Full Fact Check: How important are vitamins in protecting you from COVID-19?
Illustration by Piper Hudspeth Blackburn.
Vitamin supplement sales are booming, as eager consumers rush to find a way to prepare their bodies to fight off a COVID-19 infection. Some grocery stores and pharmacies have placed limits on the amount Emergen-C, a popular powdered drink mix vitamin supplement, while others have stocked up on daily multivitamin gummies.
The Vitamin-hype even spread onto the social media platforms like Twitter & TikTok, where users mixed Emergen-C and Vodka to make a drink dubbed a “Quarantini.”
“’We do not recommend taking any of our products with alcohol,’ responded Emergen-C in a tweet.
The sale numbers and social media posts lead us to one big question: how effective are vitamins in helping immune systems fight off a respiratory virus like COVID-19?
It is actually illegal for vitamin and supplement brands to claim that their products prevent or treat diseases like COVID-19. So, if you see some vitamin cure floating around Facebook or Ebay, it is probably a scam. Take this warning from the FDA for advice: “If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.”
A History of Supplement Mania
Vitamin and supplement sales were doing particularly well even before the COVID-19 outbreak. A 2016 market analysis found that online sales of supplements were moving at a faster rate than the e-commerce average.
The Vitamin business is over a century old. In the early 20th century, Casimir Funk, a Polish biochemist, penned the name Vitamine while researching beriberi, a disease found in those who subsisted on diets based in polished white rice. He found that the disease was actually caused by the absence of a nutrient that was removed during the industrial processing of the rice. Funk concluded that diseases like pellagra, scurvy, and rickets were caused by similar deficiencies, and Vita-amines could help cure them.
The Vitamin Basics
We do need vitamins and minerals to be healthy, and we get those necessary nutrients from the food we eat. However, an unbalanced diet, with poor processed foods, refined grains, and added sugars can leave some people with serious vitamin deficiencies.
Some of the most common vitamin deficiencies in the US are iron, Vitamin D, and calcium. Specialists recommend that you seek out food to correct some of these imbalances. For instance, someone with a calcium deficiency could eat more milk, almonds, cheese or sardines.
If you do happen to overload on extra Vitamin C or Biotin hair gummies, you’ll expel the extra vitamins on a trip to the bathroom, since your body will only keep what it needs to keep you healthy.
The Role of Vitamin D
New research by Northwestern University, echoed in research from Ireland and the United Kingdom, has found a correlation between Vitamin D and the severity of COVID-19 infections. How? The vitamin could make a difference in how your immune system responds to the novel virus: adequate levels of Vitamin D may actually prevent your body from going into a cytokine storm, when the immune system starts to attack its own cells and tissues.
In our everyday lives, Vitamin D has a variety of benefits. It plays a role in bone health and increases your body’s ability to absorb Vitamin D and helps regulate your immune system. Some research has found that vitamin D supplements can help reduce the risk of respiratory infections like the common cold or the flu.
In one comparison of 20 European countries, British researchers found that the countries with the lowest average vitamin D levels had significantly higher amounts of COVID deaths. In addition, they found a correlation between high death rates in elderly populations and vitamin D levels.
Researchers at Northwestern projected that nearly a fifth of COVID-19 patients with a Vitamin D deficiency would develop severe infections, compared to just 14% of those with healthy vitamin D levels.
In the United States, race may play a role as well. While an estimated two-fifths of American adults may be vitamin D deficient, three-quarters of African Americans may be affected, according to a study The Cooper Institute. Black Americans have a more difficult time producing Vitamin D because higher amounts of melanin- important in blocking harmful ultra-violet light from the sun- can slow the manufacturing of Vitamin D in the body.
Remember Casimir Funk’s conclusion about Vitamins and diseases? Today, Vitamin supplements are prescribed to patients with low Vitamin D levels, and conditions like rickets.
However, it’s important to not overdose on any supplement, as Vitamin toxicity is very common for those that take “too much of a good thing.” Vitamin D toxicity can result in the growth of calcium stones in the kidneys, as well as nausea and vomiting, weakness, and frequent urination.
If you believe you may have a vitamin deficiency, contact your health care provider for guidance.
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