Obesity and Vitamin D Deficiency
Channel: BioBalance Healthcast
Date: 2019-02-22

See all the Healthcast at https://www.biobalancehealth.com/healthcast-blog

You may think that people who take vitamins are crazy or hypochondriacs, but it is a valid truth that vitamins are vital to the enzyme pathways that make our bodies metabolize food into energy, grow, move, and think. Sadly in the 21st century, in societies like ours, with an abundance of food, most of us are still undernourished in the most important nutrients—vitamins.  

An extreme example of vitamin deficiency we rarely see in the US is Scurvy, from the lack of Vitamin C. In the 1800s people who experienced a lack of vitamin C became weak, anemic, and had bleeding of the gums, and loose and open wounds on the skin that wouldn’t heal, as well as experiencing personality changes. Vitamin C is a building block for skin, collagen in blood vessels and in the skin.  At this time in the world the food with the most vitamin C was citrus fruit, and most of the world did not live in an area that was warm enough to produce citrus fruit.  In fact it became so common, that in the British Navy sailors would be given a lime and grog daily to keep their bones strong.  Hence the name given to the Brits is “limey”.  Fifty percent of sailors in the 1800s died from Scurvy on long voyages.   We rarely see this disease in the developed nations now, both because we have inexpensive citrus fruit and juice, refrigeration and transportation to carry the fruit from warm countries and areas of our country, and because most people take multi-vitamins that have vitamin C in them.  

Vitamin D3 is the vitamin we are concentrating on today because Americans have a great deficiency in Vitamin D and we are becoming obese because of it.  Vitamin D is a fat-soluble vitamin that is actually a hormone that does many things including building bone, stimulating the metabolism of fat into energy, lowering blood glucose and stimulating the burning of calories. This is a vicious circle, the less vitamin D the fatter you get, the fatter you are the less vitamin D you can make or process.

We are now at a crossroads in the health of our country when we have to do something drastic to save ourselves from an atmosphere of “abundance” that causes us to eat too much drink too much and lay around too much.  Our obesity rate is out of control and one of the big factors is a vitamin deficiency—Vitamin D!  This vitamin can be consumed by taking a supplement containing Vitamin D3, and from exposure to the Sun.  There are many factors contributing to this.  Our society has changed in the past 100 years from an agricultural nation populated with people who made a living on the land (outside, where they absorbed vitamin D through their skin), to a nation whose occupants live at desks with non-nutritious food, with no exposure to the sun except for brief moments in a day, and who protect their skin from the sun with sunscreen, thus causing a nation that is pale and Vitamin D deficient.