Vitamin D is very much the poster vitamin right now with everyone touting it’s benefits including everything from fat loss to decreased risk of an array of diseases. So it’s pretty common knowledge that it’s good for you and we should be making sure we have our levels in a healthy range. However the Dubai Health Authority (DHA) announced back in October 2017 that a staggering 90% of the UAE population is vitamin D deficient, despite living in a place where it’s sunny pretty much all year round. This may come as a surprise to many so let’s look at what we can do to make sure we are getting enough of this essential vitamin. 

The Problem

The issue with getting yourself out of vitamin D deficiency in the UAE is because it is so hot for a lot of the year, we don’t tend to spend an awful lot of time in the sun. We go straight from homes to cars to offices and hotels etc and with very little pedestrian friendly access nobody walks anywhere either. We live a surprisingly sheltered life considering the brilliant and consistent weather we have, but as it’s such a place of 100mph work and play we often don’t get time to sit and absorb some proper sun, well evidently not enough anyway. 

Another problem is the way in which vitamin D is created by the body, it is synthesised when our skin comes into contact with sunlight due to UVB rays, but the absorption of the sunlight we need to synthesis vitamin D is blocked by things like suncream, clothes, windows, filters (for those of you that use sunbeams, it probably has a UVB filter in the bulbs) so even if you are the sort of sun worshipper that can bask in it all day, if you use suncream then you’re probably not absorbing any at all (it’s also worth mentioning that you can only synthesise vitamin D when the sun is high in the sky, so between 10am and 3pm is your best bet). You also need to look at the UV index on the weather app on your phone, in places like Australia and South Africa where the sun is very intense, the UV rating could be 10 or even 14 which is very high, it would not take long to burn in that even if lathered in cream. Dubai however has a comparatively low UV rating most of the year meaning we would have to spend a longer time in it than some places to get enough to synthesise a healthy amount of vitamin D. 

The Solution

Now I’m not saying that you should spend all day in the sun with no suncream because you would burn and that is silly. Burning the skin actually undermines the absorption and therefore production of vitamin D in the body. The best thing is to build up a tolerance to the sun slowly, spend 15-30 mins (depending on a variety of factors) in the sun with no cream before applying and carrying on if you want. The tanning we see in our skin is actually our body becoming tolerant to the sun, so the more tolerant you are the longer you need to spend to absorb enough vitamin D to stay in the healthy range. This is where we can see a lot of discrepancies between people with different skin colour and the amount of time each one needs to spend in the sun to keep their vitamin D levels up. African ancestry descendants would need to spend more time in the sun than European ancestry descendants to get the same effect, as seen in a paper by Hall et al (2009). 

So giving a recommendation to people is quite difficult because it depends on so many factors, the most accurate way to determine how much vitamin D you should be getting would be to get a blood test. 

Vitamin D is known as the sunshine vitamin but it is possible to get it from food, but very impractical and the amount of food you need to ingest to achieve the recommended daily intake would leave you in a pretty high calorie surplus for the day. For example to get 2500IU per day of vitamin D, which is a pretty modest/normal amount you would have to drink 6250ml of milk, or 143 LARGE eggs EVERY DAY, now I like eggs but that does seem a bit much. 

So if we have established it’s quite hard to get enough vitamin D from the sun and near impossible to get it through your diet in high enough quantities (you can see why so many people are deficient now can’t you) then whats left? This is one of the instances where supplementation is a very good idea, you can easily get capsules containing 1000IU – 5000IU which you would just take daily and take all these problems away. Now I have been referring to vitamin D as a vitamin here but technically it is more of a pro hormone because of how you can take massive doses of it and your body will just use as much as it needs when it needs it without excreting the waste. For example if you had 1 weeks worth of vitamin C at once, your body would absorb what it needs then the kidneys would get rid of the rest. However with vitamin D  you could even have 6 months worth in one dose and still be fine, so it’s pretty hard to ever reach toxic levels of it in the body, which is why I usually aim for 5000IU per day, factoring in I might forget to take one on a morning from time to time, this level would keep you well in range! 

The Benefits

Vitamin D’s reputation as the powerhouse vitamin is well deserved because of it’s benefits including:

• Improved immune system Preitl et al. (2013).
• Improved bone health by supporting calcium absorption Hill et al. (2013). 
• Reduced risk of bone loss & fracture in the elderly. 
• Vitamin D deficiency associated with development of cardiovascular disease, cancer, irritable bowel disease, autoimmune disorders Holick (2007).
• Reduces depressive symptoms Shaffer et al. (2014).
• Potentially improves strength Tomlinson et al (2015).
• Potentially improves fat loss Ortega et al (2008).

The Proof

One study done by Ortega et al. 2008 with 2 groups of women on the same calorie diet (both in equal deficit) where one group had low vitamin D levels and one group normal levels and the normal level group showed significantly more fat loss over a short space of time (1.7kg vs 0.5kg).

Another study by Carillo et al. 2013 showed a 4000IU group of people and a placebo group and the 4000IU per day group had significantly lower waist circumference measurements after 12 weeks and also increased peak power in performance at around week 4. 

I could go on all day with this, you can see there is a mountain of research behind this topic showing vitamin D is great for fat loss, muscle function, athletic performance, decreased risk of lots of major diseases, mood and psychological benefits the list goes on. 

http://gulfnews.com/news/uae/society/90-of-uae-population-vitamin-d-deficient-says-dha-official-1.2113556