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How Showering Decreases Your Vitamin D Production
If you’ve been tuning in to the latest natural health information, you’re probably aware that vitamin D is the talk of the town because of its amazing health benefits, and that you can get it for free simply by getting optimal sun exposure.
As you know, vitamin D is produced when UVB radiation from the sun (or a safe tanning bed) strikes your skin. Vitamin D is a fat soluble nutrient, so your skin converts a cholesterol derivative in your skin into vitamin D3, a steroid hormone.
However, the vitamin D3 that is formed is on the surface of your skin does not immediately penetrate your bloodstream because it needs to be absorbed first.
But how long does it take for vitamin D3 to penetrate your skin and reach your bloodstream?
Until recently, Dr. Mercola believed that this took about an hour or two. However, new evidence reveals that it takes up to two days before you can assimilate the majority of the vitamin D that was produced when you exposed your skin to the sun. Meaning, if you shower and soap, you’ll be washing away most of the vitamin D3 your skin produced and negate the benefits of sun exposure.
So if you want to make sure that you’re still getting healthy vitamin D levels, you have to delay washing your body with soap for about 48 hours after getting sun exposure because the vitamin D you produced from sunlight is still in the oils of your skin and can be washed away before it’s absorbed into your blood.
Not a lot of people will be too keen to not take a bath for two days.
But come to think of it, this is not really a major hygiene issue because you really only need to soap your underarms and groin area and avoid soaping up the larger areas of your body that you exposed to the sun.
Aside from showering with soap, taking statin drugs or proton pump inhibitors (medicine that reduces gastric acid production) will lower your cholesterol levels, and since cholesterol is a vitamin D precursor, this will decrease your body’s ability to produce vitamin D.
Skipping the shower will not only help you optimize your vitamin D levels, it will also help you avoid the dangers of disinfection byproducts, chlorine and other contaminants in the commercial water supply.
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Tags: disinfection byproducts, shower, showering, Vitamin D, vitamin D3
I only take cold showers in the morning without soap. The cold water closes the pores. Do you figure that this would lower my vitamin D levels. Cold water showers are supposed to increase your immune system.