by Keri Gans

As a registered dietician, one of the questions I routinely ask my patients on their initial consultations is: “Do you know your vitamin D status?”

Why, you may ask yourself, does this matter? Over the last couple of years, vitamin D has come out of the closet, leaping to the forefront of many nutrition discussions. You might even say it’s the vitamin du jour. It has always been associated with bone strength, of course, but recently it’s been connected with so many health conditions it could make your head spin.

Current research has linked vitamin D shortages to heart disease (today's headline), certain cancers (see above), diabetes, obesity, depression, and multiple sclerosis. The problem, though, is that the outcome of various research studies differ, and there’s still no overall consensus on what vitamin D does and doesn’t do. What do I need to know? The first thing I recommend to patients is to get their vitamin D levels checked. Ask your doctor to test for 25-hydroxyvitamin D. Blood levels of less than 30 nanograms per milliliter are considered deficient, but many experts agree that a level of 50 nanograms per milliliter is ideal. 

How do I get enough D? As you might imagine, I always like to recommend food first. Foods that contain vitamin D include fatty fish (like salmon, tuna, or mackerel), liver, and egg yolks, and vitamin D-fortified milk. But in all honesty, it’s hard to meet your daily needs with food alone. As for the sun, yes, it does convert a cholesterol substance found in the skin into vitamin D. But baking in the sun, especially without sunscreen (which is the way you’d need to do it) adds a whole new host of problems—wrinkles and possible skin cancer among them. And as you get older, your body absorbs less vitamin D from this exposure.

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