There's No Such Thing As A Vitamin D Deficiency - Part 4
Why there are probably few if any people who really need to take a vitamin D pill.
Vitamin D is everyone’s favourite supplement. It is sold in virtually every pharmacy, supermarket, and online store that you can imagine. It’s low risk, cheap to manufacture, and has spawned a creeping spiderweb of industry that is worth tens of billions of dollars a year.
Also, as I’ve been discussing, it probably doesn’t work. The evidence shows that there are few, if any, things that vitamin D supplements improve. People who have lots of vitamin D in their bodies are generally healthier than those who have less, but as it turns out taking a supplement to increase your vitamin D levels in general—and there are exceptions—probably doesn’t do anything to improve your health.
This is the fourth and final installment of the series. I have been reviewing the 2024 Endocrine Society guidelines for vitamin D supplementation. So far, we’ve see that the guidelines did away with the idea of a vitamin D “deficiency”. They also recommend against supplementation for the majority of people who do not have specific diagnoses which require vitamin D supplements.
They did recommend that four groups get supplements:
Pregnant people
Adults aged 75 and over
Children under 18 years of age
People with prediabetes
In parts 2 and 3 of this series we went over why the evidence is extremely unconvincing for pregnant people, older adults, and children. I would go so far as to say that we have strong evidence that vitamin D supplements don’t work for older adults and children, and the evidence for pregnant people is fraught with highly untrustworthy research.
That leaves us with the final group who the Endocrine Society recommended take supplements: people with prediabetes. What about them?
