Milk and Vitamin D

Vitamin D is essential for you to actually absorb calcium and assimilate it into bone. That is why you see milk fortified with Vitamin D. I won't get into all of the physiologic components here, but there are several components to vitamin D which are required to process calcium into our bones.

The natural source of vitamin D are fish, egg yolks and liver. These are usually not in everyone's diet on a regular basis. Supplementation is helpful to ensure that you get vitamin D to help with the processing of calcium in the body.

You may recall from your health class that Vitamin D is the sunshine vitamin. This occurs naturally through the skin. It only takes about 20 minutes of sun exposure to produce enough Vitamin D. Remember, if you live in a cold climate and you are bundled up in the winter time, you may not get the 20 minutes of exposure. Also if you have darker skin ( more melanin pigment in the skin), you will need more than 20 minutes.