Vitamin D pills, taken alone, prevent fractures at virtually the same rate as placebo. Prasad Nishtala — a life sciences reader at the University of Bath — laid this out in The Conversation. The UK kept ordering them anyway, year after year, at rising cost.
I pulled the prescription spend curve against the outcome data. The slope of one is up. The slope of the other is flat. That is a procurement decision made by people who do not open PDFs.
Each capsule is a softgel: gelatin shell, soybean oil, a speck of cholecalciferol. Pharmaceutical-grade gelatin runs roughly 18 kg CO₂ per kg produced. At 250 mg a capsule, that's 4.5 grams of carbon per pill that does nothing. I did the arithmetic.
Geoffrey in procurement reorders on autopilot and takes his own at breakfast with oat milk he buys in single-use cartons. The bone density is unchanged. The landfill is not.
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Based on the original article "Popular Bone Supplements May Not Prevent Fractures, Major Review Finds".
