Too Much Vitamin D Can Be Toxic

If you are giving vitamin D to your teenage children it is fine, but if you are giving vitamin D to your obese teenagers, you had better stop now. According to a new study, not only does vitamin D offer absolutely no benefits to obese teenagers, it also increases their cholesterol and triglycerides.

These findings are the conclusions of a series of studies that is investigating childhood obesity. The study was published in Pediatric Obesity and it is only one of the many other ongoing experiments of its kind.

What is worrying is that obesity seems to have risen two times in children and four times in adolescents over the last 30 years. These are the Centers for Disease Control’s results after having studied obese children in the past years. It is widely known nowadays that 1 in 5 American adolescents is obese.

Up until now, numerous observational studies have shown that vitamin D deficiency can be the cause of obesity issues. We are talking about insulin resistance or even cardiovascular diseases. Thus, a large number of health care providers recommend high doses of vitamin D supposing that its implementation will impede such complications from ever developing.

Doctor Seema Kumar, who is a pediatric endocrinologist in the Mayo Clinic Children’s Center, has been conducting clinical trials and published several studies on the vitamin D subject in the past decade. While she has yet to find any vitamin D benefit for obese children, her latest study revealed something more terrifying.

According to Dr. Kumar, taking in too much vitamin D has enabled a condition better known as vitamin D toxicity: the patient can experience vomiting, nausea or even kidney complications. Also, Dr. Kumar and her colleagues discovered that cholesterol and triglycerides levels had also rise after having taken in too much vitamin D.

However, Dr. Kumar mentioned that this conclusion might have resulted due to one of the experiment’s limitations: there were very few children participating in the experiment (19 teenagers) and the study also had a very short timeframe.

She insists that further tests be implemented, with more participants and extended over a longer period of time in order to obtain clear results, unaltered by any unfavorable conditions.

While Dr. Kumar does acknowledge the study’s result, she mentions that reasonable vitamin D supplements are still a good piece of advice in order to maintain a healthy lifestyle. The easiest and most common way to take in vitamin D is via sunlight, fish oil or fatty fish. If the body cannot retain the recommended amounts, supplements are advised.

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