Keep Your Babies To Sunlight

The festive season is over. Cold-foggy weather is ahead of us. Please do not forget to keep your kids in sunlight. Sunlight is a principal source of Vitamin D for the human being. Vitamin D deficiency in childhood especially the first one year of life causes serious immediate diseases like rickets and multiple long term consequences like diabetes, osteoporosis, etc. Asian people are dark-skinned people. We need more sunlight exposure than those of white-skinned people to get adequate vitamin D levels. Bones get soften in rickets and get deformed in weight-bearing regions. Infants first try to crawl with both hands. We should look for swelling of wrists to search for rickets in infants. Walking kids usually present with bowing of legs. I recently found multiple rickets kids with swelling of wrists.

Though food also plays an important role in Vitamin D level in our body, sunlight exposure is a cheap and easily available source of Vit D. There is significant controversy regarding the duration of daily sunlight exposure. It varies from country to country, white skin to dark skin people, etc. For Indian Kids, it is a rough estimation of around 15-30 min daily peak hour sunlight exposure which is sufficient to maintain Vit D level in our kids. Prevention is always better than cure.