Vitamin D as a child affects life as an adult
You take your vitamins religiously. You exercise and watch what you eat. But your kids? You send them to school with a Twinkie and fruit juice and don’t think twice about vitamins for them.
It’s not that you don’t care about your kids, it’s just that we don’t really think of them as having the problem. We think of kids being more resilient and the choices that they make not having a long term impact. But we just now that this isn’t true. There is a long list of things that happen to children that have effects decades later as an adult. These can include:
- Childhood maltreatment (physical, emotional, nutritional, sexual)
- Exposure to parents who smoke
- Antibiotic exposure as an infant
The point is that things that happen in childhood DO matter. These things can play a huge role in the health challenges your child will or will not have to deal with as an adult.
That’s a pretty strong responsibility as a parent.
Luckily some things are easier to implement. Which brings us to this particular study looking at the relationship to vitamin D levels in children and the health of their blood vessels 27 years later (as measured by carotid artery intima media thickness, or IMT). Here’s what they found:
- Children with the lowest levels of 25-OH vitamin D (<40 nmol/L or 16 ng/ml–a very low number) were 70% more likely to have high-risk IMT.
- These same low-level vitamin D kids were 80% more likely to have risk factors for heart disease as an adult.
This is a very simple addition to your child’s routine. With Keegan (9 years old), he gets 6,000 IU of vitamin D per week. That’s only 3 drops per week of the Biotics Bio-D-mulsion Forte formula that I recommend here in the office. I will usually add another drop of Biotics Bio-Ae-mulsion Forte as well (vitamin A 12,500 IU) to help support immune function.
This combination has seemed to keep his immune system humming at top efficiency and according to this study, may be protecting his blood vessels at this very moment…