Would you like some Vitamin D with your B-12, iron, calcium...?

Is it just me, or is the medical community going out of its way to "discover" new nutrient deficiencies in the general population? I'm not talking about some newly discovered vitamin or a mineral that no one previously suspected was critical to some vital life process. No, I'm talking good old Vitamin D, discovered over 80 years ago and well-known to prevent or cure rickets.

Your body manufactures it by the truckload if you get even 15 minutes of sun, and if you manage to avoid even those minimal rays, it's still pretty easy to get the RDA of 400 IU from the host of fortified dairy products, OJ, and cereals out there, or just take a multi-vitamin. I'd never even heard of anyone being tested for vitamin D deficiency... until recently.

Last spring when I went in for annual physical, they drew blood for the usual tests I have every three to six months – thyroid function and cholesterol, mainly – but this time the order also included a check of vitamin D levels. Seems that doctors have now decided that the level previously considered adequate is actually not... which means they're instituting routine testing so they can determine that a large chunk of the population (like me) is suddenly vitamin D-deficient.

Now, it's not that vitamin D supplements are particularly expensive – they're not, even for the high-octane prescription strength pills (10,000 IU 3x a week) my doctor put me on temporarily to pump up my levels, and your garden-variety 1000 IU or 2000 IU tablets from Wal-Mart are downright cheap for "maintenance" doses. I just can't help thinking that it'd be mighty easy for some committee of medical "experts" to say, "Hey, people can tolerate lots more vitamin D than we've been saying is necessary. What if we say we've underestimated the optimal levels? Then we'll have an excuse to order more tests, prescribe vitamin D to counteract the new-found "deficiency", and then follow up with even more tests on a routine basis to monitor progress." All without a ricket in sight.

Cynical? Paranoid? Maybe. But when I'm already scarfing down fish oil (4x), calcium (2x), low-dose aspirin, B-12, iron, thyroid, generic Prilosec, and a statin every day, before I add a couple more pills to the mix I'd really like a more solid rationale than "We think we may not have been recommending enough for the last 80 years."