Vitamin D Benefits: Vitamin D can improve your mood, lower the risk of a heart attack and help with asthma management.
Getting enough vitamin D protects your health in a variety of ways.
“It’s very important to optimize your intake of Vitamin D Benefits to help support bone health,” says Rebecca Drayer, a registered dietitian at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago. “There’s a greater risk of bone fractures if vitamin D levels are low because this may cause less calcium to be stored in the bones.”
Vitamin-D is also essential for good muscle function, says Sandra Arevalo, a registered dietitian who is the director of community and patient education at Montefiore Nyack Hospital in Nyack, New York.
Here are seven benefits of vitamin D:
1. Improved bone health. Vitamin D increases calcium and phosphorus absorption in the gastrointestinal tract and can help prevent osteoporosis, a disease that causes bones to become weak or brittle, says registered dietitian Sonya Angelone, a San Francisco area-based registered dietitian and spokesperson for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. Vitamin D can increase bone density when supplemented to breast-fed infants.
2. Reduced risk of heart disease, hypertension and all-cause mortality. Research published in Scientific Reports in 2020 suggests that, for people who have vitamin D deficiency, taking supplements of the vitamin “had a favorable effect on diastolic blood pressure levels and parathyroid hormone concentrations” in comparison with people in a control group. “Therefore, vitamin D may be recommended to be used as an adjunct therapy to routine treatment in coronary artery disease patients with vitamin D deficiency.”
