Staying active, eating well and avoiding harmful habits are all pillars of a healthy lifestyle, but a growing body of research suggests that a missing nutrient could be causing memory loss in millions of people.
Research shows that Vitamin D is associated with strong bones, healthy muscles, and healthy teeth.
Beyond that, some scientists believe it may extend lifespan, with anti-inflammatory properties thought to protect telomeres in our DNA and potentially reduce the risk of conditions like rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis.
But, like with any vitamin, a higher dose of Vitamin D can be toxic after one man became hospitalised from excessive consumption of it. That said, it's also pretty rare to get vitamin D toxicity from your diet alone, so we run the real risk of not getting enough in the first place.
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According to BBC research, roughly 23% of adults in the UK are low in vitamin D during winter, which isn't surprising given the lack of sunlight during the colder months.
But most people aren't aware they're deficient and it can quietly affect our brain health.
As shared by Spring, a new study has found that people with low vitamin D levels experience memory decline two to three times faster than those with healthy levels.
Scientists tracked nearly 400 older adults and found that 60 percent had low vitamin D levels, with 35 percent having insufficient levels and one quarter severely deficient.
“Independent of race or ethnicity, baseline cognitive abilities and a host of other risk factors, vitamin D insufficiency was associated with significantly faster declines in both episodic memory and executive function performance," said Professor Joshua Miller, one of the study’s authors.
Miller added that the findings suggest that people in their 60s and older 'discuss taking a daily vitamin D supplement with their physicians.'
He noted: "Even if doing so proves to not be effective, there’s still very low health risk to doing it.”
Similarly, Professor Charles DeCarli, the study’s first author and director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Center at UC Davis, said: “We expected to see declines in individuals with low vitamin D status.What was unexpected was how profoundly and rapidly [low vitamin D] impacts cognition.”
Vitamin D can be obtained through sunlight exposure and diet, including dairy products.
Yet despite how straightforward a deficiency is to address, DeCarli argues it remains an underappreciated health issue.
“I don’t know if replacement therapy would affect these cognitive trajectories. That needs to be researched and we are planning on doing that," the expert explained. "This is a vitamin deficiency that could easily be treated and that has other health consequences. We need to start talking about it.
"And we need to start talking about it, particularly for people of colour, for whom vitamin D deficiency appears to present an even greater risk.”