When my son was born, there were few things I knew how to do. So much of parenting is experiential, which is why it is so easy to judge the woman in aisle 4 parenting her tantrummy toddler and so hard to keep your energy for a child who seems to gain more energy with every passing year.
I did “know” one thing: Vitamin D drops. I had to give them to him everyday. I tucked them in the cabinet with his thermometer and baby Tylenol and I didn’t miss a single dose.
I live in Canada and I am not a fan of anything akin to a polar vortex. There is much of the year where I find indoor replacements for all of our activities, because this seems preferable to frostbite. Vitamin D is necessary.
Right?
Turns out, my certainty was unfounded, even though every nurse and physician insisted on it.
There are some experts that say that even those who are Vitamin D deficient (hello, everyone in Canada) don’t need to supplement and that vitamin D is not the cure-all that we might have hoped.
Vitamin D is not really a Vitamin. It is a hormone (say what?). It helps to promote the absorption of Calcium in the body. Vitamin D3 is found in fish and sunlight. Vitamin D2 is found in plant-based foods, including mushrooms. (1)
The current guidelines for vitamin D was based on a group of elderly people who didn’t get much sunlight and were prone to fractures. But people need only be outside for a short period of time without sunscreen to reap the benefits. If housebound, supplementation may be crucial, but that certainly isn’t true for most of us.
In addition, more supplementation is not necessarily better. An increased dosage actually showed an increased number of fractures and falls. In search of better health, some people believe that the more vitamin D, the better. This is not true. Unsafe amounts are more than 4,000 IU per day (600 IU is the recommended amount for most healthy adults). As with anything in life, the trick is to make sure that you are moderate. (2)
Moderation: the key to good health.
It is certainly not the same thing to take a supplement and to stand outside in the sunshine, otherwise we would be replacing our vacations with a pill. Vitamin D levels are often self-diagnosed. If we feel tired or out of sorts during the winter, it is one of the many things we can blame. Doctors are finding that patients who are tired, weak, depressed or sick want to blame it on low D levels. (3)
(Another thing to blame: living in Canada. I’m obviously not over the polar vortex.)
A doctor and a blood test is the only thing that can diagnose a need for a supplement. Of course, with infants this is not something we want to do. Low levels of D and calcium in infants could lead to seizures, which no parents want to chance. Easier to just give the drops and get on with it.
When it comes to adults, it is not as proactive as you may think to grab another vitamin and add it to your daily arsenal. We will know if we are truly deficient and happily, this is not as common as we have been lead to believe.