Research Update: Vitamin D Reduces Bone Fracture Risk... Again

[Christine]

Health care always offers a variety of choices, you just may not know it. With regard to this topic, you can either pay about $30,000 for a new hip after it fractures or you can take some vitamin D and prevent the fracture from happening in the first place. That’s what the latest research suggests in one of the premier medical journals, the New England Journal of Medicine. With all types of medicine, natural and pharmaceutical, dosage is the key to its therapeutic value. This new study makes the case for the proper dosage of vitamin D.
"Taking between 800 IUs and 2,000 IUs of vitamin D per day significantly reduced the risk of most fractures, including hip, wrist and forearm in both men and women age 65 and older," said Bess Dawson-Hughes, MD, director of the Bone Metabolism Laboratory at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging (USDA HNRCA) at Tufts University, the study's senior author. "Importantly, we saw there was no benefit to taking Vitamin D supplements in doses below 800 IUs per day for fracture prevention."
The average adult does not get enough sun exposure year-round to produce the necessary amount of vitamin D, actually not even close. So, how about food sources of vitamin D? Unfortunately, food sources like salmon, tuna, and fortified milk and orange juice only give you about 150 IUs per day. And multivitamins? Most multi’s contain 400 IUs of vitamin D. So, if you are doing all the above, you are only getting about 550 IUs of vitamin D per day, far short of the fracture-preventing therapeutic amount.