Get the Nutrients You Need
(Page 2 of 4)
February/March 2006
By Walter C. Willett, M.D.
VITAMIN D
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Vitamin D is a hormone made by your skin. Most of what we get from food comes from dairy products (which, by law, must be fortified with vitamin D), vitamin-fortified breakfast cereals and eggs from hens fed vitamin D. Although calcium usually gets all the credit for building bones and preventing fractures, vitamin D should get at least equal billing.
There are other reasons for getting more vitamin D. In test tubes, vitamin D strongly inhibits the growth and reproduction of a variety of cancer cells, including those of the breast, ovary, colon, prostate and brain. New studies suggest that the same thing happens in our bodies. Several small studies suggest that getting more vitamin D, especially from sunlight, helps lower blood pressure. Getting too little may contribute to heart failure and peripheral artery disease (blocked blood flow in the legs) and may be implicated in the artery-clogging process known as atherosclerosis. In the Nurses’ Health Study, women who took vitamin D supplements were about half as likely to develop multiple sclerosis as those who didn’t.
People who can bask in strong sunlight for a few minutes on most days year-round make plenty of vitamin D, but that rules out everyone living north of San Francisco, Denver, Indianapolis and Philadelphia: During the winter months, the amount of ultraviolet light hitting those northern regions isn’t enough to generate vitamin D. It also rules out people who can’t get out for a 15-minute walk when the sun is high in the sky—in other words, millions of people. Your best bet is to find a multivitamin that delivers 800 to 1,000 International Units (IU) of vitamin D. A standard multivitamin plus a vitamin D supplement is another option.
VITAMIN E
In the Nurses’ Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study, we saw lower risks of heart disease in women and men who took vitamin E supplements of at least 100 IU for at least two years. At the end of 2004, an international team pooled the data from nine long-term studies in order to tease out whether vitamin E had an impact on heart disease. According to the researchers, “The results weakly support the hypothesis that higher dietary intake of vitamin E … reduces the risk of coronary heart disease.” At the beginning of 2005, an analysis of the results of 19 vitamin E trials suggested that users of high-dose vitamin E (more than 400 IU per day) might have a slightly higher death rate than non-users. However, most of the trials in the analysis included only volunteers with heart disease, and an exhaustive review of vitamin E by the Institute of Medicine showed it is safe at much higher doses. In a recent large trial among women, vitamin E supplements reduced total cardiovascular deaths by 24 percent. The final role of vitamin E in preventing heart disease remains unsettled, but it is wise not to rely only on high doses of vitamin E to protect you against a heart attack or stroke.
