The Paradigm’s Best Defender: Stasha Gominak on Vitamin D

An Essay on Clinical Observation Inside a Captured Frame

The Pattern

On the Diary of a CEO podcast, Stasha Gominak described a pattern in her practice. Patients who take vitamin D and B vitamins revert to falling asleep at ten and waking at six. Even the ones who had worked night shifts their entire careers.¹ She has been in this practice for over a decade. The pattern is consistent enough that she considers it near-universal.

Something is producing that effect. The question is what.

What Gominak believes she is treating is vitamin D deficiency. Her theoretical apparatus is elaborate. Vitamin D is a hormone. It acts on receptors in the brainstem that regulate sleep architecture. Its deficiency has become a global epidemic. That epidemic drives what she calls the “pandemic of sleep disorders.” Correct the deficiency, restore the sleep. Restore the sleep, restore health.

She published this framework with Walter Stumpf in 2012 in Medical Hypotheses.² Stumpf spent three decades mapping vitamin D receptors in animal brains using autoradiography, a technique that labels the molecule with a radioactive isotope, delivers it to rats, and images where it accumulates.³ He found nuclear retention in cells lining the brainstem. Gominak took his anatomical mapping and married it to her clinical observation. Patients on vitamin D slept. The brainstem receptors were what mediated the effect.

The framework has grown since. In 2016 she added the microbiome. In interviews since, she has added maternal supplementation targets, cortisol, acetylcholine, and a stack of B vitamins alongside the D. The clinical practice remains what it always was. Vitamin D and B100, adjusted for the patient. Sleep improves. The framework explains why.

Gominak is not a crude figure. She reads primary literature. She cites specific studies. She acknowledges when evidence is preliminary. She is the kind of clinician the curious skeptic finds compelling: thoughtful, mechanistic, willing to think outside the standard endocrinology line. She has become one of the most articulate defenders of vitamin D supplementation in the wellness-adjacent internet.

What follows is an essay about what she can see and what her framework prevents her from seeing.

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The Clinical Observation Is Not the Target

Patients on Gominak’s stack sleep better. Some report reversal of migraine, restless legs, fibromyalgia symptoms, and daytime fatigue. She is not fabricating these results. The improvement is not placebo alone, because placebo does not run for years, and her clinical practice runs for years.

The framework question is what those results mean.

One reading holds that the patient was deficient in an essential hormone and Gominak restored it. Another holds that the patient was living in a degraded terrain (indoor life, industrial food, chronic toxic exposure, disrupted circadian rhythms) and that a fat-soluble steroid precursor combined with a heavy stack of B vitamins produced a pharmacological push on that stressed system, which the patient experienced as improvement. Both readings are consistent with the clinical facts. Only one requires the paradigm to be true.

The distinction matters because the two readings point toward very different long-term outcomes. The first suggests indefinite supplementation. The second suggests that supplementation is a temporary rescue that fails to address the underlying terrain, and that the chemical push accumulates costs the patient will pay later.

Gominak operates entirely inside the first reading. She is not neutral about which frame applies. She has built her practice, her books, her podcast appearances, her hypothesis papers, and her clinical protocols on the assumption that vitamin D is the hormone she believes it to be.

What the Framework Measures and Administers

Two mechanical facts about her practice matter more than any hypothesis paper she has written.

The first is the 25-hydroxyvitamin D test, the standard blood test for vitamin D status. It measures the concentration of 25(OH)D in serum, which is the number your doctor reports when you get a vitamin D level checked. The problem, established by the biochemistry itself and by DeLuca’s own laboratory work in 1968, is that 25(OH)D is what the liver produces from ingested cholecalciferol.⁴ If the patient is not taking a supplement, the liver has less substrate. The test returns a lower number. It is therefore not a measure of the body’s vitamin D status. It is a measure of how much supplemental cholecalciferol the patient has been ingesting. The circularity is complete: the paradigm sells a chemical, defines deficiency by a test that measures the chemical, and captures anyone not taking the chemical as deficient.

Gominak targets maternal 25(OH)D levels “in the 60s” so cord blood arrives “in the 40s.”¹ Standard laboratory reference ranges begin classifying deficiency below 30 ng/mL. What was considered adequate in 1990 is now severely deficient. The threshold has crept steadily upward, capturing more of the population with each revision.⁵ Gominak does not challenge this expansion. She participates in its upper range. Her canonical success case, a patient she calls Madeleine, has been taking 30,000 IU of D3 per day for four years. The Institute of Medicine’s tolerable upper intake level is 4,000 IU per day.

The second mechanical fact is what she administers. Cholecalciferol, the D3 in her supplements, is manufactured from lanolin. Sheep wool is washed with industrial detergents to strip out the sebaceous gland secretions. The lanolin is processed with benzene and chloroform. The extracted 7-dehydrocholesterol is irradiated with ultraviolet light in an industrial reactor.⁶ The resulting molecule is identical to the active ingredient in Rampage, Quintox, Agrid3, and TeraD3 rat poisons. In the poisons it appears at 0.075% concentration. The remaining 99.925% is seeds and grain, which the rats eat. The vitamin D is what kills them. It kills through hypercalcemia: calcium floods the bloodstream, calcifies soft tissue, damages the kidneys, and stops the heart.⁷ The mechanism is the same in rats and humans. Only the dose and timeline differ.

The molecule also depletes cofactors as the body processes it: vitamin K2, magnesium, boron, zinc, and vitamin A. Chronic supplementation drives cofactor deficiency states that then present as new symptoms, which the paradigm reads as further deficiencies requiring further interventions.

Gominak’s B100 stack, the second half of her prescription, contains cyanocobalamin (manufactured from what industrial documentation calls “proteinaceous material recovered from waste effluents,” treated with cobalt salts and cyanide) and folic acid (a synthetic compound invented in 1943 that does not exist in food).⁸ Her patients improve on the combination. The improvement is real. What the improvement demonstrates about the compounds is less clear than the framework suggests.

The Architect on the Record

In June 2013, historian Mike Chappelle interviewed Hector DeLuca at the Endocrine Society’s annual meeting in San Francisco.⁹ DeLuca identified 25-hydroxyvitamin D3 in 1968. He identified the active hormone 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D3 in late 1970. He cloned the vitamin D receptor in 1987. Most of the vitamin D analogs on the pharmaceutical market came from his laboratory. The building blocks of Gominak’s framework, meaning the metabolites, the receptor, the analogs, are all his.

Chappelle asked about autoimmunity. DeLuca’s group had spent years studying the standard mouse model of multiple sclerosis. They had found a specific waveband of ultraviolet light that suppresses the disease in mice. That waveband does not produce vitamin D.

“The correlation between sunlight, vitamin D, and multiple sclerosis is only a correlation,” DeLuca told Chappelle. “It’s not cause and effect.”⁹

Then he went further. Most of the presumed extra-skeletal functions of vitamin D, meaning the mood claims, the sleep claims, the neuroprotective claims, the broad claims about immune regulation, have not been demonstrated. Receptors exist in many tissues. That receptors exist does not mean the compound is required for the tissue’s normal function. The one confirmed extra-skeletal action is parathyroid suppression, exploited in dialysis patients, whose mortality profile is dominated by vascular calcification.¹⁰

Gominak’s framework runs on the extra-skeletal claims. The sleep effects. The brainstem receptor activating choline acetyltransferase. The acetylcholine restoration. The cortisol pathway. None of it is the parathyroid-calcium axis DeLuca described as confirmed. All of it is what the architect said on the Endocrine Society’s own record had not been established.

Her citation for the choline acetyltransferase mechanism is a single 1986 study in which one dose of 1,25(OH)2D3 raised ChAT activity in specific rat brain nuclei.¹¹ The subsequent literature on vitamin D signaling shows its effects are heavily cell-type specific. Any ChAT effect is context-dependent, not a universal output of receptor binding.¹² Gominak has built a general theory of sleep chemistry on one rat experiment whose own authors framed it as a preliminary finding.

The 2013 DeLuca interview sat publicly available for over a decade before Chappelle posted the transcript in July 2026.⁹ Gominak’s 2012 paper predates it. Her 2016 paper does not cite it. Her later work does not cite it. Neither does the mainstream vitamin D literature that shaped clinical practice. The architect answered the question, and the field kept building on the answer he had ruled out.

The Microbiome Move

By 2016, straight vitamin D supplementation was not fully explaining Gominak’s clinical results. Some patients improved and then plateaued. Some improved on the vitamin D initially and then developed new symptoms. Straightforward correction of a hormone deficiency should not produce these dynamics. A paradigm rescue was needed.

She published it in Medical Hypotheses in 2016.¹³ Vitamin D deficiency, she proposed, alters the intestinal microbiome. The altered microbiome produces fewer B vitamins. The B-vitamin shortfall, especially pantothenic acid, reduces coenzyme A. Coenzyme A is required for cortisol and acetylcholine synthesis, so the cascade lowers both. Sleep problems, arthritic pain, hypertension, and autoimmunity follow. Her intervention: vitamin D plus B100, on the theory that both must be replaced while the microbiome recovers.

Her own account of how she arrived at this reading is worth noting. Between 2020 and 2023, she took 5,000 IU of D3 daily on her doctor’s advice. In 2025 she developed rheumatoid arthritis symptoms. Her patients who had followed the same COVID-era protocol were showing up years later with the same class of diagnoses: lupus in some, rheumatoid arthritis in others. She read the pattern as confirmation of her microbiome hypothesis. The D depleted the B vitamins by shifting the gut. The missing B vitamins produced the symptoms. Add B vitamins, and the framework survives.

A different reading is available. The D3 depleted cofactors. The depleted cofactors produced the very syndromes she and her patients received as new diagnoses. The compound produced the harm. She read the harm as evidence that a further compound was needed.

Read on its own terms, the paper is a hypothesis. Read against the paradigm’s history, it is an ad hoc modification. When the primary claim (vitamin D deficiency causes sleep disorders) failed to fully explain the clinical data, the framework grew a second layer. When the second layer also fails, a third will presumably appear.

The mechanistic chain is speculative at every joint. The randomized trial evidence on vitamin D altering the human microbiome is mixed. Some studies show taxonomic shifts, others show none.¹⁴ ¹⁵ The bacterial B-vitamin depletion claim rests on inference from microbiome composition, not on measured intraluminal B-vitamin concentrations before and after supplementation. The pantothenic acid to coenzyme A to cortisol chain is real biochemistry, but it does not establish that gut bacterial output is the rate-limiting step for cortisol production in the adrenal cortex.¹⁶ The clinical intervention combined both agents, so no one can determine whether any observed benefit came from vitamin D, from B vitamins, from placebo, or from regression to the mean.

Recent microbiome literature also runs the causal arrow in both directions.¹⁷ Microbial composition influences vitamin D metabolism. Vitamin D metabolism influences microbial composition. Neither is a stable primary driver of the other. Gominak’s framework requires vitamin D deficiency to be the upstream cause of the microbial shift, or the whole chain collapses. The evidence does not support that requirement.

The 2016 paper is not a fraud. It is an intelligent clinician doing what defenders of paradigms have always done when their primary claim runs into anomalies. She added a mechanism.

What Her Own Data Shows When Read Differently

Some of Gominak’s own observations point outside her framework, when read for what they show rather than what she says they show.

She notes that Vietnamese men who moved from outdoor to office work developed hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and early stroke, despite maintaining the same Vietnamese diet.¹ She reads this as vitamin D deficiency. The confounder is that everything else about their exposure profile also changed. Sunlight has cardiovascular effects independent of vitamin D. UVA-triggered nitric oxide release from skin lowers blood pressure through a pathway that has nothing to do with cholecalciferol.¹⁸ Circadian light exposure resets melatonin timing through the retinohypothalamic tract. Movement, ambient temperature, and contact with soil and vegetation all shift when a person moves indoors. Attributing the effect to one missing molecule is an act of framework, not observation.

She notes that supplementation “is not the same as being outdoors.”¹ She does not follow the implication of the acknowledgment. If skin-produced cholecalciferol (sulfated by the enzyme SULT2A1, transported differently in the blood, cleared differently by the body) is not the same substance as the industrially irradiated lanolin extract sold in bottles,¹⁹ then the premise of measuring one and replacing it with the other collapses. The two compounds share a chemical name. They do not share a biology.

She cites Stephanie Seneff on this point.¹ Seneff has argued for years that the sulfated form skin produces is functionally distinct from oral cholecalciferol.²⁰ Gominak accepts the distinction and supplements anyway. The framework absorbs the anomaly without changing the practice.

She notes that traditional cultures without supplements were largely free of the chronic diseases her patients present with. Weston Price documented fourteen distinct traditional populations across the globe with virtually no tooth decay, cardiovascular disease, or mental illness. These populations ate wildly different diets. None took supplements.²¹ The Inuit lived months in complete darkness without rickets. Swiss villagers in the Lötschental Valley had no tuberculosis in an era when it was Switzerland’s leading cause of death. None of them measured serum 25(OH)D. None of them took cholecalciferol capsules. Gominak’s framework has no room for these populations. Her practice would classify all of them as deficient by the tests she uses.

What Gets Inherited

Gominak recommends maternal 25(OH)D “in the 60s” so cord blood arrives “in the 40s.” The mother reaches that number by supplementing with cholecalciferol. Her body has been depleting K2, magnesium, boron, zinc, and vitamin A to process what she has been swallowing. That is the biochemistry she carries into pregnancy. The baby is built inside it.

The baby will then be tested by the paradigm, found deficient by its ever-rising threshold, and prescribed the same compound the mother took. If she gets sick as a child, she will be told the problem is her deficiency, and given more. If she gets sick as an adult, she will be told the same thing. Her whole life will unfold inside a frame her mother’s clinician introduced her to before she was born.

Gominak does not intend this. She is trying to help. The paradigm does not require her intention. It requires her prescription.

The Last Word

Gominak’s clinical observations are real. Her patients feel better on her stack. Her interest in mechanism is genuine. She is, at every level, better than the endocrinologist who reflexively prescribes 2000 IU and moves on. This is why she is the paradigm’s most sophisticated defender, and why examining her framework rather than a crude one produces a stronger indictment.

She operates inside a system whose test measures the compound it sells, whose thresholds have been ratcheted upward for decades to expand the market, whose primary molecule is manufactured from sheep wool and chloroform and appears in identical form as the active ingredient in commercial rat poison, and whose flagship extra-skeletal claims were ruled out by the man who built the field. She does not see this because the framework does not permit her to see it. She sees a hormone in need of restoration.

DeLuca said on the Endocrine Society’s own record that most of the extra-skeletal functions have not been demonstrated. He said the sunlight-multiple sclerosis link is not vitamin-D-mediated. He described the substance as a precursor of a steroid hormone whose therapeutic action is raising serum calcium, whose mechanism of toxicity is the same as its mechanism of action, and whose commercial history began with an industrial UV irradiation process at Wisconsin under a licensing arrangement whose royalties funded the entire research program.⁹

He said this in 2013. The transcript has been publicly available since 2026. The vitamin D paradigm continues to grow, and Gominak continues to prescribe.

No traditional culture ever needed sheep wool dissolved in chloroform and irradiated to be healthy. The people whose bodies were the most resilient in recorded history, meaning the Swiss dairymen of the Lötschental Valley, the Gaelic fishermen of the Outer Hebrides, the Maasai on their milk-and-blood diet, the Inuit through their months of arctic night, none of them measured serum 25(OH)D and none of them took capsules.

They lived on the terrain. Whatever their bodies did with sunlight, food, movement, and darkness, they did it without the intervention Gominak now considers essential to correct a deficiency they did not have.

How to Explain This to a Six-Year-Old

Imagine there is a doctor. She is kind. She wants to help people sleep, because lots of people cannot sleep, and that makes them tired and grumpy and sick.

She gives them little pills. The pills say “vitamin D” on the bottle. And when people take the pills, some of them sleep better. So the doctor thinks the pills are working, and she has been giving them out for a long time.

But here is the funny thing about the pills.

The pills say “vitamin D,” but they are made in a factory from sheep wool. Real sheep wool. Workers wash the wool with chemicals until they get a special grease off it, then they cook the grease with more chemicals, and they zap it with a special light. That is what comes in the bottle. It is not sunshine. It is not food. It is sheep wool that has been turned by chemicals into something you can swallow.

And here is another funny thing. The same stuff that is in the pill is what people use to kill rats. When a rat eats it, its body fills up with too much of a mineral called calcium, and its heart stops. When people take the pill, their bodies do the same thing, only slower and in a smaller way.

The doctor also gives out little pills of “B vitamins.” Those are made in a factory too, from things you would not want to touch.

Why do the people feel better when they take the pills?

Sometimes when you push a tired body with a strong chemical, it wakes up for a little while. That is what the pills are doing. The pills are not putting something back that was missing. They are giving the body a shove. The shove feels good for a while, but it also uses up other things the body needs, like helpers called K2 and magnesium and zinc. So then the body starts to have new problems. And the doctor says, “You must need more pills.”

Long ago, before there were any pills, there were people who lived in very cold places with no sunshine for months. There were people who lived in villages way up in the mountains. There were people who lived on grass fields with only cows and their milk to eat. None of them took pills. None of them measured anything in their blood. And their bodies were strong. Their teeth grew in straight. They did not get sick.

They did not need the pills, because their bodies were already doing what bodies are supposed to do, when you feed them real food and let them go outside and sleep in the dark.

The kind doctor is not being mean. She really does want to help. But she is looking at the wrong thing. She thinks the little pills are the answer. The answer was always the sun, and the food, and moving your body, and the darkness at night.

In Print

Five of my books are now available as paperbacks, printed to order through Lulu and shipped worldwide. The Unvaccinated lays out the completely unvaccinated as a comparison group across twenty chapters and five appendices — as far as I know, the only book of its kind. Medicalized Motherhood follows a woman through 123 documented interventions from teenage pill to postpartum discharge. Drilling for Profit argues that cavities, gum disease, and crooked teeth are a dietary problem the dental profession treats surgically. What Your Vet Can’t Tell You applies the same critique to pets — food, vaccines, and a profession trained by the industries whose products cause the harm. Escape from Psychiatry documents the fabrication of the DSM, the collapse of the serotonin hypothesis, and the specific damage done by every major psychiatric drug class.

A physical book reaches the person a Substack post never will — the sceptical relative, the friend who won’t click a link but might open a book, the visitor whose eye lands on a coffee table. Buy one to keep, and one to give away.

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References

1. Gominak, S. Interview with Steven Bartlett. The Diary of a CEO, 2025. Independent research and further reading document.

2. Gominak, S.C., and Stumpf, W.E. “The world epidemic of sleep disorders is linked to vitamin D deficiency.” Medical Hypotheses 79, no. 2 (2012): 132–135.

3. Stumpf, W.E., Sar, M., Clark, S.A., and DeLuca, H.F. “Brain target sites for 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D3.” Science 215, no. 4538 (1982): 1403–1405.

4. Blunt, J.W., DeLuca, H.F., and Schnoes, H.K. “25-Hydroxycholecalciferol. A biologically active metabolite of vitamin D3.” Biochemistry 7, no. 10 (1968): 3317–3322.

5. Holick, M.F., et al. “Evaluation, treatment, and prevention of vitamin D deficiency: an Endocrine Society clinical practice guideline.” Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism 96, no. 7 (2011): 1911–1930. Compared with Demay, M.B., et al. “Vitamin D for the Prevention of Disease: An Endocrine Society Clinical Practice Guideline.” Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism 109, no. 8 (2024): 1907–1947.

6. Unbekoming. Vitamins and Supplements Reconsidered, V1.0, 2025, chapters on cholecalciferol manufacturing.

7. Merck/Sigma Aldrich. Pharmaceutical grade Vitamin D3 (Cholecalciferol) Safety Data Sheet, CAS 67-97-0. Spectrum Chemical. Pharmaceutical grade Vitamin D3 (Cholecalciferol) Safety Data Sheet, CAS 67-97-0. Rampage, Quintox, Agrid3, and TeraD3 rodenticide product labels.

8. Unbekoming. Vitamins and Supplements Reconsidered, V1.0, 2025, appendix on synthetic B vitamins.

9. Chappelle, M. “Interview with Hector F. DeLuca, PhD.” Mike Chappelle Substack, July 4, 2026. Original interview conducted June 15, 2013, at the Endocrine Society annual meeting, Moscone Center, San Francisco.

10. Unbekoming. “Sunlight and Vitamin D Are Not the Same Thing: An Essay on Hector DeLuca’s 2013 Testimony to the Endocrine Society.” Lies are Unbekoming, July 28, 2026.

11. Sonnenberg, J., Luine, V.N., Krey, L.C., and Christakos, S. “1,25-Dihydroxyvitamin D3 treatment results in increased choline acetyltransferase activity in specific brain nuclei.” Endocrinology 118, no. 4 (1986): 1433–1439.

12. Dimitrov, V., et al. “Vitamin D-regulated Gene Expression Profiles: Species-specificity and Cell-specific Effects on Metabolism and Immunity.” Endocrinology 162 (2020).

13. Gominak, S.C. “Vitamin D deficiency changes the intestinal microbiome reducing B vitamin production in the gut. The resulting lack of pantothenic acid adversely affects the immune system, producing a ‘pro-inflammatory’ state associated with atherosclerosis and autoimmunity.” Medical Hypotheses 94 (2016): 103–107.

14. Naderpoor, N., et al. “Effect of Vitamin D Supplementation on Faecal Microbiota: A Randomised Clinical Trial.” Nutrients 11 (2019): 2888.

15. Shieh, A., et al. “Pilot trial of vitamin D3 and calcifediol in healthy vitamin D deficient adults: does it change the fecal microbiome?” Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, 2021.

16. Miller, W.L. “Steroid hormone synthesis in mitochondria.” Molecular and Cellular Endocrinology 379, no. 1–2 (2013): 62–73.

17. Bellerba, F., et al. “The Association between Vitamin D and Gut Microbiota: A Systematic Review of Human Studies.” Nutrients 13 (2021): 3378.

18. Liu, D., et al. “UVA irradiation of human skin vasodilates arterial vasculature and lowers blood pressure independently of nitric oxide synthase.” Journal of Investigative Dermatology 134, no. 7 (2014): 1839–1846.

19. Reynolds, C.J., et al. “Sulfated vitamin D metabolites represent prominent roles in serum and in breastmilk of lactating women.” Clinical Nutrition 43 (2024): 1929–1936.

20. Seneff, S., and Nigh, G. Various publications on sulfated cholecalciferol and glyphosate impact on vitamin D metabolism, 2010–2020.

21. Price, W.A. Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. Paul B. Hoeber, 1939.