Vitamins You Should Be Taking During the Winter

Now that winter is well underway, it’s very important that we should be talking about vitamin D it’s essential for your bones, but it’s also essential for mood and your immunity. Normally vitamin D is synthesized in the skin so when your skin is exposed to sunshine in the summer, your skin can make up to 10,000 units of vitamin D daily.

The minimum recommended guideline for supplementing is 800 units a day, which is a tiny amount, and just helps to prevent you from a deficiency which could cause rickets, a bone disease. If your skin can make 10,000 units in the summer, we know that doses of up to 10,000 units a day are quite safe. In fact, medical studies have been done using doses up around 50,000 units per day and even as high as 300,000 units for certain types of conditions.

I myself take about 6,000 to 8,000 units per day, and I use a liquid vitamin D that comes in drops. Each drop that I place on my tongue has 1000 units. I do 6 or 7 drops after I’m done brushing my teeth. It’s good to be combining vitamin D with a meal or with some source of fat so I typically take my Omega 3’s at the same time that I take my vitamin D and that just helps it to absorb a little bit better.

Equally important to vitamin D for up taking calcium into your bones is a lesser known vitamin called vitamin K2. K1 and K2 are from the same family, but they have different roles. Vitamin K1 comes from green, leafy vegetables, and it’s involved in producing coagulation factors that we need for making a blood clot if we cut ourselves. K2 on the other hand, comes from bacteria in the gut so we could supplement with fermented foods, such as sauerkraut or natto, as well as organ meats. Egg yolks and dairy are also sources of vitamin K2.

K2 is involved in the transport of calcium coming out of the blood vessels into the bone so it amplifies the benefits for bone building that we’re getting from vitamin D. If you’re going to supplement with vitamin K2, the typical dose to use would be 100 to 200 micrograms a day.

So remember these two important ingredients for building bones, but also helping to support our immunity in these winter months.