Raena Morgan: Hi, I’m Raena Morgan with iHealth Tube visiting with Dr. Sherill Sellman. We’re talking about women’s bone health. Dr. Salman we’ve talked about bone strength training being vitally important to bone health, could you give us some other examples of things that we can do to improve our bone health.
Dr. Sherill Sellman: Well, there are many things we can do to improve our bone health and I might add at any age. So one of the things that plays a vital role in bone health is getting adequate vitamin D and it seems that we’re becoming very deficient in vitamin D. And where’s the best source of vitamin D? It’s the sunshine. The sunshine actually stimulates the skin to produce vitamin D and vitamin D is such an important vitamin or it’s actually a hormone that stimulates the calcium to be placed into the bones. So it turns out that we’re becoming very vitamin deficient because we are so phobic about the sun and everyone splatters these sunscreens on them, you’re not able to get vitamin D if you don’t either have access to the sun or make your skin available to the sun. so we only need 20 minutes a day and especially in the summer time but we should all be doing vitamin D and a little sunbath.
Raena Morgan: A sunbath.
Dr. Sherill Sellman: Yeah. That used to be so common for health, a sunbath. There are sanatoriums we go to you know cleanse and rejuvenate and you go and you lie in the sun for a period of time as part of the healing process and it still is true. We do need that.
Raena Morgan: So hence the sunscreen, right. No sunscreen.
Dr. Sherill Sellman: Without a sunscreen. It blocks the Vitamin D getting into the skin. So I mean there are countries like Australia that are so sun phobic that they slather up and they wear this bathing suits at the beach that the kids have the bathing suits from their ankles up to their necks like the 1920s bathing suit. So these children are showing up to be very vitamin D deficient. Their immune systems suffers, their bones suffer, its tremendous problems of being vitamin D deficient. So if you can’t get the sun then at least get it from cod liver oil, that’s a great source of vitamin D and you can take some vitamin D supplements as well. So vitamin D getting that vitamin or really the hormone is important. But other things that people don’t think about when it comes to bones, first of all we need to have strong digestive system. So you may want to ask why.
Raena Morgan: Right, exactly, because people don’t associate digestion with healthy bones.
Dr. Sherill Sellman: They don’t. But if our digestive system is weak and by weak I mean we have perhaps inflammation going on in our digestive tract or we are not making adequate digestive enzymes or we don’t make adequate hydrochloric acid which is the stomach acid which begin—
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