With the end of British Summer Time coming this weekend, and the annual change of the clocks back to GMT, the evenings will be darker earlier and the days feel shorter.
With this in mind, are you aware of the guidance on vitamin D? Vitamin D is essential for healthy bones and in the UK we get most of our vitamin D from sunlight exposure between March and September. We need vitamin D to help absorb calcium and phosphate from our diet which are important for healthy teeth, bones and muscles.
Between October and March in the Uk the sunlight doesn’t contain enough UVB for us to make vitamin D which means we need to get it from our food and from supplements. Unfortunately there are not many food sources that contain good supplies of vitamin D and so the Government recommend that anyone over 5 years and under 65 years should consider taking a daily supplement containing 10 micrograms in autumn and winter.
The Department of Health also recommends that all babies from birth to 1 year old, including breast-fed babies and formula-fed babies who have less than 500ml a day of formula, all children aged 1-4 years, anyone over 65, all pregnant and breast-feeding women, and all people who aren’t exposed to the sun should all take daily vitamin D supplements all year round at a dose of 10 micrograms a day. For babies less than a year the recommendation is 8.5 micrograms to 10micrograms per day.
Back in June, we covered the subject of sunshine and vitamin D in our podcast, and whilst the safe sun advice may be less relevant at the moment, the vitamin D information certainly is. You can hear the podcast on our podcast page or you can hear it here:
23 October 2020