A randomized, controlled trial evaluating the efficacy of an online intervention targeting vitamin D intake, knowledge and status among young adults.

What Was Tested

Researchers studied Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc in this randomized controlled trial publication.

Vitamin D plays a key role in bone health.

Consuming adequate vitamin D during young adulthood is important due to the development of peak bone mass; however, many Canadian young adults do not meet vitamin D recommendations.

Who Took Part

According to the abstract, 90 adults were involved.

By PubMed's age tags, the people studied were teenagers, young adults and adults, both men and women.

Using a pre-post design, 90 Ontario adults (38 men, 52 women; 18-25 years), were randomly assigned to intervention or control groups.

Participants completed a socio-demographic survey, pre-post food frequency questionnaire, and a vitamin D knowledge questionnaire (3 time-points).

How the Study Was Run

The design is described as randomized.

Random assignment meant chance, not the researchers, decided who got Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc and who got the comparison, which limits bias.

A sub-sample of participants completed pre-post blood 25(OH)D3 tests.

Univariate ANOVA tested pre-post between-group differences in vitamin D intake and status.

Repeated-measures ANOVA tested between-group differences in vitamin D knowledge and perceptions across 3 time-points.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Awareness, Bone Density, Cholecalciferol, Diet, Dietary Supplements, Health Behavior and Health Knowledge, Attitudes, Practice.

The authors tagged it with the keywords Behaviour change, Emerging adulthood, Intervention, Mobile app, Nutrition and Vitamin D intake.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized study of Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc in 90 adults.

The abstract goes on to report its results in about 8 sentences; this page does not restate them, so read the paper for the findings and their limits.

The publication is from 2016 (The international journal of behavioral nutrition and physical activity), a journal based in England.

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