Vitamin D is known as the sunshine vitamin. You get either get it by being in direct sunlight, or through foods and vitamins. This essential vitamin is responsible for hundreds of functions in the body and is one of the 24 essential micro-nutrients for human life, yet most of human population is deficient. If we go back to ancestral times, most our days were spend out hunting and gathering food, exposed to the sun's rays. Now, we work in offices, wear sunscreen, and have no direct sunlight. 

Common signs of vitamin D deficiency: Depression, Anxiety, Seasonal depression, weight gain, brain fog, bone loss, muscle weakness, exhaustion, high blood pressure, decreased endurance.Just to name a few.  

If you are feeling generally run down and exhausted, look into supplementation, it may bring you back to life. This is one of those "easy" fixes, don’t pass it up. 

Fortunately, there is a relatively easy fix if you can't pack up your bags, drop your kid at grandmas and move to Hawaii. A high-quality vitamin D supplement in the right dosage will do the trick. If you don’t know your levels, I recommend you get a simple blood test to see your levels. If they are not optimum, start supplementing with 2000IU per 20Lbs of body weight. Depending on how you are feeling you may need to increase or decrease your dosage. 

If you find you are very low, consult a doctor to get a 50,000+IU injection to bring your levels up, and follow up with supplementation.  

For Health and Genetic consulting contact kristin@modernthriving.com

Dietary fat doesn’t make you fat, in fact, the fat on your body and the fat you consume should be considered two different things entirely. Fat is the only nutrient that does not raise your blood insulin levels, they are essential for survival, i.e. ESSENTIAL FATTY ACIDS, they provide satiety, regulate your hormones, allow vitamin A, D, E, and K to be absorbed, and needed for health and vitality. But in the 1950s an American physiologist who studied nutrition and exercise  named Ancel Keys started claiming that saturated fat cause heart disease, back then, the study sounded pretty convincing and thus “low-fat” craze of the begins.

Trans-Fat

Manufacturers of packaged foods jump on board as fast as they could remove all of our precious saturated fats out of their products. They started introducing unsaturated fats which are liquid at room temperature. Most of the time the products fat content were rancid or “unstable” by the time it hits the grocery store shelves. Companies that still had fat in their products figured out how to stabilize their fats for a long shelf life. They did this by a process called “hydrogenation”, pumping hydrogen into the molecule to become stable and solid at room temperature. Therefore creating one of the most terrible things you could put in your body, Trans-fat. Products like shortening, margarine, cake mixes, frosting's, pie dough, fast food, popcorn or anything that had fat in it before were replaced by highly processed GMO non-organic “stable” vegetable oils like corn, soybean oils; trans-fat. When word got out that these seemly healthy “vegetable oils” where supposed to be the cure all to Mr. keys theory of saturated fat causing heart disease, the exact opposite happened, Americans bad cholesterol LDL shot through the roof, along with raising your chance of heart disease, obesity, diabetes or a stroke. Scary stuff, right? Feel like you’ve been lied to your whole life yet?

Saturated Fat

Enough about the bad guys, let’s look at the good guys, Saturated fats the ones Mr. Keys damned to hell. Saturated fats are a chain of carbon atoms that have a single bond.  These guys are the most stable, solid at room temperate, and stand up to high heat cooking; they include your animal fats, butter, cheese, coconut and palm oil. Start cooking your veggies in butter, bacon fat, or Ghee. Try to also make sure all your animal fats are from grass-raised organic farms. Animals not from grass-fed organic farms are fed grains, hormones, and antibiotics store all of these in the fat, so you’d end up consuming fat and a bunch of other nasty things. No, there is no proof that saturated fat is PROVEN to cause heart disease, -insert facepalm here-, (noun, a gesture in which the palm is brought to ones face in disbelief)

Unsaturated Fat

Unsaturated fat, are liquid at room temperature, some of them good and some of them are bad. Remember when I told you liquid fats are unstable at room temperature, which is still accurate. So stay away from your oils at the grocery store most of them are unstable. If an unsaturated fat is solid at room temperature, those are the transfat, which we learned is no good. So what’s left? Your unsaturated fats from whole food sources, such as avocado, nuts, and fish, as a good rule of thumb, try to get your fat from whole food sources, and you should be in the clear.

Nice try Mr. Keys. Now we know that his study was based on loose evidence and we have managed to grow our obesity, diabetes, heart disease into a serious problem. Around the 90s, when the low-fat craze got serious, companies started to replace all fat in products with sugar. And our “problem” turned into an epidemic. But! That is a story for a different day.

If you have been low-fat for a long time, try slowly incorporating fat into your daily meals. Since you’ve been on the low-fat train for some time, it is likely that your body lost the enzymatic to process fat, eating too much of it could cause some serious tummy trouble! But don’t worry, the enzymes will start come back. If you already have some fat in your diet ADD MORE, you’ll thank me later.