Vitamin D & Covid-19

Vitamin D is one of my favourite vitamins. It supports and boosts your immune system and since I improved my vitamin D levels, I am a lot less susceptible to those minor illnesses like colds.

A couple of recent studies have suggested that having good Vitamin D levels can help make you less susceptible to contracting COVID 19 and if you do get it, vitamin D helps prevent the infection from becoming so severe. Although it is early days and the results are not yet definitive, these studies are just are suggesting it is likely that Vitamin D plays an important protective role.

Unfortunately, vitamin D is notoriously difficult to get in adequate amounts from today’s diet. You can get vitamin D from exposing your skin to sunlight, that is why they call it the sunshine vitamin. But these days we are so conscious of sun damage and skin cancer, we tend not to get enough this way.

So most of us are deficient in vitamin D. One American study tested 16,000 people and found that 70% of them were low.  Reading this made me interested in finding out what our levels are like in New Zealand. Our Ministry of Health website states that approximately 32% of New Zealanders have below the recommended level of vitamin D in their blood. So you have a one in three chance of being low, and that risk would increase the less time you spend in the sun.

So I think in light of these studies and considering our relatively high risk of being deficient in Vitamin D, it would be worth anyone at ‘high risk’ of Covid-19 to talk to their GP about whether it would be wise for them to start supplementing.