Imagine a nutrient that could help prevent cancer, heart disease and tuberculosis, preserve bones, and thwart autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis and juvenile diabetes.

Sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it?

But that’s the potential now being attributed to Vitamin D, whose usefulness was once thought to be limited to prevention of rickets in children and severe bone loss in adults. Known as the sunshine vitamin because it is produced when the skin is exposed to ultraviolet light, Vitamin D has been garnering increasing attention recently, because of what it may be able to do and because many people appear to be getting too little of it.

“There’s a drumbeat about Vitamin D that is being played very loudly,” says Mary Frances Picciano of the Office of Dietary Supplements at the National Institutes of Health.

In April, the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition published a special supplement on Vitamin D, highlighting widespread deficiencies “in various populations throughout the world, including ‘healthy’ people in developed countries where it was thought that Vitamin D deficiency was obsolete.”

In March, Picciano chaired a session on Vitamin D at the Experimental Biology annual meeting, one of the largest gatherings of scientists in the world. Designed to pinpoint gaps in knowledge, the session was the second meeting on Vitamin D sponsored by the ODS in a year. In the wake of emerging positive results, the National Cancer Institute gathered scientists to review the nutrient’s ability to reduce cancer risk, particularly of the breast, colon, prostate and lung. And last fall, the US Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality issued an evidence-based review of Vitamin D that found it to be key for bone health at all ages, including in the prevention of falls in the elderly.

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