Low Vitamin D Linked To Chronic Pain – Natural Pain Relief Supplement

Low Vitamin D Levels Cause Chronic Back Pain

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

Maybe your asking yourself “what is vitamin D?” and why is vitamin D so important for keeping our spines healthy? I wanted to look further into the role that vitamin D plays in keeping our spines healthy and why it helps to prevent chronic back pain.

How to Get More Vitamin D

Vitamin D is the most freely vitamin available from a sky near you, no jokes.

Vitamin D is the cheapest vitamin to produce in the world because we can get our daily recommended allowance directly from sunlight.

If we do managed exposure sunlight then direct sunlight for about 5-15min per day should be enough for our skin to create all the vitamin D we need for a day. However, remember not to burn and give yourself sunburn. More sensitive skin types, like redheads and typical celtic fair skin UK residents, may need gradual a build up of sunlight exposure to get up to 5-15 minutes per day.

SPF (sun protection factor) of 15 cream has the ability to block 99.9% of sunlight needed to produce vitamin D from our skin. This means wearing too strong of a sunblock can stop you from producing enough vitamin D directly from sunlight. However, it is important with long exposures to the sun, like on a beach holiday in Spain, not to sunburn by wearing sun cream.

Vitamin D & Spinal Health

It has been suggested we are living in a Vitamin D pandemic. It is thought that around a billion people are vitamin D insufficient or vitamin D deficient worldwide.

Vitamin D is an important low back pain vitamin 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 vitamin D with the calcium tablets and the vitamin D coming naturally, ideally from the sun.

How Much Vitamin D Do We Need

The sun is continually recommended as the best source of vitamin D. It is impossible to overdose on vitamin D from the sun whereas you can get vitamin d toxicity from too many supplements.

The amount of vitamin D that we need per day has been suggested to be 800-1000 IU/day. Some like the vitamin D council in the US say that is too low and for clinical benefits adults need 5000iu/day if not getting this amount of vitamin D from natural sun exposure.

The best source of vitamin D in a natural diet form is 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 vitamin D compared to wild salmon.

Sunlight exposure to create vitamin D is dependant on where you are in the world. The closer to the poles the harder it is to make vitamin D even if it is sunny all the time in summer. In the northern hemisphere, like in the UK, vitamin 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.

Creative Commons Image courtesy of atlih on Flickr

Vitamin D Role In Chronic Low Back Pain

How to Get More Vitamin D

Vitamin D & Spinal Health

How Much Vitamin D Do We Need