Is Vitamin D a waste of time?

Is Vitamin D a Waste of Time?

By Dr. Jason Sonners

According to the recently released study in The Lancet, Vitamin D supplementation may be a waste of money. This article is being released about a month after another medical journal, Annals of Internal Medicine, stated that most vitamin and mineral supplements did not prevent chronic disease or death, that their use among healthy adults was not justified, that they wasted money and that they should be avoided.

These statements and comments, coming from well respected medical journals, carry a lot of water within the medical and lay communities. They lead inevitably to a serious question for Core Therapies: Are these statements accurate and do they reflect or contradict the recommendations we make in our offices to you?

In order to tackle this question, we need to break it down into a few elements.

First: Are vitamins and minerals necessary for health?

The only reason for any living organism, including humans, to eat food is so that we can have fuel for our lives. Hopefully, the food we eat gets broken down in our intestines and our body absorbs the vitamins and minerals it needs. These vitamins and minerals are absolutely required for healthy functioning of our immune system, endocrine system, nervous system, digestive system, and just about any other system we can name. So, yes…vitamins and minerals are necessary for health.

Second: Are we getting all the vitamins and minerals we need from the food we eat?

In order to answer this question we must determine what the human diet ought to look like and then evaluate our own diet against this to see if we might be close to getting all the nutrients we need from the food we are eating. In short, humans are designed to eat the food that we would have access to in the natural world without processing, without genetically modifying, without over-preserving and, of course, without adding hormones, pharmaceutical drugs and sugar. What’s left? Organic fruits and vegetables, nuts, seeds and grass-fed organic lean protein sources. The quantities may vary day to day and season to season, but on average we should be getting approximately 8-12 servings of vegetables, 3-5 servings of fruit, 2-4 servings of nuts and seeds and 1-3 servings of lean protein daily. Ideally, we should consumer very limited quantities of grains and dairy products, if any at all.

How does your diet stack up to these guidelines? Unfortunately it is difficult to really consume the amount and type of foods needed to make sure that you are fully nourished every day. And even if we were getting close to those numbers, especially the amount of fruit and vegetable intake, we must consider that most of the produce we have access to is coming from over farmed/under nourished soil that is typically picked early and shipped around the world. These factors unfortunately limit the amount of nutrients available from the foods we are eating.

Third: If we are not getting all the nutrients we need from food, where can we possibly get it?

Consistently making the effort to improve your diet and working toward the above goals is always the best choice, but when that is not happening what else can you do? Supplement! This brings us back to the above mentioned articles…

• Not all supplements are created equal. Most, if not all, of the studies used to discredit supplement use are choosing synthetic, laboratory produced (garbage) vitamins and I would have to agree that using these vitamins as a source of nutrition is probably a waste of money. That being said, there are companies now that are using organic, properly dried, concentrated fruit and vegetables to make their multi vitamin/mineral blends. These are the best choice! If the articles claimed these types of vitamins were useless, it would be like saying that proper nutrition is useless in creating optimal health (ridiculous right?).
• Vitamin D plays an integral role in the following: immune system function, inflammation, bone growth and strength, hormone production and regulation, and much more. Does that sound important to you? Me too! So why is supplementing useless? I’m really not sure other than to say Vitamin D supplementation is one consideration among many in helping your body to be healthy. There are dozens of causes of cancer, stroke, heart disease, osteoporosis and hormone imbalance, and no one should think that Vitamin D by itself should be wholly responsible for correcting or treating any of these conditions. That being said, if Vitamin D is a necessary human nutrient required for optimal health (which inarguably it is), then is recommending that most people be deficient in this nutrient helping anyone? I would think not. So, yes…please continue to supplement with your Vitamin D and while you should not expect this daily vitamin to cure heart disease or cancer, you can expect it to be one of a variety of measures you are doing in the big picture of maintaining and improving your health.
• Taking Vitamins is not treating conditions, it is nourishing your body! The mind set of treating conditions (“taking a pill for every ill”) is a medical paradigm that has been conflated with a holistic concept of nourishment. This type of model will never prove effective, since this is not the intended use of nutrients. Bodies heal very effectively on their own provided they are in an environment conducive to healing (proper nutrition, proper exercise/movement and low stress). Rather than using supplements to heal you and treat conditions, think of using them as a way to make sure your body has everything it needs to function properly and express health optimally. If this is happening, you can then expect healing.

Is Vitamin D a waste of time? Throughout your journey for better health, find experts in their fields who you trust to advise you regarding your health. There is no magical vitamin that can fix everything; however, knowing where your diet falls short and making sure you are using high quality vitamins to supplement those deficiencies is a logical way to ensure your nutrition is at the level you need it to be to attain your health goals.