By Brant Cebulla,Vitamin D Council

Although we try constantly to improve global vitamin D awareness, we actually don’t have quality data on best methods to educate on vitamin D.

We want to educate people to make sure they’re getting enough vitamin D. What’s missing is research that shows how to best educate to meet these goals. Unfortunately, we don’t really have the data to know which works best on a population scale.

For example, there is no data on whether recommending a supplement, recommending sun exposure or recommending both — on a population scale — is best to try and raise vitamin D levels. We don’t know if a one-size-fits-all recommendation is better than a formulaic recommendation tailored to the individual in efforts to raise an entire populations’s vitamin D levels. We also don’t know if we should be giving people simple directions to get more vitamin D or if we should be teaching end-goal to get maximum participation.

At the Vitamin D Council, we do our best to educate using all of these angles. We try to layer the presentation of our information, making simple steps accessible first, then if the individual wants more, provide more in depth recommendations and regimens to go by.

We know our methodology works okay through a combination of in-person usability testing and web analytics tracking. That being said, we don’t have the budget to more rigorously put our information to the test, and we’re still not sure how  well we’re meeting out end-goal question: Are we maximally decreasing the percentage of people deficient in vitamin D?

Click here to read the entire article in Smart Tan Magazine online.