Vitamin D is an important part of our health; it helps strengthen our bones and may also help in boosting your mood and fight a lot of diseases. It’s also become famous in recent years due to a lot of doctors telling patients that they are not getting enough of it. This is mostly because humans’ main source of Vitamin D comes from sunlight, causing it to get dubbed as the “Sunshine Medicine”, something which a lot of people can’t get enough of whether cause of the place they live in or because they work indoors for long periods of time.
There have been a lot of studies talking about how people aren’t getting enough, but now doctors think the problem might actually be the opposite. It’s possible that people are actually getting too much Vitamin D.
How could this have happened? Well it’s mostly because doctors are still unsure about exactly how much Vitamin D you should have on a daily basis. Over the years people have played around with the measurements or misinterpreted studies and this has in turn caused them to have a constantly growing concern for it.
To deal with this, people have been taking a lot of supplements and medicine to help increase their intake. People turn to supplements because, while milk and oily fish also offer Vitamin D, a lot of people feel that they’re consuming the ‘correct’ amounts.
It’s gotten to the point where people actively ask for Vitamin D check-ups in the USA, something that you can’t do unless it is requested by a doctor; this has caused the amount of check-ups to rank up as the fifth most common tests that people take, just after cholesterol levels and ahead of blood sugar, urinary tract infections and prostate cancer screening. Doctors aren’t sure of when doing Vitamin D tests became so popular either.
In actuality, the amount of people who might be in danger of Vitamin D deficiency is quite small and the amount of people who actually suffer from it is even smaller.
The amount that each person needs can vary from gender, to age and even genetics. It’s because of this uncertainty that doctors gave the general consensus that a person should obtain between 600 to 800 Vitamin D units, which in turn led to people believing that they weren’t getting enough even though they were getting more than what their body needed.
Thankfully the side effects of getting a lot of Vitamin D aren’t too bad as long as you don’t go too far into it. Because of this doctors advice that you simply live your life normally without worrying too much about your intake, get as much sun as you can and make sure to consume dairy products or fish. What matters is that you get the necessary amount and if you start to feel like you might be developing deficiency then talk to your doctor and get some guidance.
Photo Credits: My Skin Pharmacy, Draxe.com, Eat Right Ontario, Fisher Center for Alzheimer’s Research Foundation
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