Vitamin D — What’s It Good For?
An enormous abundance of spectacular things actually! While, technically speaking, Vitamin D is not actually a vitamin, it’s really just a pre-hormone that your skin begins to create as soon as it comes in contact sunlight. Extremely similar to photosynthesis between a plant and the sun.
Vitamin D is an AMAZING immune system booster. It’s even been found that this little “vitamin” fights/prevents cancer, diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, osteoporosis, and Alzheimer’s.
Reasons Why You May NOT Be Getting Enough Of This AMAZING Vitamin
Now this is only an estimation, not an exact number, but it’s been approximated that somewhere around 10% of all Americans are Vitamin D deficient, that’s a LOT of people, not a good thing. Let’s take a look at why YOU might Vitamin D so that you can help YOURSELF.
1. Sunscreen and How Often You Actually Use It
Well, it’s a “SCREEN” from the “SUN,” meaning it screens your body from the sun. This simply makes it nearly impossible for your skin to manufacture any Vitamin D at all, much less the actual amount that it really needs to in order to stay healthy. Plenty of people live in places where there’s sun nearly year-round, yet they’re STILL deficient in Vitamin D because they wear sunscreen so much, blocking that lovely, lovely sunshine from reaching the skin and doing it’s job.
2. Location Of Where You Live
As a rule of thumb, if you were to draw a long line between Los Angeles and Atlanta, then see whether or not you lived above or below that line, if you lived above, the sun’s shine are actually much too weak to trigger any sort of Vitamin D production at all, excluding summer of course when the rays are at their strongest.
3. UV Index, By That I Mean The Overall Quality Of The Sunshine Aroudn You
Unbeknownst to most, just because our in the sun, doesn’t actually automatically mean that your body is producing Vitamin D. Weird, right? The effectiveness of the sun’s rays can be corrupted/affected by a number of things, including the season, weather, time of day, cloud cover, air pollution, altitude, and even your surrounding surface.`
4. Bathing, Cleaning, Showering, ETC…
It takes up to 48 hours for your skin to fully absorb all of the vitamin D it makes in the sunshine. About 50% of the total formation occurs within the first few hours so try to hold off showering at least until then. Otherwise your new vitamin D will literally go down the drain.
