a few more words about Apple

[walkitout]

It was a revelation to learn that all mothers -- breastfeeding or artificial feeding -- for the first half of the 20th century were told to supplement their babies with orange juice (for vitamin C) and cod liver oil (for vitamin D). The idea was to prevent scurvy and rickets, of course.

Which explains in part what the hell my mother may have been thinking, feeding me OJ at 6 weeks of age.

Comments

[jinasphinx.livejournal.com]

This may also explain why my dad was telling me to supplement Nicky with a little vitamin C when he was just a couple months old. (I said yeah, uh-huh, and then asked our family doc about it later, who said no need.) Although I guess with the new vitamin D guidelines, the cod liver oil may actually have been a good idea.

N. doesn't have rickets, right?

[walkitout]

So I figure you're in the clear. I think you're better off taking the kid into the sunshine with minimal clothes than giving them cod liver oil -- and I'm actually pretty much in favor of cod liver oil. But I think when the kids are exclusively-BF, the right person to supplement is the mother; the "right" amount will come through in the milk if the mother has it in her and then we don't have to wonder if the current guidelines are reasonable or not.

I think the problem back in the 19th/early 20th C was that women covered up more than we do now (so were vitamin D deficient), and women living in cities didn't have access to fruits (and vegetables) year round that contained enough vitamin C.

Re: N. doesn't have rickets, right?

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

When I was a kid, the family living next door to us (who were quite fair-skinned) all seemed to have mild cases of rickets. One of them was actually diagnosed with rickets, treated, and grew up as the only one with really straight legs. (This was a family of more than a dozen children. A lot of stuff fell through the cracks.)

A friend of mine who's a breast cancer survivor got diagnosed with low levels of vitamin D recently. She has somewhat dark skin, but not very (it's dark compared to yours or mine, put it that way).

Re: N. doesn't have rickets, right?

[walkitout]

Apparently you can have some weird metabolic thing that causes rickets:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-linked_hypophosphatemia

I first heard about this watching _Bones_.

I don't know anyone personally that had a problem -- that's kind of wild. But then, maybe the people I know who had a problem never got diagnosed?

Re: N. doesn't have rickets, right?

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

My best guess is that the kids were on homemade formula and they didn't bother adding vitamins (because that's the expensive part). I doubt it was a metabolic thing as that wouldn't have been fixable for the one child who was actually diagnosed (that is, it wouldn't have gotten better just with vitamin therapy).