Top 10 Vitamin D Immune Boosting Foods You Must Eat

hello health champions today I want to talk about vitamin D the best ways to

get it into your body and the top 10 foods to get it through diets coming

right up

hey I'm doctor Ekberg I'm a holistic doctor and a former Olympic decathlete

and if you want to truly master health by understanding how the body really

works make sure you subscribe and hit that notification bell so you don't miss

anything ironically the first thing we have to

know about vitamin D is that it's not a vitamin vitamin D is actually a hormone

because we can make it ourselves and a vitamin by definition is something that

has to be obtained through the diet like most hormones we need it in very very

tiny amounts so its measured in micrograms or international units one

microgram is 40 international units of vitamin D the hallmark of a deficiency

is called rickets rickets is a softening of bone it's a malformation of bones

when the calcium can't get deposited because we don't have enough vitamin d

the bones get soft and crooked and miss shapen the normal way that we make

vitamin D that we don't get it through the diet we manufacture it is from

exposure to the Sun it's called the sunshine vitamin and we are supposed to

make enough just from a little bit of sun exposure we can't also get it

through the diet and when we do it comes in two forms one is called vitamin d2

also known as Peugeot Calcifer all and the other one is d3 called

cholecalciferol and if you notice how close this name is to cholesterol that

gives you a hint of what the building block is we use cholesterol to

manufacture cholecalciferol so vitamin d3 is the form that humans and animals

make and vitamin d2 is the form that plants made in either case

vitamin D is made from ultraviolet light so when they manufacture it

synthetically they actually irradiate it so if they make d2 from plant source

they irradiated and if they make it from an animal

source they irradiated grease from lamb's wool but sunlight

isn't all we need we also need healthy organs so first the Sun hits the skin

the skin makes cholecalciferol or vitamin d3 but we're not done then the

d3 has to get to the liver and be processed in two kalsa dial and we're

still not done because the kidney has to finish the process and turn it into

calcitriol which is the final product so if we have a fatty liver or we have some

kidney disease then we can't complete this process and we don't get the final

product of vitamin D that we actually use called calcitriol another thing

that's good to know is that because vitamin D is fat soluble it can be

stored unlike vitamin C and vitamin B which are

water soluble they have to be replenished much more frequently vitamin D we can

have a store for weeks and months we don't have to get it every day we can

build up a reservoir and then we'll be fine through the winter for example so

why is vitamin D so important what is it that it does well it's involved with

calcium metabolism and calcium is one of the most important minerals in the body

not just for bone but it also does a thousand different things in the body as

signaling molecules vitamin D helps the body absorb calcium from your digestive

tract and it also monitors how the kidneys excrete it so it helps bring it

in and it helps manage how it's excreted it also works with calcitonin which is

the parathyroid hormone the parathyroid hormone

puts calcium in the bone and then it reduces and pulls calcium out of the

bone into the bloodstream so that's a constant exchange and in the short term

it's much more important to have the proper level of calcium in the blood

than to have it in the bone because the bone that's important for years to come

so we have a stable skeleton when we don't have the proper blood calcium

levels then we can't make it through the next few minutes calcium and vitamin D

work together and vitamin D manages and works together to produce proper muscle

tone and it produces the proper signaling in the nervous system and it

is an immune activator these are the basic underlying mechanisms and that's

why vitamin D and calcium are so crucial because these mechanisms participate in

virtually everything that happens in your body every time they do some new

research they find more ways than vitamin D is important so they find that

low levels of vitamin D is associated with higher levels of cancer higher

levels of heart disease higher levels of fatigue more obesity and more depression

and that more they look the more they find that vitamin D is crucial for that

function so it's almost like we don't have to ask what's vitamin D involved

with but rather is there anything that it doesn't do is there any function

where it's not involved and they pretty much haven't really found anything so

that's why there's so much talk recently about vitamin D and one of the most

important that is very current is the immune issues that vitamin C and vitamin

D are both incredibly important for the immune system to function properly so

what about deficiencies are they common well the deficiency is classified as

having less than 20 nanograms that's 20 billionths of a gram

per milliliter of blood and they found that they did a study in the u.s. 42% of

Caucasians were deficient that's fair skinned people who have an easy time to

make vitamin D from the Sun they're the best at making it Hispanics have a

little bit harder time of making vitamin D and they had 69% of people were

deficient and african-americans over 80% of people were deficient because the

darker the skin the more pigment you have the more it interferes with the

vitamin D manufacture so while less than 20 nanograms is deficient a normal or

sufficient level is considered 30 to 50 and some people argue that the higher

the better and they say that maybe we should be 80 200 nanograms that that

would enhance things further and I don't subscribe to that opinion because even

though deficient is a bad thing that doesn't mean that more than sufficient

is better it's not like it's supposed to do something it's just that the absence

of it prevents the body from doing certain things that's not the same thing

as saying that more is always better and in fact with vitamin D you can get

toxicity effects it is possible to have toxicity you have to work at it pretty

hard but it is possible and to get up in the 80 to 100 nanogram range is

typically only possible through pretty heavy supplementation so here's what it

typically looks like if you get it in supplement form and the recommended

daily intake or daily allowance used to be 200 international units and in 1997

they changed that and they said that we probably need about 400 IU's and I'm not

sure why if that was just because they discovered more people were deficient or

because people are getting less healthy and spending less time in the Sun and

getting fresh air and so forth from 1997 400

IU's were recommended for adults and 600 IU's were recommended for elderly

because as you get older you use it less efficiently and you make it less

efficiently now here's the interesting question for you because someone took

all of the fortified foods because they can make synthetic cheap vitamins and

sprinkle it in all the milk and all the orange juice and on all the cereals

virtually every processed food out there is fortified with vitamin D and when

they added all that up they found that the average person received about 2,400

about four to six times the recommended daily allowance from synthetic vitamin D

so how then were all these people deficient how is it possible to get all

that synthetic vitamin D and still be deficient well in my opinion I think it

is because the synthetic vitamin D is not the same when we irradiate yeast or

when we irradiate Greece it can never be the same way as

the original mechanism that your body manufactures it and most of that

fortification is also the D to the Ergo Calcifer all because it's much cheaper

to make and the body isn't really good at using that but it's not the only

factor because it's all the other mechanisms it's all the other pathways

in the body that utilize and put things together so any part that's not working

the less healthier we get overall the less efficiently we're going to be using

the vitamin D as well we had a patient come in a couple of years ago and her

blood work showed that she was very deficient he was under 20 and her

medical doctor gave her 50,000 I use of synthetic vitamin D and her levels

hardly changed they came up maybe one or two points and then we put her on

a program of whole food supplements real food and a very low dose of a natural

vitamin D called cataplexy d and within a few weeks her levels were up to 58 so

a small small amount of something that the body could actually use was much

much more potent than tens of thousands of units of synthetic vitamin D so I

think it's not just the number that matters but it's the quality and how

well it fits in with a bigger picture so let's go over the best food sources to

get real whole natural vitamin D and it's can interesting that vitamin C is

only available in plant food and vitamin D is only available in animal food there

is virtually no exceptions to that rule we'll have a couple in here but pretty

much vitamin D being a hormone is a animal product so first let's talk about

butter if we eat 100 grams or about three and a half ounces just a little

bit less than a stick of butter the way they're sold in the u.s. then we get

sixty international units of vitamin D but are you gonna eat a stick of butter

well if you're on keto you might but if you have fat phobia like a lot of people

then you're gonna eat considerably less so let's say a serving is three

tablespoons and that might still seem a lot to some people but I eat three

tablespoons quite often I probably go through close to a stick of butter

most days those three tablespoons are only going to give us about 27

international units for that serving so it's about nine I use per tablespoon so

you're gonna have to eat to get the 400 IU's completely from butter you're gonna

have to eat about a pound and a half about six sticks of butter

and that would be pretty hard to pull off and it wouldn't probably be the best

and healthiest way in the long run either even if butter is a good food if

we eat beef short ribs it has 27 I use per hundred grams if a serving is a

hundred and fifty grams or about six ounces that would give us 41 I use and

to get the whole 400 I use we'd have to eat about a one and a half kilos or

three pounds of ribs that's pretty hefty so these are not reasonable even though

there's a good little trickle of vitamin D we're not going to be looking to

eating these foods to getting the whole supply of vitamin D beef liver same

thing 49 if a serving is a hundred then we'd have to eat about three pounds

eight point eight kilos of liver if we eat eggs now we're getting into a

reasonable range I mean it could be done hundred grams three and a half ounces

that's about two eggs has 80 if we two eggs then if we want to get the whole

400 we have to eat about 500 grams which is 10 X 9 or 10 eggs if we go into the

plant kingdom mushrooms are about the only thing that in the plant kingdom

that makes any vitamin D the richest source is called a chanterelle which is

very tasty especially sauteed in butter but it's very expensive it's hard to

come by it has 212 I use a serving might be 50

grams so we get a hundred and six if we want the whole thing from mushrooms from

chanterelles we have to eat about almost half a pound and that's a pretty big

pile the other thing to keep in mind is that the plant source are going to have

d2 it's going to be our goal Calcifer all which is not as efficient so in

order to get the same amount you probably have to double up or triple up

on the d2 and we don't know for sure or that that source is as good as the d3

that we're making ourselves pork spareribs 30% fat so it's the fat pretty

much because vitamin D is fat soluble it's going to be the fatty tissues that

have most of the vitamin D eighty-eight IU's per hundred grams

six ounce serving is a hundred and thirty-two IU's and if we eat one pound

of pork spareribs then you would get the 400 IU's from there alone and this could

you could definitely argue that that's possible if you go into a restaurant and

you get a whole rack of ribs that's probably at least that much but if you

did that every day then you might get tired of ribs before long and now we're

going to talk about the best item so this is really some of the very few

sources that are you can reasonably get all of your vitamin D from a food source

and they're gonna be fish based for the most part so the lean fish not having so

much fat like cod or flounder or sole or white fish they'll have somewhere

between a hundred to 400 IU's and if a serving is 150 grams or six ounces now

we're talking 150 to 600 IU's so you could get the whole daily supply from

about a hundred to four hundred grams so moderate to a very large serving

depending on the fish and by the time we get to the fatty fish the numbers get

even better so things like salmon or mackerel or even eel if you can get that

now we're getting up toward a thousand so salmon would be more in the 400 range

eel would be more in the thousand range if a serving is 150 grams you could

easily get your whole daily supply from one serving so you'd only have to eat

about 40 to a hundred grams about one and a half to three and a half ounces to

get that 400 IU's and then we get to once more mushrooms so I don't know if

you could array chanterelles but once you shine some UV

light on mushrooms they start making vitamin D they make the Ergo Calcifer

all the d2 and they make a lot of it so if you put them in a saw solarium if you

put them in on a Sun tanning bed or out in the Sun for 10 minutes or so you're

gonna get about a thousand I use in those mushrooms per hundred grams and if

you eat that serving you're gonna get the full thousand from one serving of

mushrooms but you have to put them under UV light either in the Sun and a strong

Sun or you could do it even faster if you have some UV light you'd only have

to eat about an ounce and a half to get that 400 IU's but like we said the Ergo

kalsa for all the d2 is not as potent as the d3 so these really are the best food

sources to get vitamin D and even the so it might be hard to consume enough of

these on a regular basis it's kind of tough to get vitamin D from food only

assuming that you never get out into the Sun at all and if that's the case then I

would suggest that the last one the first one on the list cod liver oil is

going to be your best bet for a simple way to get all of your vitamin D on a

daily basis three and a half ounces 100 gram gives you 10,000 IU's which is more

than you need so a serving being a tablespoon would give you 1,500 and to

get the 400 IU's you'd only need a little under a teaspoon so if you take

somewhere between a teaspoon and a tablespoon of cod liver oil then you're

gonna get your full daily supply of vitamin D and not only that but you're

gonna get it in a form that's very absorb Bowl and you're gonna get it

together with plenty of vitamin A and there's going to be a lot of those

associated factors like adek in there as well so often times when we

talk about this we're kind of assuming that

gonna get all your vitamin D from one source from one food the food is really

more just to supplement the best way still and always to get your vitamin D

is from the Sun that's how humans have done it for thousands hundreds of

thousands of years but there are some limitations if you have dark skin the

darker the skin the harder it is for you to make vitamin D that's why

afro-american people have more deficiencies because even though they

tolerate the Sun much better they also have to spend more time in the Sun to

make that vitamin D the area of exposure we don't show off much skin anymore we

wear clothes most of the time we sit indoors we work indoors we sit driving

our cars we drive from one garage to another garage and we rarely see

daylight unless we make an effort to go outside and once you go outside then

it's the area of skin that's exposed to the Sun that matters right so if you're

only showing your face that might only be five or ten percent of your body

surface and you're not going to make a whole lot of vitamin D the angle of the

Sun matters so at the equator the Sun shines pretty much straight down and the

UV radiation is pretty intense the further you get away from the equator

the less the angle the inclination of the sun rays and by the time you get up

to areas like where I'm from in Sweden where you have 55 60 degrees away from

the equator the angle is so slight that it's only in the middle of summer that

you make any significant vitamin D and then we have sunblock in recent years

we've been made aware of the cancer producing effects of excess Sun so then

people go overboard and now they're afraid of the Sun and they don't even

want to spend even 30 seconds in the Sun and all the cosmetics and the skin

lotions and everything we put on have have sunblock and that effectively

prevents completely the production of vitamin D also now let's say that we

venture outside and we try to make some vitamin D how much can we make how long

does it take well on someone like me I'm Caucasian I'm fair-skinned I live in

Atlanta that's 34 degrees north of the Equator if I go outside in June or July

and I'm gonna make a thousand I use a vitamin D I have to spend about 20

minutes outside in in bright Sun about three times a week and I only have to

expose 20% of my skin so that's like hands forearms and face so if I still

wear like a short sleeve shirt I can pull that off in about 20 minutes if I

take my shirt off if I'm bare skin from the waist up now I have about 50% of my

skin exposed and I only have to spend about eight minutes in the Sun to get to

make a thousand I use if I also wear shorts so I have about 80% of my skin

exposed I only have to spend five minutes in the middle of the summer so

these times are gonna go up a little bit if we're talking April or September and

depending on where you live you're gonna figure this out so I would recommend

that you try to get most of your vitamin D from the Sun that is how humans have

received it that's how we have made it for as long as we have been here on the

planet so even though Sun can be in excess can be damaging if you do it in

moderation if you don't stay out until you get sunburned if you just get

moderate exposure then it is a healthful vitamin it's a nutrient that your body

needs then I suggest you also eat some real food because it's not just about

the vitamin D it's also about the other factors it's about the calcium and

it's about the digestion it's about essential fatty acids they all work

together to transport and produce and interact with each other

if you eat real food and you take care of your digestion then you're gonna have

the best chance of making and utilizing the vitamin D properly also and if you

feel like you are at risk that you may not be getting enough Sun or you may not

be getting enough through the food if you don't eat fish on a regular basis

then I would my best recommendation would be a cod liver oil supplement if

you have access to some of the things we use like a duplex D or whole food

supplements they would also be good but cod liver oil is so easy it's

inexpensive it's available everywhere just pop a couple of those and you'd be

fine if you enjoyed this video make sure that you also check out that one thank

you so much for watching I'll see you in the next video