“Strike Vitamin D Off the List for Cold Prevention?” That was the headline. “Study clears up speculation about vitamin D reducing colds,” said the press release.
So I was intrigued.
Supposedly, vitamin D was “tested” and found ineffective in warding off colds and flu. But look what they ACTUALLY did…
They had people take 200,000 IU once per month? That’s insane. We suggest 2,000 to 5,000 daily. It would be like saying take aspirins once a month and then pronouncing it didn’t relieve pain!
By the end of the study, both the vitamin D group and the placebo group had averaged just under four upper respiratory tract infections per person, according to the researchers’ report in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Only half of the swabs in each group tested positive for respiratory viruses, and two in each group were the flu.
“Our tests are good, but not perfect, and some viruses may have been cleared by the time the swab was collected,” says researcher David Murdoch MD, head of pathology at the University of Otago in Christchurch, New Zealand. He’s right there it’s way incompetent, silly or just plain evil (intending to try and sink the amazing benefits of vitamin D).
The biggest criticism with this study is that they did not monitor blood levels of vitamin D, usually measured as 25-hydroxyvitamin D [25(OH)D]. So researchers have no idea if the participants got ANY vitamin D, or how much.
Murdoch’s trial “vigorously” addressed the question of whether vitamin D can prevent colds, Jeffrey Linder, MD, MPH, a doctor at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, writes in an accompanying editorial. Linder’s comment is as laughable and irresponsible as the whole study.
This is a crazy (wicked) study by any standard, absurd in design, and should NEVER have been published.
[SOURCE: JAMA. 2012;308(13):1333-1339. doi:10.1001/jama.2012.12505]
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