Vitamin D and Cardiovascular Disease Prevention

I’m working on a new entry into my Optimize Your Diet series this week. The focus of this upcoming post will be optimizing your intake of Vitamin D as the vitamin has been closely related to many diseases and ailments when it is in deficiency.

As we all know the body creates Vitamin D when we spend time in the sun. The problem of course is that we cannot spend large periods of time in the sun without doing damage to our bodies without applying sunscreen. However we effectively block the rays which cause the body to create Vitamin D by applying sunscreen and thus the whole problem is not resolved. Ideally we should spend short periods of time in the sun without sunscreen but this is not always possible nor is it always enough time to get the body’s fill of Vitamin D. To get the full amount of Vitamin D we will also have to make sure it comes in our diet and as a last resort we can supplement it. I hope you’ll come back and read my upcoming post on how to optimize your diet to get the most vitamin D from your diet that you can.

In the mean time I wanted to share with you a lecture presented earlier this year at UCSD Medical Center presented by Dr. David Sane, MD of Wake Forest University. The lecture is titled Vitamin D and Cardiovascular Disease Prevention and as you can probably deduce covers the biology of how Vitamin D plays a role in heart disease, atherosclerosis, and hypertension. Heart Disease is easily the number one leading cause of death in America and vitamin D deficiency is creeping up in prevalence all the time. In addition to the lecture’s topic Vitamin D deficiency has also been linked to an increased risk for various forms of cancer so in the interest in preventing disease and extending life and vitality, awareness of proper nutrition should be fairly important.

The following video lecture is approximately 45 min long so I understand if you pass on it but I wanted to provide an option for the willing and interested as a precursor to my post later this week. I hope you’ll come back to check it out. Thanks for reading and enjoy.