Vitamin D the “Sunshine Vitamin”
It is crucial for good mental health, bone health, immune function, and more.
In this guide, I’m going to break down:- How vitamin D affects your health
- How much you need
- How you should get it
What Does Vitamin D Do?
Before we get to the less than thrilling science of vitamin D formation and metabolism, I think it’s important to highlight why it’s so important for your health.Here are 4 of the most important and most studied benefits of having a sufficient amount of vitamin D. There are other potential benefits like a lower risk of diabetes, among others, that will be studied more extensively in the future
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1. Bone Health
Strong bones depend on many things, including vitamin D.What you probably didn’t know, was that vitamin D is needed to stimulate movement of molecules like calcium and phosphorus. Vitamin D is needed to absorb both calcium and phosphorus efficiently.
A severe lack of vitamin D can cause rickets, a bone disease in children that results in frail, painful bones throughout the body. There’s also a similar adult equivalent, osteomalacia.
2. Healthy Immune System Function
You
immune system is responsible for fighting all sorts of unwanted guests
in your body and protecting you from illnesses ranging from the common
cold to cancer.School children were split into 2 groups during one study. One group was given vitamin D supplements, while the other wasn’t. The group with the supplements had about a 42% lower chance of getting the flu.
Similar studies have also shown that vitamin D helps lower the rate at which children develop respiratory infections.
Furthermore, it’s clear that vitamin D plays a fairly major role in the overall immune system, and it will continue to be studied in this aspect.
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3. Cancer Protection
Vitamin D can significantly reduce your risk of developing many types of cancer, including breast, colon, ovarian, prostate, pancreatic, and more.While the mechanism is still not fully known, current theories are that it interrupts one of the key 7 phases of cancer development.
Based on their results, they found that raising the minimum recommended level of vitamin D by 50% would prevent about 58,000 cases of breast cancer and 49,000 cases of colorectal cancer per year.
But what about vitamin D and skin cancer? Don’t worry, we’ll get to that soon.
4. Overall Decreased Risk of Death
There are many theories about how vitamin D helps you stay healthy.It’s often hard to isolate effects due to interactions and dependencies on other vitamins, especially for fat-soluble vitamins like vitamin D.
However, we can still look at overall trends to see if vitamin D plays a significant role in decreasing mortality, and it appears that it does.
Time and time again, large meta-analysis studies have shown that a healthy vitamin D intake is associated with a longer lifespan. It is a remarkably consistent finding.
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The Risks of Vitamin D Deficiency
Those benefits we just looked at are just one side of the coin.The other half consists of the serious consequences of being chronically deficient in vitamin D. You’re not just risking the flu if you’re not getting enough sun, it could turn out much worse.
1. Rickets
Rickets is a disease that occurs exclusively in children.
If
a child doesn’t have enough vitamin D, they can’t absorb calcium
effectively from food, as we talked about, which leads to bone issues.The consequences of rickets include :
bone pain
muscle weakness
2. Weak Bones or Muscles
Vitamin D has been most heavily researched for its connection to bone
and muscle strength. It’s been found that vitamin-D deficiencies
increase the risk of fractures in older adults. Vitamin D ensures the
body is able to absorb calcium and phosphorus, critical elements to
building strong bones. In a review of 12 fracture prevention trials with
40,000 elderly individuals, researchers found that high intakes of
vitamin D supplementation (800 IU per day) reduced hip and non-spinal
fractures by 20%. Muscle strength to prevent falls and fractures was
greater in those with sufficient vitamin D.3. Osteomalacia
Once you’re an adult, a lack of vitamin D will still cause calcium absorption problems, but you’re obviously fully grown already.With osteomalacia, your bones get softer.The symptoms are often not apparent right away, but over time, bone pain and muscle weakness is common. This pain can occur in pretty much any bone, but is most commonly in the hip region, ribs, or legs.Due to the range in pain felt, it may be difficult to diagnose.
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4. Acne or Eczema
Part of this process extends to issues with acne or eczema when you have a vitamin-D deficiency. Because vitamin D is a hormone, a deficiency can likely have an affect on your other hormones. Thus, a hormone imbalance is possible. In addition, proper vitamin-D levels stimulate your T-cells to fight infection, including the acne bacteria. Vitamin D is also known to cool inflammation and control your insulin response. It’s helpful in reducing severe skin conditions such as acne or eczema.One study on oral vitamin-D supplementation found the clinical improvement of patients with atopic dermatitis, aka eczema. Vitamin D may also impact sebocytes, cells in your body that that excrete oil, by producing proteins with antibacterial properties.
5. Depression
We naturally associate the sun with cheeriness, so it kind of works out well that we believe a vitamin D deficiency can cause depression.A meta-analysis of studies in 2014 showed that for most people with depression, vitamin D supplementation had no significant effect. However, for those with clinical depression, it did have a statistically significant benefit.
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6. Weakened Immunity
A vitamin-D deficiency can play a role in autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis (MS), type-1 diabetes, or IBS. Researchers have found MS rates to be higher far north or far south of the equator, where exposure to sunlight is more limited. One Finnish study found that children who regularly took vitamin-D supplements during infancy had a 90% lower risk of developing type-1 diabetes than those who didn’t.Vitamin D can also play a role in your body’s response to infectious diseases like the flu, common cold, or tuberculosis. Calcitriol is known to boost the immune cell production of microbe-fighting proteins. Researchers found that adults with low D levels were more likely to report having a recent cold, cough, or upper-respiratory infection.
Vitamin-D supplementation can prove further benefits for women. One study by researchers in Iran found that a bacterial infection in the vagina, bacterial vaginosis (BV), was effectively cured with vitamin-D supplementation.
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How You Get Vitamin D
So this vitamin D stuff, kind of important, right?So how do you get it?
Well, there are 3 main sources from which you can get vitamin D.
Before we get to those, there’s one more thing you need to know. Vitamin D is a fat-soluble vitamin, which means we can store it in our bodies for months, and even years in certain situations. When we talk about daily values, think of this more as an average over the long-term. You don’t necessarily need it every day.
1. Food
Many people are under the impression that there’s no vitamin D in food – not quite.Food is not a great source, but you can get a significant amount from it
If you eat a lot of fish, or consume cod liver oil regularly, you probably get a decent chunk of your needed amount from that alone, which is great.
Keep in mind that when you cook food that contains vitamin D, anywhere from 10-50% of it is lost, which means those numbers in the table are more than you’ll actually get .
2. Sun
The sun is by far the best (and cheapest!) source of vitamin D.
You don’t need to know all the little steps. What you do need to know is that UV radiation from sunlight is absorbed in the skin, which then reacts with cholesterol to form vitamin D.
However, we can’t actually use this form of vitamin D. Instead, it goes through a few conversions until it finally is turned into calcidiol, the active form of vitamin D that cells can use.
Note that skin needs to be actually exposed to sunlight in order for vitamin D production to occur. This is why it’s more common to become vitamin D deficient during winter months when you’re all covered up.
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– Color of your skin: As mentioned earlier, the fairer your skin is, the less time you’ll need to be in the sun to absorb UV rays. The darker your skin is, the more time you’ll need, scaling from 15 to 90 minutes.
– Amount of skin you expose: The more skin you expose, the more vitamin D you can produce. Forearm, rather than facial, exposure is best for vitamin-D uptake.
– Factors that block UVB: Glass blocks UVB but not UVA, so it’s not safe to attempt to get your daily sunshine vitamin from through a window. In addition, sunscreens with SPF ratings above eight effectively block the synthesis of vitamin D in the skin.
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3. Supplements
Food alone usually isn’t enough.So what if you live somewhere where you can’t get enough sun, either?
That’s when supplements are necessary. You can find them on the shelf at most pharmacies, drug stores, or online.
 |
| Vitamin-D3 |
Vitamin D2 and D3
There are 2 common types of vitamin D. Vitamin D2 is found in certain plants, while D3 is found in animal products/fish.
Vitamin D3 is about twice as good at being converted to the active form of vitamin D. While most supplements are vitamin D3, double check the ingredient label before you buy them.
How Much Vitamin D Do You Need?
The last main part of this guide is to determine how much vitamin D you actually need to not be deficient.For reference, most studies I’ve linked to in this guide have adult patients on 4,000-5,000 IU per day.
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How Much Vitamin D Do You Get From The Sun?
The actual amount you get from the sun will vary depending on a lot of factors, not all of which are in your control (like UV index).There’s no easy way to calculate it. Here’s what I found:
“If you’re fair skinned, experts say going outside for 10 minutes in the midday sun–in shorts and a tank top with no sunscreen – will give you enough radiation to produce about 10,000 IU.”
So it’s not too difficult to get a good amount of vitamin D.
Note that it said “if you’re fair skinned.” The darker your skin is, the less UV you will absorb, and the less vitamin D you will produce . I’m not sure exactly how much extra time you need in the sun if you have dark skin, but be aware that you’ll need a bit more.
Can You Overdose? It’s possible, but very unlikely. You would need to have an incredibly high vitamin D intake for an extended period of time.
There is one final thing I need to address to wrap up this guide: skin cancer. I am by no means telling you to lie out in the sun all day. Get some sun, but don’t get burned.
Any sunburn will accelerate aging, and even worse, it will elevate your risk of skin cancer. And skeletal deformation bowed knees, thickened wrists/ankles, etc.
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