| DBM COMMENTPlease note: for mushrooms to be an effective and viable source of Vitamin D, they MUST have been exposed to or grown in SUNLIGHT. |
For almost all of human history, humans got their vitamin D from sun exposure.
As a vegan or as a client of DBMs, milk from cows is excluded. Neverthless, to allow you to gain an understanding of the volume of milk one would have to consume (if one drank it) in order to obtain just the daily required amount from fortified milk – ONE AND A HALF LITRES. The same is true for most brands of fortified milks made from almonds, hempseed, rice, and if you were foolish enough to poison your body even further, with soy.
Not getting enough vitamin D might do more than weaken your bones, too. Vitamin D deficiency has been linked to increased risk for multiple sclerosis, muscle weakness, cancer, and depression.
To get sufficient vitamin D from sunlight, light-skinned people can make enough with 10 to 15 minutes of sun exposure per day (in the middle of the day and on a day when sunburn is possible), the darker your skin, the more sun exposure you need to make vitamin D. It becomes more difficult to make enough vitamin D with advancing age and the fact that most elderly people tend not to spend much time outdoors complicates things quite a bit. Using that blocks the sun’s UV rays, like sunscreen or clouds, will interfere with vitamin D synthesis.
In many parts of the world, it’s impossible to make enough vitamin D during the colder months, too. While tanning beds are sometimes recommended as an off-season sunlight replacement, many of them emit the type of UV rays that raise cancer risk without making adequate vitamin D.
So, although vitamin D is sometimes thought of as a “vegan issue” in nutrition, it’s really not. With the exception of those who eat fatty fish daily—and not too many omnivores do that—vitamin D is hard to come by for everyone.
The current U.S. Daily Value for vitamin D is 600 IU (international units) and the toxicity threshold is thought to be 10,000 to 40,000 IU/day. Sometimes vitamin D values are given in micrograms (mcg,μg), when this is the case remember that 1μg=40IU for Vitamin D.
Vitamin D is oil soluble, which means you need to eat fat to absorb it. Natural foods high in vitamin D for vegetarians include:mushrooms, and egg yolks. Vitamin D is also naturally made by your body when you expose your skin to the sun and is called the sunshine vitamin. Please check with your DBM Physician / Practitioner if eggs are permitted on your program
alongside is a list of high vitamin D foods, for more see the list of foods rich in vitamin D2 (Ergocalciferol) and foods rich in vitamin D3 (Cholecalciferol).
