Wednesday, July 29, 2009

A Lesson on Vitamin D


I would venture to guess that homeschooling parents are some of the book-smartiest people there are. When you're homeschooling, you're researching not only what to study and how to study, but you're researching the world and everything in it. We learn more than we ever wanted to and then some (lol) about history, geography (it's changed since we were young!), science, and health... and we revisit words we'd once forgotten like numerator and denominator.

Our family isn't homeschooling this semester, but in an effort to keep this blog alive, I find myself still researching random points of interest and today came across an interesting study on Vitamin D. A friend recently shared that a bout of depression she'd had was attributed in part to a vitamin D deficiency... today I learned that not only can your body's response be sorrow and lethargy, but there are in fact a whole host of illnesses and annoying consequences to not giving your body an adequate dose of sunlight or to maintaining proper levels with vitamins and/or foods.

I won't restate the entire article for you here, that would be silly considering it's just a click away... Vitamin D Deficiencies. However I'd like to share a few points of the article that I found incredibly interesting... one being that the average vitamin D deficient individual is as much as 16 lbs heavier than those without the deficiency. Wow... that's pretty significant. They also have found links to this deficiency and certain forms of cancer (for example prostate and breast), hypertension, MS, osteoporosis, and even birth defects.

The information in this article is very motivating. I'm not an outdoorsy gal, by any means. However.... if spending 15 minutes outside once or twice a day could lower my chances of getting cancer or MS, I'm there!

I encourage all my readers to take a look at this article and learn an easy way to improve your health. I wish all ways to health were this simple!





2 comments:

April said...

I know we are book smart. Only homeschoolers read the encyclopedia like a novel......

Anonymous said...

I just found out this week that I have a severe vitamin D deficiency, despite eating plenty of dairy and getting a moderate amount of sun (I live in the country and have animals...)

I am overweight and have a lot of the other symptoms that go along with the deficiency. I hope that taking supplements will help my health. It was kind of a shock to find this out pretty much by accident.

Vitamin D deficiency is apparently very common in the US. Thanks for getting the word out.