Study Shows Serious Vitamin D Deficiency in Young Children

The Children's Hospital Of Philadelphia has issued a statement that should be of concern to all parents. Young children and adolescents, who are otherwise healthy, are turning up with low levels of Vitamin D and this could lead to major health problems such as rickets, which can greatly stunt growth in the young, Rickets is a deficiency disease resulting from a lack of vitamin D or calcium and from insufficient exposure to sunlight, characterized by defective bone growth and occurring chiefly in children. Vitamin D deficiency can also lead to brittle bone disease in adults.

They site a study in the current issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition that measured blood levels of vitamin D in 382 healthy children between six years and 21 years of age living in the northeastern U.S. The study included monitoring the children's dietary( daily consumption of milk for one) and supplemental vitamin D intake, as well as body mass, and found that more than half of the children had low blood levels of vitamin D. That is a frightening statistic The study showed that 55 percent of the children had inadequate vitamin D blood levels and 68 percent overall had low bloodlevels of the vitamin in the wintertime. Vitamin D is known as the Sunshine Vitamin because sunshine is a source of Vitamin D, a partial expatiation for the Vitamin D shortages in winter.

One disturbing fact that come out in the study is that the children with the worse results were African American children and children above age nine that had low dietary vitamin D intake. They did not include economics in the survey. Parent think they are saving money by giving the children less costly juice drinks or soda. Or they do not want to hassle with the children over what to drink. The fact that it is more prevalent in children over nine indicates that while parents are getting them to drinking milk when they are young, one they are old enough to hang out with their friends, they drink what the friends to, mostly soda. They do not want to be un cool and parents, lead by example and you will see a change.