New Analysis Claims Vitamin D Supplements Are Useless -- Here’s Why It’s Wrong
Dr. Mercola
Last November, researchers at the Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research1 declared that vitamin supplements are probably useless when it comes to preventing heart disease and/or cancer.
Their seriously flawed analysis (which, sadly, is being used by the US Preventive Services Task Force to update its recommendations on supplement use) was widely reported by the media.2
Now, the attack against vitamin supplements has heated up yet again—this time they're trying to quell the idea that vitamin D, specifically, has any useful purpose for the average person.
Numerous media sources3, 4 have trumpeted the findings of a recent meta-analysis,5 which claims that vitamin D supplements are not only useless against heart disease, stroke and cancer, but may do more harm than good, and that further investigation into vitamin D would likely be "pointless"! According to the authors of the study:
"Available evidence does not lend support to vitamin D supplementation and it is very unlikely that the results of a future6 single randomized clinical trial will materially alter the results from current meta-analyses."
What's more, they also found that people taking vitamin D supplements had an increased risk for hip fracture, which prompted Professor Karl Michaëlsson, a researcher at Uppsala University in Sweden, to publish a call for stricter labeling on vitamin D supplements. In his editorial,7 which accompanied the featured analysis, he writes:
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