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- Welcome my friends to the Bob and Brad podcast.
My name is Mike Kenitz.
I'm a physical therapist assistant.
Who's worked with Bob and Brad the last 10 years.
Today I am doing this podcast solo
and our guest is Jordan.
You may know her from our
workout videos on our YouTube channel.
If you're listening to the audio version of this
you may have heard her in the past talking
about ketogenic diet with us.
Jordan's background, she has a
bachelor's in exercise science, a master's in nutrition,
and she's a certified personal trainer.
And today we are gonna talk about ways
to boost your immune system naturally
through food and possibly supplementation.
So stay tuned.
Do you wanna elaborate on vitamin D
which you were talking about a little bit there.
- Yeah, yeah, so lets
yeah, let's dig into vitamin D.
I wanna like preface this with, I'm not a vitamin D expert.
There are people that literally devote their entire careers
to researching this vitamin cuz it's so powerful.
So please, just like, I'm going to give you
the information I know, based upon my background,
research I've done, people I follow,
you know, my personal experience with it
but just know that there really isn't any good, solid
like conclusions on this either.
So, but I wanna talk a little bit
about like how much to take.
Should you supplement, should you not?
That whole thing.
So first of all, do I supplement with vitamin D?
Yes I do.
However, in the summer months I spend quite a bit
of time outside, basically, whenever I'm not working
and I'm able to be outside I'm outside.
So then I don't take vitamin D.
I might take it like once every two weeks,
if I go through a stretch of not getting outside
or if it's really cloudy and crappy weather,
but in the wintertime I do take it.
I used to always take 5,000 IUs a day.
It's actually measured in international units
but I recently had my blood levels drawn
and I'm gonna talk about that,
but mine was a little bit higher than really necessary.
So I am planning to back that amount down
come this fall, winter, not take as much.
- Is vitamin D one of the vitamins that like
you don't actually typically urinate out
if you get in excess.
- Yeah, yep, so its fat soluble.
So we actually store it.
Well, we store it in our fat.
So any excess we can't get rid of.
So, I mean, you would have to be supplementing
with a quite a large quantity, I think
to actually build up toxicity in your body
but it can cause some other problems that aren't like
you know, extreme, extreme that we just maybe
don't even realize are attributed to that.
- So, you can, - Right, so I
- Go ahead.
- I just say it's more important for, cause we're
in the Northern hemisphere and we have winter and stuff.
So it's more important up here during winter,
cuz I mean when it's real cold out,
you and I probably don't go out
a whole bunch and if we are like
this much of our skin is showing to the sun.
- Yeah. Yeah.
And I don't think you can really get too
much synthesis there when you're completely.
- No, you're in the Southern US states.
You're probably fine, but
- Right.
If you're in the Southern US states
and you're getting outside I think they say
usually 15 minutes outside skin exposed
I mean not naked, but like
- Yeah.
- you know, short sleeves, shorts,
like you have to have sun or skin exposed
without sunscreen actually,
because that sunscreen blocks vitamin D production.
So if you get outside for at least 15 minutes every day
in the direct sunlight,
you're probably pretty covered.
- Yeah.
- So, - So oh, go ahead.
- Is vitamin D good for anything else
besides your immune health?
- Yes. Yeah.
Oh gosh.
Yeah, there's a lot of things.
Some of the main top things that it's good for bone health.
So vitamin D actually promotes calcium absorption
and it's necessary for healthy bones and teeth.
So actually vitamin D deficiency through research
has been shown to cause osteoporosis
or be one of the factors.
So super important for healthy bones.
- Right. - Mood.
That's why so many of us up here
in the Northern hemisphere get so depressed
in the winter, honestly like
- Yeah, really. - negative 20 out.
But I think it has time to do with the fact
that many of us are walking around vitamin D deficient.
- Yeah, if people don't live in an area like this,
it's called seasonal depression.
- Yep. - Yeah and it's real.
- Yeah. I'm not like depressed during winter
but I'm way more energetic spring through fall
than I am winter and it takes a little more oomph
to make me go outside once it's winter months.
- Yeah, I hear you.
- It's nasty here.
- Vitamin D, you said it's fat soluble, right?
So don't you normally want to have it
with fat when you take it.
- Yeah, so usually that vitamin D is one where
I just tell people like when you eat breakfast
take your vitamin D.
- Okay.
- You know, simple, simple kind of thing.
But yeah, that is, that is correct.
What are they talking about?
Oh, is it good for anything else?
Yeah, mood.
Low levels have been linked to depression and anxiety.
So it actually helps to synthesize a hormone
called serotonin in our body
which is literally like a happy chemical.
It makes you feel happy.
- So, - Yeah.
- There's yeah.
Don't we all wanna do that.
So, and then cardiovascular health too, so protective
against heart disease, hypertension, things like that.
So you're not just taking vitamin D
for boosting your immune system.
You're taking it for a lot
of other functions in the body as well, so.
- Sure, so do people take vitamin K and D together?
- Yeah, so that's a thing for sure.
- So do you wanna elaborate what vitamin K is?
- Yeah, so vitamin vitamin K that's actually
another fat soluble vitamin.
So like vitamin D you could take too much
K it gets stored into fat.
We don't urinate excess out.
So vitamin K there's, to not bore you
but there's two types of vitamin K.
K1, K2.
If you've heard of that
K1 is found in like our leafy greens
less bio available actually than K2.
K2 is found in more in animal sources
and fermented foods actually they're the
that term comes up again.
And actually our gut bacteria also produce
vitamin K2 in our body as well.
So, but if you, so some supplement manufacturers
will actually pair vitamin K2.
Well, it should be K2 cause it's more bio available
with vitamin D to help because
they kinda work synergistically in the body.
So vitamin D directs the absorption of calcium
from your intestines into the blood, but then once it's
in the blood, K takes it into your bones to be utilized.
So it helps vitamin K, vitamin D, calcium.
They all kind of need each other, if that makes sense.
- Sure, so do you, what foods, if people don't
wanna supplement?
Okay, so I know dairy, but what, like, if someone want is
like vegan or vegetarian, what would they do?
- For K2
- For D or K2?
- Oh okay.
So D
- I actually don't know.
- Here's the problem.
So I didn't really mention this in the beginning
but vitamin D there's actually two forms of that too.
D3 is our naturally occurring form.
That's like, when you go sit out in the sun
and you're gonna produce it, like you're, that's the form.
- Okay.
- So that's the form your body knows
but then there's a synthetic like plant based form
called or that's D2.
So that's really the only source, you know
that would be for somebody vegan, but I just
need the vegans out there to know that the bio availability
of that is pretty poor in our body.
- Okay, sure.
- It is what it is.
With K it's the same thing, K2
those are gonna be our animal sources,
but you can get can get it from fermented food.
So vegans could do some vegan source, fermented food
but K1 is from the leafy greens.
But again, that's not as bioavailable.
- Sure. Why?
So with the bioavailability, it's more
because it's a plant being digested by human
and then there's fibers and other toxins that plants create
which we can't digest and absorb it all, right?
- Correct.
- Did I say that correctly?
- Yeah, that's a good way to explain it.
- Yeah, you have more elaborate way or is that good enough?
- No, I think that's good enough.
Yeah. - Okay.
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