Vitamin D may improve your energy levels. Here’s how much you need each day

You might have heard that vitamin D can be crucial for bone health, and that taking supplements  may be in order if you’re not getting enough naturally from sunlight or from D-rich foods like eggs, oily fish, or fortified milks.

You’ve maybe even heard that vitamin D has been shown to improve cognitive function and to lower the risk of heart attack. 

It may come as welcome news to learn that vitamin D could also heighten your energy levels.

That makes sense, since, according to the Cleveland Clinic, some of the top symptoms of vitamin D deficiency in adults are fatigue, muscle weakness, and low mood, which can lead to feeling down and exhausted. 

What is vitamin D?

Vitamin D, also referred to as calciferol, is a fat-soluble vitamin available in foods, either naturally or through fortification, and through supplements, according to the National Institute of Health Oddice of Dietary Supplements. It is also produced within the body’s cells when ultraviolet (UV) rays from sunlight hit the skin, triggering vitamin D synthesis.

No matter what the source, though, vitamin D must be activated within the body—first through the liver, which converts vitamin D to calcidiol, and then in the kidney, which forms what’s known as calcitriol.

Once activated, vitamin D promotes calcium absorption in the gut, prevents muscle cramps and spasms, and leads to healthy bone growth.

Vitamin D also plays a role in reducing inflammation, immune function, and glucose metabolism.

What does science say about vitamin D and energy?

A fair amount of research backs the idea that vitamin D may help put some pep in your step.

A study published in the journal Medicine compared the results of two groups with fatigue and vitamin D deficiency—one of which was given vitamin D supplements, the other a placebo. In just four weeks, the group given vitamin D experienced significant improvements in energy levels.

Similarly, a small study out of UK, found vitamin D vital for making our muscles work efficiently and boosting energy levels. It showed that muscle function improves with vitamin D supplements, suggesting that fatigue could be due to “reduced efficiency of the mitochondria: the ‘power stations’ within each cell of the body.”

One study of soccer players found a link between vitamin D and improved athletic performance; another found vitamin D improved the energy levels of recent kidney transplant patients. Researchers have even linked vitamin D insufficiency to the chronic fatigue of fibromyalgia, and with fatigue and weakness in pre-menopausal women.

Do I need a vitamin D supplement?

Before rushing to take D supplements, experts recommend seeing your doctor to test for vitamin deficiencies and to rule out other conditions.

“If someone is dealing with low energy, my initial response would be to recommend a series of tests before considering supplements,” Dr. Elizabeth Sharp, internist and medical director at Health Meet Wellness in New York City, previously told Fortune. “Testing for vitamin deficiencies, such as vitamin D and Vitamin B 12, especially in vegetarians, is crucial. Additionally, I would screen for thyroid disorders if other symptoms suggest such a condition, and I would also rule out anemia and iron deficiency. It’s important to identify the underlying cause accurately to ensure appropriate and effective treatment.”

Experts caution that a supplement is unlikely to help if you’re not deficient in a nutrient. Still, notes a Harvard newsletter, “It’s very hard to get the vitamin D you need from your diet; oily fish and fortified dairy products are the only important sources.” An analysis of 2013–2016 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) data showed that 92% of men and more than 97% of women ingested insufficient amounts of vitamin D daily from food and beverages. So supplements likely make sense for most adults. 

Once vitamin D supplements are determined to be appropriate, exercise caution when making your purchase.

“Be wary of supplements that are far cheaper than the rest or look like a good deal,” a naturopathic endocrinologist and author of Is This Normal?, previously told Fortune. “Often these are using poor quality ingredients, and in some cases … they won’t actually have what the label lists.” The U.S. Food and Drug Administration doesn’t approve the safety or effectiveness of supplements.

Consumers may want to consult the National Institute of Health [Office of Dietary Supplements] as well as subscription-based sources, such as Consumer Lab, which looks into issues ranging from possible contaminants to making sure a supplement contains what it claims to.

How much vitamin D do you need?

Recommended daily intake for adults up to age 70 is 600 IU and 800 IU for adults over 70,according to the NIH. Brighten adds, “It is also important to be getting enough sunlight.” She also underscores the importance of testing D levels to help determine what you need.

Don’t overdo it on supplements, caution experts. Taking too much vitamin D can be toxic in rare cases, as with an 89-year-old U.K. man who died in March in part from vitamin D toxicity (though he did have several underlying conditions).

Further, notes the Office of Dietary Supplements, vitamin D can interact poorly with some medications, including statins and steroids, so be sure to discuss with your doctor.

 

 

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Are your hormones trying to tell you something?

From the moment of our first period to the slings and arrows of the menopause and beyond, hormones play a huge role in our everyday health. They influence everything from joie de vivre to weight and fertility. For that reason, hormone replacement therapy (HRT) has long been a helpful solution, upping levels of the female sex hormones estrogen and progesterone which naturally decline with age.

Contrary to popular belief, though, HRT is not just for the menopause– different forms of the medication can be used to address an imbalance of other hormones in the body at any time of life.

As Dr Gareth Nye, ambassador for the Society for Endocrinology explains, our bodies have around 50 major hormones, known as the ‘endocrine system’– all excreted by our glands and which instruct cells to perform a particular task.

‘Our hormones are all linked; they’re a network, so changes in one area have knock-on effects elsewhere,’ Dr Nye says.

Hormones are a form of signalling molecule which govern all the systems of the body, including how efficiently they run. When they are imbalanced, the effects can be significant– and this is when it might be time to go to your GP. Here are some of our most common problems– and the hormones that may be causing them…

HAS YOUR LIBIDO GONE FLAT?

It might be time to think about replenishing your testosterone levels. While it’s often assumed to be an exclusively male sex hormone, women actually produce three to four times more testosterone than estrogen during their 20s and 30s. It’s still at far lower levels than in men, but it plays a crucial role in brain health by increasing the amount of dopamine in the body– a chemical messenger which plays a role in thinking, decision-making and pleasure.

Just as estrogen and progesterone levels plummet with age, so do those for testosterone. Not all women will notice the effects, but experts say that, if after starting on standard HRT treatment, you’re still left with symptoms such as low mood, insomnia, anxiety and a lacklustre libido, then testosterone replacement might be the answer. It’s been credited with restoring women’s sex drive and ‘transforming’ our mental health.

There is also evidence that men and women with low testosterone could be more likely to have heart problems. Upping levels might not only protect against that, say experts, but could also protect women’s muscle mass and brittle bones from osteoporosis. The advice is to try standard HRT first, but if symptoms such as low libido, anxiety and insomnia persist, you can ask to be prescribed testosterone cream.

Women who think they could benefit from testosterone should contact their GP and ask to be referred to a menopause specialist. Many private menopause doctors will also prescribe their own formula. The availability of testosterone to British women is set to increase with the advent of an Australian cream developed especially for women called AndroFeme – the company behind it plans to submit an application for a UK licence later this year.

ARE YOU TOO HAIRY?

This time it might be too much testosterone. Some of this crucial hormone is produced in the brain, while the rest comes from the ovaries and the adrenal glands. It means that, if the ovaries are not functioning properly, normal levels of testosterone can be disrupted.

The one in ten women with polycystic ovary syndrome, which causes ovaries to enlarge and makes it harder to release eggs, may find that they over-produce testosterone as part of this ovarian malfunction. This causes excess hair on the body and face. Some medications, such as steroids and anti-inflammatories, which affect the adrenal gland, can also trigger a similar effect. Treatments include taking a contraceptive pill to balance out the male hormones, and a cream called eflornithine, which can slow the growth of unwanted facial hair.

TUMMY FAT HARD TO SHIFT?

This may be a sign of reduction in estrogen levels as the menopause approaches. Estrogen helps to regulate the body’s metabolism and body weight by acting on another hormone called leptin.

The more leptin in the body, the more full you feel after eating. But as estrogen levels naturally decline, those for leptin also fall and appetite ramps up as a result. Studies have also found that the way fat is distributed round the body changes as we approach the menopause, too. Even if we don’t put on weight, fat stores are shifted to the abdomen. Stress can also cause extra weight around the middle thanks to the release of another hormone, cortisol.

It’s important to take steps to prevent or reverse this weight gain. Excess weight around the abdomen is known to increase the risk of heart disease and type 2 diabetes, and some types of cancer including breast, colon and endometrial.

A Mediterranean diet based on whole foods, with limited processed carbohydrates and sugary products, will help – as will regular exercise and reducing stress.

FEELING THIRSTY AND TIRED?

You may be resistant to insulin, a hormone produced by the pancreas to keep blood sugar or glucose levels in check. Normally, insulin works as the ‘key’ to unlock the cells in our muscles, fat and liver, allowing glucose to enter and provide energy.

But if we’re storing too much fat around the pancreas and liver, and regularly have high blood sugar, our cells can become ‘insulin resistant’, which means they no longer take in glucose and the sugar stays in the blood. This ends up in our urine, pulling more water out of the body and causing dehydration and thirst. What results is type2 diabetes, a condition which affects four million of us and can cause serious problems such as heart disease, high blood pressure and damage to the nerves and eyes.

It’s important to see your GP if you’re feeling very tired or thirsty all the time, and have an increased need to urinate. Other symptoms include blurred vision and itchy genitals. You don’t have to be overweight– although obesity is a major risk factor for type 2, it is thought to be linked to how and where individuals store fat.

Losing weight can send the condition into remission, and blood-sugar-lowering medication, such as metformin, can help manage the effects.

NOTICED UNUSUAL BLEEDING?

It could be a sign of too much estrogen and should always be checked by your GP, as this has been linked to an increased risk of uterine cancer.

The endometrium – the tissue which lines the uterus – is particularly sensitive to estrogen. This grows during the menstrual cycle to prepare for an egg to be released, and is shed– prompting menstruation – when that egg isn’t fertilised.

Too much estrogen can cause too much tissue to grow, potentially leading to endometrial cancer which affects nearly 10,000 women a year in the UK. Women who have never been pregnant are particularly at risk.

‘It’s as though your body knows what normal growth is to support a pregnancy, but if you haven’t been pregnant, the endometrium thinks it has to keep on growing,’ Dr Nye says.

There are other explanations: unusual bleeding can also be linked to fibroids, chlamydia or polycystic ovary syndrome. It’s also normal to have some irregular bleeding in the first few months after starting a new contraceptive pill. See your GP about any changes that are not normal for you – such as bleeding in between periods, very heavy periods or bleeding after the menopause.

IS YOUR FACE PUFFY?

You might be overproducing cortisol. Stress activates the body’s ‘fight or flight’ mechanism. When that happens, the hypothalamus, a gland in the brain, instructs the adrenal gland to release cortisol. Known as the ‘stress hormone’, it causes blood pressure to rise– an important mechanism designed to prepare us to react.

But regularly releasing too much cortisol can lead to a condition called Cushing’s syndrome. The main symptom is a distinctive pattern of weight gain on the chest and tummy, with a build-up of fat on the back of the neck and shoulders, and a red, puffy and rounded face. The most common cause alongside stress is medication – anything that works on the adrenal gland, such as anti-inflammatories and steroids taken to treat asthma, rheumatoid arthritis or eczema.

People with the condition are four times more likely to die from heart disease, but symptoms can be managed with drugs. It’s also advisable to reduce stress levels and avoid high-fat foods.

 

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Depression is more than low mood – it’s a change of consciousness

You’ve lost a habitable Earth. You’ve lost the invitation to live that the Universe extends to us at every moment. You’ve lost something that people don’t even know is. That’s why it’s so hard to explain.

This is one person’s experience of living with depression, as recounted in the psychologist Gail Hornstein’s book Agnes’s Jacket (2009). If you ask someone to describe what depression is like, they will often struggle to put it into words. We know a lot of the symptoms, but we still don’t understand the nature of the illness. We are like someone who knows that a fever, a cough, and loss of smell are all symptoms of something, but has no idea about the virus that causes them.

People who’ve never been through depression might assume it’s just an extreme form of feeling low. Don’t we all find that our daily activities can sometimes lose their sparkle? Yet, accounts of people with depression point in a different direction. As another person said to the psychologist Dorothy Rowe, recorded in her book The Experience of Depression (1978): ‘I awoke into a different world. It was as though all had changed while I slept: that I awoke not into normal consciousness but into a nightmare.’

Such reports support the idea that depression stands apart from other forms of everyday experience, as the philosopher Matthew Ratcliffe has emphasised in his book Experiences of Depression (2015). Depressed people often say it involves a fundamental shift, like entering a different ‘world’ – a world detached from ordinary reality and other people. Depression seems to be a more totalising kind of experience than some others. Perhaps it is even a distinct state of consciousness, and can, in turn, reveal something about the nature of consciousness itself.

The self-reports of people with depression point to a deep and interesting connection with consciousness. To make sense of this idea, think about the effect of sleeping and dreaming on your mental life, or the experience of emerging from dreamless sleep into wakeful consciousness. In these transitions, our consciousness undergoes a profound structural shift. Consider, for example, how your experience of the passage of time when dreaming diverges from your experience of time when awake: we frequently experience days and weeks passing in a dream in the space of a few waking hours. Similarly, our sense of self and identity is highly malleable in the dream: we sometimes perceive ourselves from the ‘outside’ looking down at our bodies, dream of being someone other than ourselves, or dream of being detached from a body altogether.

Similar sorts of structural changes to conscious experience occur after taking psychedelics. Examples include the well-documented phenomenon known as ‘ego dissolution’ – the breakdown and loss of self in its entirety – or the dramatic warping of space in the psychedelic state. In both dreams and psychedelic states, people report robust, wide-ranging alterations that disturb and alter not only their sensory experiences but their conception of themselves and their connection to reality and other people.

Neuroscientists and philosophers of consciousness have recently coined a new term – the global state of consciousness – to describe the structural properties of experience that varies between ordinary wakefulness, dreaming, the psychedelic state and the minimally conscious state. These states are called ‘global’ because the whole of conscious experience is altered, not just a particular element. The fine detail of what we experience in everyday waking life changes all the time (sounds, colours, odours all come and go), but the structure stays largely fixed: I feel myself to be present in the world, at the centre of an integrated, coherent point of view; time carries on flowing at the same rate; space has the same geometric structure. The global state is this overarching structure and ordinarily stays constant as particular experiences pass us by. When we dream, take psychedelics or suffer a brain injury, this structure can be altered, and we enter a different global state.

Could depression belong in this family too? What people with depression describe as their ‘world’ or their ‘nightmare’ might be a distinctive global state, in which some of the structural pillars of ordinary experience (such as the sense of self, space and time) are distorted. Not a ‘dream’ or a ‘trip’, but a state that belongs in the same group.

One clear and telling theme in reports of depression is the idea of inhabiting or falling into another ‘world’ or ‘place’. ‘For me, depression was a place,’ wrote the late journalist Sally Brampton in a 2003 article in The Telegraph. ‘The landscape is cold and black and empty. It is more terrifying and more horrible than anywhere I have ever been, even in my nightmares.’

We’d suggest this talk isn’t merely metaphorical. While depressed people are not literally in a different world, they are in a different state of consciousness – one they can become awake to and, hopefully, awake from.

Seeing depression along with other altered global states of consciousness is a theoretical rather than a clinical shift – but it could make a difference to how we treat depression further along the line. In particular, the idea can shed light on the success of psychedelic psychiatry, a recent and growing research field, which looks to treat various mental disorders with psychedelics such as ketamine, mescaline and psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms). While psychedelic psychiatry is still in its early days, initial results for depression have been promising, and major research centres have now been set up at Imperial College London and Johns Hopkins University.

But why might psychedelic therapy work as a treatment for depression? One common suggestion is that psychedelics provide individuals with an uninhibited space or window for insight and emotional release. Yet the idea that depression is an altered state of consciousness suggests a different explanation: it could be that psychedelics work by forcing a transition between global states of consciousness. First, they propel a depressed patient into a new state of consciousness, the psychedelic state. At the end of the episode, the patient must transition out of it – but into what? Perhaps, after a psychedelic trip, the patient can emerge into a state of ordinary consciousness, rather than the ‘nightmare’ of the depressed state.

The idea is that psychedelics might work to reset or reboot a patient’s global state of consciousness. On this hypothesis, being depressed is like being stuck in a dream from which you cannot wake. Psychedelics are the jolt that finally wakes you up. As Brampton wrote in her memoir Shoot the Damn Dog (2008): ‘It is like living through a waking nightmare. What we most want is somebody to take our hand, to try to connect us back to the world.’

This hypothesis can also guide investigation into the biological mechanisms involved in depression, which remain elusive. Some psychiatrists have even started to worry that depression might not be a single and unified mental disorder at all. However, if we are correct that depression is a global state of consciousness, despair is premature. After all, we don’t yet know the neural mechanisms underlying any global state of consciousness, be it wakefulness, dreaming or the psychedelic state. Indeed, the idea that depression is a global state of consciousness opens up the tantalising possibility that work in consciousness science and neuroimaging could one day inform new tests for depression.

Another theme in reports of depression is fear and alienation arising from a lack of understanding. The depressed person knows something bad is happening, but they don’t know what this is or what is causing it. Being unable to describe or relate what is happening, whether to yourself or others, can be particularly distressing. ‘It’s so difficult to describe [depression] to someone who’s never been there because it’s not sadness,’ said the author J K Rowling.

For people living with depression, can thinking about their illness as a global state of consciousness provide any immediate assistance? Knowing that you’re in an altered state of consciousness won’t make that state go away, but it might help you make sense of your experience, and recount it to others. Not everyone has been depressed, but many of us have dreamed or been drunk or high. We know about other alterations to the structure of experience, and so might have a bridge to grasping what is happening to our friends and loved ones.

We need to move away from the common but mistaken view of depression as a form of sadness, which people can simply ‘pull themselves out of’. Seeing depression as a global state moves us in the right direction. The global state stays the same while specific experiences, including emotional experiences of joy and sadness, come and go. Particular emotions are like particular events in a house, whereas depression changes the structure of the house.

Consciousness science should be able to shed light on depression – but the reverse is true too. It’s well known that ‘abnormal’ states of consciousness, such as dreaming or the psychedelic state, allow us to better understand the features of the ‘normal’ state that a healthy person occupies when awake. By distorting the experience of time, space and self, for example, we can learn about what is involved in the ordinary grasp of time, space and self. Yet, researchers have long faced a problem: the changes wrought by psychedelics are so dramatic that the intervention is a crude one, like taking a sledgehammer to the ordinary conscious state. The differences between dreaming and wakefulness can be less obvious, but a sleeping subject can’t report directly and reliably on them.

This is where the depressed state could be valuable. It involves sometimes subtle changes to ordinary wakefulness – more like the work of a scalpel than a sledgehammer – but that can be probed by interviewing people. As a result, the depressed state could be incredibly useful for exposing elusive aspects of the conscious waking state that we often take for granted. For example, by examining the changes to a depressed person’s experience of time, space and self, we come to better understand how time, space and self contribute to our ordinary experience of the world.

The psychologist Andrew Solomon hints at some of these transformations in his memoir The Noonday Demon (2001):

When you are depressed, the past and future are absorbed entirely by the present moment, as in the world of a three-year-old. You cannot remember a time when you felt better, at least not clearly; and you certainly cannot imagine a future time when you will feel better. Being upset, even profoundly upset, is a temporal experience, while depression is atemporal. Breakdowns leave you with no point of view.

Paying attention to ways in which depression alters our lives could lead to interesting new hypotheses about the function(s) of consciousness – what consciousness does for organisms. What can a person do in their ordinary state of consciousness that they can no longer do as well in a depressed state, or vice versa? How do these structural changes to time, space and self affect other mental activities? This will be an exciting direction for the next generation of philosophers and consciousness scientists.

 

This is only for your information, kindly take the advice of your doctor for medicines, exercises and so on.   

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