Vitamin D Role In Chronic Low Back Pain

Vitamin D Important for your Spine

Vitamin D has been linked in a recent article¹ to playing an important role in contributing to people suffering pain from chronic lower back pain.

What is vitamin D and why is it so important for keeping our spines healthy? I wanted to look into the role Vit D plays in keeping our spines healthy.

How to Get Vitamin D

Vitamin D is the most freely vitamin available from a sky near you, no jokes. It is the cheapest vitamin to produce in the world since we can get our daily recommended allowance directly from the sun.

Managed exposure to direct sunlight for about 5-15min per day should be enough for our skin to create vitamin D. Remember not to burn, so more sensitive skins may need gradual build up to sunlight to get to 5-15 min in a day.

SPF factor of 15 can have the ability to block 99.9% ability to produce Vit D from our skin so wearing sunblock is important for long exposures to sun so as not to burn.

Vitamin D & Spinal Health

It has been suggested² we are living in a Vitamin D pandemic with around a billion people Vit D insufficient or deficient worldwide.

Vit D is important when it comes to our spines as it is involved with bone metabolism and calcium absorption.

Conditions related to our backs that can occur with lacking Vit D are rickets, osteomalacia, muscle weakness/aches, boney fractures & osteoporosis. So if you are taking a calcium supplement to help or prevent osteoporosis then you need to be getting Vit D also, and again ideally from the sun.

How Much Vitamin D Do We Need

The sun is continually recommended as the best source of vitamin D as it is impossible to overdose on Vit D from the sun whereas you can from a dietary source.

The amount of Vit D that we need has been suggested to be 800-1000 IU/day. You can get the best source of Vit D from oily fish like salmon or cod liver oil, however it has been shown that due to fish farming feeding farmed salmon can have 10-25% only of Vit D compared to wild salmon.

Sunlight exposure to create Vit D is dependant on where in the world you are also. The closer to the poles the harder it is to make Vit D even if it is sunny all the time in summer. In the northen hemisphere Vit D production occurs rougly in March and ends in October time during 10am to 6pm in a day.

So during your lunch break maybe go for a healthy walk and get a little sun to boost your spinal health.

Further Reading:

1. Al Faraj, S., Al Mutairi, K. (2003) Vitamin D deficiency and chronic low back pain in Saudi Arabia. Spine Volume 28 Issue 2 pp 177-179

2. Horlick, M.F., (2008) Vitamin D: a D-Lightful health perspective.  Nutr Rev. Oct;66 (10 Suppl 2):S182-94.