A recent study has found that cholesterol booms in teens taking vitamin D daily supplements. The vitamin is often prescribed to teens and children who are suffering from obesity or are overweight, yet this new find may prove that, on the contrary, these supplements are only making it worse.
Vitamin D is one of the most misunderstood elements in the vitamin family. Because of this, most doctors tend to take all proposals by all studies as new facts in the advancement of medicine. Furthermore, speculation may take the minds of some other doctors.
Naturally, seeing as the vitamin D levels in obese teenagers and children tend to always be low, the logical step would be to put the individual on a vitamin D treatment. Vitamin D was also believed to improve the healthiness of the obese’ hearts and decrease their chance of developing diabetes. This is, apparently all the more wrong, as it increases the levels of bad cholesterol in their blood.
Seema Kumar is an Indian-American researcher working as a pediatric endocrinologist at the Children’s Centre of the Mayo Clinic. She has conducted a big pile of research on the effects of Vitamin D dietary supplements on kids and adolescents. Her studying has been going on for ten whole years, and she has actually conducted four clinical trials and published six papers on the subject.
Her most recent study looked at obese and overweight children. Over a period of three months, she monitored children who were taking daily prescriptions of vitamin D in order to keep their levels in the normal range. However, this did not seem to help. At all. They did not change their body weight, their body mass, waistline, and index all remained the same. As did their blood pressure and flow levels.
Kumar maintains that this is just one of her studies showing now actual benefits for children taking vitamin D. She also calls for more research to be conducted on the matter, preferably under strict, placebo-controlled groups, and over longer periods of time. She still is skeptical about her own work, as other studies show that vitamin D helps the functioning of blood vessels.
The main new results that this study brings are that the children she has studied had increased triglycerides and cholesterol while under supplementation of vitamin D.
Kumar believes that one of the biggest problems is that doctors give obese children increased doses of vitamin D, up to 4-5 times the norm. This can easily lead to vitamin D poisoning, since it becomes toxic when in abundance.
Image source: smithsonianmag.com
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