Dubai: The UAE has sunshine almost every day of the year, and yet somewhere between 60 and 90 per cent of GCC residents are vitamin D deficient. So if the odds are that high, why not skip the whole doctor’s visit and just buy a supplement from the pharmacy shelf?
It is a reasonable question. The answer, according to the doctors, is more complicated and one that suggests not to.
Why almost everyone here is at risk
“The paradox resolves once you separate sunlight being available from sunlight actually reaching the skin,” says Dr. Anna Protasova, Specialist Dermatologist at Tajmeel Clinic in Dubai.
So can you just use supplement?
This is where the doctors push back, and the reason is chemistry.
“Vitamin D is not like vitamin C, where sufficient amounts are eliminated by the kidneys through urine,” says Dr. Vukovic. “It is liposoluble, which means it could cause hypervitaminosis, even toxic effects, with amounts deposited in fat tissue and the liver.”
That storage problem is exactly why more is not better. Walk into any UAE pharmacy and you will find everything from 400 IU to 50,000 IU sitting side by side, and to a shopper they look identical.
And if you have been taking it for years?
“Get the test, and I would say it without alarm,” says Dr. Protasova. “Two years of a low or moderate daily dose is very unlikely to have harmed you. But you have been treating something you were never confirmed to have, and you have no idea whether it worked.”
Plenty of people supplement faithfully and stay deficient because the dose is wrong for their body weight, or because they take it without food, when it absorbs far better with a fat-containing meal.
As Dr. Radha Nilesh Patil, Specialist Dermatologist at Medcare Royal Speciality Hospital, says: “Supplements should not become something we take indefinitely simply because they are considered harmless. Vitamin D is essential, but supplementation should be individualised rather than based on the assumption that everyone needs a high dose.”
So yes, you are probably deficient. No, that is not a reason to skip the test.
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