Wouldn’t it be nice if a simple, inexpensive vitamin supplement could solve so many health-related issues?
So begins the question at the heart of a review featured in this article:
As I’ve written in so many blogs and Facebook posts, vitamin D is either great or relatively inconsequential…and yet some fitness and nutrition experts tout its glories daily. Why? Because they often fail to appreciate that correlation is not causation.
What does that reallllllly mean?
Basically, let me do a simple logic analogy, a reflection of what I had to wrestle with my freshman year at Vanderbilt in 1970.
- Socrates was a man.
- All men are fallible.
- Therefore Socrates was fallible.
Makes sense, right? I mean, it does not get much easier than that, although now that we have genomics and procedures that can give more insight into what man-ness is, maybe we can dispute this on the face of it.
But let’s go back to the idea here about correlation and causation.
- Socrates was a man.
- All men are fallible.
- Therefore fallibility is because he was a man.
You can see the problem here. If we attribute the very high correlation of man-ness to fallibility, then we get the first argument. If, on the other hand, we attribute fallibility because of man-ness, then….ooops. That does not work. It’s not because of being fallible that we are men. It’s because we’re men that we’re fallible.
Same with vitamin research. Often we find that people with certain conditions have deficiencies in certain vitamins, minerals, etc, and then skip to the conclusion that those deficiencies contributed if not caused the conditions. So we then make the next logical step and supplement the deficiencies hoping to solve or cure or manage the conditions. WRONG!
As the brief article above notes, pumping a lot of people up with a lot of vitamin D over a long period of time will not prevent all that many falls – 1 in 50 over a 10 year span. But, if you are one of those who fall because of low D, you would surely kick yourself in the butt for not having taken D in supplement form all those years. The problem is, maybe your D was low but maybe you also don’t consume enough high quality protein or calcium foods; or exercise enough, or in the right way; or maybe simply have too much clutter around your house.
There are so many causes to falls – as my one elderly but fit client did yesterday putting his pants on – that may have little to no relationship to D status; yet, maybe he’ll be found to be low in D after the fact. Despite years of training, years of living and eating right, years of maintaining good mental, social and family health – wearing socks on wood floors while picking up a leg to get into your pants may simply be a rare but bad decision on that particular day.
And yet, people are still buying supplements by the billions of dollars for deficiencies they don’t have or that won’t impact their health. They are spending a lot of money and a little bit of time wishing on a star. And yet, too, they all know that health and fitness require spending time and energy. Still, they are hoping that one little pill will do it for them.
And even with this article in hand, they will find a way to avoid the truth: proper and consistent exercise and reasonable attention to diet and maintaining healthy social relationships may be all you need for a long, health life.
