Vitamin D supplements don't work if you're too fat, study warns

[wvwvw]

Vitamin D supplements may not work if you're overweight, a study suggests.

Supplementing the sunshine vitamin is vital for keeping bones strong and strengthening the immune system, and may lower the risk of death from cancer.

But a review of existing evidence found the benefit only applies to people who are a healthy weight.

People who are overweight or obese — a risk factor for a host of health issues including cancer, heart disease and stroke — had 'minimal' benefit from the pills.

Scientists believe people who have too much fat in their bodies struggle to metabolize vitamin D supplements for use in the body.

The study found they had significantly lower levels of vitamin D in their blood compared to healthy people taking the same pills.

Dr Deirdre Tobias, an epidemiologist at the Brigham and Women's Hospital who led the research, said: 'We observed striking differences after two years, indicating a blunted response to vitamin D supplementation with higher body mass index (BMI).


Researchers led by Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, found that people who used the supplements were no less likely to suffer bone fractures than those who did not.


'There seems to be something different happening with vitamin D metabolism at higher body weights, and this study may help explain diminished outcomes of supplementation for individuals with an elevated BMI.'

For the study — published today in JAMA Network Open — researchers re-analyzed data from one of the largest and longest-running vitamin D trials to date, the US-based VITAL study.

This tracked 26,000 people who took daily vitamin D supplements for about five years between 2010 and 2018.

All the participants were over 50 years old, and did not have cancer or a cardiovascular disease at the start of the study.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/a...udy-warns.html

[PlattitüdenPaule]

Well it's soluable in fat, so it binds to all the fat cells. No big surprise there.

[Insuperable]

I also remember one scientist said that research shows that there is a benefit to bone strengthening when using Vitamin D supplements, but for some unknown reason research shows there are no other benefits. What he meant was that bone strengthening (calcium absorption) is just one of many functions vitamin D does, one that is simply the most well known. Vitamin D is needed for many other funtions in body besides bone strengthening. On top of that, people who use Vitamin D supplements use too much of it and probably develop some resistance to it.