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Vieth R, Fraser D. Vitamin D insufficiency: no recommended dietary allowance exists for this nutrient. CMAJ. 2002 Jun 11;166(12):1541-2. PMID: 12074121 In fact, current recommendations for vitamin D are not designed to ensure anything. They are simply based on the old, default strategy for setting a nutritional guideline, which is to recommend an amount of nutrient similar to what healthy people are eating. This approach underlies the circular logic behind a familiar refrain about nutrition: "If you eat a good diet, you won't need supplements." By this logic, the answer to the question, "How much nutrient do you need?" is, "Whatever healthy people happen to be eating." The essential point, lost in the confusing terminology of modern nutrient recommendations, is that a recommended daily allowance (RDA) does not yet exist for vitamin D. Instead, the recommendations for it are referred to as "adequate intake" (AI).12,13 The AI for young adults (5 µg or 200 IU) was chosen to approximate twice the average vitamin D intake reported by 52 young women in a questionnaire-based study reported from Omaha, Neb., in 1997.13,14 Because the available evidence was acknowledged as weak, the Food and Nutrition Board of the US Institute of Medicine called its recommendation an AI.

Why "Vitamin D" is not a hormone, and not a synonym for 1,25-dihydroxy-vitamin D, its analogs or deltanoids. Vieth R. J Steroid Biochem Mol Biol. 2004 May;89-90(1-5):571-3. PMID: 15225841 doi:10.1016/j.jsbmb.2004.03.037