You can always tell when someone’s had a big old serving of the D. They look happy. Healthy. Practically glowing. If we had it our way, we’d be getting it every minute of the day… but unfortunately, our bodies are only capable of doing it in daylight hours.
That’s right. The main way we obtain Vitamin D is from sunlight exposure. When those sweet rays touch our skin, our incredibly helpful bodies set to work on synthesising the stuff to help keep us on firing form. In fact, we get about 80-90% of all our Vitamin D intake this way – great, right!? But it doesn’t take a genius to work out why there’s a whopping great portion of the UK population who are chronically deficient rn.
To put it bluntly, Grey Britannia just don’t deliver. For us to synthesise Vitamin D ourselves, the intensity of the UVB rays have to be 295 nm. This level is only achieved between March and October in the Northern hemisphere, so we’ve got to rely on other sources of vitamin D for the remaining 6 months of the year to ensure we are thriving. There’s only one thing for it.
Diet Hard Too
Yes, the mathematicians among you might have been wondering where that other 10-20% of Vitamin D intake was accounted for. Diet. It is possible to top up your levels by consuming D-rich foods. However, it turns out these are very few and far between. The select few places you’ll find it is:
- Oily fish – such as salmon, sardines, herring and mackerel
- Red meat
- Liver
- Egg yolks
- Specific mushrooms
- Seaweed
As you can see, if you eat an animal-based diet, there are several food choices available. But for the less carnivorous among us, the only two plant-based options on the Vitamin D menu are mushrooms… or seaweed. And we don’t know about you, but seaweed isn’t necessarily something we can simply nip down to the shops for on the regular.
That means we’re down to just mushrooms, and they’re only able to deliver on Vitamin D2 (which decreases through picking and cooking) and is also less than a third of the potency of Vitamin D3.
What can we take from this?
Vitamin D is crucial for maintaining and supporting many aspects of human health including bone health, muscle function and repair and immune health. As Vitamin D is such an important vitamin to optimise, it probably comes as no surprise that I’d encourage anyone to give MOJU a go. After all, beginning your day with a nutritious breakfast and a MOJU Immunity Shot is a delicious, easy and convenient way to get your day off to the best start. Much better than a kilo of mushrooms.