Updates plus summary on vitamin D lecture from last week

What a wonderful day! Exam days are starting to be my favourites.. I think the exam went really well today. That's how it felt anyways.. I have now relaxed for a few hours, caught up with fitness magazines that i've got but haven't had time to read and put away all my notes and papers that had to do with this exam! What a great feeling!

Tomorrow, me and dad are going to another city to listen to more nutrition lectures the whole day. This time it's a retired doctor who has pretty much devoted his life to these things and he really knows a lot. He spends hours every day to read about new research. I will take notes and do a summary for you here later on.

I will not write a long summary about the D-vitamin lecture because I've already wrote about vitamin D before and also because they have now posted pretty much the whole lecture online so if you understand swedish then you can see it here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=syRaJVIBNnw

We in Sweden/Scandinavia are living far away from the equator. We live as far from it as northern Canada and Siberia where not many people live at all. This means that during the summers, we can get enough vitamin D from the sun a few hours a day. During fall and spring those hours are much less and during the winterns - we can't get any vitamin D at all from the sun because of that the sunrays that produces this in our skin is too low. This means that even if there is sunlight outside on a winter day - we still can't get any vitamin D.

We can store this vitamin and some peoples storage are empty before the winter, and for some it last until spring. This may be an explanation about the winter depressions and spring depressions people tend to have here.

Sunscreen blocks the ability to form the vitamin in the skin.

It hard to get enough vitamin D from the food. We can get around 100-400 IE from fish but if you are out in the sun for a half an hour, you get 10 000 IE. The recommendations in Sweden right now are 300 IE, which a lot of new research shows are way too low but still people (average) don't come up in this number. Personally I take a supplement on 1000 IE per day the last weeks (as the winter is approaching) and I can defently feel a big difference on how I normally feel during a normal swedish october/november.

There are many new researches being done when it comes to this vitamin and Mats Humble who had the lecture is mentioning MANY. They still need to do many more studies but it seems like this vitamin is important for example the immunsystem, against  depression, prevention of cancer and many other things.

I think this is so incredibly interesting and it will be fun to see if the recommendations will change soon or not.
But hey, that's another reason for me to move to Texas right? I wouldn't have to eat vitamin D pills but I could just be outside!