I would like to apologise for doing yet another blog-watch on Vitamin D only three weeks after the last one. Actually, no I’m not going to apologise. Vitamin D is an important topic for everyone and especially for athletes since an enormous number of people are deficient and deficiency impacts heavily on performance.
Vitamin D - my hero supplement!
The only supplements I take are fish oil, Vitamin D and glucosamine sulphate with condroitin. Of these I consider fish oil and Vitamin D to be crucial supplements that anyone should take, not just athletes and other active people.
On the point of the glucosamine sulphate with condroitin it’s possible that I don’t actually need as much of this at the moment since my fat loss diet includes roast chicken with gravy almost every evening. I make the gravy using homemade chicken stock for which I boil up the bones and gristle from my chicken for several hours, which means I’m extracting a lot of the condroitin from the chicken remnants. As a result I’m probably getting a good daily dose of extra condroitin at the moment.
So, moving onto the Vitamin D links, there have been a few studies and articles recently that have been of particular interest to me. I thought that, despite the relatively short time since I last wrote about Vitamin D, I ought to share them with everyone else.
- I remember being incredibly confused about which Vitamin D supplement to get when I first started shopping (and remember from my last blog-watch, just because it says it has a certain strength of Vitamin D doesn’t mean it’ll do the trick so don’t just go for the budget brand – it’s worth doing a bit of research on forums and google for recommendations before you make the purchase). There seemed to be D2 and D3 available but what was the difference. I eventually established that I needed Vitamin D3 but if you would like to see a nice short article explaining why that is, Iron Man Magazine have just published something explaining the sources of the two types of the vitamin and some astounding research that seems to emphasise the need to use natural D3 and not D2.
- If you want some real-life evidence of a potential link between Vitamin D deficiency (and supplementation) and athletic performance but you are tired of reading research studies while trying to decide if they are biased in some way then it is worth considering the improved performance of the Chicago Blackhawks. The Blackhawks, a professional hockey team, had seen many losing seasons and then they started supplementing the whole team on Vitamin D. In the last 18 months since starting this supplementation regime they made it to the Western conference finals last year, are performing even better this year, have seen a reduction in the number and severity of colds and have also seen a reduction in the number and severity of repetitive use injuries. Does it sound intriguing? For a broader discussion of these sorts of Vitamin D benefits I suggest a read of Jimmy Moore’s blog post that was kicked off by the same article from the Vitamin D Council.
- In Jimmy Moore’s post that I just linked to he refers to the pain hat his wife suffered from. It seems that the message about chronic pain being associated to extremely low Vitamin D levels is starting to get out into the public domain with an article popping up about this on WebMD. The article includes a fascinating reference to a woman who had barely measurable Vitamin D levels and 3 pages of symptoms and problems. After an intensive course of Vitamin D supplementation she was able to cross every single symptom off the list.
- Lupus is an unpleasant autoimmune disease that is present in my family. As a result I’m always interested when I see research about lupus. I was even more interested though when Nephropal wrote about the link between Vitamin D and Lupus. It seems that Lupus sufferers have seen a reduction of activity of the disease when they have supplemented with Vitamin D.
- Helen Kollias did a really good article for Precision Nutrition a little while ago discussing in detail a study that looked at the possible connection between body composition and Vitamin D levels. It seems that, surprisingly, there is a connection between these. Specifically it seems that women who are deficient in their Vitamin D levels carried more abdominal fat, more body fat and had a higher BMI. So it seems that Vitamin D may help with body composition goals too.
- Dr. Briffa wrote about a piece of research that suggested that in an elderly population, those with higher levels of Vitamin D also had improved physical function, suggesting that Vitamin D levels may help me in my goals of living a long and active life. As Dr. Briffa points out, there could be other reasons why these older people had improved physical function, but for want of further detailed information about the participants the Vitamin D is definitely a plausible explanation.
- Finally, I think Mark Sisson must be a mind-reader. I drafted this post up last weekend and then on Wednesday up came a post by Mark all about Vitamin D! He’s covering the similarities (and differences) between solar and oral/dietary Vitamin D sources and how much to dose up with. Worth a read as a reminder for any salient facts if you don’t want to re-read my previous blog-watch posts which cover some of these same topics.
That’s it for another blog-watch about Vitamin D. I’ll see if I can leave it for a bit longer than a month before I next write about Vitamin D!
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