One in eight Europeans has insufficient vitamin D

One in eight Europeans has a vitamin D deficiency, scientists at University College Cork have found.

Their groundbreaking analysis also reveals that up to 40% of people have insufficient vitamin D levels to support good bone health.

The European Commission-funded project was led by Professors Kevin Cashman and Máiréad Foley, at UCC’s Cork Centre for vitamin D and nutrition research.

They analysed vitamin D status in 18 nationally, or regionally, representative studies of 55,844 European children, teenagers, adults, and elderly people.

Prof Cashman said their report, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, was a conservative estimate of how many people had vitamin D deficiency.

Severe vitamin D deficiency causes rickets in children, and osteomalacia (softening of the bones) in adults.

It may also increase the risk of many other chronic, non-bone related diseases, including cardio-vascular disease, cancer, childhood allergies, and eczema.

The ODIN project (food-based solutions for optimal vitamin D nutrition and health, through the life-cycle) raises a number of particular concerns.

Between 18% and 65% of dark-skinned individuals in Britain, Norway, and Finland were vitamin-D deficient — a far higher rate than that of the white populations in those countries.

Also concerning is the prevalence of vitamin-D deficiency among white Europeans — about 11m (12%-15%) in Germany, 500,000 (12%) in Ireland, and 13m (20%) in Britain.

The analysis used standardised data for vitamin-D status, a key and novel approach developed by the Vitamin-D Standardisation Program at the National Institutes of Health, which is in the US.