Health Blog: Vitamin D Deception?

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Some suspect conflict of interest in vitamin D report

Remember back in November when the highly anticipated verdict on vitamin D came out? Lots of people in the know were shocked. But now it is beginning to make sense.

Since so many studies were seeing a strong correlation between various maladies and vitamin D deficiency, lots of folks thought for sure the National Academy of Sciences, whose health arm, the Institute of Medicine, would recommend minimum doses of vitamin D of more than 1,000IUs/daily.

They didn’t, as I wrote in an earlier blog.  Instead they recommended a paltry 600 IUs for kids and young adults, and 800 IUs for people over 71. Even more surprising was that they said that most people are getting these amounts already through diet and sunshine. The collective “really?” and “what gives?” could be found all over the Internet.

Here at WellWise we believe that positivity is a healthy practice, and that too much cynicism is probably not. However … we were not really that shocked to find out that the committee apparently suppressed dissent from some of the nation’s experts on the subject. Tsk, tsk. Among the 14 experts whose comments were not mentioned in the report were those from Harvard’s Dr. Walter Willett, probably the most famous nutritional scientist in the world.

And the tsk-tsking grew louder when we learned that two members of the Institute of Medicine committee may have a conflict of interest. One holds several patents on vitamin D analogs (prescription medicines derived from vitamin D) for the treatment of various diseases. The other sits on the advisory board of a Canadian company called Cytochroma that is developing three synthetic vitamin D analogs. 

The revelations come thanks to a couple of vitamin D advocacy groups, the Vitamin D Council and the Alliance for Natural Health. They have filed Freedom of Information Act requests to release the comments, which means we may eventually find out what the dissenters said about the committee’s work.

Sigh. We guess there has to be a place for healthy cynicism, too.

Stay tuned … we will pass along more information as it comes out. Meanwhile, we suggest you take your vitamin D supplements. Our neighbor to the north, Canada, recently raised their recommended daily dose to 1,000 IUs, but even the IOM committee said that a 4,000 IU dose was safe.  

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