Can you get enough Vitamin D from the sun?

I wrote a post last week about the seeming epidemic of Vitamin D deficiency. My wife, sister, and friend all have this and I was kind of wondering why thinking that maybe the lack of time in the sun in the Winter may be the culprit.

As we all have heard in the past the best way to get Vitamin D is to get time in the sun although there are many food sources for Vitamin D like salmon, sardines, shrimp, milk, cod, and eggs.

I found the following snippet of info from a Canadian doctor in talking about our body synthesizing and getting Vitamin D from being in the sun:

“Sunscreen with a sun protection factor of 8 and above appears to block vitamin-D-producing ultraviolet rays,” writes Carla Hagstrom of Toronto, who has been consulting the website of the Office of Dietary Supplements at the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

However, she says most people don’t usually apply sufficient amounts of sunscreen to cover all exposed skin, or reapply it regularly, so some vitamin D will be synthesized.

“You need between five to 30 minutes of sun exposure, between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m., twice a week (without sunscreen) for vitamin D synthesis,” she says.

Well there is a bit of a problem here as we all know that getting too much sun in the middle of the day is going to cause us to burn. I have written on how to get a suntan as well as some sunburn cures so I tend to be a bit nervous about lots of sun and not much sunscreen.

On the other hand perhaps Carla Hagstom is suggesting more that we need to take supplementation of Vitamin D. Maybe I will need to dig a bit deeper on this one.

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