mossrose
October 20th 2004, 05:11 PM
I saw this in the October issue of the Canadian Reader's Digest, and found it quite interesting.
Anybody know anything much about Vitamin D?
The Healing Vitamin
Even with a healthy diet, you may be D-ficient
BY DIANE PETERS
Samar Elhamalawy didn’t know what was wrong with her little son. But when Mahmood was nine months old, he suddenly lost interest in walking. He reverted back to crawling, from standing and cruising along the couch. “He just started to deteriorate,” the Hamilton mother of two recalls. A few months later, she worriedly asked her family doctor why he had so few teeth. Then, at 14 months old, the little boy took two steps, fell down and broke his arm.
Within a month, Hamilton bone specialists diagnosed Mahmood with rickets, a bone-weakening disease caused by vitamin D deficiency.
Looking back a century, the slums of New York and London teemed with children whose weak, spindly limbs and bowed legs testified to their D deficiency. (Tiny Tim, the character in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, was a likely case.) The disease all but disappeared after the 1920s, when doctors realized it could be cured by sun exposure and farmers began fortifying milk with vitamin D.
But lately the malady has been making a comeback. That’s bad news, and not just for kids: Nowadays scientists are linking low levels of D to cancer, hypertension, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, osteoporosis and inflammatory bowel disease.
The rest of the article is here:
http://www.readersdigest.ca/mag/2004/10/Vitamin.html
Anybody know anything much about Vitamin D?
The Healing Vitamin
Even with a healthy diet, you may be D-ficient
BY DIANE PETERS
Samar Elhamalawy didn’t know what was wrong with her little son. But when Mahmood was nine months old, he suddenly lost interest in walking. He reverted back to crawling, from standing and cruising along the couch. “He just started to deteriorate,” the Hamilton mother of two recalls. A few months later, she worriedly asked her family doctor why he had so few teeth. Then, at 14 months old, the little boy took two steps, fell down and broke his arm.
Within a month, Hamilton bone specialists diagnosed Mahmood with rickets, a bone-weakening disease caused by vitamin D deficiency.
Looking back a century, the slums of New York and London teemed with children whose weak, spindly limbs and bowed legs testified to their D deficiency. (Tiny Tim, the character in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, was a likely case.) The disease all but disappeared after the 1920s, when doctors realized it could be cured by sun exposure and farmers began fortifying milk with vitamin D.
But lately the malady has been making a comeback. That’s bad news, and not just for kids: Nowadays scientists are linking low levels of D to cancer, hypertension, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, osteoporosis and inflammatory bowel disease.
The rest of the article is here:
http://www.readersdigest.ca/mag/2004/10/Vitamin.html