From Sunshine to Supplements: Mastering Vitamin D3

In this episode of 'Ask the Chiropractor,' Dr. Brant Hulsebus from Rockford, Illinois, dives into the importance of Vitamin D3, particularly in relation to New Year's resolutions. Discussing its role as the 'sunshine vitamin,' he explains how geographical location impacts Vitamin D3 levels, the necessity of sunlight exposure, and how to supplement effectively with healthy fats like fish oil. Dr. Hulsebus also provides insights on different forms of supplementation, including UVB light bulbs. Additionally, he touches on other health tips related to omega-3 and exercise. For those with specific chiropractic questions, Dr. Hulsebus encourages leaving comments for future discussions.

www.rockforddc.com

Transcript

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Hello, Dr. Brant Hulsebus here, and welcome to another edition of Ask the Chiropractor. Ask the Chiropractor is my little podcast that I do when someone has a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, I try to answer. I'm a chiropractor here in Rockford, Illinois. I'm a proud graduate of Palmer College of Chiropractic, and I'm happy to be the team chiropractor of the Rockford Icehogs. Let's dive into it. This is like a part four or maybe a part three following up on my New Year's resolutions. I did one, now it's about four weeks ago on New Year's resolutions and I had questions about three different areas. One was about the omega 3 and the fish oil. So about two weeks ago I did a whole one on what I look for in fish oil and what I look for, why fish oil is important, why I think it's so essential that you supplement that. Next one I did was about exercise and moving and I just did a whole one about the importance of making sure you get up and move every 30 minutes and go for a walk and work on your balance exercises too, how vital that is. So if you have questions on those two, just go back to the previous episodes. I'll go into much more depth, but this is the final one I'm going to talk about with the New Year's resolutions, and I talked briefly a little bit about vitamin D3. I always say not R2 D2, but D3. Why is vitamin D3 so important? Why do we need to supplement vitamin D3, and what does it do? Why is it so important? We've all heard about being deficient of vitamin D3. It's a major problem. That strictly depends on where you live. Vitamin D3 is a sunshine vitamin. If I'm in Florida year round, or somewhere near the equator, where it stays warm most of the year, I don't really have to worry about my vitamin D3, because I'm getting outside every day. The measuring stick to see whether or not you're deficient in vitamin D3 is, because it's a sunshine vitamin, if you're not getting enough sunshine, then you're probably deficient. And how do we know what enough sunshine is? The rule of thumb is a half an hour outside each day in the equivalent of your swimsuit. So if you're outside and you have a pool in your backyard or you want to lay out in the sun and you're out there for 30 minutes in your swimsuit, then you're all good. You don't have to take any vitamin D3 that day. You got plenty the natural correct way. In the summertime, if you're in t shirt and shorts, maybe you're playing golf and you're out there for an hour. You got plenty of vitamin D that day. No problem. Sometimes in the summer we might not get enough vitamin D3 because maybe we work a 12 hour day. I know here in the clinic we're open 12 hours on Monday. I don't get outside on Mondays. I don't really get my vitamin D3 on Mondays. I supplement vitamin D3 on Mondays because I'm not getting enough in the summertime. Now, if I Thursday my day off and I work in the yard all day, I don't take my vitamin D3. Actually, I keep my vitamin D3 here at the clinic at work because I know if I'm at home, the odds are I'm going to be outside doing stuff. I don't really need to worry about it. In the winter time, when it gets cold, like today, it's got a negative wind chill, right? It's really cold outside, so now we're not going outside at all in our swimsuit or anything. We don't want any skin showing. It's too cold. So now we have to take vitamin D3. Now, what's interesting about vitamin D3 is we're not really meant to eat it, we're really meant to get it through our skin. And because we're not meant to eat it, a lot of times people ask me, what food can I take that has it in it? Can I take a, can I eat something without a vitamin D3? And the answer is really no. I mean it's not really something that we can synthesize from our food. You know like a tiger, tigers don't eat a lot of produce, right? And we eat vitamin C from colorful vegetables. But tigers are able to synthesize their own vitamin C because their anatomy and physiology is different than ours, so they don't need to do the vitamin, they don't need to take vitamin C. They don't need to eat an orange. They don't need to have a bell pepper. They just eat meat, they're carnivores, and they're able to synthesize their own vitamin C through different areas. So vitamin D3, it's like that for us. We don't have to eat anything with vitamin D3 in it because we get it from the sunshine. But if we're not getting enough sunshine, then we're not getting enough vitamin D3. So we're not meant to eat it, so we have to trick our systems into absorbing it. So if you do vitamin D3, you have to take it with a healthy fat. And a healthy fat, the healthy fat I take it with, without a doubt, is my fish oil. It's actually built in. So when I do my fish oil, the vitamin D3 is already in there, so when I swallow the pill, I get both. And that's the idea too. It should be in a gel cap or a dropper. I got some that's in a dropper too. If I'm not feeling good, I double my vitamin D3. And then the vitamin D3 with the dropper. So I'll do the normal ones with the, in the fish oil, and then I'll add a supplement with the dropper to make sure I'm getting enough vitamin D3. You see a lot of people catch the flu in the wintertime, right? And they say, oh, we're in flu season. I don't think we're in flu season. I think we're in lack of movement season because it got too cold to be outside doing stuff. I think we have a lot of stress with the holidays, which cause, we know that causes subluxation and other issues. We also increase our sugar intake during that time of the year, and we also start to deplete our vitamin D3 levels. This research shows that people who supplement vitamin D3 are extremely low risk of catching the flu. People who don't are extremely high. And it's almost the opposite when it comes to getting the flu shot versus the vitamin D3, which one's better for you? I can tell you if I was in Vegas and I had to bet on vitamin D3 or a flu shot, I'm gonna put all my money on vitamin D3. Okay? I'm not saying don't get the flu shot. That's not my, I don't give them and I don't prescribe them. I don't have anything to do with them. I'm just telling you I would definitely do my vitamin D3 if I was worried about the flu. And I'd also cut down the sugar and I'd also get more exercise. I covered that in the last couple of videos though. So vitamin D3 you have to take with a healthy fat. Now a healthy fat could be your eggs, could be your avocados, those are all healthy fats. It doesn't have to be fish oil. You can take it with any of those healthy fats you have. If you don't have any of those, a little bit of olive oil. So if you have a supplement, a vitamin at home, that has all the daily vitamins you need in it, and it says it has vitamin D3 in it, technically they probably put it in there, so legally it probably is in there. But you can't absorb it unless you have a healthy fat. So if it's not, that vitamin doesn't have a healthy fat in it, I'm going to tell you what, if it's not a gel cap it, 99 percent of the time it does not have a healthy fat. You're not getting any vitamin D3 from that. Now I'm not saying you have to get rid of that vitamin, I'm just saying you might want to do that dropper thing I was talking about and include that with it. Or just take it with your fish oil, because you can't get omega 3s without getting fish oil. Get, check the previous video, I talked more about that. You can't get that in a daily vitamin either. So people come in and tell me, I take my daily vitamin. I'm like, ah, yeah, it's in there, but you're not absorbing it. Other people tell me they get in their milk and their dairy products. That's not D three, D one and D two are the ones they put in dairy products. And D 1D two's job is to be a taxi service to carry calcium from your digestive system into your bloodstream so you get enough calcium. That's why they say, make sure your vitamin D levels are high for calcium. And that's D1, D2, that's not D3. Okay, so why they all have the same name. They can't have different names more than D one, D two, D three. I don't know. I'm not the guy in the chemistry lab that gave them names, but vitamin D three is different than vitamin one, D one and D two and the vitamins D three. You're not gonna give them the at fortified dairy products with vitamin D in it. Now, do you need other vitamin D? Yeah, if you wanna get calcium into your system, you definitely need the other vitamin D. So I'm not telling you not to do the ones with vitamin D, I'm just explaining that vitamin D is different than the vitamin D from the sunshine. But we have some people with digestive issues. Maybe it's Crohn's disease or some other issues, and they take the vitamin D supplements in the oil, with the healthy fat. And they still don't, their levels still don't go up. Now what do you do? The good news is, there's two types of tanning bed lights. UVA as in apple. Those are the ones that give you the nice tan and the skin cancer. And then there's UVB as in boy. everybody. And those are the ones that give us the sunburn and the vitamin D3. So they sell specific lights that you can turn on in your house and sit underneath, and your skin will hit those lights and know you make vitamin D3. Now if you're going to use one of these lamps, I do recommend that you show as much skin as possible, right? In privacy, so you get the maximum effect of that light. And a lot of people spend a lot of money on these medical UVB lights. Here's my tip, my little trick. Go to the pet store. Buy a reptile light bulb that says UVB on it. Make sure it's doesn't, make sure it's one that does not give off heat, right? Make sure it's one that just says UVB and that's the same light bulb, but just a different box. And if that box is a lot cheaper than the other box, maybe for sad lights, seasonal depression, that's the vitamin D deficiency again. Same light at the pet store. Just get that light. So I recommend you put that light somewhere and you put it where like in a room that you sit in a lot. A lot of times I tell people to put a bunch in their bathrooms. So I always tease the bathrooms in the room, we usually expose the most skin with the lights on, so I recommend doing that. And get your vitamin D that way with two of the light bulbs. It's a little trick, a little hack I have. I had one patient, supposed to take between 2, units of vitamin D every day. I had one patient, she was doing 5, 000 a day and her levels didn't go up. They got all the way up to 50, 000 a day. I told her about the light bulbs. She got the light bulbs. She did it. She said, make the light bulbs and bam, her vitamin D levels up. Regulated right away. That's a good way to do it. Like for my kids, when they were really little, they used to like to play dress up. I have four daughters. We used to switch out some of the can lights in the basement and with some of the, Reptile light bulbs, and the girls would be down there playing, getting tons of vitamin D while they were playing. There's lots of ways you can do this, get the vitamin D in. And by the way, the lighter your complexion the more probably deficient you are, the more you the shorter, the better you are at making it. Because if you have very light complexion, you sunburn readily that means you came from a part of the world that doesn't get a lot of sunlight, so your skin's really good at making it. If you're really dark complexion, then you probably, if your family originated from near the equator, then you're probably not very good at making it through your skin. So if you have really dark complexion, think about more time under the light. If you have really light complexion, think about less time under the light. Alright, so there you have a little story about Vitamin D3. So I just wanted to talk a little bit more about my Chiropractic New Year's Resolutions and I guess I got a lot of comments and feedbacks on the fish oil, the exercise, and the Vitamin D. So I wanted to make each one their own private video. So that's what I did. Now, if you have a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, go ahead and leave a comment below. Because remember, an optometrist, a dentist, medical doctor, they don't study chiropractic. They study optometry, dentistry, and medicine. Chiropractors study chiropractic. And the only person that can answer a question about chiropractic is a chiropractor. So leave a question or comment below, and maybe next week you'll be the question of the week. Thank you.