getting enough vitamin D it’s crucial for your bones, your mental health, and your immune system. And while you can get vitamin D naturally from sun exposure, it can be hard to get enough during the winter months or rainier seasons.
Fortunately, you can also get vitamin D through supplements and certain foods, too. food like Salmoncow’s milk, yogurt, certain types of mushrooms, tuna, and eggs are high in vitamin D and can help you meet your recommended daily values.
Although milk is a great beverage choice for boosting levels of this vitamin, many people are plant-based or just don’t enjoy drinking milk very much. If this is the case, you can find a juice with vitamin D, like fortified orange juice!
Read on to learn more about the vitamin-rich benefits of fortified orange juice and for more healthy tips, check out The 45 Best Recipes for an Instant Vitamin D Boost.
What is fortified orange juice?
Orange juice it contains a handful of helpful nutrients like vitamin C, potassium, folate, magnesium, and antioxidants like flavonoids and carotenoids. Because of these nutrients, orange juice is known to help boost immunity, protect your heart health, and help less inflammation.
What you won’t find as a natural nutrient in orange juice is vitamin D. However, you can find this vitamin in many different fortified versions of orange juice, which essentially means orange juice to which nutrients have been added. Some of the most common nutrients added to fortified orange juice are calcium and vitamin D.
Getting your vitamin D through fortified orange juice can be just as effective as taking a supplement. A study of American journal of clinical nutrition found that vitamins D2 and D3 are just as bioavailable in juices as they are in capsule or pill form.
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Buy fortified orange juice
When you are looking to buy a fortified orange juicebe sure to look for a few key things: that it’s actually fortified, that it includes vitamin D specifically, and that it doesn’t come loaded with added sugar.
For example, this Tropicana Fortified Orange Juice would be a great choice because it has both calcium and vitamin D, and contains zero grams of added sugar.
You’ll want to make sure you read the Nutrition Facts label carefully when looking for one of these juices because sometimes it may only be fortified with calcium and not vitamin D.
Food to go
The bottom line here is that you will always get the best vitamin d booster by spending time in the sun on a daily basis. However, we all know that this is not always possible depending on the time of year or where you live.
Your next best bet would be to get vitamin D naturally through foods such as Salmon, eggs, and yogurt, so you can enjoy eating a variety of foods. But if you follow a more plant-based diet or just don’t like these foods, drinking fortified orange juice can give you the vitamin D boost you need.
