 Vitamin D has certainly been a main focus of my channel ever since I've started YouTube as it's really the most important vitamin we need in order to be happy and healthy. One specific I've never really touched on is you know how much vitamin D are we getting when we go out in the sun? How much IU international units is our body producing? And we have a general idea of what blood levels should be from various organization recommendations. 40 to 80 nanograms per milliliter and what's also used in certain European countries is nanomoles which is 2.5 times nanograms 100 to 200 nanomoles per liter. And the reason there's a range here is because the lower end is what you're supposed to come out of winter with. And once your body has depleted the vitamin D stores that it built up during the summer to where it should be around the higher end. It's like a cycle you know our body absorbs vitamin D and energy from the sun to be used in the colder darker months and then sun comes back again and we are happy again. Now there's two important considerations. One is the geographical location as the sun has different strengths in different parts of the world and two is your skin color. That's why when we see native indigenous peoples such as the Aborigines in Australia they have very very dark skin almost black and they still use like coconut oil to protect it as that Australian sun is incredibly harsh and they're exposed to it almost all day every day. The idea being you spend most of your day out in the sun with nearly full body exposure throughout the entire year. And you know most people barely get outside a few days per year and now with all the chemicals they spray in the sky even if you do try to go out in the spring or summer you're not even getting UVB. It's basically impossible to get vitamin D from the sun now unfortunately. You can take a supplement to fix a deficiency however the supplement does not provide the physiological benefits of being in the sun. So once you take your levels to that lower end using a supplement you'll no longer see the benefits and need to seek actual UVB exposure. Usually around 10,000 IU per day for several months gets people to that point but again be very very careful and especially if you're consuming a lot of dairy you might want to remove that from your diet until your body can balance calcium levels. And this is something I personally discovered because yeah for me supplementing vitamin D made me feel good but going out in the sun or going to a tanning bed was a whole different story I felt energized and I heard someone say that even if you're out in the sun with your clothes on your body is absorbing energy from the sun so it's just important to be outside we aren't really meant to spend our entire lives in a wooden box. Now what actually struck me to make this video was a study I found done in South America which is relevant because it was closely the equator and you have to understand that the UVB absorption for these people is drastically higher than where most of us are. So they measured the amount of time it took for the body to synthesize 1,000 international units of vitamin D with only face and hands exposed only face and hands exposed and this is the time in minutes going up on the left and then the bottom isn't really that important it's just measuring it at different years which is fairly consistent throughout so the spring summer and autumn are all fairly similar I numbered spring number one summer number two and autumn number three you know summer being a little higher UVB and then spring and autumn being relatively consistent so give or take ten minutes for 1,000 IU to be synthesized on only your hands and face and then in the winter it actually took them 20 minutes but I would assume somewhere in New York it would take you like an hour or two to synthesize that much and it might not even be worth going out if your goal is to increase your vitamin D stores that would definitely have to be tested but even like a short sleeve shirt and shorts would be drastic you know that you know if your hands and face is only 5% of your body then your arms and your legs are you know 15, 20, 25% it's so much higher now keep in mind that's without sunscreen we did a video on how toxic sunscreen is maybe five or six weeks ago now but if you have sunscreen on your skin you're not synthesizing vitamin D so not only are there bad ingredients in sunscreen it's blocking you know you getting the vitamins from the Sun and there's another study claiming for most white people a half hour in the summer sun in a bathing suit can initiate the release of 50,000 IU of vitamin D into circulation within 24 hours of exposure this same amount of exposure yields 20 to 30,000 IU in tanned individuals and 8 to 10,000 IU in dark skinned individuals so the guess work here is diminishing returns do we know how many hours per day the body is capable of synthesizing vitamin D is it only 2 to 3 hours you know after the first hour how much does it taper off even if it's 50% diminishing returns you know 100,000 first hour 50,000 second hour 25,000 third hour you're still getting an incredible amount of vitamin D that is until your skin gets very dark you know so a pale person in the beginning of the summer should quickly start darkening their skin and then they would have to invest more time to synthesize more vitamin D as their skin darkens and I did some estimations here so you know a white person would get 200,000 IU per day a tanned person 100,000 IU per day and a dark skinned person 40,000 IU per day and that's a hypothetical visit to the beach now what's interesting is the first study also indicated that skin cancer was related to the person's ability to synthesize vitamin D not actually the amount of time exposed to the sun and in my personal experimenting I noticed that if I supplemented vitamin D my skin would darken much faster so when your D3 levels are low your skin won't darken as quickly and it makes sense from a biological mechanism perspective that your skin won't start darkening until you have a healthy amount of vitamin D because why would your body want to reduce your vitamin D absorption if you're deficient and from a nutritional perspective you know if you don't have enough animal based nutrients especially cholesterol your body won't be able to synthesize the vitamin D so instead of creating vitamin D and healing your skin your skin's going to burn become damaged and take a very long time to heal and the reason I say animal foods is because you know cholesterol animal protein the amino acids and vitamin K2 mk4 are only contained in animal based foods you know granted you should definitely be supplementing K2 mk4 this is why people on a vegan diet start having so many health issues one of the many reasons so I think the main thing to take from this is that Frank is so handsome he has to get a haircut every few months to remind you guys of that so it's helpful to monitor your blood levels of vitamin D once or twice per year to make sure they're in that correct range you know you can get all the sun exposure you want go to the tanning salon as much as you want in the lower UV index months even supplement small amounts to some degree but you won't know if your levels are ideal without a blood test and you definitely don't want to go higher supplementing without that blood test so you can ask a doctor to write a script or use various lab websites now where you pay $100 for vitamin D test but there's usually two different types of vitamin D tests $100 each one is active one is inactive vitamin D and you definitely want to get both just make sure you don't take a supplement or tan several days before that blood work as their residual vitamin D in your blood it can skew that test you know you might be taking a lot and then you go to the doctor and the levels are sky-high but you could still be deficient so thank you guys for joining me today definitely check out organ supplements.com where we have a variety of things that you can take we have vitamin D we have vitamin K2 and one thing I didn't mention was you know you need every single vitamin and mineral to be optimal in synthesizing vitamin D even things like selenium copper, magnesium aldenum anything on the list of vitamins and minerals you need it for all of these physiological functions but there's some specifics like the vitamin D supplement the K2 supplement magnesium oil supplement which I also have those are more significantly important so definitely check that out and of course I have you know over a thousand videos on YouTube of various nutritional education so thanks again for joining me guys and I will see you for tomorrow.