High-dose vitamin D no better than standard dose for preventing kids’ colds: study
TORONTO — Giving children high daily doses of vitamin D instead of the standard recommended amount doesn’t appear to reduce the number of times they come down with wintertime sniffles, a study suggests.
For the last 30 years, vitamin D has been thought to play a role in preventing or reducing the number of colds and bouts of flu children experience over the fall and winter.
But Toronto researchers found children who received the standard daily dose of 400 international units (IUs) and those given 2,000 IUs per day both had an average of almost two upper respiratory infections during the cold-weather months.
“What we found was there was no difference in the number of viral infections that children got, regardless of which group they were in — the high-dose group or the regular-dose group,” said Dr. Jonathon Maguire, a pediatrician at St. Michael’s Hospital.