Do You Need a Vitamin D Supplement?
Do you take Vitamin D? You should. Unless you work outside 52 weeks a year you probably don’t get enough Vit D. I recommend a Vit D supplement to everyone I know. A recent Mercola.com article really sheds some light on this.
According to Dr. Heaney, “the embarrassing secret about the whole field of nutrition is that we don’t have any a priori idea about what normal is; absolutely no idea at all.”
For example, the Institute of Medicine, in approaching most nutrients, simply defines the requirement as the least you can get by on without developing a certain disease. But this may be a far cry from what you need for optimal health, and as a general rule, many nutritional guidelines are insufficiently low.
With all this evidence showing we need far more vitamin D than we’re currently getting, why have agencies such as the US Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) and the Institute of Medicine (IOM) failed to keep up? Why are they still recommending levels that are so far below ideal? According to Dr. Heaney, there are two main reasons for this discrepancy:
They’re looking for disease prevention rather than health promotion, and the endpoints are very different. The US Preventive Services Task Force, for example, is concerned with the prevention of diseases, and their focus is on what you need to do in order to minimize your risk. “The focus of prevention is not inappropriate for an agency that’s concerned with prevention. But that’s not the same thing as promotion of nutrition,” Dr. Heaney says.
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