"The New Super Nutrient!"

Unblinking unirony.

There's something special about seeing this little, unblinking claim that "Vitamin D is the New Super Supplement." It's on a rack of milk jugs at the local grocery store, reminding people not that milk is a healthy food to be drunk in moderation, like all foods, but that the media and opportunistic marketers once again take a scientific result out of context, hype it to the extreme and feed it to us as gospel.

We've known about vitamin D for years. Want to handle your vitamin D deficiency? Go outside. I don't care if it's cold. The vitamin D metabolic pathways are so goddamned weird they're a sure sign the Intelligent Designer was drunk as a skunk when he came up with them, and supplements are a poor substitute for sunlight. It's pretty damned amazing when a site that hypes supplements tells you "Sunlight exposure is the only reliable way to generate vitamin D in your own body." (The same article informs you that sunblock causes diseases such as prostate cancer by depriving you of Vitamin D.)

Amazing because it's all bunkum. Reynold Spector's article, Science and Pseudoscience in Adult Nutrition Research and Practice, documents what we do and don't know about human nutrition and the simple fact is: we know squat. Spector concludes:

The answer, notwithstanding thousands of positive EOS (epidemiology/observation studies) and, in some cases, small inadequate clinical trials, is there is no rigorous scientific evidence for the utility of dietary supplements, including megavitamins in normal-weight (nonpregnant) adults with a stable BMI of 20-25 eating a diet containing adequate amounts of nutrients.

He goes on to state that there are known RDAs for some vitamins, such as B-12 and D, that you will need to supplement when you get past age 60, but for most of us, just going outside and eating well is enough.

The photograph documents a cynical attempt to sell more milk, but you'd need ten glasses a day to replace whan sunlight can do in 20 minutes. Just go outside already.