Vitamin D is an essential fat-soluble vitamin and a key modulator of calcium metabolism in children and adults. As calcium demand increases in the third trimester of pregnancy, vitamin D levels are crucial for maternal health, fetal skeletal growth, and optimal maternal and fetal outcomes. It usually occurs as a result of an excess of vitamin D supplementation (as opposed to excessive exposure to the sun or excessive intake due to diet). To take the Everlywell home vitamin D test, simply take a small blood sample (with a simple prick on your finger) and send it to the laboratory using the prepaid shipping label included with the kit.
Keep reading to find answers to questions you may have about vitamin D during pregnancy, such as how to get vitamin D, recommended levels of vitamin D intake, symptoms of deficiency, etc. Finally, you can also get an idea of the vitamin D content of various types of foods by consulting the National Institutes of Health resource on vitamin D (see table). If you're taking a vitamin D supplement, the amount of vitamin D is likely to appear on the supplement's nutrition label, in international units or in micrograms (2.5 micrograms per 100 IU). Low vitamin D levels are usually due to inadequate dietary intake and lack of exposure to sunlight.
Getting enough vitamin D helps promote healthy baby development and is beneficial to overall health throughout the pregnancy. Skin pigmentation is another, since people with darker skin need more sunlight to generate vitamin D (this is due to the properties of melanin, which absorbs energy from the sun's rays, so there is less of it, which triggers the production of vitamin D). Second, many people spend a lot of time indoors, where there's no sunlight to trigger vitamin D production in the skin. Vitamin D is important for babies, because an insufficient amount can increase the risk of rickets, which is the softening or weakening of bones.
Preeclampsia affects approximately 5-8% of pregnancies, although it should be noted that these symptoms may be due to other health problems and vitamin D supplementation has not been shown to prevent preeclampsia independently. First, there aren't many foods that naturally contain vitamin D, so it's not always easy to get it from your diet. However, labels usually include the percentage of daily value (DV), which reflects the amount of vitamin D in a serving of that food as a percentage of 800 IU. It's best to talk to your healthcare provider to find out how much vitamin D your baby needs through supplementation.
Because getting enough vitamin D during pregnancy can be difficult with food and sunlight alone, many people turn to supplements.
