Vitamin D is perhaps the single most underrated nutrient in the world of nutrition. This is likely because it's free - your body makes it when sunlight touches your skin. It prevents osteoporosis, depression, prostate cancer, breast cancer, and even affects diabetes and obesity. Learn all you need to know about vitamin D and the effect it has on the body:
15 facts about vitamin D and sunlight exposure
1. Vitamin D is produced by your skin in response to exposure to ultraviolet radiation from natural sunlight.
2. The healing rays of natural sunlight (that generate vitamin D in your skin) cannot penetrate glass. So you don't generate vitamin D when sitting in your car or at home.
3. It is nearly impossible to get adequate amounts of vitamin D from your diet. Sunlight exposure is the only reliable way to generate vitamin D in your own body.
4. A person would have to drink ten tall glasses of vitamin D fortified milk each day just to get minimal levels of vitamin D into their diet.
Diseases and conditions caused by vitamin D deficiency
• Osteoporosis is commonly caused by a lack of vitamin D, which greatly impairs calcium absorption.
• Sufficient vitamin D prevents prostate cancer, breast cancer, ovarian cancer, depression, colon cancer and schizophrenia.
• "Rickets" is the name of a bone-wasting disease caused by vitamin D deficiency.
• Vitamin D deficiency may exacerbate type 2 diabetes and impair insulin production in the pancreas.
• Obesity impairs vitamin D utilization in the body, meaning obese people need twice as much vitamin D.
• Vitamin D is used around the world to treat Psoriasis.
• Vitamin D deficiency can cause schizophrenia.
• Seasonal Affective Disorder is caused by a melatonin imbalance initiated by lack of exposure to sunlight.
• Chronic vitamin D deficiency is often misdiagnosed as fibromyalgia because its symptoms are so similar: muscle weakness, aches, and pains.
• Your risk of developing serious diseases like diabetes and cancer is reduced 50% - 80% through simple, sensible exposure to natural sunlight 2-3 times each week.
• Infants who receive vitamin D supplementation (2000 units daily) have an 80% reduced risk of developing type 1 diabetes over the next twenty years.
Shocking vitamin D deficiency statistics
• 32% of doctors and med school students are vitamin D-deficient.
• 40% of the U.S. population is vitamin D-deficient.
• 42% of African-American women of childbearing age are deficient in vitamin D.
• 48% of young girls (9-11 years old) are vitamin D-deficient.
• Up to 60% of all hospital patients are vitamin D-deficient.
• 46% of pregnant mothers are severely vitamin D-deficient, causing widespread vitamin D deficiencies in their unborn children, which predisposes them to type 1 diabetes, arthritis, multiple sclerosis and schizophrenia later in life. 81% of the children born to these mothers were deficient.
• Up to 80% of nursing home patients are vitamin D-deficient.
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