Vitamin D3

25 Jan Vitamin D3

So what is all this hype about vitamin D lately. We’re hearing that everyone’s deficient in it, we know that we get it from the sunlight, but nobody’s really talking about what it does, we just know that we should be taking it. I wanted to do this video because I think it’s important for everyone that’s working inside of an office, for everyone that is working day in and day out and maybe isn’t getting enough sunshine, so that they can hear exactly what vitamin D does in their body, and how getting the right amount of vitamin D can actually help you burn some fat. I’m going to to get to that in this video on how vitamin D can redistribute some of your body composition.

First let’s talk about what vitamin D really is. Vitamin D isn’t really even a vitamin. Technically, by definition, a vitamin is something that you have to get from the diet to basically support a bodily function. Well vitamin D isn’t really a vitamin. It’s considered a hormone. It goes through what’s called a methylation process. It’s actually processed by the liver and kidneys in order to be created. It’s not something we’re getting from the diet; it’s something that we are getting a precursor from the diet or from the sunlight, and then it’s getting converted into what we’re calling a vitamin, but in this case really a hormone.

Back in the 1920s they found that there was a pretty significant deficiency in vitamin D in a lot of our foods. Those that weren’t getting enough sunlight were developing something called rickets. Rickets was a painful bone disease where the bones could actually bow and shape and bend in weird ways. Rickets isn’t too common now because we’ve started fortifying our foods with vitamin D, like you’ll see your milk a lot of times says it’s got extra vitamin D added to it; but as more and more of us are getting used to not wanting to eat the mainstream preservative-filled foods, we’re starting to find that we’re not getting enough vitamin D again, simply because we’re starting to east healthier. It’s kind of a weird situation: we’re eating healthier, but we’re not getting enough vitamin D.

It’s not just as easy as absorbing sunlight and getting vitamin D. Vitamin D is split into two different vitamins: you’ve got vitamin D2 and vitamin D3. Vitamin D2 is really created when a plant absorbs UV light; then we eat the plant and we get that vitamin D. Vitamin D3 is created when we absorb sunlight, that UVB light. That UVB light converts to what is called 7-Dehydrocholesterol into vitamin D3. From there that vitamin D3 has to be converted into something called calcitriol. There’s a massive amount of conversion that takes place just for vitamin D to really have an effect. That vitamin D3 that has been converted from 7-Dehydrocholesterol now goes to the liver, goes to the kidneys, the kidneys and the liver convert it into calcitriol where it is in its usable form. There you have it. You start figuring out when you look at the word, “calcitriol,” Calcitriol helps calcium become absorbed, which leads me into exactly what vitamin D does.

Vitamin D allows us to absorb calcium. That’s why you see it in milk. Because milk has a lot of calcium they figure, “Okay. If we add vitamin D it’s going to help this absorption of calcium.” It’s pretty significant. Without vitamin D, we’re only absorbing about ten to fifteen percent of the calcium that we consume daily. With proper vitamin D levels, or at least having vitamin D levels close to the recommended daily level, we are absorbing closer to fifty percent. If you look at my other videos you’ll see that I talk about how important calcium can be to not only mental health, but staying in the best possible physical shape as well.

The reason that vitamin D is so big right now, the reason we’re hearing so much about it, is because there’s a lot of factors that are making us deficient in it. One, we’re not eating the right foods that do actually have vitamin D3, like the fatty fishes like salmon, halibut, or possibly even some things like egg yolks. We’re not getting enough sunlight as well. We’re stuck in offices all the time. A lot of us are working nine-to-five jobs. The other thing is when we do go outside, we’re wearing sunscreen. I’m not here to tell you, you shouldn’t wear sunscreen. That’s really not my position. I’m not a doctor. The thing is sunscreens are getting so powerful now that it’s preventing us from absorbing and converting that 7-Dehydrocholesterol. So you really ought to maybe think about going outside for even just a few minutes without some sunscreen so you can at least let that natural conversion take place.

Now I want to talk about what vitamin D can do for you and if you make sure you get your levels to the right place, how much better you can feel. Now we already talked about calcium. We talked about how it can have that effect. Let’s talk about how we can actually change your body composition. That can definitely help you redistribute some of that belly fat. This is perfect for the guy that’s trying to keep the muscle on. He doesn’t want to lose a lot of weight, he doesn’t want to go into a caloric deficit, but he does want to redistribute some of his belly fat.

According to the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition there was a study that took place over the course of twelve weeks that took twenty-three participants. Of those twenty-three participants half of them took four-thousand IUs of vitamin D in supplement form, and the other half took placebo. They all went through the same twelve-week resistance training program. At the end of that twelve weeks, although the two test subjects ended up coming out weighing the exact same, more or less, not losing any weight, not gaining any weight, those that took the vitamin D supplement had a drastic difference in their waste to hip ratio. That waste to hip ration is a great indicator of how leans someone is through the abdomen, not necessarily focusing only on body weight.

What that tells us is that by having an adequate amount of vitamin D, it takes some of the stress off of our body which allows our cortisol levels to come a little bit lower. I’m hypothesizing here because nobody really truly knows why vitamin D has a direct correlation with belly fat, all we know is it does exist. The fact is if you go out and you eat the right kinds of foods, you eat the fatty fishes like the salmon, the halibut, or even the right kind of tuna, you can get the adequate amounts of vitamin D that you need. Otherwise, get out in the sun and make sure that you’re at least letting yourself absorb ten to fifteen minutes of sunlight three times a week.

At the end of the day you can definitely take a vitamin D supplement. There’s a lot of them out there usually ranging from 1,000 IU all the way up to 10,000 IU. You can do a simple blood test that only costs a couple of bucks to see exactly where you’re at, and you can start taking a vitamin D supplement and get yourself to where you need to be and monitor it yourself.

That’s if for this video. Hopefully this sheds some light on how vitamin D works, how it’s helping you absorb calcium, but more importantly that it’s not really a vitamin at all, and how you can help your body make it happen. I’ll see you in the next video.