“Diet fails us for this nutrient,” Ashley Jordan Ferira, Ph.D., RDN, mbg’s vice president of scientific affairs says in a TikTok video. “It would take 50 glasses of milk a day to get 5,000 IU of vitamin D3. Or, how about nine servings of salmon? That’s silly, right?”
And if you’re wondering if you can simply get enough of the “sunshine vitamin” by spending time outside on a sunny summer day, think again: “Sunshine, unfortunately, is equally variable,” Ferira says. “And also risky.”
The thing is, a lot of U.S. adults are vitamin D deficient or insufficient (29% and 41%, to be exact). And if they think food and sunshine alone are enough to move the needle on their vitamin D status, they may be in for a rude awakening when they get their test results back.
