by Effie Moore Salem

Created on: October 19, 2009   Last Updated: October 18, 2010

Vitamin D is important. Getting some sunshine is the easiest and the least expensive of seeing that children get plenty of sunshine. Professionals recommend that children get least ten minutes of sun exposure every day. This means sun without sun shield. The interaction of the sun's rays and a epithelial chemical reacts and starts the liver manufacturing Vitamin D 3. This ensures them enough Vitamin D to ward off rickets and other bone malformations. Of course the sun does not shine every day and you cannot stockpile sunshine on the sunny days to save for non-sunshine days so the second best recommendations is to drink milk regularly, eat eggs and fish. These are about the only foods that have any usable amounts of this very important vitamin.

It is important because without enough vitamin D the normal blood levels of calcium and phosphorous will not be maintained nor will it be absorbed as needed to promote healthy bones and teeth. The lack of Vitamin D causes rickets, a disease where the bones are soft and pliable. Recognizable symptoms of this disease are bowed legs and other skeletal deformities. In adults, where normally the bones begin to weaken with age and yes, the lack of vitamin D, osteoporosis is the result.

Years ago, maybe sixty or seventy years, rickets was a common childhood disease. To ward off that condition, children, nearly all children, had to swallow the nasty tasting Cod Liver Oil. As I remember it, there was one thing tasting worse and that was the Castor oil that was sometimes given to relieve constipation. After the medical scientist honed in on the problem and started treating the children, rickets all but disappeared.

It was not until the discovery that too much sun could cause skin cancer and the marketing of sun screen products and a few years hence rickets began to be on the increase. In the last year or so, doctors began recommending that sunscreen use be modified. Allow for some sunshine to come into contact with the bare skin and thus have the body manufacture its own supply of vitamin D. How does this work? When the body is exposed to the ultra violet rays of the sun (UVB) this starts the synthesizing process in the body that creates vitamin D. This is a special kind of vitamin D called Vitamin D 3, or cholecalciferol. The other one utilized by humans is Vitamin D 2 or ergocalciferol that is synthesized from plants.

To be absolutely correct, vitamin D 3 acts not as the other vitamin acts but is a biological process using the sunshine as a catalyst for the body to metabolically produce this vitamin. Before exposure to the sun the chemical agent is scientifically known as 7-dehydrocholesterol and becomes useful to the body only after coming in contact with the sun. After that the liver transforms it into cholecalciferol.

What precisely is the difference between Vitamin D 2 and Vitamin D 3? Basically the difference is the way in which it is made. Vitamin D 2 is made from plant sources and vitamin D 3 is from the body sources of cholesterol and is therefore created from animal sources. The synthetic form of vitamin D, the one that is added to the milk and other food products is of the plant variety, vitamin D 2. It is, in reality, more of a vitamin - in definition terms and not usefulness - than vitamin D3.

All you need to know however is get your children out and into the sunshine as much as possible and make sure at least ten minutes they are without sunscreen. It is a valuable aid in forming those strong bones and teeth and it is free! In lieu of that of course, you can buy supplements and forget about the hot sun, but of the choices, why not get the real thing? Your children will likely prefer the sun shining on them.

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