Two Excellent and Natural Sources of Vitamin D

 

We've all been told to avoid the sun. People these days have heard a thousand warning stories about skin cancer, about how our skin will wrinkle and shrivel if we go out and about, how we need to protect ourselves with SPF 1000 and wear long sleeved shirts, how even on cloudy days UV rays can come through all the cloud cover to pierce our clothing and burn us into a bad shape. So we've begun to avoid the sun, to shun it, or only expose ourselves in the early morning or late afternoon, to the result where we are all becoming vitamin D deficient. A recent study showed that over 50% of Americans have less than optimal levels of vitamin D during the winter, which is why it's crucial that we seek other sources. In today's article we'll take a brief look at why vitamin D is so important, and where else you can get it other than the sun.

Vitamin D is created in our skin when it is stimulated by ultra-violet light. From there the vitamin is shunted into our bloodstream where it is processed by our livers and kidneys into calcitriol, the biologically available form that regulates calcium and phosphate levels in our blood, controls how healthy our bones are, fights off depression, and ensures healthy cardiovascular systems by fighting heart disease. A lack of vitamin D can thus clearly do awful things to our systems as we suddenly begin to suffer from a variety of different ailments.

Thus a good source of the vitamin comes from fatty fish. This can either by fresh fish such as salmon, trout, or tuna, or even the canned version, which is better due to its being able to be saved on the shelf for long periods of time and always at hand. You can get plenty of your vitamin needs from canned tuna, which has 150 Individual Units (IU's) out of the 600 we need, or a can of albacore tuna which has 50 IU's, or even a couple of sardines which has about 40 IU's.

Strangely enough we can also acquire vitamin D from mushrooms, which produce it in the same way we do. Most mushrooms however are grown in the dark, and thus don't have the right amounts of vitamin, but some specific brands are grown in the sun, and thus do. If you can, find a brand that is grown in the sun, such as Dole's Portobello Mushrooms.

 

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