Vitamin D is the newest vitamin craze in the medical world as well as the natural health world. The reason for all the hype is multiple research studies have proven it can decrease you cancer risk, keep you memory sharper, help your immune system work better and help boost your mood. depressed youth given vit D showed huge improvements in their mood, and low levels may increase your chance of dementia as you age.
Transcript
Welcome to the last part of my 7 part series telling you my top 7 simplest ways to get healthy now. Last time we learned why smiling will make you instantly happier and in this final video I’m going to tell you about the most important vitamin you need to be taking now–Vitamin D.
Vitamin D is the newest vitamin craze in the medical world as well as the natural health world. The reason for all the hype is multiple research studies have proven it can decrease you cancer risk, keep you memory sharper, help your immune system work better and help boost your mood. depressed youth given vit D showed huge improvements in their mood, and low levels may increase your chance of dementia as you age.
So, how much vitamin D should you be taking? It really depends on where you live, how fair your skin is and how much time you spend outdoors. If you are like me for example, and live in a rainy northern climate that gets lots of rain for most of the year, for me that’s Vancouver Canada, than you probably need about 2000-5000IU of vit D each day. You can see how high your levels are by getting a blood test, which you want to do to measure a specific kind of vitamin D in the blood, called 25 hydroxyvitamin D or vitamin D3. You want your blood level ideally to be between 100-150, according to the latest research, despite what we used to think, which was that levels of say, 50 were just fine. The new vit D research strongly supports that we probably really underestimated the level of vitamin D that is optimal for health and that we should aim for blood levels between 100-150 of or vitamin D3. Doctors used to worry that This range of 100-150 would cause toxicity, but now we know that this is not true and that you need to take superHUGE doses of Vit D to get toxic from it–it’s really quite hard to do. If your doctor won’t test your blood levels for you, as may be the case because the test is not cheap and a lot of conventionally trained docs still believe it is unnecessary, don’t worry–you can safely take between 2-5000IU of vit d each day without getting anywhere near the toxic range if you live in a northern climate and don’t get outside for hours each day–i.e. anyone living in a city in Canada or northern Europe.
Ok, So how should you take it, and what type of vitamin D should you buy? You should make sure that the supplement you choose is Vit D3 or 25 hydroxy vitamin D NOT vit D2. Vit D3 is the active form we need. In most brands, they pills come in 1000IU per pill, and are very tiny and easy to swallow. I should also mention that these pills are very cheap, so everyone can really benefit from taking them every day.
One very important thing you need to remember about vitamin D pills is that they need oil to get absorbed into your body, so you MUST take them with a meal with some sort of fat, like olive oil, butter etc in the meal. IF you take them with a piece of fruit only or on an empty stomach, it’s not going to do you much good. My trick is I take my vit D pills with my fish oil omega 3 pills because that the fish oil will make sure the vit D gets absorbed.
So that’s the end of my series on the top 7 simplest Ways to improve your health. I hope you learned some useful tips! Now that I’ve shared my top 7 health tips, I’d love to hear your favorite health tips that you’ve discovered–please leave me a comment here or if you have any questions about any of the topics I covered, please right them below this video so I can answer them in a new video or on my blog for you.