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.

Via Wikipedia

[Bicx]

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.

Hmm...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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....

Re:Hmm...

[dougisfunny]

Mountain Dew, now enhanced with Vitamin Dew

Re:Hmm...

[Monkeedude1212]

I just did a bit of research, it would take 10 taaaallll Glasses of Vitamin D enriched Milk to barely get the amount required.

However, less than 30 minutes of sunlight (varying on your size, your skin pigmentation and where you live) will deliver this amount.

Re:Milk?

[Renraku]

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.

Re:Alrighty, clue me in

[TheSync]

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.

Re:Milk?

[Knara]

Sunlight isn't required to "activate" Vitamin D. It's that sunlight causes our bodies to naturally produce it.

Re:Milk?

[ottothecow]

They already do this...the whole reason milk is loaded with vitamin D is that in the 1930's the government started forcing dairy producers to fortify their milk with vitamin D in order to combat rickets

Maybe the real problem is the lack of milk.

Re:Sunlight is the key

[idontgno]

Unless the Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] 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.

Re:Hmm...

[bakawolf]

as opposed to a long and unpleasant life?

Supplement with Vitamin D3 softgels, 5000IU/day

[brian0918]

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 [blogspot.com] and this neurobiologist [blogspot.com]

Re:Via Wikipedia

[Anonymous Coward]

They consider the crust a grain, the sauce a vegetable, the cheese a dairy, and the pepperoni a meat.

That's not surprising considering that pizza crust is made of grain, the sauce from a vegetable, cheese is a dairy product, and pepperoni is a meat.

Web calculator

[Khashishi]

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 [nadir.nilu.no]

here's a more detailed version
http://nadir.nilu.no/~olaeng/fastrt/VitD_quartMEDandMED.html [nadir.nilu.no]

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 [www.nilu.no]
or maybe this
http://www.nilu.no/index.cfm?ac=publications&folder_id=4309&publication_id=9024&view=rep [www.nilu.no]

Re:Milk?

[ottothecow]

Eh...those guys are clearly talking about the other benefits of large amounts of vitamin D.

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.

$32,000 will support a family of four?

[spun]

Bullshit. Do you have any idea what the average salary [wikipedia.org] 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.

Re:Milk?

[bLanark]

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!

Re:Via Wikipedia

[ucblockhead]

I'm not so sure of that. We took our kid out of one daycare center because they increasingly relied on the TV as a pacification device. TV had gone from "special treat on Friday" to "2-3 hours a day."

Re:Via Wikipedia

[SpeZek]

And there's no scientific evidence that there's anything wrong with corn syrup.

Yeah! That's right!


Except for, you know, all the scientific evidence [nih.gov]

Re:Hmm...

[iosq]

RDA Is different from healthy blood levels. All the vitamin D doesn't miraculously vanish from your system when the clock strikes midnight. USDA seems to disagree with your recommendation of 4000-8000 IU a day - they set the "tolerable upper limit" for Vitamin D intake to 2000IU/day. That's not to say I think the levels you are suggesting are actually dangerous, just that no one without a pre-existing deficiency would need to supplement to that level.

Re:and of course

[sjames]

Yes, please and a pony.