January 18, 2016

Supplement pushing

The Herald has a Daily Mail story about vitamin D for making you generally feel better. It’s not so long ago that the NZ media had a lot of less supportive coverage on vitamin D — Ian Reid, Mark Bolland, and Andrew Grey won the Prime Minister’s Science Prize last year for their work showing that calcium and vitamin D aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.

The story does have some new evidence.

In the study, by a medical team in Edinburgh, volunteers were asked to cycle for 20 minutes. They were then given either a placebo or vitamin D and, two weeks later, were asked to cycle for 20 minutes again.

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Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »