Ok So Ill Probably Vitamin D Deficient What To Do
For this i would suggest finding a good vitamin D supplement and taking it daily, theyre quick, cost effective, and its really no effort at all. Or if its more of a summers month you could set a time everyday or at least say 3 days a week where you go outside in the sun for around 15-30min, that should be enough vitamin D for your daily needs, on top of that you could also eat more vitamin D rich foods such as egg yolks, fatty fish like salmon or cheese, all these things should boost your levels up and get you back to feeling better!
What Are Good Sources
The best source of B12 is offal. 75g of lamb liver can contain as much as much as 60 mcg. Compare that to 18 mcg in 75g of mussels, 2.5 mcg in ground beef and 1.5 mcg in an egg.
Dietitians of Canada have put together an excellent table of good sources5.
Top tier:
- Beef
- Eggs
While those in the top tier will provide you with a much higher dose of B12, it is not that important. An adult only needs 2.4 mcg per day5. Therefore, only exceptionally poor diets will not achieve this.
Most of the time, a healthy and varied diet is all you need.
Whats The Difference Between Stress And Anxiety
Because the symptoms of stress and anxiety are so similar, many people use the terms interchangeably. It is useful to understand the difference as many vitamins help both but the definition is different. Shared symptoms between the two conditions include:
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Difficulty sleeping
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A hard time concentrating on tasks, conversations, etc.
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Mood swings or mood changes, such as irritability
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Chronic fatigue and loss of motivation
However, while stress is a response to a short-term trigger , anxiety is a persistent feeling that never goes away.
Whether youre experiencing long-term anxiety or short-term stress, psychologists point out that both are emotional responses within your brain and nervous system. And an ever-expanding body of research is investigating how the foods you eat affect how you feel, and whether specific vitamins and minerals can help your brain to better moderate your emotional responses to lifes difficulties.
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The Role Of Vitamin D In Our Body
Vitamin D benefits the body in various ways. The most important role of Vitamin D is that it helps in the absorption of calcium. Apart from this Vitamin D helps in building up the bones and keeping them healthy and strong. It also helps in the blocking of parathyroid hormone. This hormone can cause the bones to become brittle. Talking about hormones, Vitamin D is also an unique vitamin in the sense that your body turns it into a hormone.
The most important aspect of Vitamin D is that it strengthens the immune system and helps to make the muscle system strong. It is very important that you should have a strong immune system because a strong immune system helps to fight various infections and diseases. Vitamin D helps to regulate the blood pressure as well, so if you are consuming too little Vitamin D, then it can lead to high blood pressure.
Vitamin D affects your mental health as well. Thus, a deficiency of Vitamin D can affect the development of the brain as well the brain function. Vitamin D activates those genes that help to release the neurotransmitters. The deficiency of Vitamin D is also one of the causes of depression.
Can I Take Vitamin D Everyday
If youre taking a vitamin D supplement, you probably dont need more than 600 to 800 IU per day, which is adequate for most people. Some people may need a higher dose, however, including those with a bone health disorder and those with a condition that interferes with the absorption of vitamin D or calcium, says Dr.
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Seasonal Affective Disorder And Anxiety
Seasonal affective disorder , once considered its unique disorder, has been renamed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as a type of depression. It is now referred to as a specification only, i.e., depression with seasonal pattern.
People who experience seasonally patterned depression are known to show symptoms that include feelings of anxiety, and other symptoms that are reminiscent of those related to anxiety, such as irritability, antisocial behavior, insomnia, reduced sex drive, decreased appetite and weight loss. Some of these symptoms, like insomnia, may also contribute to the development of anxiety.
Your anxiety, therefore, can depend on how much sun you are exposed to if you are an individual who is particularly strongly affected by seasonal shifts.
Vitamin D Remains Important
Even if vitamin D doesn’t serve as a remedy or preventative tactic for mood-related conditions, that doesn’t diminish its importance for your overall health.
The recommended daily allowance is 600 IU daily, climbing to 800 IU for adults age 70 and up, according to the T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Nearly 25 percent of people in the United States fall short on the sunshine vitamin, per the ODS.
If food and sunshine aren’t providing you with enough of it, a vitamin D supplement can fill in the gap.
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Is Vitamin D Linked To Depression
Studies have shown a link between vitamin D deficiency and depression. Researchers behind a 2013 meta-analysis noticed that study participants with depression also had low vitamin D levels. The same analysis found that, statistically, people with low vitamin D were at a much greater risk of depression.
What Is A Meta
- The English word meta comes from the Greek word which means after or “beyond.”
- When researchers get together to perform a meta-analysis this means they are going to review the available papers, looking beyond individual clinical studies, checking for any patterns that may stand-out.
- For example, there might be 10 studies demonstrating an outcome but 2 studies showing no results whatsoever. Researchers will try to understand why this happened and describe their own conclusions in their meta-analysis.
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Impact Of Vitamin D Deficiency On Mental Health
The body needs Vitamin D at the proper level for it to function as it should.
How Vitamin D Works In The Body
Your muscles, heart, brain, and immune system have vitamin D receptors. The body transports the vitamin to the kidneys and liver, where it converts into an active hormone. In this form, it assists the body in absorbing calcium.
Your body acquires vitamin D through sun exposure. Certain foods and supplements can also be sources of vitamin D. Dark-skinned people have a high level of melanin.
Itâs the component that determines coloring in the human and animal world. This pigmentation prevents the skin from absorbing vitamin D correctly.
How Vitamin D Deficiency Leads to Mental Health Effects
Low levels of the vitamin may contribute to schizophrenia in adults, depression, and seasonal affective disorder. Other health problems that can arise from the deficiency include:
- Low bone density
- Excessive weight loss or gain
- Trouble sleepingââ
If you experience any of these symptoms similar to depression, have your vitamin D levels checked. Your doctor will do a test to determine the level of the vitamin in your blood.
For depression diagnosis, you may have to complete a self-assessment test. A blood test can’t diagnose depression but may test other conditions that cause depressive symptoms.
What Vitamins Help Depression And Anxiety
- Post comments:
If you have ever wondered what vitamins help with depression and anxiety, My Natural Pharmacy has some great information for you. This week we weigh in on a video from Dr. Handle Sinclair, who has some great information to answer that question.
The short answer is absolute yes, there are several vitamins that can help with both depression and anxiety. At the top of the list of vitamins that you should look into, and discuss with your doctor and/or nutritionist is:
If you would like to see Dr. Janelle Sinclairs video, .
Thanks for visiting mynaturalpharmcacy.com
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Vitamin D And History
Vitamin D is not believed to affect anxiety directly. Though it may be correlated with higher anxiety levels, there are likely reasons beyond the vitamin itself – reasons that will be discussed later in this article.
Historically, seeing the sun was often a cause for celebration and happiness. Sun meant food could grow, and that warmer weather was coming. Conversely, not seeing the sun often meant food was becoming scarcer and that important members of your village, tribe, or family, not to mention yourself, were at risk of dying from the cold. People became less active, and some cultures even took to hibernating like bears during the colder seasons. It is no wonder that cultures across the world, from the ancient Egyptians to the Mayans to the Greeks, once worshipped the sun as a god.
Today, it is believed that ancestral memory – which is, in some ways, short-term evolution – may play a role in why vitamin D and spending time outdoors makes people feel better. Just as humans feel an instinctive revulsion towards bitter flavors due to our ancestral association of bitterness with poisonous foods, the human body may have an instinctive awareness of its need for sunlight.
Does Vitamin D Relax
Vitamin D helps your blood vessels relax and widen and can also help prevent inflammation and clotting. Without enough vitamin D, your blood vessels arent as stretchy, and inflammation and clotting are more likely to occur. Vitamin D also helps lower the risk of heart disease by lowering the risk of diabetes.
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How Can You Use Vitamin A For Anxiety
Vitamin A helps to nourish the most critical system in our body that is the nervous system, and hence your muscles can relax. A proper functioning nervous system helps in minimizing stress mentally. When you are relaxed, you cannot get any anxiety.
When you are calm, there are slim chances for you to have a panic attack.
Vitamin a has the fatty acids, and they are a necessity in our bodies. They are also helpful in reducing anxiety.
How Might It Work
The evidence suggests B12 could improve our mental health. But how might it do this? Or, to use the technical term, what might be the mechanism of action ?
The research from McGill1 provides a possible explanation:
“In most, but not all, studies on patients with neuropsychiatric disorders, folate deficiency was associated with low levels of the serotonin metabolite 5-hydroxyindoleacetic acid in the cerebrospinal fluid . In one study, supplementation with folate restored CSF 5-HIAA levels to normal.”
If B12 is vital to regulating our levels of serotonin, and serotonin is key to a healthy brain, this could provide an explanation.
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Vitamin D Can Help Prevent Type 1 And Type 2 Diabetes
While studies are not conclusive, vitamin D may be helpful for preventing both type 1 and type 2 diabetes, says Newgent. One such study, published in 2006 in the journal Diabetes Care, found that while vitamin D on its own did not effectively lower the risk of an overabundance of sugar in the blood, a combined daily intake of > 1,200 mg calcium and > 800 IU vitamin D could effectively lower the risk of type 2 diabetes.
Vitamin D And The Causes Of Stress
Not only will having enough vitamin D help you cope with stress, it may also help you deal with the causes of your stress. For example, do you worry about your performance levels? If so, it’s essential you keep your vitamin D topped up: it has been shown to increase athletic performance in vitamin D-deficient athletes.1
It could also be worth considering taking a vitamin D supplementation if it’s injury that’s causing you to be anxious. It can help your body to absorb calcium, helping to strengthen your bones, and has been shown in studies1 to help reduce the incidence of stress fractures – one of the most common sports injuries – as a result. Vitamin D deficiency has also been associated with an increased incidence of illness and muscle injury, and adequate vitamin D levels are thought to be important for muscle repair after injury,2 and in injury prevention as well.
Vitamin D could also be of help if you worry about your weight – especially if it tends to gather around your waist. In studies, vitamin D supplementation has been associated with a lower waist-to-hip ratio, as well as body fat reduction.3
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How Does It Affect Mental Health
Could a lack of B12 be a source of mental health problems? It certainly sounds plausible. Given its roll in regulating the brain and nervous system, it sounds like a prime candidate.
But what does the evidence say?
In 2007, McGill University published a paper reviewing the evidence1.
They noted there is decades of evidence showing that B12 deficiency correlated with mental health issues2. However, this is not proof in itself, as it could be that the effect that anxiety and depression have on our appetite leads to a diet that is poor in vitamins.
However, more recent evidence has suggested there may be a stronger link. A meta-analysis by Oxford University found that there was evidence that B12 supplements improved mental health3.
What remains unclear is whether it could help everyone, or whether it only helps people who are already folate deficient.
Not all studies agree. A 2003 meta-analysis by the Cochrane Collaboration looked at whether B12 could improve the mental health of people with dementia4. They concluded:
“From the three studies involving people with dementia or cognitive impairment and low blood levels of vitamin B12 eligible for inclusion in this review there was no statistically significant effect of vitamin B12 supplementation on cognition.”