Vitamin D? Vitamin sunshine!
I’ve recently been exploring what vitamins we can add to our diets to improve mental health, and vitamin D made it to near the top of my list. That’s because vitamin D is already known to have mood influences.
How We Get Vitamin D
Vitamin D is actually made by our skin and interactions with sunlight. Have you ever noticed how a little sunshine improves your mood? Or maybe you’ve heard of Seasonal Affective Disorder (or, the aptly named acronym: SAD)? Both of those are related to the absorption of UVB rays, which create vitamin D for us. UVB also creates sunburns, so be careful. There’s no need to get a sunburn trying to lift a bad mood.
How cool is that? Your body is trying to make you happy.
How Much Vitamin D Do We Need?
Have you noticed that “fortified with vitamin D” label that often comes on milk containers, including milk provided in school lunches? There’s a good reason for that and it’s not based on any governmental conspiracy. What do the theorists call the contrails left by airplanes? Chemtrails? A little high school physics is in order, I think. And chemistry.
The FDA (who is not out to get us) has recommendations for vitamin D in daily food intake, to the point where they also suggest fortifying foods like milk and orange juice with additional vitamin D. That’s because vitamin D is
necessary
not often found naturally in lots of foods
is usually not in foods that kids often like unless we add it.
Sure, kids might like eggs, but I don’t know many who would ever ask for beef liver, which is an excellent natural source of vitamin D. I don’t even care for the taste of beef liver, but I do like the nutritional effects of it, which is why I’ve added grass fed beef liver supplements to my diet.
How Do You Know If You Need Vitamin D?
Symptoms of vitamin D deficiency, as you might expect, include fatigue, depression, and poor sleep.
Vitamin D doesn’t have the same result as something like caffeine. It’s not going to get you excitable. In fact, it can have a calming effect, but those certainly include a good and stable mood.
I’ve got my daughter and I both taking vitamin D supplements. For me, I’ve been taking vitamin D tablets for a while, and I’ve noticed since starting them that I don’t get as lethargic. This, in combination with our recent habit of wearing blue light glasses has helped us regulate mood and sleep. My daughter isn’t one for swallowing vitamins, though, so I recently started her on these vitamin D gummies and they’re fantastic.
The last time we went to IKEA, for example, she got so tired - foot-dragging, pale faced, feeling down… We stopped at the cafeteria and sat not far from the windows, and she started to perk up. When we left, I asked her if something had her down, and she pointed out that there are no windows. She really just needed to see some sunlight. The same thing happened when she came with me to work one day and shared my office, which also has no windows.
Well, boom! I ordered these, and now even though it’s been rainy for a few days, and we haven’t seen a lot of sunlight, I still haven’t noticed that same pale/down look she gets when there are no windows.
It’s also worth noting that Vitamin D isn’t just going to improve your mood across the board. If you don’t have a vitamin D deficiency (as Half The World Population does), then it might not improve anything for you. Simply make sure you’re getting enough vitamin D, and you’ll have one less thing to bring your mood down.