Vitamin D deficiency/insufficiency and challenges in developing global vitamin D fortification and supplementation policy in adults.

What It Covers

Researchers studied Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc in this review publication.

However, relatively little is known about poor vitamin D status and unmet needs in adults.

This report aims to highlight the contribution of epidemiologic studies (through the identification of health effects and societal burden) to the development of vitamin D fortification and supplementation policies and reveal unmet global challenges in adults.

In order to assess worldwide vitamin D status in adults, the search strategy combined the medical literature database MEDLINE (using PubMed) for the time period between January 1, 1980 and February 28, 2011, using the key words "vitamin D" "deficiency" and "insufficiency", and included articles in which access to full text was possible and in which healthy adults were assessed according to one of four commonly used vitamin D threshold classifications.

Why It Was Studied

This review summarizes studies discussing vitamin D status in adults and reveals that vitamin D deficiency/insufficiency is highly prevalent in adults and that current fortification and supplementation policies are inadequate.

Who the Included Studies Covered

PubMed indexes the participants as adults, women only.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Dietary Supplements, Food, Fortified, Health Status, MEDLINE, Nutrition Policy, Nutritional Status and Risk Factors.

What This Means in Plain Language

This is a review of Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc.

Results are reported in around 4 sentences of the abstract; we leave them to the paper itself rather than summarise them.

The publication is from 2012 (International journal for vitamin and nutrition research. Internationale Zeitschrift fur Vitamin- und Ernahrungsforschung. Journal international de vitaminologie et de nutrition), a journal based in Singapore.

More context: the Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc compound page, all human trials.