Jan 29, 2015 3 min read

You hear a lot about vitamin D these days. Maybe it’s because Western Pennsylvania is in a cloudy deep freeze, and we’re not getting any sun. Maybe we really are suffering the “vitamin D” crisis I keep reading about. But whatever – I can probably use some more.

The best way, experts say, is to let your body use sunlight to make vitamin D. Sure, there are pills, but they aren’t as effective as sunlight or food sources, and I could never eat enough salmon or mackerel to make up for these rotten Pittsburgh winters.

So, I’ve been looking for sunshine, going about my day while keeping an eye outside. When the sun came out one morning this week, I saw it for what it was: vitamin-enriched good health. I headed outside.

If faces were good sun receptors, none of us would suffer from the ill effects of vitamin D deficiency. Anyone could spend 20 minutes outside letting the sun hit her in the face.

But for full vitamin D production, you should get sun on larger swaths of skin, preferably the shoulders, back and outstretched legs. It was 17 degrees that morning, but sunny. I could either try a salmon-cake recipe for dinner – no, thank you – or I could head out, scantily clad, into the sunny, sunny tundra.

The idea was to expose large patches of skin to the sun for as long as I could stand it. I was shooting for 15 minutes. I prepared my spot by scraping snow from a patio chair, donning stretch pants and a sleeveless shirt and wrapping myself in a blanket.

This would be done in the back yard or else the neighbors would talk, so I waddled out the back door, across the patio to my waiting chair. I sat down, rolled up my pant legs, stretched my legs out, unwrapped the blanket from my shoulders and commenced my vitamin treatment. I suffered an immediate outbreak of goosebumps.

To pass the time, I paged through a mental list of health problems I was staving off by being out in the sun: joint pain, weakness, high blood pressure, psoriasis and the ailment of most interest to my loved ones, crankiness.

You know how time creeps along when you’re lying in the sun trying to get a tan? Back when I did such things, I would check the clock thinking 30 minutes and find it was only 10. Well, try that sitting in a metal chair with ice crystals forming on the back of your neck.

I lasted 90 seconds. And here I thought I made it at least twice that long.

I went inside, got into warmer clothing and checked Google to see if a person can get useful sunlight through a glass window, so I could do this from inside the house. My research was inconclusive.

While I was at it, I researched nonsalmon sources of vitamin D. They are far down the list, but egg yolks and mushrooms aren’t bad.

I’ll leave my hoodie sweatshirt on and make omelets for dinner.

Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.