Now on the A-list: vitamin D

If you're one of the millions of Americans who pop a calcium supplement each day to maintain strong bones, you're on the right track: Calcium helps ward off osteoporosis, a disorder that contributes to more than 1.5 million bone fractures annually. What you may not realize, however, is that if you're not getting enough vitamin D -- and chances are you're not -- that extra calcium you're taking may not be helping your bones as much as you think.

Scientists have known for years that bones need calcium to stay strong. They've been passing that message along to Americans, who have been diligently drinking milk and eating yogurt and swallowing calcium pills. They've also known that adequate levels of vitamin D are crucial for bone health, because the body uses vitamin D to help shuttle calcium across the intestinal wall into the blood.

For years, most medical specialists believed that if people consumed the recommended dietary allowances of vitamin D, then the calcium in their diets would be fully absorbed by their bodies. Recently, however, that thinking has been turned on its side. Several studies have found that even when people get the recommended daily amounts of vitamin D, their bodies are not absorbing all of the calcium they consume. Based on these studies, researchers are recommending that Americans boost their intake of vitamin D.

In a study published in the April 2003 Journal of the American College of Nutrition, researchers at Creighton University gave calcium supplements to 34 post-menopausal women who consumed recommended amounts of vitamin D regularly. Half were given 500 milligrams of calcium alone, and half were given the calcium after taking vitamin D supplements for three weeks.

After the women took the calcium supplements, researchers collected blood samples to determine how much calcium had been absorbed by their bodies. The women who took the vitamin D supplements absorbed 65% more calcium than those who didn't. "Higher vitamin D intake substantially improved calcium absorption," says Dr. Robert P. Heaney, an osteoporosis researcher at Creighton University and the study's senior author.

Heaney's results dovetail with the findings of a large study in England that was published in March 2003, in which researchers found that people between the ages of 65 and 85 who took vitamin D supplements suffered 22% fewer bone fractures than those who didn't.