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Health Check: Vitamin D - a panacea?

Vitamin pills

16/04/2014

Vitamin D - a panacea?

BBC World Service - Health Check, Vitamin D - a panacea?

What is the evidence for the benefits of vitamin D supplementation?

Are there benefits to taking vitamin D? A controversial Dutch scheme paying alcoholics in beer to clean civic areas; Does the Turkish dieting industry need more regulation?

In recent years, vitamin D has been billed as the latest miracle pill with articles in newspapers saying it can improve your immune system, reduce your risk of cancer, diabetes and heart disease, and make you live longer. These are in addition to the long-known benefits for bone health. But get two doctors in a room and you will get two different views on the benefits of vitamin D and whether we should be taking supplements. So what is the evidence from trials? Should we be taking supplements or not? The British Medical Journal has just published two reviews of all the recent trials and Naveed Sattar, Professor of Metabolic Medicine at the University of Glasgow has been examining this evidence.

Beer Work Project in Amsterdam
Many cities around the world have wrestled with the issue of people with alcohol problems living on the street, drinking, making a mess and even getting into fights. But in the Netherlands the city council of Amsterdam East has decided to take radical action. It has asked the Rainbow Foundation - a non-governmental organisation committed to people with social problems, the homeless, drug-users and those with psychiatric problems - to give jobs cleaning the streets and parks to a small group of these people. The result is that the roads are clean and the participants are given a new purpose. But controversially the people are paid in beer as well as cash. Thijs Westerbeek reports.  

Diet Clinics in Turkey
A doctor in Turkey has been sentenced to three and a half years in prison after a 19 year old woman died at the diet camp he ran. According to local newspaper reports, when architecture student Dila Kurt attended Dr Muzaffer Kushan’s ‘International clinic’ in a village just outside Istanbul, she died suddenly after losing more than 13kg in just six weeks. With a growing problem of obesity in Turkey and increased attention on body image, the diet industry is booming, but now some doctors are calling for better regulation of it. Dr Reci Meseri is Assistant Professor of Nutrition and Dietetics at Ege University in Turkey.

Picture credit: Vitamin supplements, Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

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