My name is Yuri Elkaim, and for the past 13 years, I’ve made it my mission to uncover the truth about what makes us healthy and why it’s so hard for millions of people to do so in spite of all the health and nutrition information we now have at our fingertips.

How Vitamin D Works

Let’s start off with an understanding of how vitamin D is created. When your skin is exposed to UVB radiation from the sun, it begins the process of vitamin D production, beginning with provitamin D3, previtamin D3, and then vitamin D3, also known as cholecalciferol.

Vitamin D3 is then sent to your liver, where it is modified and semiactivated into what’s called 25-hydroxy vitamin D.

This is the major circulating form of vitamin D that your doctor should be measuring in your blood to determine your vitamin D status.

The optimal amount of 25-hydroxy vitamin D in the blood should be between 55 and 80 ng/ml. However, in order for it to become active, 25-hydroxy vitamin D must then go to the kidneys, where it is then modified to its active form, or 125-dihydroxy vitamin D.

Now, in this activated form, it’s able to tell your intestines to absorb calcium from your diet to ensure adequate blood calcium levels and to keep your bones healthy and strong.

However, a few obstacles can prevent all of this from happening.

First, if your liver is diseased or overloaded with toxins or if you have kidney disease, you won’t be able to convert vitamin D properly.

Second, if your intestines are damaged due to stress, poor diet, IBS, or other and are not able to absorb fat properly, you won’t be able to absorb vitamin D, since it’s fat-soluble, which increases your chances of becoming deficient in vitamin D.

And since vitamin D plays a critical role in calcium absorption, poor vitamin D absorption limits your body’s ability to use calcium from your diet.

In a vitamin D-deficient state, only 10-15% of dietary calcium is absorbed from the food you eat.

It’s no wonder that so many people are suffering from bone problems like osteoporosis, and no amount of milk or calcium supplements is gonna fix the problem unless this vitamin D issue is solved first.

Here’s Something Else to Remember, Especially if You’re Overweight…

Since vitamin D is a fat-soluble vitamin, some of it gets trapped inside your body’s fat stores. Research from Dr. Holick, a leading expert in vitamin D, reveals that obese people required double the amount of vitamin D as non-obese people to show optimal levels in the blood.

So, how much vitamin D do you really need?

The current RDA, or recommended dietary allowance, is just 600 IUs per day. The Canadian Cancer society is a little bit more generous by recommending 1000 IUs per day. But neither of those recommendations are nearly good enough to raise your blood level of 25-hydroxy vitamin D.

Here’s why…

Each 100 IU of vitamin D ingested daily produces a 1 ng/ml increase in 25-hydroxy vitamin D.

What that means to you is this: If the optimal blood level of vitamin D is 55 to 80 ng/ml, you would need anywhere from 5500 to 8000 IUs of vitamin D per day.

And even though vitamin D is a fat-soluble vitamin, which means that at very high doses, it can be stored in the body and could potentially lead to toxicity, research in the area of bone health, heart disease, cancer, and flu prevention has shown that up to 10,000 IUs of vitamin D per day is completely safe.

With that said, why is the RDA still just 600 IUs per day? Beats me.

Part of the challenge with vitamin D is that it’s very tough to get from food. In fact, the best food sources are very rare in almost everyone’s diet: eel, swordfish, sockeye salmon, shitake mushrooms, and cod liver oil are the only significant food sources of vitamin D, and of those, cod liver oil might be the most accessible, but you’d still require about 11 teaspoons per day to get just over 5000 IUs of vitamin D.

Doable, maybe; tasty, not so much.

Well, then…

What Are Your Best Options for Getting Enough Vitamin D?

Truly, your best option is to get fully exposed sunlight several times per week. This means no sunscreen because SPF of just 8 reduces your skin’s ability to make vitamin D by a whopping 95%.

Research in the Journal of American Academia Dertmatologica estimated that getting the equivalent of 1000 IUs dose of vitamin D requires exposing your face, hands, and arms to full sunlight at noon for just 6 to 15 minutes in Miami or 9 to 19 minutes in Boston during the summer. If you have darker skin, then you would need a little bit more time in the sun.

And the good news is that about 20 minutes in the sun without sunscreen is not going to lead to sunburn for most people, so you really have nothing to fret. Once you’ve had your bare sun exposure, then you can put on your clothes, lather on the sunscreen, or simply go inside. I can’t emphasize this enough.

Getting natural sunlight isn’t just important for your vitamin D, it improves your mood, which is also linked to vitamin D status and seamlessly ensures that you spend more time outdoors, helping you become a little bit more active.

And then there’s the question of supplementation, which where you and most people have been taken for a ride by supplement companies.

See for yourself…

Recently, a third-party testing site called ConsumerLab.com evaluated the content and quality of 20 vitamin D-containing supplements. Of those 20 products, 8 failed getting approved because they did not contain the amount of vitamin D stipulated on the label, and even others were contaminated with lead.

Vitamin D Supplementation is Tricky…

…and you really need to know which ones are worth your investment.

In my household I use sublingual vitamin D3 drops for both myself and my kids. Each drop contains about 600 IUs of D3, so I have a good estimate of exactly how much we’re really getting. Regardless of where you get your vitamin D, just be sure to take it with food, especially fat, since that improves its absorption into your body.

And don’t be fooled into believing all vitamin D is the same, because it’s not. A long time ago vitamin D was first isolated from the irradiation of a specific component in fungus called ergosterol. This vitamin became known as D1.

However, scientists quickly uncovered that vitamin D1 had little antirachitic effect. In other words, this first synthetic vitamin D did not act the same as natural vitamin D in keeping your bones strong and healthy.

At that time it was also assumed that the vitamin D made in the skin during exposure to sunlight was vitamin D2; that, too, is false, as scientists later learned that human skin actually produces vitamin D3, as we saw earlier.

We’ve learned a lot over the past 50 years about vitamin D and how it’s synthesized in the body, yet unbelievably large amounts of misinformation still corrupts the judgment of millions of well-intentioned people, maybe even you.

But It’s Not Your Fault – You’ve Simply Been Misinformed

Here’s another example and one that’s quite important to understand…

You’ve probably seen countless foods throughout your grocery-store aisles—like milks, cereals, and even orange juice—now boasting that they’re fortified with vitamin D.

Several years ago food companies caught wind that vitamin D has many important health benefits, so they’ve found ways to fool you into believing that their fortified foods can actually confer the same benefits as natural vitamin D itself.

But here’s the thing:Almost every single food product that’s fortified with vitamin D is fortified with its least beneficial and synthetic form, vitamin D2, also known as ergocalciferol.

It’s been conclusively shown that vitamin D2 is far less effective than D3 and almost negligible compared to natural vitamin D in supporting your bones and teeth and keeping your immune in tiptop shape to fend off the flu and most disease.

Why, then, would food companies rely on this weaker, synthetic form as one of their ingredients?

Because it’s CHEAPER.

It’s no surprise that big food companies have one agenda and one agenda only: their bottom line.

They don’t care about your health, and don’t be fooled into thinking that they do. If they actually cared, they wouldn’t cut corners looking for the cheapest possible synthetic ingredients to fill their products.