Vitamin D Probably Can't Slow Aging

How endless headlines are coming from the same tired dataset.

These are apparently real vitamin D capsules. Gaze in awe. Photo by Karyna Panchenko on Unsplash

Vitamin D is probably the most written-about supplement of all time. It’s essential for all sorts of bodily systems, and decades of research have shown that having lower levels of the vitamin put you at higher risk of everything from heart disease to dementia. It’s also very safe, cheap to produce, and therefore a very promising target for intervention.

To put it simply: people who have less vitamin D are generally much less healthy than those with more. Surely that means taking a supplement is good for your health?

The problem with this idea is that we have been researching vitamin D supplements for a very long time, in some of the biggest randomized trials ever conducted. Overwhelmingly, we have seen no benefits from taking the pills.

Which makes the recent headlines about the supplement a bit confusing. According to global media, you can slow your aging by taking vitamin D. If true, this would finally justify the billions of dollars spent each year on the massive global market for the pills.

Unfortunately, the science doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. There’s no reason to believe that you can slow your aging processes by taking a vitamin D supplement just yet.

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