The weird way you could get more vitamin D

You’ve probably heard how important getting enough vitamin D is to your health.

In fact, the list of health problems that have now been linked to vitamin D deficiency is long and scary, including:

• Breast, colon, and prostate cancer
• Heart disease
• Weight gain
• Depression

And, according to the Vitamin D Council, vitamin D deficiency is even implicated in autoimmune disorders, chronic pain, high blood pressure, and more. Clearly, keeping your levels of the sunshine vitamin optimal is incredibly important if you want to stay healthy and even happy.

Now, a new study by a team of nutritionists and agricultural scientists at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) has found a weird solution for helping all of us get more D in our diets, starting with chickens…

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A little about Vitamin D

But, before we get into exactly how it works, we should probably look at vitamin D itself to understand the “why” behind it.

You see, vitamin D is called the sunshine vitamin for good reason. When your skin is exposed to the UVB rays in sunlight, your body produces the vitamin. In fact, in less time than it takes your skin to burn, you can make anywhere from 10,000 to 25,000 IUs of D, which is a healthy dose.

Unfortunately, that’s also where the problem comes in…

Most of us get little to no sunlight on a daily basis since we spend most of our lives indoors. And, since our bodies make vitamin D most efficiently when we expose large areas of skin to sunlight (not just our face and arms), it’s even more unlikely that we get enough sunlight to do any good.

That means that for the most part, you have to get your vitamin D either from the foods you eat or from supplements. And, that’s where that new MLU study comes in.

A solarium for chickens

Chicken eggs are a natural source of vitamin D. Each egg you eat gives you approximately 44 IUs of D to help you increase your levels.

But, those MLU researchers wanted to see if they could boost that number.

In earlier studies, they had proven that when the legs of chickens were exposed to UV light, the eggs they laid had higher D content than those of chickens not exposed to sunlight. However, those experiments had been conducted under ideal conditions that would never be possible to simulate on a full-scale chicken farm.

The results did get them wondering though…

If there were UV lamps in henhouses – in effect creating a solarium for chickens – could they get the same results and stimulate the chicken’s natural production of the vitamin?

So, they tried it out and guess what…

The research team’s idea worked!

After only three weeks of UV light exposure for six hours per day, the vitamin D content of the eggs increased three to four-fold. That means each egg instead of delivering 44 IUs of vitamin D had 132 to 176 IUs of the sunshine vitamin to offer.

And, there’s no need to worry about the chickens. Just to make sure that the UV light didn’t bother the birds or cause any behavior changes that would indicate problems, the researchers also observed the chickens for changes throughout the trial with no issues to report.

So, soon chicken farms around the country could feature chicken solariums that will help keep us all from becoming vitamin D deficient so that we can better fight off everything from depression and obesity to heart disease and cancer.

But your free-range chickens are probably already getting plenty of natural sunlight and producing more vitamin D than their less fortunate counterparts, so called broiler” chickens, that are typically raised in massive, windowless sheds that hold tens of thousands of birds. Just one more very good reason to avoid commercially raised foods.

Sources:

1. The Truth About Vitamin D: Why You Need Vitamin D — WebMD
2. How do I get the vitamin D my body needs? — Vitamin D Council
3. A solarium for hens? How to increase the vitamin D content of eggs — EurekAlert!