Dr. Mary Claire Haver

There's a big gap between I am horribly deficient and I am at an optimal level.

So you should know what your vitamin D level is.

In our clinic, we try to make sure that our patients are reaching a level of 60 to about 100, okay?

Deficiency starts at 30.

The cutoff for deficiency in our labs is 30.

But that's not enough.

We don't want you to just be barely over the line.

We want you to be at an optimal level.

So all of our patients, we are checking a vitamin D level.

If it is low, sometimes we have to give them a prescription amount, which is 50,000 IUs per day.

We'll do that as a loading dose.

And then we're recommending somewhere between 2,000 and 4,000 international units per day.

When you talk to Lisa Moscone, another fantastic podcast that we did, and Brain Health, when you talk to Luis, Dr. Luis and Nicola, the two brain health specialists, all have tremendous amount of things to say about omega-3 fatty acids, okay?

If you can get them in your diet, great.

Hard to do.

Hard to do.

So you may want to consider supplementing somewhere around 2,000 milligrams of omega-3 fatty acids, which includes DHA and EPA, okay?

If you are a vegan or vegetarian, that's going to be a little tougher to do.

You're going to have to go higher on that level because you're going to have to get like an algae-based, Nordic Naturals makes a really nice one for a vegan or vegetarian form of that omega-3 fatty acid.

Fortunately, it's found in large amounts in fatty fish.