This is part of our ongoing The Best Kept Secrets to Healthy Aging spotlight. Each day, we will be posting some of the great information that’s packed into our book, The Best Kept Secrets to Healthy Aging.
Today’s topic:
Vitamin D Levels and Normal Aging
While the consumption of lower levels in youth may allow one to achieve better blood concentrations of vitamin D, the requirement increases in middle age and thus the dose required to achieve optimal levels also increases. For one thing, the ability of your skin to make vitamin D in response to sunlight becomes much less efficient – skin loses 50% to 75% of its ability to make Vitamin D in response to exposure to sunlight by age 60 – increasing the need for dietary vitamin D to narrow the ever-expanding gap between vitamin D requirement and supply. For another, older people tend to spend less time exposed to the sun – partly out of fear of skin cancer, partly out of reduced mobility. In addition, the ability of the kidneys and tissues to perform the final step in the activation of 25-hydroxyvitamin D3 to 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D3 declines with age, meaning that even more vitamin D must be available in the blood in order to satisfy the physiological needs of the calcium economy for the older adult. Finally, overweight individuals need to consume more vitamin D than they needed when they were lean and trim because fat deposits soak up and store vitamin D – the more fat, the greater the percentage of ingested vitamin D that ends up in storage rather than use.
Next Best Kept Secrets to Healthy Aging topic:
Vitamin D Recommendations and Assumptions
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