Why I started the Vitamin D Company to bring Vitamin D to you?

Oliver Gillie has written about health and healthy living in UK national newspapers for over 20 years. He was named Health Champion of the year in 2009 for his campaigning on vitamin D. Here he explains how the sun-vitamin can help you and your family.

Taking a vitamin D supplement is one of the most important things you can do to improve your health. It is the only vitamin you cannot get enough of from a healthy balanced diet. A lot of people don’t know that, so I have set up The Vitamin D Company to get the message across.

You may think you need other supplements but, if you have a good mixed diet, vitamin D is the only vitamin most people need to take. The large majority of people in Europe need to take vitamin D regularly. It does not have to be our brand. We think our sunshine vitamin is the best but any brand will do.

The sun is our natural source of vitamin D. Human beings used to live outdoors, be outside every day - and in cold northern climates they would sit in the sun to warm up. Now, people are inside most of the time in offices and comfortable houses. Even when they are outside, they wear sunscreen that blocks out the sun. Most people are not used to the sun and must take care not to burn. A few minutes’ exposure to begin with may be enough. Then gradually build up the time you can safely stay in the sun.

During the five months of summer, half an hour of bright midday sun on most of your body will produce enough vitamin D for a week. Only a few people who work outdoors, builders, scaffolders, gardeners, sport teachers and outdoor enthusiasts fanatics manage to get enough regular exposure to the sun nowadays. And only a very few people, like Eskimos who eat fish, whale or seal at every meal, may get enough vitamin D from their diet.

Cities grew with industrialisation and infectious diseases spread. We learnt the importance of clean water in the 19th Century – how to prevent the great killers: typhoid and cholera. In the 20th we learnt the importance of clean air. And in the 21st Century we are learning the importance of sunshine - and how it may even prevent cancer, the major cause of illness and death today.

We now know that previous advice to stay out of the sun in fact put health at risk, especially for those living in the British Isles where there is so much cloud and we see so little sun. People with low levels of vitamin D in their blood have more heart disease, cancer, diabetes, asthma and infectious disease including flu. They die younger. I have spent a lifetime studying healthy lifestyle and vitamin D was scarcely mentioned. Then about ten years ago, studying the scientific literature, I began to understand how important vitamin D is for general health – not just bones. I was amazed that I had not heard about it before and since then I haven’t been able to stop myself telling people about it.

But it was frustrating because people could not get the higher dose vitamin D that they needed. I talked to doctors, to ministers, to senior government officials and to colleagues in the press, radio and TV. Along with many others I wrote academic articles for peer-reviewed journals to tell scientists and doctors about the issues. More people now know about the importance of vitamin D for health but still it is not easy to get vitamin D in the right dosage.

So, with experts in the business, I decided to launch The Vitamin D Company to sell vitamin D in a convenient, easy-to-take form. I am a shareholder and director of the company. Of course, we hope to be profitable, but most important to me is that more people understand about vitamin D and take a supplement which I believe will save lives.

    Oliver Gillie and The Vitamin D Company