The Basics About Vitamin D

Vitamin D, often called the sunshine vitamin,  is responsible for the body’s absorption of calcium.

This gives vitamin D an indispensable role in building and maintaining strong and healthy bones and teeth.

Deficiency of vitamin D can cause serious bone cause problems such as osteoporosis in adults and rickets in children.

Recent research has shown that vitamin D can help prevent:

• Cancer
• Diabetes
• Multiple sclerosis
• Rheumatoid arthritis
• Psoriasis
• Inflammatory bowel disease

Recommended daily intake for an adult is 1000 IU (international units) and the certified safe limit is 2000 IU.

The best most natural source of the vitamin is sunshine, most experts say the 10 to 15 minutes a day on your face and arms is enough.

Other natural sources are:

• Milk
• Tuna
• Salmon
• Mackerel
• Sardines

Supplementing vitamin D?

If you decide to do this you have to be careful. Vitamin D is fat-soluble which means that what is not used by the body is stored. Eventually the stored vitamin D can build up to toxic levels. Symptoms of too much vitamin D are:

• Drowsiness
• Diarrhea
• Headache
• Loss of appetite
• Fragile bones
• Calcium deposits throughout the body

Vitamin D and cancer

The absolute best way to get vitamin D is sunshine. This of course puts us in a dilemma since we have been taught than sunshine gives us skin cancer and lately that sun protective lotions also gives us skin cancer.

A couple of months ago Dr Mercola presented a graph showing the number of deaths in cancer related to the latitude.

The number of deaths more than doubled at latitude 50 compared to the equator. Latitude 30 crosses the US-Mexican border, the Middle East and north of India. And on the other side south of Australia and South Africa.

So for anyone living north or south of those lines sufficient sunshine is definitely something to consider. Maybe we should see sunshine as a natural cure for cancer. Pretty depressing for me who currently lives just below latitude 60.

For all of us who are not luck to live just around the equator and to make matter worse, spend a lot of time indoors vitamin D is important. And we have to learn to manage our daily intake.

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