Vitamin D helps boost resistance to the common cold during the winter season, a recent study on Mongolian children undertaken by researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital shows.
Researchers surveyed 247 third and fourth grade Mongolian children living in the capital Ulaanbaatar, where high altitudes and cold climates mean children rarely get sufficient sun exposure. Vitamin D, which is not actually a vitamin but a group of fat-soluble secosteroids key for human health, can only naturally be received from the sun.
Researchers divided the children into two groups: one that received a Vitamin D supplement in their daily milk and another that did not. After a three month period, the group that received the supplement had a cold incidence rate 50 percent lower than the group did not.
"Our...findings suggest that the association between vitamin D status and ARI [acute respiratory infection] risk is indeed causal, at least among school-aged children with very low vitamin D status in early winter," the group wrote in the August 20 online issue of the journal Pediatrics.
The study, which is the first of its time to prove causality between Vitamin D supplements and cold reduction rates, could be important even outside of harsh climates like Mongolia's.
In the U.S. roughly 20 percent of young people are Vitamin D deficient. That rate rises to 50 percent in African American children. The study shows providing 400 IU's of Vitamin D per day - the recommended amount - could vastly improve the health of American children.
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