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As you may know, Vitamin D has been making headlines lately, and for good reason. Scientists are beginning to discover the tremendous health benefits of this long neglected vitamin, and unfortunately, how deficient most people are in it.

If you don’t get much sun, odds are you don’t get enough vitamin D.

African-Americans and others with dark skin, as well as older individuals, have much lower levels of vitamin D due to less creation of the vitamin from exposure to sunlight. A normal African American with dark skin color has a sun protection factor of 15-30. They can stay out 15-30 times longer in the sun, but the downside is that an African American who is dark skinned would need approximately 7-10 times the amount of sun exposure as a light skinned person. If you put a sunscreen on with an SPF of 8, it reduces your ability to make vitamin D in your skin by more than 95%. A sunscreen of 15 reduces vitamin D production by an astounding 98%.

Worldwide, it is estimated that more than 1 billion across all ethnicities and age groups have insufficient amounts of vitamin D in their blood. In [...]