It’s Vitamin D-day.

There’s a reason why we added Vitamin D to our new Vitality range. There are so many hidden health benefits you may not have heard of!

Sunny side up

Unlike a lot of vitamins, D can be manufactured by your body if you’re exposed to sunlight. But if you’re in the sun, you put on sunscreen – or you certainly should to prevent cancer and wrinkles – which reduces your skin’s ability to make vitamin D by 90 to 99%. And even if you wouldn’t use it, it wouldn’t help a lot considering it’s tough to catch the right rays. Our sunlight intake in general is too weak to generate enough D, especially when you live in the UK! ;) Plus air pollution doesn’t help either, because it can filter out some of the UV-rays, so less of them will reach your skin.

Goodbye cold, depression and … fat!

There have been loads of studies and awareness campaigns that have shown vitamin D's crucial role in strengthening bones, boosting immunity, battling depression and reducing the risk of cardiovascular diseases and cancer. BUT now, after years and years of research and thousands of studies, experts may have proven their claim that a deficiency of vitamin D has a huge impact on your fat burning process too. Every cell in our bodies needs D to function properly, even the fat cells. Special receptors for vitamin D signal whether you should burn fat or store it: when D plugs into these receptors, your fat-burning mechanism gets recharged/boosted, like your phone whenever you plug in the battery cable! Meanwhile, receptors in your brain need vitamin D to reduce hunger and cravings, as well as to pump up levels of the chemical serotonin – which works mood-elevating! At the same time, D helps your body’s ability to absorb other important weight-loss nutrients, especially calcium. If you have a calcium deficiency, your body can experience an 5x increase in the fatty acid synthase, which is an enzyme that transforms calories into fat. In other words: Vitamin D could speed up your weight loss!

But if the sun isn’t good enough, what is?

Instead of sitting in the sun and trying to up your D levels, it’s much safer and more satisfying to get more of the vitamin from your diet. You could go to the doctor first to get a simple blood test done called 25-hydroxy vitamin D, or 25-OH D, which is the best (read: most reliable) way to find out not only whether you are deficient but also how bad your deficiency is. If you do have a deficiency, you should change your diet a bit. You could change your eating habits or you could just order vitamin D supplements. Because of all the health benefits, we added Vitamin D3 to our new Vitality range, It is available on our website now.

Kinds regards,

The NutraVita team