Hello and welcome to Nutrition Facts. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Greger. Today we're going to explore

smart nutrition choices based naturally on facts. Whenever there's a new drug or

surgical procedure, you can be assured that you and your doctor will probably hear about it

because there's a corporate budget driving its promotion. But what about

advances in the field of nutrition? That's what this podcast is all about. Today we

bring back the nutrition facts grab bag with the latest news on a whole variety of

topics. First up, vitamin D supplements are put to the test for treating fibromyalgia.

Here's the story. Fibromyalgia is one of the most common joint and muscle

diseases, afflicting millions of Americans. Characters by widespread musculoskeletal pain and

often accompanied by other symptoms such as fatigue. The medical profession used to think it

was all in people's heads, but today there's irrefutable evidence that it is indeed a disorder

of the body and not just the mind. Back in 2003, an influential paper was published out of the

Mayo Clinic in which a shocking 93% of fibromyalgia type patients were found to be vitamin D deficient,

and so they concluded that all such patients were at high risk of severe vitamin D deficiency.

But wait a second, said the skeptics, there was no control group, where's the Mayo Clinic located?

In a soda, maybe 90% of everyone in Minnesota is D deficient. When controlled studies were done,

some did indeed find that those suffering from these kind of pain syndromes were

significantly more likely to be D deficient, but other studies did not. Even if all the studies

did though, that doesn't mean that low vitamin D levels cause fibromyalgia. Maybe chronic widespread

pain disorders like fibromyalgia cause low vitamin D. It's the sunshine vitamin after all,

and fibromyalgia patients may not be running around outside as much as healthy controls.

So no vitamin D is contributing to the disease, you have to put it to the test.

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