Vitamin D is not a vitamin

That’s right: Vitamin D is not a vitamin. While many and most vitamins are edible micronutrients found in our food, vitamin D remains an anomaly born from an unthinkable feat of modern science: putting sunlight in a bottle.• • •The general definition of a vitamin is “a carbon-containing compound essential in small quantities for normal function of the body”, or to put it in more simple terms, nutrients our bodies cannot produce internally, and must obtain from the environment. Unlike most vitamins, which are found in foods, the chief source of vitamin D is sunlight, and must be digested differently than the other vitamins. (Although vitamin D can be found in some foods naturally, such as cold water fish or mushrooms, the amounts are too miniscule to satisfy the human body without sunlight).When sunlight touches our skin, a hormone is released by our skin, turning the raw sunlight into what scientists call “pre-vitamin D.” This hormone released by the skin is the first step in digesting sunlight, and gets absorbed into the blood stream and processed by the liver. The liver receives the skin’s hormone and releases its own hormone called “calcidiol.” The calcidiol then travels to the kidneys, where another hormone “calcitriol” is now activated. Calcitriol then travels to the cells in the heart, immune system, breast (female), or prostate (male).More simply, raw sunlight touching our arms, legs, and face triggers a beautiful symphony of reactions throughout our body to imbibe precious nutrients from the sun to make us healthy.If it were actually possible to put sunlight in a bottle, Western history from Plato to the Renaissance, Galileo to Newton, Copernicus to Rousseau, would be turned on its head. Such a discovery would awaken pharaohs from their tombs in kowtow to Ra, the great Egyptian sun god, who by an immense moment of modern science, was somehow put inside a capsule, stuffed in a bottle, and sold at Wal-Mart for $5.Sarcasm aside, it is not possible to put sunlight in a bottle.• • •Scientists have done something very different. Vitamin D capsules do not contain sunlight, but rather, synthesized versions of the hormones calcidiol and calcitriol.Knowing that vitamin D is actually a set of synthesized hormones normally originating in the liver and kidneys, we can ask some very interesting questions about the dietary advice nutritionists push on the American people.It also raises other, more philosophical questions: can calcidiol and calcitriol have the same effect on the human body as original sunlight?The ingestion of vitamin D through the stomach is unnatural to the human body. Calcidiol and calcitriol are supposed to be triggered through skin contact with sunlight, which makes a strange niche of American food culture possible when we eat vitamin D pills or vitamin D fortified foods. Is vitamin D supposed to be digested through our stomachs and intestines? Are vitamin D pills and vitamin D fortified foods out of natural place, throwing our symphony of body reactions off kilter?Which begs another interesting question about the American approach to health and nutrition. Americans tend to believe, by and large, that human manipulation of nutrition is somehow better, and more satisfying, than natural foods. We take fish oil pills instead of eating oily fish, we prefer oats shaped like Cheerios over regular oatmeal, and aspartame over sugar. Are fish oil pills better than herring?Are Cheerios better than oatmeal? Well, it depends on the nutrition advice we are willing to follow, and the philosophy of food we are willing to live with.u u uThe issue of vitamin D is more disturbing than other conflicting nutrition advice, however. The sun is the most primal relationship humans have to the natural universe, the most intimate connection we have to life on planet earth. It is common knowledge, and yet so beautiful to reiterate, that no life would exist without the sun.Plants could not grow, animals could not thrive, rain would never fall without our sun. The earth would be a freezing ball of lifeless carbon without the sun, unsuitable to even the most inhospitable atmospheres in the universe.The sun was meant to be acknowledged for the beauty of life it provides for all its inhabitants. The sun, just like our food, is one of life’s greatest pleasures. The sun was meant to be enjoyed and revered for the life it bestows, and not substituted for a series of synthesized hormones Ra would never recognize.Aaron Zweig is director of the Food Studies program and a history teacher at the Marvelwood School in Kent, a veteran restaurant cook and an experienced organic gardener. He holds a master’s degree in Food Studies from New York University.