Welcome to Daily Bitachon as we continue to explore the benefits of the sun. We're continuing with our theme that the sun releases vitamin D that's already existing in our skin. What else does vitamin D, our hero, do besides helping with our serotonin, helping with our immune system? It also helps the bones. It strengthens our bones by boosting calcium absorption in your gut. That means you can have all the calcium in the world that's necessary for bone building, as we all know calcium is good for bones, but what causes the calcium to end up in your bones? It needs to have certain other minerals that help it be absorbed. Without enough vitamin D, you will not absorb the necessary calcium. And vitamin D is this key that unlocks your intestines to absorb the calcium more effectively and increases the absorption from 10 to 15 percent to 30 to 40 percent. More than double the absorption of calcium happens because of vitamin D. That's absorbed. After it absorbs, the vitamin D helps transport the calcium to your bones, integrating them into your bone structure to make them hard and strong. Now besides helping your bones, this vitamin D, you're really going to appreciate vitamin D and again, it's all part of the sun. Vitamin D also helps maintain muscle strength, which improves balance and reduces the risk of falls and prevents fractures. The vitamin D interacts with receptors in your muscle tissue to aid contraction and growth, producing thorosynthesis, sorry, protein synthesis, reducing inflammation and supporting muscle repair and regeneration. Now what's very interesting about our vitamin D, people after a workout they'll take protein or carbohydrates post-exercise because there is a certain window of when it's going to help. But vitamin D builds up in your system over time and therefore there's really no need to take it right after a workout, which is also very beneficial. So a little bit more on our vitamin D, who's our hero. It helps with heart function by keeping your arteries flexible and can even possibly regulate your blood pressure. It supports insulin sensitivity, which is important for not developing diabetes. So vitamin D, as we said, is really our hero and that's why, as I said a few days ago, the USDA changed their requirements of vitamin D so that when you go to the doctor, they will tell you you're low on vitamin D. It's a very expensive blood test for this to see your vitamin D. That's why not all insurance plans even okay it every year. So once they realize you don't have enough, they just tell you take your vitamin D. And some signs for low vitamin D is frequent colds and flu, like we said, it lowers your immune system, persistent fatigue or bone pain because your bones are not going to be great, slow healing wounds, low mood or irritability because we said your SSRIs are not going to be right, muscle weakness or cramps. So if I were you, I would say I got to start taking more vitamin D. And of course, this all started from the natural source of vitamin D is our sunlight. So Hakadosh Baruch Hu gives us everything that we need in the sun and as we said, due to our lifestyle changes, we might need to take supplements. Now for those people that say well is there anything natural besides sunlight and I don't want to take supplements, so certain types of fatty fish, salmon, tuna, mackerel are good for that. Egg yolks are good for it and if you look at the side of your different types of food, milk, cereals and things like that, they say fortified with vitamin D and that's the beautiful government trying to help us and putting vitamin D into our food so without realizing it, we're taking vitamin D and that is going to be the end of our vitamin D discussion for this series currently. Tomorrow we'll continue with some other