Vitamin D: importance and how to get it

Abstract

Welcome to Public Health Moment from the University of Minnesota. As days grow shorter and colder, Minnesotans are forced to deprive themselves of one natural source of vitamin D – the sun. Vitamin D is essential for the developing and sustaining healthy bones. But many Americans and Minnesotans fall short of the recommended intake of this vitamin. That’s according to Lisa Harnack, director of the Nutrition Coordinating Center and a professor of epidemiology at the University of Minnesota. <Harnack: “We recently looked at vitamin D intake in the Minneapolis-St. Paul Metropolitan area and found that vitamin D intake has been on the decline over the past 25 years. And that’s probably because vitamin D is found in just a few foods and one of those is milk. And people are drinking less milk today than in the past.”> Harnack explains how we can get more vitamin D through our diet. <Harnack: “Dairy milk is required by federal law to be vitamin D fortified. But if you’re a soymilk drinker or a rice milk drinker, some of those products are fortified, you just need to read the label and look for one that in the nutrition facts panel indicates that it contains vitamin D. Some yogurts are fortified with vitamin D, some margarine, some orange juices are now fortified with vitamin D – some of the breakfast cereals. “There’s a limited number of foods that are naturally high in vitamin D: Oily fish, like salmon and tuna, mushrooms, liver. So, it’s hard to get the foods that are naturally high in vitamin D regularly in your diet.”>