Sunday, February 7, 2010

The Wonder Vitamin


Imagine a treatment that could build bones, strengthen the immune system and lower the risks of illnesses like diabetes, heart and kidney disease, high blood pressure and cancer. Some research suggests that such a wonder treatment already exists. It’s vitamin D, a nutrient that the body makes from sunlight and that is also found in fish and fortified milk. Doctors are increasingly testing their patients’ vitamin D levels and prescribing daily supplements to raise them. But don’t start gobbling down vitamin D supplements just yet. The excitement about their health potential is still far ahead of the science. Although numerous studies have been promising, there are scant data from randomized clinical trials. Little is known about what the ideal level of vitamin D really is, whether raising it can improve health, and what potential side effects are caused by high doses. And since most of the data on vitamin D comes from observational research, it may be that high doses of the nutrient don’t really make people healthier, but that healthy people simply do the sorts of things that happen to raise vitamin D.

4 comments:

  1. Yours is a rare example of good reasoning on that issue, thank you very much. I recently heard of a new pill with which they want to push people to live 100 years.

    In the last 50 years there haven't been great discoveries about nutrition which go beyond: 1. we have to diversify our diet 2. we musn't eat too much calories (even cholesterol is produced by our own organism for 50 to 70%, and the more calories we consume, the more cholesterol will be produced) 3. we have to eat less meat than scientists believed 30 years ago and to increase our consume of vegetarian ffod. All the rest are detailles of no great significance and might be confuted in 10 years.

    The most important thing is to accept that paradise doesn't exist on earth and that it even can't exist.

    Ladies and gentlemen, don't run after paradise!!

    Make some sport, but not too much and for instance enjoy life.

    Italy is the country with the highest life-exspectancy all over Europe and with one of the worst social systhems, especially on what concerns doctors and hospitals.

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  2. Coherency isn´t the relation between cause and effect. My professor of statistics presented, as an example for this, a story how children come to birth. Needless to say: the stork brings babies. As proof for this, he pointed out a verified high birthrate in those areas where storks are living. The reason for this is simple: Storks like marshy areas, where, overall, lower class people live, having a statistically significant larger quantity of children.

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  3. @cs

    All alcoholics drank milk when they were little babies!!

    So why is Italy the country with the lowest birth rate all over the world???

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  4. Let's turn serious.

    Five years ago in the german tv, the nutritionist of Jörg Pilawa's Nutrition Quiz affirmed that 4 walnuts (Juglans regia) every day would reduce cardiac infarction risk by 50%!!!

    But if you look around in the internet you will not find anything confirming such a strong pharmacological effect of walnuts.

    You can find only the usual banalities about fat acids which can have effect only if they replace other more harmful fat acids, but not in addition to the latter.


    Ten years ago the news was, that garlic would have a useful effect on thrombocytes and help to avoid infarction. But in the meantime this news is considered confuted again.

    The only evidence is that people are afraid of infarction.

    Well, Serge Gainsbourg wasn't such a coward and enjoyed every day his Gitanes instead of eating Juglans regia.

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