The new doubled recommendations for children's vitamin D levels collide headlong into our toaster-pastry, grab-and-go, fluorescent-lit lives, asking us to make breakfast the most important meal of a day and to boot the kids outside to play.
This month, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) said kids need twice the usually recommended amount of vitamin D because of evidence suggesting that it may help prevent serious diseases. The new recommendation is 400 IUs, or international units, every day. That's four glasses of milk.
Specifically, the report focused on breast-fed babies and even more on their mothers, said Dr. Teresa Kovarik, a pediatrician in HealthPartners' Como Clinic in St. Paul.
"We have the majority of women as being vitamin D deficient, and because babies are born with only 70 percent of what the mom's level is, the babies are even more deficient," Kovarik said. "Then the breast milk is deficient, so we really have a snowball effect."
The AAP's report may just be the tip of the iceberg, she added.
"We need to be looking at whether the mother's level is enough and supplement the mothers first, which helps the mom and the baby," she said.
If the flap about vitamin D seems sudden and alarming, you're right. "We are having emerging data that show there really is an epidemic of vitamin D deficiency in women in our country," Kovarik said, noting that sunscreen use and spending more time indoors have put a crimp in the easiest and fastest way to get vitamin D.
Living in Minnesota winters doesn't help. The angle of the sun is so extreme that for five months of the year, we're not converting sunlight into vitamin D. A deficiency also is behind a rise in rickets, or a softening of the bones, once considered a malady of developing countries.
