Vitamin D is essential in building and maintaining healthy bones, teeth, and muscles. There is a strong association between vitamin D deficiency and increased risk of requiring a C-section especially for pregnant women.

In addition to taking a multivitamin (typically containing 400 IU of vitamin D) and getting some vitamin D from meals, pregnant women should be taking a minimum of 1000 IU of vitamin D per day.

If you give breastfeeding women between 4000 and 6000 IUs of vitamin D per day through breastfeeding alone, their babies can get all of the vitamin D that they need.

There are not too many foods that are naturally rich in vitamin D. Oily fish like wild salmon contain about 500 to 1000 IUs per serving, so you would have to eat salmon almost every day to barely get enough vitamin D to meet all of the needs.

Wild salmon get their vitamin D from the food chain, where it is abundant. Food pellets that are fed to farmed salmon do not contain vitamin D, so farmed salmon typically provide 100 to 250 IU of vitamin D per serving, which is only 10 to 25% of the vitamin D found in wild salmon.
 Excessive exposure to sunlight increases risk of non-melanoma skin cancer, which is relatively easy to detect and treat if detected early enough.

The key to responsible use of sunlight to ensure optimal vitamin D status is to make sure that you do not get excessive sunshine that result into sun burning.

Getting enough sunlight to create a light pinkness in skin tone creates around 20,000 IU of vitamin D in the system.
Aging decreases the ability to produce vitamin D from sunlight. A 70-year old has a 70% reduced ability to produce vitamin D from the sunlight compared to a 20-year old. So the older we get, the more likely it is that we will need to get some of our vitamin D from supplementation.

Obesity increases the need for vitamin D intake and creation via sunlight, because storage of vitamin D in fat cells reduces the amount of vitamin D available to the rest of the body.

For people living in western countries with limited exposure to sunlight, a good amount of sunlight exposure is 5 to 15 minutes on the arms and legs, two to three times a week. After this amount of time, sun screen can be used to help prevent premature aging and increased risk of non-melanoma skin cancer.

For people with history of vitamin D deficiency, it is advisable to supplement with a minimum of 1000 IU of vitamin D per day in addition to the vitamin D found in a multivitamin and a couple servings of foods that contain vitamin D.

Many people that exhibit symptoms of chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia disease may actually have osteomalacia, which is caused by vitamin D deficiency.
Higher levels of vitamin D with in the normal range are associated with optimal lower extremity function (healthy bones and muscles in the legs).

Optimal vitamin D status reduces risk of fracture especially as you age. The best blood test to assess vitamin D status is 25 hydroxy D. It is better to have the 25 hydroxy D level to be above 30 ng/ml. The optimal range is likely between 50 and 60 ng/ml.

Important to note is that for every 100 IU of vitamin D that you ingest, you raise your blood level by 1 ng/ml. Optimal vitamin D status is associated with a decreased risk of breast, colon and prostate cancers.

Ends