Know what might influence your vitamin D levels in the body

One of the most important and commonest sources of Vitamin D is the sun. Most people especially those with executive jobs usually find themselves under office roofing’s with minimal sun light exposure. Just want to remind my readers that you need sun light on a daily basis to increase your life span. Vitamin D mediates major body activities especially in the digestive tract. Besides, this essential mineral helps to make healthy bones, teeth, and muscles. One of the important notes to take is that vitamin D levels usually decrease with age. Age reduces the body’s ability to produce vitamin D from sunlight. For example a 60 year old has almost 70% ability to produce less vitamin D from the sunlight as compared to a 20-year old when both are exposed to the same climatic conditions. Therefore, it is well understood that the older we get, the less likelihood to absorb vitamin D from the sun and more likelihood to suffer from consequences of Vitamin D deficiency. Another internal body factor that can influence vitamin D levels is obesity. 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. Vitamin D can increase your lifespan through prevention of numerous health challenges. Vitamin D enhances the strength and efficiency of the immune system, which decreases the risk to develop autoimmune diseases encountered in our natural life. Additionally, there are proved clinical trials that suggest the role of Vitamin D to regulate blood sugar levels and prevent type II diabetes, prevent high blood pressure as well as decrease the risk of cancer occurrence in the body. Sun light contains ultraviolet light or rays reach our body in three different lengths; the ultra-violet A, Ultra-violet B, and Ultra-violet C. The ultra-violet B rays are the ones that can produce vitamin D in the body as they act on the cholesterol found in the skin. The exposure and absorption of vitamin D from sunlight differs from one individual to another. For example the light skin colour allows deeper penetration of ultra-violet B rays that in turn decreases the amount of sunlight exposure needed for adequate vitamin D production. Therefore people with dark skin need more minutes of exposure to sunlight, the dark skin is harder for Ultra-violet B rays to penetrate and produce vitamin D. There are geographical factors such as altitude and latitude, season, pollution and clouds all affect or determine the amount of ultra-violet light rays that reach your body. For example the higher you live above the sea level, the more exposure you have to ultra-violet light B rays. People who live so close to equator have much more exposure to light than those who lives far away from the equator. For people living in western countries with limited exposure to sunlight, a good amount of sunlight exposure is five 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. It is clinically observed that many people who exhibit symptoms of chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia disease may actually have osteomalacia caused by vitamin D deficiency. People especially those at advanced age are advised to check their vitamin D status. The best blood test to assess vitamin D status is 25 hydroxy D. The optimal range is likely between 50 and 60 ng/ml. There are not too many foods that are naturally rich in vitamin D. Oily fish like wild salmon contain about 500 to 1,000 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 per cent of the vitamin D found in wild salmon. People with vitamin D deficiency have to take supplements for vitamin D in form of tablets, food extracts among others. Dr Joseph Kamugisha is a resident oncologist in Jerusalem, Israel