Vitamin D

Vitamin D, as the great Charles De Marr might've put it, is “the hottest thing since sunburn!” (Line at 7:05 mark in THIS VIDEO). 



Mercola’s talking about it. Nora Gedgaudas is talking about it. Al Sears is freaking out about it. Even Joel Fuhrman is talking about it (at the expense of completely negating his vitamin D-less dietary recommendations). Everywhere I turn somebody’s going on and on about the power of vitamin D, and its absence from modern man’s menu.



When I read Weston A. Price’s Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, Price talks extensively about vitamin D being an important “activator” of other nutrients. In other words, nutrients, which work as a team, depend upon vitamin D. It’s not just that vitamin D is important, or simply one of the team players. It’s like, the game can’t be played without it. Playing the game without vitamin D is like trying to play a game of baseball without a pitcher on the field (and you thought baseball WITH a pitcher was boring!).



But I gathered from reading Price that vitamin D was something you could get from a blend of key animal foods such as eggs, butter, whole milk, cream, liver, and so forth. When I did some research on the vitamin D content in most common foods however, I found the numbers not easily adding up to “10 times the average American’s intake,” which is what Price reported of the vitamin D content of native diets free of degenerative and infectious disease.



To get thousands of IU of vitamin D per day, you’d have a lot of work cut out for you eating eggs (25IU per yolk), or butter, or liver, or… well anything really. Getting that much vitamin D is virtually impossible without consuming tons of cod liver oil, or fatty fish such as salmon, herring, or mackerel.



Most of our vitamin D, as it turns out, comes from the sun, but in winter at substantial Northern or Southern latitudes, vitamin D synthesis does not occur. On top of that, wearing sunscreen, which most idiots do, inhibits vitamin D synthesis on those rare occasions that we modern humans venture into the great outdoors. Even with proper, unthwarted sun exposure, vitamin D synthesis from sunlight is by no means a guarantee. Dark-skinned people, who have by far the lowest serum vitamin D concentrations on average (90% of African American women are thought to be vitamin D deficient – and that’s based on the low bar set by modern medicine for what constitutes a healthy D level), need dietary D even more.



So yes, as we enter the dark days of winter in the Northern latitudes, it’s time to step up our vitamin D intake from food until spring arrives, and sunbathing can resume. You don’t have to be freaky about it. Weston A. Price said specifically too, for those that may recall, that native diets contained ten times the vitamin D of the average American diet at that time. That was before we had the wondrous invention of Kellogg’s breakfast cereals fortified with vitamin D, drowned in vitamin D-fortified milk, and D-fortified Flintstones viteys washed down with D-fortified orange juice. Today we still, even with that lengthy list, take in a couple hundred IU’s of Vitamin D per day per capita at most. Back then, who knows. Maybe getting 1,000 or even just 500IU per day was 10 times the typical amount.



But before you reach for the cod liver oil, try real, whole food. Whole food that comes with other key essentials like B-12, selenium, and protein. I’m talking about something that nearly everyone in decent financial condition can obtain with reasonable effort – wild-caught salmon. They sell it at CostCo for Pete’s sake ($3.50 per portion).



Here is a video and article on making the perfect crispy-skin sockeye salmon (nearly 5,000IU per pound), at 180 Kitchen. Click HERE to check it out.