May 3, 2017
Happy Easter everyone!
My Easter weekend up here in Northern Canada was an interesting one! We had quite a snowstorm and we ended up with over a foot of snow, seriously come on, I can only take so much winter and now we are back to square one! I am no stranger to the lack of sunshine, but come March and April I am ready for that beautiful warm sunshine.
I can’t change mother nature, so why not find the silver lining of being stuck in the house for three days? To be honest, it wasn’t too difficult to figure out what that was….it gave me extra time for studying. I am on the second course of my quest to become a holistic nutritionist, and I happened to find myself in the vitamin section, and low and behold there it was, Vitamin D, AKA the sunshine vitamin.
Now I do take a vitamin D supplement, so other than my yearning for warm weather and the sunshine, I don’t have to worry to about my body lacking that incredibly important vitamin. Most people realize the connection between vitamin D and depression or as it is sometimes called Seasonal Affective Disorder interestingly enough the acronym is SAD.
What some people don’t realize is a lack of Vitamin D can have some major impacts on our health. Adequate Vitamin D levels can prevent cancer, strengthen the immune system, fight inflammation, osteoporosis, dementia, Alzheimer’s, and more.
What is the best way to get that vitamin D into your system? Sunshine!! Spending 20-30 min out in the sun with as much skin exposed as possible. Make sure you skip out on the sunscreen because it blocks out the UVB rays that your body needs to produce vitamin D. There is another huge reason to skip the sunscreen though and that is that most of them are full of chemicals, some of them carcinogenic! So be careful when choosing your sunscreen.
Going back to living in Northern Canada…actually Canada period, we have a huge lack of sunshine and in the winter months when it’s -40 you’re not spending to much time out there anyway. So that leaves the other alternative, a vitamin D supplement. The National Academy of Science set the Tolerable Upper Intake Levels at 2000 IU per day. I personally take around 8000 IU per day, a little less in the summer.
Why do I take so much? Mostly because of my research regarding cancer and vitamin D, you can find arguments for and against the correlation between cancer and vitamin D. I strongly feel there is enough evidence to support the argument that vitamin D can prevent cancer, I also choose to believe that if you already have cancer, it can increase your life expectancy. I’m of the believe if it’s not going to harm you and it has the potential to prevent such a horrible illness, why not incorporate it into your life!
So, come on mother nature bring on the sunshine!!
Have a wonderful, hopefully, sunny day wherever you are!
