Stasha Gominak: Vitamin D Expert: The Supplement World Is Giving The WRONG Advice!

Neurologist Stasha Gominak opens with a warning: supplements can cause harm when people do not understand how to use them. She argues that taking vitamin D is not the same as spending time outdoors, because sunlight may affect the body in ways a pill does not. Her broader claim is that sleep problems may involve deficiencies linked to indoor living and the gut microbiome. She calls vitamin D a hormone, setting up a discussion that challenges familiar sleep advice.

Gominak traces her interest in sleep to clinical work after training in biochemistry, medicine, and neurology. She says she treated about 2,000 patients in neurology and later worked with thousands more as an online sleep coach. Her approach, she says, looks for brain chemistry behind symptoms rather than assuming patients have failed at basic behavioral advice. These are her descriptions of her experience and framework; the opening does not establish the proposed biological links.

A young patient with daily headaches improved after starting CPAP for sleep apnea, prompting Gominak to investigate sleep in other patients. She recalls women who woke around 3 a.m., experienced headaches, or had disrupted sleep despite appearing otherwise healthy. In one example, she compares these cases with older people she encountered in rural Mexico and wonders whether spending more time outdoors could matter. The stories explain what drew her attention, but they cannot by themselves identify a cause.

Gominak focuses on sleep-study findings involving delayed or reduced REM sleep and, in some patients, breathing interruptions limited to that phase. She describes the normal progression through lighter sleep, deep sleep, and REM, when muscle tone is strongly reduced. From there she asks whether some cases reflect neurological regulation in the brainstem rather than only airway anatomy. She links this question to autonomic nervous system activity and to patients' reports of mood and memory changes, while presenting the connection as an interpretation of her clinical observations.