Vitamin D is most known for its effects on bone and muscle health. Vitamin D has an enormous impact on our health: it regulates several hundred genes. Consequently, it is important for heart, immunity, metabolic support, eye, and skin health. There is emerging evidence that vitamin D plays a crucial role in immunity and reviews have shown vitamin D can reduce risk for acute respiratory tract infections [1].

Vitamin D is produced when our skin is exposed to sunlight. That’s how we get up to 90% of our vitamin D and certain foods like fatty fish, milk and eggs are also rich in vitamin D contributing the remaining 10%. Especially during winter it can be a challenge to get enough. Also increasing use of sun protection has lowered our access to vitamin D, just like the increasingly indoor lifestyle.

In fact, 88% of the global population has insufficient vitamin D levels [2]. If you want to know your exact vitamin D level the most common way to measure in your body is through a blood test. These tests include measuring calcifediol, which is the most common form of vitamin D in your blood.

Please contact your physician or healthcare practitioner’s office for a vitamin D test. Your physician may also advise you to take vitamin D without pre-testing your levels if you are likely not getting sufficient (e.g. being home-bound, having dark skin pigmentation, living in Northern latitudes).

There are different units for representing vitamin D levels namely ng/ml and nmol/l. For information purposes, we have created an overview of what typically is considered an optimal levels of vitamin [3]. Please consult your healthcare practitioner to determine what is best for you.