Vitamin D is the hottest vitamin under the sun. Even the Financial Times is writing about it. In an article about the sunshine vitamin, they discuss University of Toronto Professor Reinhold Vieth’s fight to get the Institute of Medicine (IOM) to raise the dietary reference intakes (DRIs) of vitamin D for all age groups in the United States and Canada. They say the recommendations, if increased, will only rise slightly. The main reason they give for the static recommended intake? Money. They state no company with the financial power, i.e. a pharmaceutical company, will want to sponsor a placebo-controlled randomized study to look at the effects of vitamin D in a healthy population because the vitamin is easy and cheap to make. Thus, it doesn’t offer a high profit margin. And, they argue, even if someone would back a large-scale study that could encourage daily recommended dose changes, the study wouldn’t be completed for at least a decade.
They also discuss recent studies confirming its health benefits; and give a history of the vitamin, including the discovery, and how the understanding of the vitamin’s role in human health has changed since the early 20th century. Then, they discuss how it works in the body. They also offer a sidebar on why they feel a 1984 study that showed vitamin D’s toxicity at 3,800 IU/d was flawed.