Vitamin D Can Make You Smarter, And Other Things

Vitamin D apparently stands for Definitely good for something, but what exactly? In recent years, the long neglected vitamin has ascended from useless to use-it-to-improve-every organ, and now this: The Scientific American reports on two European studies whose results suggest that vitamin D can make us smarter. The first study, conducted at the
University of Cambridge, looked at vitamin D levels in more than 1,700
men and women aged 65 or older who were divided
into four groups based on vitamin D blood levels: severely deficient,
deficient, insufficient (borderline) and optimum.The scientists found that the lower the subjects’ vitamin D levels,
the worse their perform­ance on a battery of
mental tests. Compared with people with optimum vitamin D levels, those
in the lowest quartile were more than twice as likely to be cognitively
impaired. The same journal reports on a second study, conducted at the University of Manchester in
England, that looked at vitamin D levels
and cognitive performance in more than 3,100 men aged 40 to 79. The researchers found that people with
lower vitamin D levels exhibited slower information-processing speed, and the correlation was particularly strong among men older than 60 years.

Read more in the Scientific American.

Read SportsGeezer on epidemic vitamin D deficiency.