Vitamin D and Infertility

I really am kind of on a Vitamin D kick lately... and I mean that literally as I've been taking 2000 IU's of this greatness for 2 weeks now and feeling awesome!

But I digress, the Vit D kick continues as I came across this post on medscape.com.  They commented on a study that found that being deficient in Vitamin D might hurt your chances of conceiving using IVF (in vitro fertilization).  Interestingly, they note in their report of the study that just by increasing your Vitamin D levels above 20 ng/mL you increased your odds of successfully implanting embryos.  Note that the normal range is typically thought to be more like 30-100 ng/mL with most health benefits occurring when you're riding around the middle of the normal range.

So this got me to thinking... because often when a woman is having trouble conceiving, she will do just about anything the doctor recommends.  One step may be to start a prenatal vitamin to help improve the odds of conception, right?  So I looked up a popular prenatal vitamin to see what levels of Vitamin D it provides.  Not surprisingly, it contains the 400 IU RDA for Vitamin D.  I'm not mad at the supplement company, but you would do yourself a solid if you upped your intake of Vitamin D to a higher level since this RDA is steadily being recognized as an outdated number.

Are you trying to conceive or looking at the expense of IVF?  Why not start a Vitamin D3 supplement to help improve your chances of conception, or have your levels checked to see if this might be contributing to your infertility.  NatureMade does make lots of Vitamin D3 supplements, as do places like Nature's Sunshine.  The key is to look for D3 as opposed to D2 as it's more readily used by your body (D3 is what sunlight hitting your skin allows your body to manufacture).