December 4, 2018 – Vitamin D and Fish Oil

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Anchor lead: If you’ve been taking fish oil or vitamin D supplements you may want to think again, Elizabeth Tracey reports

Both fish oil and vitamin D supplements have been extremely popular in recent years, but new evidence presented at the recent American Heart Association meeting should result in far fewer people taking them. That’s according to Roger Blumenthal, a preventive cardiologist at Johns Hopkins.

Blumenthal: It’s real clear that routine use of fish oil capsules  in the standard doses or vitamin D supplementation in people who are not clearly vitamin D deficient didn’t have any significant impact on either cancer or heart disease.  So sometimes while we think certain supplements may be helpful we really need to do good randomized controlled trials and right now routine supplementation with vitamin D or fish oil supplements I predict will go down in frequency in the next year.   :30

Blumenthal says no harms appear to be related to taking the supplements but health benefits are lacking in rigorous studies. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.