Health Blog: Get More Vitamin D, Live Better & Longer

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Top Questions About Vitamin D Sources, Benefits and Toxicity

During our seminars and presentations about nutrition, we receive many questions about vitamin D. Seems like there’s growing awareness about this vitamin, but some confusion, too, and that’s not helping our health profiles. We’d like to help you understand vitamin D so you can make some good decisions about your health. Here are some of the most frequently asked questions:

* What does vitamin D do?

* How do I know whether I have enough vitamin D?

* What are the best vitamin D sources?

* Isn’t exposing skin to the sun dangerous?

* Do I need to worry about vitamin D toxicity?

* What are the right doses of vitamin D from supplements?

* Can vitamin D help me with my Diabetes?

Let’s start with the first of the top seven questions we get.

What Does Vitamin D do?

In a nutshell, vitamin D is so important to humans (and other animals) nature makes it easy to get and hard to get too much. The fact is, your own body can make it simply by exposing your skin to the sun (in a safe way, of course). For decades, however, we’ve been warned away from exposure to the sun, our best source of vitamin D.  Millions of us are now seriously vitamin D deficient (we think of it as a new disease we thought up: VDD).

The best way of thinking about what vitamin D does is, first, to consider what happens when you don’t have enough of it.

Vitamin D deficiency has been linked to diseases we sometimes think are just part of living – conditions such as asthma, heart disease, multiple sclerosis (and other auto-immune diseases), osteoporosis, rickets, and cancer. No one yet knows how to predict which disease you are likely to experience as a result of vitamin D deficiency, but science does know you stand an unwelcome chance of experiencing one or more of these serious illnesses, and others! It’s clear: the last thing you want is a vitamin D deficiency.

The year 2010 has been a good year for vitamin D research, with well over 1,500 papers published. Their bottom line is that vitamin D deficiency may well be linked to an extremely wide range of diseases. It needn’t be!

So what can we say vitamin D does? It shields you against some fearful diseases – you don’t want to be deficient in it!

Next: How do I know whether I have enough vitamin D?

You can reach Gloria Askew and Jerre Paquette, PhD, at secrets@phytemedia.com

You can read more about Gloria and Jerre’s book, The Secrets of Supplements: The Good, the Bad, the Totally Terrific, here.

Read more health blogs from Glora and Jerre here.

You can read other WellWise.org health bloggers here.