that. Well, on the carnivore, you’re not consuming that, so you are literally starving the candida to death, so they can go away. A couple other really important things that help open up the vitamin D receptor is dropping your insulin, and that’s what you’re doing on the carnivore diet.

Now, this video was not necessarily to tell you to go on carnivore. Some people go on it, some people don’t. I’m just explaining why carnivore helps people with a vitamin D situation. And since we’re on the topic of vitamin D, I have something even more fascinating about vita