Beside from being an essential element for the growth and good health of the skeleton, vitamin D acts like a hormone, which is essential to every single cell in our body.
Vitamin D has many functions, including: Keeping bones strong, absorbing calcium and working with parathyroid glands. Several studies have shown that vitamin D plays an important role in the prevention and treatment of certain health conditions such as: Heart disease, high blood pressure and diabetes.
Causes of vitamin D deficiency:
The main
reasons for vitamin D deficiency are: Poor diet, inadequate sun exposure, incapability
to absorb vitamin D from the intestines and difficulty to process vitamin D due
to kidney or liver disease.
You might
also be at an increased risk of developing vitamin D deficiency if you are
vegan or vegetarian, have darker skin, are elderly, stay indoors a lot and cover
up most of your skin outdoors.
How to get vitamin D?
Few foods naturally contain this vitamin. The sun is our greatest source of vitamin D, where about 80 to 90% of it comes from the sun.
It has been reported that when we expose our skin to sunlight, the vitamin intake is the equivalent of 10,000 to 25,000 IU of vitamin d supplements. The quantity of vitamin D that your skin makes depends on several factors such as: The season, the time of day, where you live, and the melanin content of your skin.
Here are the signs of vitamin D deficiency:
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