Vitamin D: What If Sun Avoidance Is the Bigger Risk? Episode 346

Welcome And Why Vitamin D Matters SPEAKER_00 0:02 Hi everyone, it's me, Sandy Kruse. Welcome to Sandy K Nutrition Health and Lifestyle Queen. For many years now, I've been a trusted voice for people in midlife and beyond who want a deeper, more honest conversation about wellness. One that includes the physical, the emotional, the mental, and the esoteric.

Most episodes are solo now because I want to bring you thoughtful research, lived experience, and grounded insight without noise or bias. And when I do bring on a guest, it's because their work genuinely adds something meaningful to the conversation. Here we explore the full spectrum of what it means to be well, how the body functions, how the mind heals, how the spirit expands, and how all of these layers shape life lived with clarity and joy. Thanks for being here.

And if this show resonates with you, please follow, rate, review, and share it. It truly helps the message reach more people. Hi everyone, welcome to Sandy K Nutrition Health and Lifestyle Queen. Today I'm going to talk all things vitamin D, the sunshine, autoimmune conditions, how they're all intertwined and linked.

And I'm coming to you from a balanced perspective. I'm coming to you from a perspective of, you know, what is the truth? Because we hear dermatologists saying avoid the sun at all costs. We hear longevity people saying it damages your DNA.

But then I always look to balance. That's the truth. And I don't have any skin in this game in the sense that I'm trying to sell you a sunscreen or my dermatology services or my supplement that's vitamin D. I'm coming to you from very much uh, you know, I'm looking for the answers in a sense that it would provide some truth to this space.

So my podcast is called Why Your Vitamin D is Still Low and Why the Sun Isn't Your Enemy. Before I get going, please hit subscribe and follow wherever you are listening to this. As you could tell by my voice, I'm kind of getting over a little bit of a bug myself. And usually my podcast topics come from a little bit of whether I hear it from other people or I'm experiencing the topic myself.

That's how my topics are born. And then I start digging into the research. So I ask you to follow me because I am one of those very few independent podcasters that's still out there without a giant machine behind me who's just trying to put a little bit of good in the world. So let's get going.

Make The Hidden Ways Low D Feels SPEAKER_00 3:38 sure you're subscribing, make sure you're following, and find me on all social media channels. I've been in this podcasting space for almost seven years. Okay, so let's say that you slept eight hours and you still woke up tired. The stairs might feel steeper than they used to feel.

You catch every single cold that's going around at the office, and it hangs on for at least two weeks. And you're maybe not sad exactly. You're maybe just flat, a little dimmer than you used to be. And then the sun comes out one afternoon, and you find yourself standing in a patch of light by the kitchen window like a cat.

You don't even know why you walked over there, but the pull is real, and your body asked you to do something. And today I'm going to tell you what it is that the body, your body, is probably asking for, and why so many people stay low on vitamin D even when they take it every single day, and why stay out of the sun message that you've been hearing so hard and harshly is something that's kind of like the half truth that I'm gonna uncover here because I get it. Everyone says the sun ages you, and I understand that to a point. However, I do feel there's so many other factors that are not ever talked about.

Like my dad is 89, and people are shocked when they see him. They're like, oh my God, he looks so good and he looks so young. My father has never avoided the sun. So, really, when I talk about this, I talk about it from a balance perspective.

I am the queen of balance. So here's something that I find pretty amazing. Your Sunlight To Hormone In Your Skin SPEAKER_00 5:50 skin will turn light from the sun into hormone. There's a form of cholesterol sitting in your skin right now.

When the sun's UVB rays hit it, it changes shape and becomes vitamin D. Then your liver will tweak it, your kidneys and your own cells tweak it again, and what comes out the other end is a hormone that switches genes on and off in almost every tissue in your body. Nobody really gets the mechanism. So I thought I'd make it really simple.

So light goes in, a hormone comes out. That's alchemy, my friends. And you don't even have to lift a finger for this process to start in your body, and your body rewards you for it. Dr.

David Fisher's lab at Harvard found that when UV light hits the skin, skin cells release beta endorphin, your body's own feel-good chemistry. The study was done in mice, but it explains a lot. Fisher thinks the pull evolved on purpose. The body that feels good in the sun goes back to the sun, and a body that goes back to the sun makes its own vitamin D.

So that moment at the kitchen window with how I started, it's not random. It's actually very old wisdom. What does it actually feel like when you're running low on vitamin D? Mostly it's sneaky, tiredness that sleep doesn't fix, getting sick more often, and bouncing back slower, a low, flat mood, aches that you blame on age or the weather or low hormones.

But there are two signs I wish everyone knew. Shin Tenderness And Weak Thighs SPEAKER_00 8:07 First, press on your shin bone. Okay, the front. When vitamin D has been low for a very long time, new bone doesn't harden properly, and a soft layer forms right under the thin, nerve-rich wrap around your bones.

So the bone itself feels tender when you push on it, deep aching in the low back, the hips, or the thighs, worse after standing, can come from the same place. Second, your thighs. You have vitamin D receptors right in your muscles. When levels get really low, the big muscles at the top of your legs weaken first.

Stairs get harder. Getting up off the couch or off the floor gets harder. And then there's mood. Dr.

Rhonda Patrick, I love her. I hope you follow her. And Bruce Ames showed that vitamin D switches on the gene that your brain uses to make serotonin. A big analysis out of the University of Eastern Finland, 41 trials and more than 53,000 people found vitamin D eased depressive symptoms, a little more so in people who started out low.

Now, every one of these overlaps with low thyroid, low iron, poor sleep, perimenopause. So think of them as your cue to get tested, not a diagnosis. Sun Risk And Sun Avoidance Costs SPEAKER_00 9:58 Now the sun. This is where I get a little fired up.

You've heard it, you know, especially on social media over the last 10 years. The sun damages your skin, cover up, sunscreen every single day, all year long, even in January and February and March and any time of the year. And here's the thing part of that is true. UV light does damage the DNA in your skin.

Burns raise your risk of melanoma. Tanning beds are classified by the World Health Organization as a known cause of cancer in the same category as tobacco. I'm not arguing any of that, although I did all of that in the 80s. I don't know how many of you Gen Xers out there did the same.

But you only ever hear of one side of the scale. Nobody tells you what avoiding the sun could also cost you. So this is why I always bring a balance to every conversation. Dr.

Pell Lindqvist at the Karolineska Institute in Sweden followed almost 30,000 women for 20 years and tracked how much sun they got. The women who avoided the sun lived shorter lives, anywhere from about seven months to two years shorter. And then the part that floored me, smokers who got the most sun had about the same risk of dying as non-smokers who avoided it. Lyndvist said sun avoidance may be a risk factor on the same scale as smoking.

Now let that sink in. Then there's your heart. Dr. Richard Weller, a dermatologist at the University of Edinburgh, found that your skin stores nitric oxide, the molecule that relaxes and opens up your blood vessels.

When UVA light hits your skin, it releases the nitric oxide into your blood. In his trial, volunteers sat under UVA light and their blood pressure dropped within one hour. That has nothing to do with vitamin D. No pill does that.

In the UK Biobank, which followed about 377,000 people, the ones who got more sun had fewer deaths from heart disease and from cancer. Then there are your kids and your grandkids. A large school trial in China published in JAMA added about 40 minutes of outdoor time to the school day, and fewer of those kids became nearsighted. Daylight protects growing eyes.

And here's one that I actually never hear talked about. How Sunlight Upgrades Food Nutrition SPEAKER_00 13:25 The sun feeds you through your food as well. You guys know I'm an RHN, a registered holistic nutritionist. So I always have a special interest in this in this side of research.

Your body makes exactly one nutrient straight from sunlight, and that's vitamin D. But every bite you eat started as sunlight because plants turn light into food. And light changes how much nutrition actually ends up on your plate. Researchers at the University of California, Davis, found that more light a plant gets while it's growing, the more vitamin C it builds.

A field tomato ripened in July sun is a different food than a pale greenhouse tomato in February. Mushrooms do exactly what your skin does. Leave them in sunlight and they make vitamin D. Researches in Denmark showed that the more sun the mushrooms got, the more they made.

So put your mushroom gills up on a sunny windowsill before you cook them. And then there are hens. Hens make vitamin D in their skin and pass it into their eggs. German researchers gave hens UV light six hours a day.

And within three weeks, the vitamin D in their eggs went up three to four times. A hen that lives outside lays a different egg than one that never sees the sky. This is why we always want pastured eggs. So the sun feeds you twice, my friends, once through your own skin and once through everything that grew in it.

Move the people inside and move the food inside, and you lose both. So What A Tan Really Means SPEAKER_00 15:29 then the big question it's getting is getting a little bit of color actually damaging to your skin because I hear extremes on social media and I've heard them for many, many years. And I'm going to give you the honest answer because I'm not trying to sell you a sunscreen or a service. The light causes some damage to the DNA in your skin cells.

Your skin sounds the alarm and it makes pigment to shield itself. So, yes, color means some damage happened. Your skin repairs most of it. But the pattern matters enormously.

The big danger is actually burning, especially blistering burns in childhood and the on-again, off again kind. Pale all winter, then a week on the beach in Mexico, tanning beds are in their own category altogether, steady every day, gentle sun is a very different exposure. It does still add up over a lifetime, mainly as wrinkles, spots, and the common, rarely deadly skin cancers on the face and hands, the basal cell, which is uh what I talked about at the start. And the so-called base tan, it's worth about an SPF of three or four.

It won't protect you on a beach day. Your skin type changes everything, too. So that's also what's not often talked about. People give these blanket statements all the time on social media.

And here's the proof that the experts are starting to agree on. Australia has the highest skin cancer rates on the planet. If any country was going to say, always avoid the sun, it would be Australia. And in 2024, they rewrote their official guidance.

Professor Skin Type Guidance And Sun Myths SPEAKER_00 17:42 Rachel Neal and her colleagues stop telling everyone the same thing and split it by skin type. If you have very pale skin that burns easily or a history of skin cancer, protect yourself always. If you have deeply pigmented skin, routine sunscreen generally isn't needed all the time. Because your bigger risk is actually vitamin D deficiency.

And everyone in between should protect carefully, but still spend some time outside for vitamin D and everything else that the sun does for us. That's not this way or the highway, which is what you see on social media. This is what we call balance. Then people tell me the sun is more dangerous now than it used to be, but is it?

I also looked into this a little, but not the way that you've been led to believe. The ozone layer did thin in the 1980s and 90s, and that let more UV through. But the world banned chemicals that were causing it, and it seems like it's worked. The latest UN organization assessment says the ozone layer is on track to return to the 1980s levels by about 2040 over most of the planet.

And melanoma, Dr. H. Gilbert Welch published an analysis in the New England Journal of Medicine showing that melanoma diagnoses have climbed dramatically since 1975, while the death rate stayed roughly flat until better treatments came along. His conclusion was that much of the rise comes from doctors looking harder and finding small spots that would have never hurt anyone.

I mean, that's the case with a lot of cancers, right? Diagnostics have gotten better. For thousands of years, people lived in balance with the sun. My parents were farmers, my grandparents were farmers.

That generation worked outside. They'd never heard of sunscreen, my friends. They worked outside, they would rest in the shade when the sun got really strong, ate the egg yolks and the fatty foods, and didn't chase a burn. Your body was built on that rhythm and it still expects it to a point.

So here's my bottom line, and that's not to say it has to be yours. We are all bioindividual and everybody has nuances. But my big thing is stop letting fear make the rules for you. Short, regular time outside with some skin showing in the morning or at lunch.

You know, a lot of a lot of people will say 15 minutes first thing in the morning, 20 minutes, shade or cover up before you go pink. Save the sunscreen for the long days at the beach in the cottage, and stop treating a walk to the mailbox in February like it's a threat. In Ontario winter, the sun sits low on the horizon. So its light comes in on a slant through a lot more atmosphere, and the ozone soaks up most of the UB UVB.

So here's an easy test for you. If your shadow is longer than you are tall, you're making little to no vitamin D. In January, your shadow is long all day, but UVA still gets through. So that cold walk at lunch still does something for your blood vessels, your mood, and your sleep, even when it can't make vitamin D.

And while I'm on winter, I want to give you some permission, but of course, I'm not giving you any kind of medical advice. But low winter light isn't a design flaw. Every generation before you slowed down in winter. They rested more, went to bed earlier, ate heavier, heartwarming foods, and lived by the seasons.

If you feel lower and slower in January, you're not broken. You're seasonal. Take your vitamin D, get your lunchtime walk-in, and also let yourself rest. Winter was always meant to be the quieter part of the year.

Why Supplements Fail And What Helps SPEAKER_00 22:28 And this all brings me back to pills or D drops, whatever you want to call it, however, you take it. Because you're not getting it from the sun from October to March. You're getting it from a bottle. And this is why so many people get stuck.

You take it every day, your number's still low. And why? The first thing nobody tells you is how you take it matters. The vitamin D3 you swallow only hangs around in your blood for about a day before it's converted and stored.

Researchers Bruce Hollis and Carol Wagner have argued for years that many of your cells, including immune cells, grab that fresh vitamin D3 and use it right on the spot. Now, here's the twist. When you get a huge dose, let's say 50,000 units once a week or once a month, your body treats it like it's a flood and switches on an enzyme whose whole job is to break down vitamin D. And that enzyme can stay switched on for weeks.

A group of top vitamin D researchers wrote a review with the title, and I love this, Vitamin D bolus is bogus. Big occasional doses can push your blood test up while quietly turning down the signal inside your cells. The biggest analysis ever done on vitamin D and colds and flu back this up. Researchers at Queen Mary University of London pooled 46 trials and more than 64,000 people.

Daily doses protected people, but big weekly and monthly doses didn't. Studies on Hashimoto's thyroid disease found the same thing. Daily lowered thyroid antibodies, but weekly did not. Think about it.

The sun never gave anyone 50,000 units all at once. It gave you a little every single day. When you match that rhythm, it works better. I always say try and get as close to natural.

The second thing is magnesium. Everybody online says to take magnesium with your vitamin D for absorption, but that's not quite it. Magnesium is what switches vitamin D on. Every step that turns the D you swallow into the form your body uses, runs on enzymes that need magnesium.

Dr. Day at Vanderbilt, who led the key trial on this, put it plainly. Magnesium deficiency shuts down the vitamin D pathway. Day's trial found something even better.

Magnesium raised vitamin D in people who were low and brought it down in people who were high. It keeps vitamin D in range, almost like a thermostat. And in 2025, the same team found magnesium increased the gut bacteria that can make vitamin D right inside your gut. No sunlight needed.

Your gut bugs make vitamin D. Who knew? I mean, I never even heard that. The third thing is sitting in a lot of medicine cabinets, reflux pills, Nexium, Pantaloc, LOSEC, Tecta, they shut down the production of stomach acid or lower it, and the channels in your gut that absorb magnesium that you know we need that acid to work well.

A 2025 study found that just over half of long-term users had low magnesium. A 2026 study found almost 40% of people on Nexium were low compared to about 12% on omiprazole. So follow that chain. Reflux pill, less magnesium, vitamin D that can't switch on.

If you're on one, please don't just stop. Ask your doctor all about this and ask for your magnesium to be checked. And then the fourth thing is your genes. Vitamin D rides through your blood on a carrier, kind of like a delivery truck made by a gene called GC.

Some versions of that truck carry less. A 2026 study found that more copies of certain GC variants that you might have, the less your level rises on supplements. Another gene, CYP2R1, runs the first conversion step in your liver, and some versions are slower. And variants of the vitamin D receptor itself showed up more often in women with Hashimoto's.

So two women can take the exact same dose and get completely different results. That's not failure, that's biology, and it's information. Vitamin D For Autoimmunity And Aging SPEAKER_00 28:27 So what does vitamin D do for you once it's actually working? Okay, I kind of covered a lot there, but here are the things that it does for you.

It slows aging in your immune cells. A 2025 piece of the huge vital trial out of Harvard measured telomeres. Okay, the these are those protective caps on the end of your chromosomes in more than a thousand people over 50. After four years on 2,000 units a day, the vitamin D group lost far less than the placebo group.

The researchers put it at close to three years of cellular aging prevented. So I'm not interested in living to 120. I'm interested in an immune system that ages slower than the calendar. It also calms autoimmunity, but only while you keep taking it.

Vital found 22% fewer new autoimmune diagnoses in people taking vitamin D for about five years, steadily, consistently, remember. Then the researchers followed those same people for two more years after they decided to stop for whatever reason. The protection faded and was basically gone. That's how a hormone behaves.

It isn't something you top up once and then you bank it. It's a signal your immune system needs to keep hearing. And here's the part that gives me actual chills. Vitamin D's main job in your immune system is something called self-tolerance.

It teaches your immune cells the difference between me and not me. It's the signal that tells your body, this is you, don't attack it. I can't think of anything more fitting than for a woman in midlife. So many women spend years turning on themselves, the inner critic, the never good enough, the giving everything away, and leaving nothing for yourself.

I mean, I've recorded on all of these topics over the last year and a bit. And here's a molecule made from sunlight whose whole purpose is to teach your body to stop turning on itself. I'm not saying that anyone caused their autoimmune disease with how they feel about themselves. I mean, I don't think that's fair.

There are some metaphysical doctors and experts out there who say that that's definitely the more the spiritual side of autoimmunity. But I do think that this is beautiful, that the same lesson lives in your cells and in your soul. Tolerance for yourself, protection, not attack. Your body is trying to learn it at a cellular level and you can meet it there.

For Hashimoto's, a 2025 review found vitamin D lowered thyroid antibodies by 15 to 30 percent, mostly in women who were deficient and mostly early on while the thyroid was still working. If your antibodies are positive and your thyroid's still doing its job, this is your window, my friends. And in multiple sclerosis, a French trial gave people at the very first signs of MS a higher dose of vitamin D every two weeks under medical supervision. Fewer of them had new disease activity, and it took almost twice as long to show up.

So if you're in menopause, here's one finding I really want you to hear. The Women's Health Initiative followed more than 36,000 postmenopausal women for 22 years. Half took calcium plus vitamin D, half took a placebo. The supplement group had 7% fewer cancer deaths, 6% more deaths from heart disease.

The lead researcher, Cynthia, Dr. Cynthia Thompson, suggested the calcium pills may be adding to calcification in the arteries. So the question isn't whether to take vitamin D, it's whether you need that calcium pill or whether food and good vitamin D levels can actually do the job. And across the big trials, vitamin D builds bone in women who are actually low.

If your levels are already good, more doesn't give you stronger bones, which is why you have to know your real number. There are two vitamin D tests and they're not the same. 25 hydroxyvitamin D is your savings account. 1,25 vitamin D is your spending money.

When you run low, your parathyroid glands push your body to convert whatever's left into the active form. So your 1,25 can look normal, even high, while your savings account might be empty or close to empty. You can be told you're fine when you're deficient. Ask for 25 hydroxyvitamin D by me.

In Ontario, OHIP only covers it for certain conditions. So for me, I can get it tested through my endocrinologist. Many of you who have health issues can get it tested for free because of your condition. Now, I think it costs around, I don't know, 50 to 80 bucks in Ontario.

But, you know, it might be worth checking once a year. Test in late winter, February or March, when you're at your lowest. If you change anything, wait about three months before you retest. And if you've been taking those big weekly doses, a good number doesn't guarantee your cells are getting the message.

Get your magnesium check too. Less than 1% of your magnesium is in your blood. And your body works hard to keep it at that level, that steady level. So standard blood tests can look fine, even though you're running low.

I prefer a red blood cell magnesium test. Most of you know I am a registered holistic nutritionist. I am not a doctor, but I have multiple certifications in many different areas, including peptides, anti-aging, and endocrinology and hormones, as well as functional lab testing. So there are ways that you can get a lot of this tested, and I recommend that you see your practitioner to get this done.

Now, your blood was built to make vitamin D out of light a little every day, and that's for your whole life. It rewards you for going toward the sun. It asks for it when it doesn't get enough. The tired legs, the tender shins, the flatness, the window that you just keep drifting towards.

That's your body talking to you. Most people don't live in the light anymore. And neither does a lot of your food. I mean, I look in Ontario, a lot of our tomatoes and things that are even our lettuce, greenhouse groom, right?

So we got to meet our body halfway. Get outside every day that you can, even in the winter. I love a winter walk. And don't burn.

Take your vitamin D daily, the way the sun gives it. Feed your magnesium. Ask for the right tests. Eat the sun-grown food local, the real eggs, the mushrooms that sat in the light, and listen to that pull toward the window, because your body always knows what it's doing.

And also research vitamin K as well. And I didn't talk about it a lot here, but that's an important part to taking your vitamin D. I'm sure that you could figure that out yourself. So please hit subscribe.

Make sure that you send this to one friend. And also follow me on all the social media channels, just Sandy Knutrition everywhere. Thank you so much for being here, and I will see you next week. I hope you enjoyed this episode.

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