Half a billion people live with little vitamin D from the sun

Created December 2016

Vitamin D deficiency in Europeans today and in Viking settlers of Greenland

Biochemistry (Moscow), December 2016, Volume 81, Issue 12, pp 1492–1497

Phenoptosis (Special Issue) Review, First Online: 18 Dec 2016, DOI: 10.1134/S0006297916120117

H. GöringEmail authorS. Koshuchowa

* Sun and UV * Optimize vitamin D from the sun * Vitamin D from the sun during Northern winters – contrary to current belief – April 2015 * 20 cent vitamin D pill similar to 2 hours sunbathing at 60 degree latitude – RCT Aug 2013 * Sunny side of the hill is the healthiest – 400BC latitude of Greece is 39 degrees * How I get some of winter vitamin D and exercise Wikipedia Cities vs Latitude A few examples * 39.9 degrees: Beijing * 40-45 degrees: New York City, Salt Lake City, Chicago, Rome, Boston * 45-50 Montreal, Portland, Paris * 50-55 London, Amsterdam, Berlin * 55-60 Copenhagen, Moscow, Stockholm, Oslo * 60-65 Fairbanks Suspect that there are more than half of billion people living North of 40 degrees http://brilliantmaps.com/population-latitude/ image

The vast majority of the Earth’s population lives between the 20th and 40th parallel north and south. It seems that right here humans have found the best living conditions relating not only to temperature and food recourses, but also to UV radiation necessary for the production of vitamin D by human skin. An exception to this general rule is Europe.

Nearly half a billion people live between the 40th and 60th parallel north of the equator despite the fact that the amounts of UV radiation there are much lower. Moreover, since the time of the Vikings, there has always been a part of the European population that lived even further north than the 60th parallel (the northern parts of Europe, including Greenland).

In this work, we present the potential role that vitamin D deficiency might have played in the extinction of the Vikings of Greenland. We analyze factors that contribute to the discrepancy between the theoretical distribution of areas with vitamin D deficiency and today’s reality, like the impact of civilization, religious traditions, as well as vitamin D supplementation in food products and as a biologically active dietary additive. The global migration of people on a scale and speed never seen before is now even more important for this discrepancy)

Original Russian Text © H. Göring, S. Koshuchowa, 2016, published in Biokhimiya, 2016, Vol. 81, No. 12, pp. 1777–1783

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