VITAMIN D AND RICKETS

VITAMIN D AND RICKETS. Rickets, and it primary cause was a lack of vitamin D.Beginning in the seventeenth century, rickets was epidemic among poor children living in crowded, dirty, industrial cities, especially northern ones. At the end of the nineteenth century, one study of children in two cities in the Netherlands and the United States reported that 80% to 90% of the children had rickets.

These children experienced a softening of their bones, increased risk of bone fractures, misshapen ribs, and deformities of legs that bowed under the weights of their bodies. Without enough vitamin D, they could not properly absorb calcium, the major building block of strong bones. If rickets progressed unchecked, the children died, because calcium also is essential for the functioning of other body tissues, such as the brain and intestines.

Vitamin D is known as the sunshine vitamin because it can be absorbed through the skin from the sun’s rays. However, winter sunshine is weak. Winter weather often keeps children inside, and winter storms produce clouds that block the sun. Even in summer, industrial cities in the past were so polluted that little sunshine reached children living in dark, crowded tenements and slums.

Children with darker skin also absorb vitamin D from the sun less efficiently than paler children. Few foods are a source of vitamin D. Vitamin D from the sun is metabolized by and stored in the liver. It is fat soluble, so it could be obtained from cod liver oil, but few children were offered this “tonic” until the 1930s.
 
That is when the connection between sunshine, vitamin D, and rickets was finally understood. By the 1940s, milk was routinely fortified with vitamin D, and infants were given cod liver oil daily. In wealthier, industrialized countries, rickets was all but eradicated.

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