The Incredible Impacts of Vitamin D on Your Gut

Dr. Stengler: Did you know that vitamin D is essential for good gut health? We've always known vitamin D is important for bone health, your immune system, controlling inflammation, reducing your risk of autoimmune diseases, and reducing your risk of cancer because it helps with normal cell division. But recent research has shown that vitamin D is very imperative for good gut health.

Most specifically for gut health, there are studies showing that low vitamin D levels are more associated with problems like inflammatory bowel disease, diverticulitis, colon cancer, and liver disease. So if you have a history of these conditions, or a family history even more so, you want to check your vitamin D levels and make sure they're at good ranges using blood tests.

How does vitamin D help gut health? Researchers have found that vitamin D greatly influences your microbiome — the levels of microbes in your gut, the bacteria, viruses, and fungi, which need to be in the right balance with the right species. Vitamin D greatly influences the balance of that community. Number two, vitamin D plays an important role in your gut barrier health — the lining of your small intestine, where leaky gut can occur if the lining is not healthy. Vitamin D plays a role in the repairing process that should occur in your gut lining. Many people have leaky gut, where you have malabsorption and absorb molecules larger than you should, leading to translocation, where bacterial byproducts get into the bloodstream and travel to different parts of the body, creating an inflammatory response.

As I mentioned, vitamin D plays a role in cell proliferation, which is important for colon cancer risk — out-of-control cell division in the colon can in part be due to low vitamin D levels, so we need adequate vitamin D for colon cancer prevention. Vitamin D also helps reduce inflammation, in part by influencing how your genes are regulated, and it plays a role in cell signaling, which helps communication between cells, including the digestive cells, keeping inflammation under control.

A lot of the American population has either low or deficient levels of vitamin D. I'm always surprised, here in the San Diego area, how many people on blood tests show low or deficient levels. There can be different reasons — genetic reasons, using a lot of sunscreen and hats and covering up the skin, or gut problems with malabsorption like irritable bowel syndrome or inflammatory bowel disease. Because it's so commonly deficient, get your levels tested, and if you have gut issues, make sure you're testing your vitamin D and getting your levels to about mid-range on a blood test to help with gut health. We'll have many videos on digestive conditions, gut health, and leaky gut on this channel, so feel free to check those out.

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