Get your daily dose of 'sunshine'

 AS THE gloomy winter days set in and the sun's rays get weaker, our opportunity to build up and maintain our body's store of vitamin D plummets.

Vitamin D is rightly called the sunshine vitamin because the action of sunlight on our skin converts pre-vitamin D into a form our body can use.

Vitamin D is actually a hormone, and does some pretty important jobs for us, not least helping us to use the calcium we eat to keep our bones healthy. Without enough vitamin D, toddlers can develop rickets – this used to be a thing of the past, but in recent years there have been several hundred children treated.



In adults, weakened bones is not uncommon, with one in four elderly people said to develop this condition, many cases being preventable with a diet rich in calcium and a good vitamin D level.

What is less known is that low vitamin D levels have been linked with other health problems ranging from breast, colon and prostate cancers, and some auto-immune conditions like Type 1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, crohns and multiple sclerosis.

Good levels may simply help ward off colds and flu.

This being such a valuable vitamin, it is worrying more than 50 per cent of adults have insufficient vitamin D level.

The vitamin is found in so few foods in good amounts that even a healthy diet can fail to supply what we need if we don't get a top up from the sun.

With excellent skin cancer campaigns in the last few years, less skin is being exposed, and sunscreen prevents up to 99 per cent of vitamin D from being manufactured by the skin.

The National Osteoporosis Society has tried to address this by issuing safe sun skin exposure guidelines, so we can balance the need to gain some benefit from the sun's rays together with minimising skin cancer risks.

They suggest two ten-minute sessions of sun exposure each day without sun cream.

Also, try to maximise your intake of oily fish like salmon, pilchards, sardines, mackerel, herring and kippers. Some branded breakfast cereals have Vitamin D added, as do some fortified malted milk drinks and some fat spreads. Eggs and some meat products will supply small amounts.

A daily Cod Liver Oil supplement can really help keep those levels topped up through the winter months.