This Misnamed Essential Can Accumulate to Dangerous Levels
This is the first-choice source of vitamin D for most people. The sun, which powers life on earth, also energizes your skin to manufacture vitamin D, which is better understood as a hormone than as a vitamin.
To understand how to get enough vitamin D without poisoning yourself with too much, first you need to realize that this essential is not a vitamin at all. By definition, a vitamin must come from what you eat. Yet vitamin D is scarce or nonexistent in virtually all foods, unless artificially added.
Nature intended that humans manufacture their own vitamin D when certain ultraviolet rays from the sun strike skin. How do we know this? Because your skin cells have the ability to make D, and will do so whenever you allow them to. Humans thrived for eons before vitamin D supplements were available, so clearly these are not necessary for healthy life.
Vitamin D is actually a hormone, a necessary substance your body makes by itself. This essential was misnamed back in the 1920s, when researchers were first discovering (more…)
