The #1 Best Juice for Vitamin D, Says Science

Getting enough vitamin D is crucial for your bones, your mental health, and your immune system. And while you can get vitamin D naturally by sun exposure, it can be difficult to get enough during the winter months or rainier seasons.

Thankfully, you can also get D vitamins through supplements and certain food items, too. Foods like salmon, cow's milk, yogurt, certain types of mushrooms, tuna, and eggs are all high in vitamin D and can help you meet your daily recommended values.

Even though milk is a great beverage choice for increasing your levels of this vitamin, many people are either 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 45 Best Recipes for an Instant Vitamin D Boost.

What is fortified orange juice?

Orange juice contains a handful of helpful nutrients like vitamin C, potassium, folate, magnesium, and antioxidants like flavonoids and carotenoids. Because of these nutrients, orange juice has been known to help boost immunity, protect your heart health, and help to lower inflammation.

What you won't find as a naturally occurring nutrient in orange juice is vitamin D. However, you can find this vitamin in many different fortified versions of orange juice, which essentially just means OJ that has had nutrients added to it. Some of the most common nutrients added to fortified orange juice are calcium and vitamin D.

Getting your vitamin D through fortified OJ can be just as effective as taking a supplement. A study from the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that vitamins D2 and D3 are as bioavailable in juice as they are in a capsule or pill form.

Buying fortified orange juice

When you're looking to buy a fortified orange juice, make sure you 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 label closely when searching for one of these juices because sometimes it may only be fortified with calcium, and not vitamin D.

The takeaway

The takeaway here is that you'll always get the best boost of vitamin D by spending time in the sun on a daily basis. However, we all know that this isn't 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 like salmon, eggs, and yogurt, so that you can enjoy eating a variety of foods. But if you follow a more plant-based diet or simply don't like these foods, drinking fortified orange juice can give you that vitamin D boost you need.