title: Intestinal absorption of vitamin D: from the meal to the enterocyte.
abstract: Vitamin D plays key roles in bone, infectious, inflammatory and metabolic diseases. As most people get inadequate sun exposure for sufficient vitamin D status, they need adequate intake of dietary vitamin D. Many studies see optimizing vitamin D status as a public health priority. It is thus vital to gain deeper insight into vitamin D intestinal absorption. It was long assumed that vitamin D intestinal absorption is a passive process, but new data from our laboratory showed that it is actually far more complex than previously thought. This review describes the fate of vitamin D in the human upper gastrointestinal lumen during digestion and focuses on the proteins involved in the intestinal membrane and cellular transport of vitamin D across the enterocyte. Although recent data significantly improve our understanding of vitamin D intestinal absorption, further studies are still needed to increase our knowledge of the molecular mechanisms underlying this phenomenon.
authors.affiliation: INRA, UMR 1260, "Nutrition, Obesity and Risk of Thrombosis", F-13385, Marseille, France. Emmanuelle.Reboul@univ-amu.fr.
authors.forename: Emmanuelle
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Reboul
mesh_terms: D001842:Bone and Bones / Q000187:drug effects / Q000378:metabolism; D004063:Digestion; D020895:Enterocytes / Q000187:drug effects* / Q000378:metabolism; D006801:Humans; D007408:Intestinal Absorption / Q000187:drug effects*; D014807:Vitamin D / Q000008:administration & dosage / Q000493:pharmacokinetics*; D014815:Vitamins / Q000008:administration & dosage / Q000493:pharmacokinetics*
chemical_list: D014815:Vitamins; D014807:Vitamin D