Fitness

It is undisputed that vitamin D aids the absorption of calcium, favors its retention, and improves its utilization.

Certainly it is a fact that calcium is needed by adults; this mineral helps to relax nerves, induce sound sleep, and decrease sensitiveness to pain. The National Research Council concedes that small amounts of vitamin D are desirable for people working at night, for elderly persons, and for nuns and others whose clothing shields them from the sunlight. According to this Council, however, “vigorous persons leading normal lives” appear not to need vitamin D. What about the almost vigorous person leading an almost normal life? It seems to me the scientific scientists are indulging in unscientific double talk here.

Vitamin D is scantily distributed in foods. There is some in egg yolks provided the hens sat in the sunshine and preened their feathers well; .50 to 200 eggs daily might supply your needs quite adequately if modern hens were not forced to live in shaded cages. Caviar contains some vitamin D; there is a little in the milk from cows pastured on high mountain slopes. Artificially produced vitamin-D milk is excellent, but as a sole source it has little value in my opinion. Fish-liver oils are the only natural foods containing sufficient quantities of this vitamin to promote health; that is, if you call them natural foods as my children do.

Vitamin D can be produced in foods or oils by exposure to ultraviolet light; the commercial concentrate, viosterol, is made bv such a method. This vitamin is formed by ultraviolet light from sunshine in the oils on the skin, provided you have oils on your skin and the shortest rays from the sun reach the earth. In winter, these rays do not penetrate our atmospheric blanket; during the summer they reach the top of the Empire State Building but usually not the street below it. Sunshine would be an excellent source of this vitamin if it were not for the facts that people are surrounded by smog, wear clothes, live in houses, have bathtubs and hot-water heaters, and listen to soap operas.

Most medical textbooks say that vitamin D is formed by sunlight on the oils in the skin although it was proved 16 years ago 1 that the oils must first be on the skin, then exposed to ultraviolet light, and later absorbed back into the body. If persons take a bath before going into the sunshine, the oils are washed off, and no vitamin D is formed; if they do not bathe before exposure to sunshine but bathe immediately afterward, the oils are removed before the vitamin can be absorbed into the body. Most of the oils appear to be washed off by cold water, and still larger quantities by warm water; warm soapy water does the job thoroughly. Time was when wood was hard to split, water hard to carry, and soap hard to make (and smelled too bad to use anyway); the Saturday-night bath was then a family institution. During the remainder of the week the oils stayed on the skin and absorbed any ultraviolet rays which reached them. The early settlers described the Indians as being great of stature with teeth “as even as piano keys,” both the advantages of having no hot-water heaters and no soap. Now as a nation we are bath-happy and soap-happy; I, for one, call it progress.

There are to be found in any medical library many books and thousands of articles concerning the need of vitamin D by children. Except for a few articles and short paragraphs on diseases known as osteomalacia, meaning literally bad bones, and osteoporosis, meaning porous bones, the need of adults for vitamin D is rarely mentioned. These diseases are identical except in degree; bad bones are worse than porous bones. In both, so few minerals are available that the bones become porous and honeycombed; the persons so afflicted may become shorter and may suffer from muscle cramps, twitches, and even convulsions, or tetany. Osteoporosis is usually painless, but in osteomalacia pain is experienced, especially in the hips; such pain is customarily spoken of as rheumatism; spontaneous fractures and breaks may occur. This disease is common in China and India, particularly when the need for minerals is increased by pregnancy and «becomes more piteous” (p. 684 of ref. 2, p. 36) with each child, especially when the mother “suckles her infant in the vain hope of thus warding off her tragic fertility.” Skeletal remains indicate that the Norse colony founded by Eric the Red in Greenland gradually became extinct because the pelvic deformities of women suffering from osteomalacia hindered childbirth; it is thought that the colonists did not eat the local diet of fish and fish-liver oils; too little vitamin D could be obtained from the Arctic sun. Osteomalacia results from famines and food shortages during and after wars. It occurs in American and English cities “where solitary old people live in proud self-respecting poverty rather than apply for charity” (p. 684 of ref. 2, p. 36). This disease can be cured by vitamin D alone, but to speed recovery calcium and phosphorus are customarily given with the vitamin.

Sir Robert McCarrison, the great English physician, wrote of osteomalacia in India among the Mohammedan women observing the custom of purdah. These women veil their faces at adolescence and rarely go outside their homes. No milk or other food rich in calcium is eaten. Vitamin D, however, either from sunshine or cod-liver oil, so increases the absorption and utilization of the meager dietary calcium that health is restored. Here, at last, is proof that vitamin D alone, without any increase in calcium or phosphorus, can help adults as well as rapidly growing children.

Americans have no more cause to worry about osteomalacia than about scurvy; 60 per cent or more of our population, however, obtain too little calcium in their diets. Much of this supply fails to reach the blood. Calcium is tricky in that it does not dissolve easily; your teeth and bones, even though washed by saliva or tissue fluid, do not dissolve. Unless calcium from food is dissolved, it remains in the intestine and is lost in the feces. The calcium supply to the tissues can be increased by eating more foods containing calcium or by obtaining ample vitamin D; both should be adequate.