The Critical Role of Vitamin D and Lifestyle in Mental Health

Do You Need To Take A Vitamin D Supplement? | This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp

Vitamin D has a huge impact on the health and function of your cells. Among its many functions, vitamin D reduces cellular growth (which promotes cancer) and improves cell differentiation (which puts cells into an anti-cancer state). But what’s even more fascinating is how vitamin D regulates and controls genes. When we don’t get enough it impacts every area of our biology, because it affects the way our cells and genes function.

Your body makes vitamin D when it’s exposed to sunlight. The problem is that most of us aren’t exposed to enough sunlight or eating enough of the few natural dietary sources of vitamin D. The good news is that supplementing with vitamin D3 can be an effective way to reverse a vitamin D deficiency. However, it is important to test your vitamin D levels to assess your personalized needs before starting any supplementation.

Dr. Hyman recently spoke to this topic in his conversations with Max Lugavere and Dr. Elizabeth Boham.

Max Lugavere is a filmmaker, health, and science journalist and the author of the New York Times bestselling book Genius Foods: Become Smarter, Happier, and More Productive While Protecting Your Brain for Life. He is also the host of the #1 iTunes health podcast The Genius Life. Max is excited to release his sophomore book, The Genius Life: Heal Your Mind, Strengthen Your Body, and Become Extraordinary, a lifestyle guide to living happily and healthily with proven, research-based lifestyle tactics, which we dig into more throughout this episode.

Elizabeth Boham is a physician and nutritionist who practices functional medicine at The UltraWellness Center in Lenox, MA. Through her practice and lecturing she has helped thousands of people achieve their goals of optimum health and wellness. She witnesses the power of nutrition every day in her practice and is committed to training other physicians to utilize nutrition in healing. Dr. Boham has contributed to many articles and wrote the latest chapter on Obesity for the Rankel Textbook of Family Medicine. She is part of the faculty of the Institute for Functional Medicine and has been featured on the Dr. Oz show and in a variety of publications and media including Huffington Post, The Chalkboard Magazine, and Experience Life. Her DVD Breast Wellness: Tools to Prevent and Heal from Breast Cancer explores the functional medicine approach to keeping your breasts and whole body well

This episode is brought to you by Betterhelp. Betterhelp is an app that lets you get affordable counseling anytime, from anywhere. They’ll match you with a licensed, professional therapist based on your unique needs. As a Doctor’s Farmacy listener you can get 10% off right now by going to betterhelp.com/drhyman

Find Dr. Hyman’s full-length conversation with Max Lugavere, “How To Fix Your Brain And Live A Genius Life” here:  https://DrMarkHyman.lnk.to/MaxLugavere

Find Dr. Hyman’s full-length conversation with Dr. Elizabeth Boham, “Supplements: Useful or Useless?” here: https://DrMarkHyman.lnk.to/Supplements