SUNLIGHT VITAMIN D SKIN

'And that presupposes you've got the equivalent of your arms exposed and you do this most days of the week.' 'For people with very fair skin, it's less than that and for people with darker skin, it can be quite a few more minutes than that.

SUNLIGHT VITAMIN D SKIN

'For most people with Caucasian-type skin that's in the order of five to 15 minutes,' Professor Mason said. And you need to spend enough time - but not too much time - in the sun. The best parts of the day to get your sun exposure in summer is the mid-morning or mid-afternoon. In fact, because your vitamin D can be stored over months, you can 'stock up' during the summer - say by getting your levels up to 70 nanomoles per litre - to keep some in reserve for winter, Professor Mason said. Sometimes we will have levels higher or lower than this. According to the Australian-New Zealand guidelines, we should have a blood level of vitamin D of at least 50 nanomoles per litre.īut since our levels vary over the year, with our exposure to the sun in different seasons, this is really an average figure. Health authorities around the world differ on how much vitamin D we need. The interaction of Ultraviolet B (UVB) rays from the sun with a steroid in our skin produces vitamin D. Our main source of vitamin D is from the sun. 'In Australia, it's actually very hard to get more than about 5 or 10 per cent from most food, because we don't have fortification - added vitamin D - to many things, unlike the Americans,' said Professor Rebecca Mason, a vitamin D expert from the University of Sydney's Bosch Institute. There's also some evidence that low levels of vitamin D predispose to some cancers - especially cancer of the breast, colon and prostate.Ī number of foods contain vitamin D - among them fish, eggs, mushrooms that have been exposed to UV, and margarine (it's mandatory in Australia to add vitamin D to margarine).īut these foods aren't nearly enough to give us adequate vitamin D, according to the experts.Osteoporosis is a major risk factor for hip fractures, especially in the elderly. In adults, the condition is called osteomalacia. Rickets - a childhood disease in which the bones soften and can become deformed.It also plays a role in keeping our muscles functioning. Vitamin D's identity crisis aside, this molecule is important for its role in enhancing the small intestine's ability to absorb calcium from our food, which is vital for bone strength. To add to that, it's also sometimes called a pre-hormone - because it's converted to a hormone in the kidneys and acts to regulate part of the body's function, like a hormone does. It's a vitamin - in the sense that we can get it in small amounts from food - but our main source of vitamin D is actually through the synthesis of it in our skin.

Sunlight vitamin d