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Prolonged Gaming Blamed For Rickets Rise
superapecommando writes "Too many hours spent playing videogames indoors is contributing to a rise in rickets, according to a new study by doctors. Professor Simon Pearce and Dr Tim Cheetham of Newcastle University have written a paper in the British Medical Journal which warns of the rickets uptake – a disease which sufferers get when deficient in Vitamin D. The study boils down to the fact that as more people play videogames indoors they don't get enough sunlight and this has meant the hospitals are now having to combat a disease that was last in the papers around the time Queen Victoria was on the throne." At least the kids are eating enough snacks with iodized salt that we don't have to worry about goiters.
Rickets is a softening of bones in children potentially leading to fractures and deformity. Rickets is among the most frequent childhood diseases in many developing countries. The predominant cause is a vitamin D deficiency, but lack of adequate calcium in the diet may also lead to rickets (cases of severe diarrhea and vomiting may be the cause of the deficiency). Although it can occur in adults, the majority of cases occur in children suffering from severe malnutrition, usually resulting from famine or starvation during the early stages of childhood.
Our wikipedia overlords report that the suggested daily supplementation for individuals at risk of deficiency is only 25 micrograms. Unless the risks of overdose are particularly hairy, or are encountered at a dose particularly close to the suggested one, this seems like a problem that could be fairly easily solved by slight modifications to the food supply.
Or, heck, just make console controllers whose plastics slowly leach vitamin D into the greasy, sweaty, hands of the gamer kiddies....
Don't listen to those people. You do NOT need sunlight to get vitamin D. Vitamin D is produced by your body when the high energy photons in sunlight break apart some chemical bonds in your skin and vitamin D is one of the results. However, it has also been isolated and produced externally for many decades. The vitamin D that you intake is almost as effective as the vitamin D produced by the sun.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Sunlight is photons. Energy. Vitamin D is matter. Vitamin D can't literally be in the sunlight.
7-dehydrocholesterol, a derivative of cholesterol, is photolyzed in the skin (mostly in the epidermal stratum basale and stratum spinosum) by ultraviolet light between 270-300 nm wavelength in 6-electron conrotatory electrocyclic reaction. The product is pre-vitamin D3.
Pre-vitamin D3 then spontaneously isomerizes to Vitamin D3 (cholecalciferol) in a antarafacial hydride [1,7] Sigmatropic shift. At room temperature the transformation of previtamin-D3 to vitamin D3 takes about 12 days to complete.
Sunlight isn't required to "activate" Vitamin D. It's that sunlight causes our bodies to naturally produce it.
Maybe the real problem is the lack of milk.
Bottles.
Unless the Wikipedia article is wrong, I think you're misinterpreting the flowchart.
Ingestion of natural vitamin D3 (cholecalciferol) from oily fish, egg yolks, and other vertebrate tissue sources, ingestion of natural vitamin D2 (ergocalciferol) from invertebrate (usually fungal) tissue sources like mushrooms, ingestion of enriched foods with versions of either vitamin, or skin exposure to ultraviolet (which creates D3) all put vitamin D into the bloodstream. Then, the liver performs the first step of processing the vitamin, hydroxylation of either into calcidiol. Then, the kidney performs a second and final hydroxylation, conversion into calcitriol. This is the vitamin used by the tissues.
In other words, sunlight is not involved with either hydroxylation reaction, only in one of the two sources (ingestion or skin synthesis) of the initial forms of vitamin D.
If sunlight were involved in either hydroxylation reaction, we'd need to expose our livers and kidneys to sunlight, and that sounds quite painful and messy to me.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
A healthy level of vitamin D in the blood should be around 60 ng/mL. In order to reach that, you'll have to supplement with the animal version of vitamin D, which is the liquid softgel Vitamin D3, and not the hard tablet D2 that's made from plant matter. If it just says "Vitamin D", chances are it's D2, and you should avoid that.
Take about 4,000 to 8,000 IU per day and you're golden. On top of that, your immune system will be able to fight off the common colds that everyone else gets each year due to D deficiency.
And don't bother trying to supplement with sun. Spending our lives in the shade has dramatically reduced our ability to convert sunlight into vitamin D.
Sources: this cardiologist and this neurobiologist
There's a very nice calculator for how much sunlight you need. You might find that 30 minutes sorely underestimates your needs.
Look for fastrt, by Ola Engelsen. There seems to be multiple versions, and I'm not sure which is the latest. Some leave out Skin Type, which an important factor, but here's one with it in.
http://nadir.nilu.no/~olaeng/fastrt/VitD-ez_quartMED.html
here's a more detailed version
http://nadir.nilu.no/~olaeng/fastrt/VitD_quartMEDandMED.html
There is also an associated paper, but I'm not sure if this is the latest version
http://www.nilu.no/index.cfm?ac=publications&folder_id=4309&publication_id=16084&view=rep&lan_id=3
or maybe this
http://www.nilu.no/index.cfm?ac=publications&folder_id=4309&publication_id=9024&view=rep
Straight from the cow, milk has very little vitamin D, but the government mandated level is supposed to be enough to get you to the point where you don't get rickets (not something neurologists or cardiologists really deal with).
The amounts of vitamin D that the guy in the first article is talking about is insanely more than any human would ever get from natural sources. We are just talking about preventing rickets here...not some miracle health vitamin.
Bottles.
Bullshit. Do you have any idea what the average salary in this country is? What the cost of housing is? Tell me how a family of four can survive on $32,000 a year, please. Tell me where you can find a suitable dwelling for four for under $800/month, in a place that actually has jobs? You and I may be able to pull it off, hell, I DO pull it off, my wife doesn't work, and we don't have to cut back on anything, but for most people, a single breadwinner is a pipe dream.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
When you speak of "The government" you mean the U.S.A., yeah?
This article (Q You did read TFA, didn't you? A No, you didn't even read the summary, did you? Sigh!) was published in the BRITISH medical journal. We Brits don't add much (if anything except water to bulk it up) to our foods here. Not even fluoride in the water (where I live, at least).
But we do get free soma every day!
Note to ACs: I won't mod you up, even if you are being funny or insightful. So take a chance! It's not real life!
Yes, please and a pony.