Living Well: Healthy Tip #9

For several days now, I've been writing an ongoing series of diet and fitness posts titled "Why the Pounds Are Sticking Around," which are a collection of tips sourced from the health magazine Self. Since the response has been so positive, I decided to forge ahead with an idea I had for a series of healthy living posts. Since exercise and training are more my forte, I sought out information from an outside source -- Men's Health magazine. To that end, I found ten great health and wellness tips that I thought would be perfect for pieces on healthy living.

So, just as I have been doing with the diet and fitness posts, I will also be posting one healthy living tip per day as part of a series I think I'm going to call "Living Well." I think you'll find these tips to be as interesting and as helpful as I did.

Healthy Tip #9 - Improve your D-Fense

I'm yet to cover vitamin D in my "Vitamins and Minerals 101" posts, but I'm sure I will be very soon. This is largely due to the fact that vitamin D is very unique in that it can be obtained not only from diet, but also from exposure to sunlight.

In addition to its known health benefits, a report appearing in the Archives of Internal Medicine shows that 400 IU of vitamin D a day reduces a person's risk of premature death by as much as 7 percent. This doesn't come as much of a surprise, considering that vitamin D consumption has been linked to a reduced risk of a number of diseases, one of which being cancer.

If, for some reason, getting a little bit of sunshine every day isn't a possibility, vitamin D can be found in abundance in dairy products, and certain types of fish.