Everybody wants to live a long and happy life, or at least most people, but some mistakes regarding what substances you put in your body can be truly fatal for you. Our organism needs plenty types of chemicals in order to function at its best, and if it doesn’t get them it may become ill, have a weak immune system, get infections and diseases and ultimately, it may die before the “terms of validity”.
But today we have to speak about vitamin D or the “sunshine vitamin” as it is also called since it’s produced in our body due to exposure to the sunlight. This may be a good explanation of why most people have the need to get outside daily.
Lack of vitamin D can triple the risk of early death
As horrifying as it may sound, this is what a group of scientists is claiming after they’ve been studying 78 581 patients with an average age of 51, spanning up to 20 years from 1991 to 2011. Researchers discovered low levels of vitamin D led to a nearly three-fold rise in the risk of death from any cause in adults aged 45 to 60 years old. And people with the lowest levels of vitamin D had a 4.4 times higher chance of dying from diabetes.
Elders can be relieved
Surprisingly enough, the scientists concluded that there was no longer any association between vitamin D level and mortality on people above the age of 75. So if you’ve made it to that age, you no longer have to worry about getting plenty of vitamin D.
Dr Rodrig Marculescu at the Medical University of Vienna confirms us the obvious: “Our survival data from a large cohort, covering all age groups, from a population with minimal vitamin D supplementation at old age, confirm a strong association of vitamin D deficiency with increased mortality.
“This association is most pronounced in the younger and middle-aged groups and for causes of deaths other than cancer and cardiovascular disease, especially diabetes.”
The research was presented at this week’s European Association for the Study of Diabetes meeting in Barcelona.
