Vitamin D wondervitamin?

curious guy

I was just looking up vitamin D there for a dissertation Im doing apparently its a wonder vitamin..http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0BgxNstkFI&feature=related..what do people think ?anyone know anything about it? also any advice on doing dissertations efficiently?

Tree

re: dissertations. keep track of every single last reference. you'll never be able to sort them out in the end otherwise.


re: wonder vitamin. vitamins go in and out of fashion regularly, todays wonder vitamin is tomorrows emmmm less wonderful vitamin

Kevster

I couldn't agree more with Tree. History has shown that different research groups continue to discover both positive and negative effects for the various vitamins. At the very worst, it was thought that taking excess amounts of vitamins can cause cancer; at best, they genuinely are necessary for life (some of them). The jury is still out on them I'm afraid.

El_Dangeroso

I think vitamin D is special though, in that it's more close to in it's actions to hormone than a vitamin. Plus it's next to impossible to get enough from diet and sunshine at this latitude, unless you eat 500g of herring a day.

It's role in cancer prevention is backed up with a lot of (at the moment associative) research, there are some intial RCT's that show promise (relative risk of about 0.5, not great I know), but doses are so low to not make a major impact IMHO. They have just begun the VITAL trial http://www.vitalstudy.org/ which will test supplementation of both vitamin D and fish oils. Disappointed to see they are only supplementing 2,000IU which is insufficient for most living below 42 latitude from what I have read, but hopefully the results will be significant enough to warrant further research.

www.vitaminDcouncil.com has some excellent resources and research.

I'm a supplement junkie, and have taken pretty much everything out there, most of it does nothing to an otherwise healthy person. But once I had normalised my 25(OH)D3 levels I stopped getting any colds, where I would normally get 2-3 a year. Anecdote I know, but definitely worth trying for anyone who is curious.

You have to get a blood test done though, you wouldn't want to risk hypervitaminosis or hypercalcemia. So a serum test of D(25(OH)D) and calcium is advised.

I get if people are skeptical, it's very early days, but initial research is proving promising, I would expect that serum D tests will become as common as cholesterol tests in the next decade.

Tree

im gonna continue to be skeptical. And vitamin d testing would have to get a lot less fiddly to become so commonplace (as it stands the sample has to be protected from sunlight and kept in fridge, cholesterol as an example doesnt need any special treatment)