If you have a slice of delicious cake, would you think it's OK to chow down the whole cake in one sitting? Of course not. Common sense would tell you that a whole cake is just too much. Unfortunately, when it comes to health advice, not everybody uses common sense.

I recently wrote a post about the benefits vitamin D can have on heart health. That's only one of the perks of vitamin D that has been in the press lately. Now many people -- buying into the vitamin D kick hook, line and sinker -- are buying high-dosage vitamin D supplements from pharmacies and health food stores.

There is no science that says high doses of vitamin D are necessary. And why waste your money on a supplement when vitamin D is so readily available from other sources? Sunlight is your best source, but again, it's important to be reasonable. You don't want to spend too much time in the sun without the protection of sunblock, so a few short 10-15 minute walks outside each week will do. Vitamin D is also available in fortified foods such as milk, some cereals, and orange juice, and it's naturally found in salmon and other oil-rich fish.

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According to this, smokers who are trying to kick the nicotine habit need to be treated like addicts hooked on a drug like heroin. Doctors say that those trying to quit smoking need to be given a product that provides a hit of nicotine as strong as one they'd get from a cigarette, much the same way that heroin addicts use methadone to quit that drug.

The article points out some scary statistics -- 100 million people died in the last century due to the negative effects of smoking cigarettes, 150 million will likely die over the next 20 years and a whopping 1 billion people are projected to die of smoking-related causes in the 21st century.

Unfortunately, those who want to quit only have access to products like nicotine gum or the patch, which deliver low doses of the drug, rather than the kind of fix a smoker would get from a cigarette. The solution? The piece mentions that better cigarette substitutes need to be developed to give smokers a better chance of kicking the habit.

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