Obese Teenagers Need More Vitamin D

The obese adolescents need more vitamin D daily intake than those of normal weight, according to a study presented at the annual meeting of Experimental Biology. Obese people, vitamin D tends to be stored in fatty tissue, which prevents it from passing into the blood and be used by the body.

Catherine Peterson of the University of Missouri at Columbia, and colleagues compared blood levels of vitamin D to a group of teenagers are overweight taking 4,000 IU of vitamin D3 supplements daily for 6 months and a placebo group . They all had a vitamin D deficiency initially.

The study found that adolescents of normal weight, it takes about 100 IU to increase the blood level of 1 ng / ml whereas in obese adolescents, it takes about 200 IU. A dose of 4000 IU per day was necessary to achieve adequate blood levels, a dose seven times higher than the recent recommendation (600 IU) of the U.S. Institute of Medicine.