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How Vitamin D Could Save Your Life

Tammy Bergstrom
8 min readNov 29, 2021

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Image by Michele Blackwell

Vitamin D is crucial to every function of the body. It is a nutrient that everyone needs, yet most people don’t get enough of it. In fact, over 40% of Americans are deficient in Vitamin D, and roughly 1 Billion people worldwide have the same problem. As more scientific evidence reveals the importance of Vitamin D in disease and illness prevention, it would be in your best interest to familiarize yourself with a substance that could save your life one day.

What is Vitamin D?

Vitamin D is not technically a vitamin, but rather a fat-soluble steroid hormone that is synthesized from sunlight, food sources, and supplements. Fat-soluble means it can dissolve in fat in the body and be stored for long periods of time. It acts as a steroid hormone by binding to cell receptor sites and turning genes on or off, which changes cell behavior.

Vitamin D coming into the body needs to be broken down by the liver and kidneys to produce a bioavailable form of the hormone. Here is the process that Vitamin D goes through to become bioavailable:

Vitamin D, also known as “calciferol”, enters the body via food, supplements, or sunshine.

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Tammy Bergstrom
Tammy Bergstrom

Written by Tammy Bergstrom

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