Update: Vitamin D’s Health Effects

With all the political headlines last week, an important health headline could have been overlooked. A group of scientists published a paper suggesting vitamin D doesn’t prevent fractures and falls or help increase bone-mineral density, and they recommended that it not be used for that purpose. I’m a strong believer that vitamin D is one of the fundamental supplements we should take, so I took a close look at this paper.

Typically I call this a Research Update, but I’m intentionally not calling it that this time because there’s no new research in this paper. This was a research review paper that included a re-analysis of prior research, some 81 studies. That’s a meta-analysis, a statistical technique that has risen in popularity in the past 10 years. In fact, it really only included research published since 2014, the last time some of these authors did the exact same analysis. Based on the prior research of the statistician involved who was the lead author, I have to believe the math is correct.

The problem is in the selection of the studies. I did something I don’t always do. I examined almost all of the abstracts of the 81 papers that were used in the meta-analysis. It was tedious to say the least. To be blunt, I don’t understand how some of the papers were selected. On Thursday, I’ll give you the run down on the research review part of the paper.

What are you prepared to do today?