I wish I had vitamin D’s publicist working for me cuz I
would have retired years and years ago from all the misplaced hype I would have
garnered.
Thus, unless you’ve been living in a cave, and most likely
even if you have, you would surely know by now that these days vitamin D is
being promoted for everything from lowering the risk of terrible diseases such
as cancer to improving your ability to play the piano.
Well, to be fair, no one seems to have made the latter
claim yet but I’ll bet someone is working on a study that proves exactly that.
Anyway, among the many claims made for vitamin D is that
higher vitamin D levels could significantly lower the risk of various forms of
heart disease, claims that are made on the basis of many studies that have
found that people with lower vitamin D levels seem to have higher rates of many
heart problems, including worse cholesterol profiles.
The problem such studies, however, is pretty simple to a
simple person like me: seems to me that the main reasons that most people with
lower vitamin D levels would have such low levels because they 1) don’t go into
the sun as much as people with more normal vitamin D levels, hence they are
less likely to exercise outdoors or even to just walk and relax in a park, and
2) they have poorer diets.
So simply upping the vitamin D levels in people with low
levels through the use of supplements has always seemed to me to be a poor way
to improve these people’s health status, and I’ve always been skeptical of the
ability of vitamin D supplements to make any difference in health outcome for
most people.
Which is why I wasn’t at all surprised that a study that
reviewed 4 million – that’s 4 million – health records concluded that in people
with low vitamin D levels and with concurrent abnormal cholesterol levels,
raising their vitamin D levels with supplements – which was documented through
blood tests that showed that their vitamin D levels had indeed risen to normal
levels – had no effect at all on their cholesterol levels.
You wanna take vitamin D to help with your bones?
Fine, makes some sense.
You wanna take vitamin D to lower your heart attack risk?
Still makes no sense to me.
