Rickets

I was thinking about Rickets the other day. It's that vitamin D deficiency disease that causes peoples bones to not form properly and they get bowlegged or whatever.

It started because my friend was talking about being lactose intolerant. Which led me, in my mind to immediately begin to argue both sides of the issues created when someone can't drink milk.
"where are you going to calcium, vitamin D, you're getting older, you need strong bones...

"Calcium is available in a plethora of veggies - like broccoli and all you need for the vitamin D is sunshine...."

This is truly how my brain functions (or malfunctions) I will argue both sides of any topic in my head for however long I have before the next distraction. Sometimes I branch off:

"My sister drinks lactaid, is there vitamin D in lactaid?...What are the other vegetables that have a lot of calcium?..."

More commonly I will go into a long lecture

"Vitamin can not be synthesized in the body without sunlight so it must be added, it plays a part in your bodies ability to utilize the calcium..."

I will take whatever weird little bits of info I have stored up there in my head, maybe start making things up, that whole sentence above might be made up. Not sure. Anyway

So this day my brain remembered a story I had heard. So there was a time that people got rickets with regularity and that is no longer the case, But I guess in the last ten years or so there has been a small resurgence of rickets. Scientists were a little baffled as to why. One guy suggested that it was because of sunblock. That parents were so well trained on the dangers of sun exposure that between sunblock, sunhats and keeping their kids out of the sun, we were inadvertently giving some kids rickets. His solution was to take your kids in the sun for 15 minutes a day without sunblock. (He was subsequently discredited and his career ruined because we are very scared of sunlight in this country.)

Then I started thinking about how the way of life we have created keeps us all out of the sun. We are totally disconnected from nature - to the extreme. So I formulated a theory that Rickets was something that would have become a common problem during the industrial revolution when everyone moved inside to work and for school. So I googled it. And I was right! According to what I read, they say Rickets is the only known childhood epidemic that was directly caused by the industrial revolution.

Ha.
Im just sayin.