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If your into fitness and health you need to get acquainted with one of the most important vitamins you need; Vitamin D.
We are now into the fall season, and it is getting tougher to get the natural sunlight you need every day to keep you healthy and strong.
What's for lunch today? How about a bowl of soup to take the chill away on a cool fall day. October is the month the sweaters come out and it gets increasingly hard to get the sun you need.
If you live in Canada or a northern place this is when you look for alternative ways to get vitamin D into your system.
You can get vitamin D from some foods like fish, milk, yogurt and margarine but it might not be enough and so popping a pill is the next best thing to sitting on a secluded tropical beach soaking up those rays.
Vitamin D really is important, not only for Canadians but for anyone wanting to stay healthy all year around.
The thinking always has been that the main role of vitamin D was to give a person healthy bones. This is true but there are other benefits as well.
General health may be affected including diseases like cancer, heart disease, type-2 diabetes and even autism and chronic back pain. Depression could also be a result of a lack of vitamin D in your system.
Does the lack of vitamin D make you sick? Autoimmune disorders where the body turns on itself as in type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis are because of a weak immune system and vitamin D or lack of could be what is causing this.
The cause of these diseases may be more complex than a lack of sun in your system. There could be a bacterial infection which causes vitamin D deficiency and so the immune system is thrown out of whack.
Because of this you will be susceptible to more infections and a vicious circle begins. So now we must try to reverse this scenario to limit these autoimmune diseases.
There is now the opportunity to get personalized recommendation for good health and reduce the risk of disease because of blood testing done by physicians.
You really need 75 nmol/L to have good protection from disease, but like most people you are probably at 30-60 nmol/L.
Every person reacts differently to supplementation but if you are at30 nmol/L you would need about 2,000 IU to meet standards for good health. In order to reach these levels you would really need to increase you level of supplementation even after good sun exposure.
It is hard this time of year to get enough sun to supply the vitamin D you need through the skin. Once your shadow grows longer than you are, which in fall is the case you can't produce enough vitamin D in your skin.
