Dr. Mitch: How important is Vitamin D for your body?

Hello, Dr. Mitch. Good morning to you, sir. So I've been taking vitamin D every day, and I don't know if I should bother or not. What does vitamin D do? Is this something we need? Yeah. So basically vitamin D, it's tough to get it from food. I know we say that vitamin D is added to milk and to other some other dairy products, but the truth of the matter is when you actually measure the vitamin D content of those foods, it's very variable. That's problem number one, tough to get it from food sources.

And we know that the main source of vitamin D for most people is the sun striking the skin and the skin takes cholesterol derivatives and makes that from them vitamin D in a very effective way of doing it. Problem is as you get older, it doesn't do it as well. And so you have more problems making the vitamin D on your own. And two, we have a certain time of year rapidly approaching, which we will not call

But during that period of time, the sun tricks through the sky in a different angle. And so it is less strong and you're wearing more layers of clothing. So you can't usually get the 15 minutes of direct sun exposure on your arms or on your face that you would need or most of us would need to make enough vitamin D. So many of us become vitamin D deficient. So who cares? Well, the truth of the matter is vitamin D is important for a number of things. Number one, bone health.

It's what helps us take calcium from our diet and make it into healthy bone. Bone is constantly being turned over. You need a constant supply of calcium and vitamin D to be able to do that well. Number one, we also think that vitamin D is involved at least partially in our immune system and how well it works. And three, there's some hints that vitamin D may be playing a role in other things such as this study in the Journal of Endocrinology. And what they basically showed that is viewer overweight, more than 25 BMI,

if you were low in vitamin D, and they gave you vitamin D, they could help you to control your high blood pressure and reduce your high blood pressure. So vitamin D made, I even play a role in heart health, vascular health, the blood vessels, and in lowering your blood pressure. In this case, they were vitamin D deficient, and so you might want to check with your doctor and have your vitamin D level checked at some point during the winter months to see how much of a supplement that you need for most of us.

If you're taking anywhere from 400 international units to 1,000 international units a day or 10,000 international units once a week, that's probably a safe dose for most people. And it will probably keep your vitamin D levels at least over the winter months where it needs to be. And so I usually suggest that people, if they can't get to a doctor, can't get their vitamin D levels checked, make sure that they're getting enough calcium in their diet, if not, add on calcium.

and start a vitamin D supplement, maybe sometime in October, November, and continue it until sometime March or April. And around, we're talking anywhere from 400 to about 1,000 international units a day. Or some doctors like to prescribe 10,000 units once a week, so you don't have to think of it. You don't have to remember to take it more than just once a week. So you can take it like that once a week. I've heard of that. Yeah, yeah. A lot of people do that.

And it's a lot simpler, right? You don't have to remember taking the pill every day. You just remember to take it one day a week, your Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, whatever day you want. And so a lot of people prefer taking it that way. And it's a lot easier for them. OK. So what food can I get it from? Do you know? There are very few foods. There's your classic cod liver oil, right? I don't even know if it's available anymore. Is it in milk? But they put it in milk, don't they? They add it to dairy products and milk. Yes.

And that was, see, back in the 20s and the 30s, we saw a lot of kids who were developing very thin bones, very weak bones, and a disease that you may have heard of called rickets. And basically that was because of low vitamin D levels. So one of the public health moves that they did to kind of protect people was to add vitamin D to the milk so that when you drank your milk, you were at least getting some vitamin D and practically eliminated rickets almost entirely.

What people may not know is there's some people who have problems with vitamin D metabolism, and specifically a small group in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in

properly rather yeah and so we have a a direct Montreal connection cool in terms of vitamin d understanding it nice uh... thanks very much my pleasure as dr mid-shelman