Trends in Vitamin D Posted: 23 May 2010
By Vitamin D Deficiency Survivor you can signup to get his e-mails
Occasionally, I will get a wild hair and decide to just see what I can find that is different. So I asked the question, “How much has interest in vitamin D changed over the several years?” Of the course the question now is where do we go to find this info.
The easy answer is google trends. If you have never visited this google website then you have missed out on a wealth of information. If you want to look at one thing then just enter into the search. If you want to compare, you can enter both things in the search and separate them with a comma.
Okay, let’s look at searches for ‘vitamin d’: Vitamin D google searches 2004 – 2010. Now that was fun. We see that there appears to be a doubling of interest every two years. This means that interest is growing at the rate of about 35% per year.
Since google only gives us relative values without a quantitative number, let’s compare vitamin D searches to the ‘big three disease killers’, cancer, heart disease, and diabetes.
Vitamin D, Heart Disease Wow now that is really cool as we see that searches for vitamin d went above the volume of searches for heart disease in 2007.
Vitamin D, Cancer The fear of cancer as shown by the volume of searches is huge compared to searches for something that is the primary prevention of cancer, vitamin D.
Vitamin D, Breast Cancer and Vitamin D, Colon Cancer The individual cancer searches are similar to heart disease in volume. Vitamin D is showing more interest than any one disease and this is great!
Vitamin D, Diabetes Same as cancer, there is a long way to go in the understanding of vitamin d and diabetes.
Let’s have some fun and see if the searches for President Obama are more or less than vitamin D.
Vitamin D, President Obama Sorry Mr. President, although you have had some spikes of interest, the searches on google show there is more interest in vitamin D than in you. Maybe you should go spend some time in the sun. (I am sure I could have manipulated the name and made the trends look significantly different)
Now that we have a base line of volume of searches on vitamin D, it will be interesting to see what happens when the new report comes out from the Food and Nutrition Board of the Institute of Medicine. We await patiently.
My personal trend – spend more time in the sun! – Pandemic Survivor