It’s always a good day when The Vitamin D Council’s newsletter comes out!

The newsletter is a wealth of information! If you’ve not yet subscribed to it be sure that you do. Wish we’d known about the Vitamin D symposium in San Diego, that would have been fun! (plus pretty good D exposure The next one is in Germany May 17th and 18th.

As mention in the newsletter….For those of you who don’t have insurance to cover your vitamin D testing, Life Extensions Foundation is running a special for the next month. You can have your vitamin D checked (25(OH)D), including the blood drawing fee for $32.25. You do have to pay for a Life Extensions membership which is $75 for a year, so unless you plan to do more testing it may not be worth it. To order the test, call Life Extension at 800 208-3444

I’ve decided that I want to purchase some sort of UVB meter and starting researching my options. Interestingly, there’s a lot of good UVB info out there thanks to reptile owners. UVB rays are critical to reptile health, and their owners must make sure they’re getting enough via the lamps that they use.

There’s even a reptile group who’s done some interesting UVB measurements worldwide and come up with some cool graphs showing the varying levels across the globe. I also found a pretty good chunk of information from a guy down in Oregon, he’s done a fair amount of his own testing and has come up with some useful UVB information.

I think I’m going to go with a D3 meter from Solartech. The D3 meter calculates the amount of vitmain D3 you’ll get per minute at the particular location you’re at. It’s not cheap at $189, but I think it will be cool to have:

I was thinking it would be fun to just track the D3 where I live over the year. I may just take the meter up to the local tanning parlor and test the tanning beds in comparision to the outdoors.