How are you going to get vitamin D now that you can’t get it from the sun (at least for the people above the 39th parallel)?
Hi everyone, Dr. Aaron Morland here with Flight Health and Wellness Center and Prey. I want to talk to you about vitamin D. It’s October here in Minnesota, at least this starting tomorrow. And so, um, vitamin D is something that we get from the sun, but once we start getting into those winter months, fall months even, we can’t get it from the sun. In fact, during, um, October, that’s when you start to see people getting less vitamin D from the sun. So, I want to talk to you about why would people even have a low number of vitamin D like as far as why they have such low levels in their blood. We just did a blood lab on a young uh man early 40s. I think that’s young. Um his vitamin D was sitting around 22. And so that is taken um in August. So had a whole summer to be accumulating vitamin D and his vitamin D is in its 20s. So, I want to talk about why would people have low vitamin D. A few different reasons. One, some people just don’t go out in the sun. If you’re not going out in the sun and you’re not eating the foods that are high in vitamin D, then you’re not going to get it. Other thing that you’re going to find is that a lot of people are afraid of the sun. Now, we’re putting sunscreen on and so we’re stopping that uh opportunity for sun to hit our skin. So, it’s really important that uh really that first 20 minutes that you’re out in the sun uh go without sunscreen so that you can um you can uh still get that vitamin D from the sun. I would say I wouldn’t go with sunscreen. There’s other things that you can do or use a natural sunscreen but it’s really important that that first 20 minutes let yourself get exposed to the sun. Another reason is that vitamin D even from the sun you have to convert that okay and you still have to convert it in the liver and the liver needs to be healthy. A lot of people don’t have very healthy livers and so it’s really important that you have a healthy liver to be able to convert that vitamin D to its active form. And so one of the things that you could do is do some kind of a cleanse that will support the liver. Do a cleanse that will help get rid of toxins. Takes that load off the uh the liver. Do uh things where you’re decreasing the amount of toxins you’re getting exposed to. That’ll help your liver to function better, which will in turn help you to be able to make that vitamin D. The other thing is that people aren’t eating foods that are high in vitamin D. So, we’ve got foods such as fatty fish, mushrooms, liver. Um, these things can be high in vitamin D. People ask me all the time, “What about milk?” Um, well, the only milk that has vitamin D in it is going to be whole milk and they add that to it and so it’s not the greatest form of vitamin D. So, can you get it from milk? Yeah, you’d have to drink about 10 glasses a day of uh the milk to get the vitamin D that you need. So, really important. One, get it from the sun when you can. If you can’t, get it from food. And if you’re not getting it enough from food, then supplement with it. But those are the reasons why most people are low in vitamin D. Again, my name is Dr. Aaron Morland. Hopefully, you’re having a great day. God bless.
