Which vitamins do professional athletes take and should you take them?
- Multiple large-scale studies have found a direct link between vitamin D and athletic performance
Vitamin and mineral supplements took another blow this week.
A large review of multiple studies found there was no tangible benefit in taking them when it came to warding off cognitive decline or dementia.
The study, published in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, featured over 83,000 people and is one of many recent studies that have doused water on the nutritional supplements industry and those who take regular vitamins and minerals for health reasons. But, is all hope lost when it comes to vitamins and mineral supplementation?
Turns out, there still may be some benefit when it comes to athletic performance and vitamin D.
A recent Wall Street Journal article noted many professional American teams including the National Football League are now regularly testing their athletes’ vitamin D levels and supplementing accordingly.
This is on the heels of a 2017 study by the Hospital for Special Surgery in the US that found that more than half of all college football players who took part in the NFL Combine had “inadequate” levels of vitamin D.
There was also a study that came out in 2015 which looked at 80 Pittsburgh Steelers during the preseason and found a correlation between adequate levels of vitamin D and players who made the roster and had less instances of bone fracture injuries.