Hey everyone! Welcome back to the blog. Today, we are diving into a health topic that really caught my attention because it can sneak up on literally anyone, no matter how active or healthy you think you are. Have you ever felt completely wiped out and just chalked it up to a busy schedule? Well, let’s talk about why we might need to pay a bit more attention to what our bodies are secretly trying to tell us.
Imagine going about your normal routine, feeling completely fit, and then suddenly finding yourself collapsing at work. That is precisely what happened to Saskia Reeves-Priestley. She was only twenty-three years old and working as a special educational needs teacher. To look at her, you would think she was in top shape—she was an avid football goalkeeper who played four times a week. Out of nowhere, though, things took a terrifying turn.
She remembers feeling intensely dizzy, incredibly nauseous, dealing with heart palpitations, and getting really hot. There were no warning signs at all. After heading to the medical professionals and getting some blood work done, the results revealed something shocking: her vitamin D levels were practically nonexistent. She described the experience simply by saying that the low levels hit her like a truck.
Saskia’s story isn’t just an isolated incident, either. Recent figures from places like the UK show that low vitamin rates are actually climbing across certain age groups, and young women and girls are taking the brunt of it. According to the National Diet and Nutrition Survey data, nearly a quarter of teenagers aged eleven to eighteen were classified as deficient last year. That is a surprisingly high number for such a young demographic!
So, where do we normally get this crucial vitamin? While we can absorb some of it through our diet by eating things like meat and oily fish, or by taking supplements, the vast majority of it is actually manufactured right inside our bodies. It happens when ultraviolet light from the sun hits our bare skin. Naturally, depending on where you happen to live on the globe or what time of year it is, the amount of sunlight changes, which directly affects our body’s ability to make it.
Of course, there are other factors at play too. Wearing sunscreen and keeping our skin covered up completely changes how much UV light gets through, even though those habits are great for protecting us from other health risks. Plus, folks with darker skin actually need exposure to much stronger light to produce the exact same amount of vitamin D as someone with lighter skin.
Doctors typically don’t run routine blood tests to check your vitamin levels unless you bring up specific concerns, though they are usually happy to hand out supplements if a patient worries they might be at high risk. But because it can be so sneaky, lots of people walk around completely unaware.
Medical experts often refer to this issue as the silent disease. Dr. Suma Uday, a paediatric endocrinologist who is very passionate about bringing awareness to this problem, explains that the deficiency in young people and adults is incredibly difficult to spot. It is super easy to miss or even misdiagnose because the early signs—like general fatigue, as well as bone and joint pain—overlap with so many other everyday issues.
Dr. Uday warns that it silently eats away at the bones, leaving them softened and much more susceptible to breaks. Think about rickets, the bone disease we usually associate with babies and infants, or osteomalacia, which causes a similar weakening in adults. It’s a serious business.
Take Amaka Osu, for instance. She was a twenty-one-year-old student living in a university house in Liverpool, just trying to make dinner one evening, when her body started shaking uncontrollably. She lost her vision temporarily, unable to see properly in front of her. Her housemate panicked and rushed her straight to accident and emergency. Just like Saskia, she eventually found out she was severely lacking in vitamin D.
Before that scary episode, Amaka didn’t think she had any symptoms other than feeling tired all the time. But as she pointed out, she was a busy college student juggling classes and work—feeling tired just felt like part of the standard university package. She actually remembered her mother having low vitamin D in the past, but she never imagined it could happen to someone her age. Thankfully, after starting on supplements, she feels much better, though she admits the whole ordeal left her feeling pretty anxious about the possibility of it happening again.
Because cases like these are slipping through the cracks, a dedicated group of clinicians and academics—including Dr. Uday—have formed an alliance called ACT NOW Vitamin D. They are pushing for the official threshold used to classify someone as deficient to be raised. By changing that baseline, they believe the medical system could catch a lot more people early on, get a much clearer picture of how widespread the problem really is, and start treatment before things get dangerous.
Dr. Uday also points out a worrying trend of lifelong deficits in women, starting in adolescence, carrying through pregnancy, and ultimately impacting newborns. If you fail to correct it from the very beginning, she warns, the cycle continues to affect multiple generations.
Professor Martin Hewison from the University of Birmingham shares that sense of urgency, calling the situation shocking. He notes that even though we discovered vitamin D a whole century ago, rickets hasn’t magically disappeared. In his view, if we are still seeing cases of rickets in our communities, it practically guarantees that countless other people are walking around with a deficiency.
To tackle this on a larger scale, Professor Hewison suggests that governments should seriously look into mandatory food fortification. This means adding essential vitamins directly to everyday foods during production, something countries like Canada and Sweden already enforce. While some places do add vitamin D to products like breakfast cereals and spreads voluntarily, making it a standard practice could help protect the public.
He notes that as winter rolls around and natural sunlight dips, people naturally start losing their stored levels. At some point, we might just have to accept that for certain groups, taking regular supplements is simply a standard part of keeping healthy.
As for Saskia, she is back on the field, playing in goal again and sticking to a regular routine of vitamin D supplements to keep her levels right where they need to be. It just goes to show that taking care of our internal health is just as important as keeping up with our favorite sports and hobbies.
I hope you found this little deep dive helpful and eye-opening! Make sure to get outside when you can, listen to what your body is telling you, and don’t hesitate to chat with a professional if you’re feeling constantly exhausted. Catch you all in the next post!
source: feeds.bbci.co.uk (www.bbc.co.uk)