Do You Know Your Vitamin D Level?

What vitamin deficiency affects over half the population and rarely gets diagnosed?

If your answer is Vitamin D, you are correct.

Vitamin D isn’t actually a vitamin or nutrient, but a hormone produced from a photolytic reaction with UV light.  Even if you think you are getting enough Vitamin D from the sun (minimum 20  minutes outside with arms and legs exposed) or food sources (surprise it’s NOT by eating dairy!), like many of us, you might not be absorbing it.

Vitamin D is essential for helping reduce depression, boosting mood, and immunity.  It’s also an important biomarker for many cancers (particularly breast and prostate), high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, fibromyalgia, chronic muscle pain, and autoimmune diseases.

Unless you want to overdose on mushrooms, wild salmon, cod liver oil and sardines every day, you should get tested and supplement.

The average 70-year-old creates only 25% of the vitamin D a 20-year-old does.

So what to do?

Get tested.  Check you magnesium level while you’re at it too – it’s also commonly low in the general population.

Get the right form – D3 (not D2!) helps your body absorb calcium. Partnered with supplement K2, calcium will be cemented to your bones, not your arteries.

Start low and slow – begin supplementation with 1000 IUs and add accordingly. The laboratory reference range for vitamin D is 30-100 nanograms per ml.  The optimum level is 50-60, so don’t let your physician say 30 is fine.   Taking a megadose of 50,000 IUs once a week by a script isn’t good either.  You need to supplement DAILY.  It’s not uncommon for someone to supplement 5,000 IUs daily to maintain an optimum level of 55.

Get rechecked every three months.

Be patient.