Childhood weight affected by vitamin D deficiency

Kids who are deficient in vitamin D accumulated fat around the waist and gained weight more rapidly than kids who got enough vitamin D, a new study that appears in American Journal of Clinical Nutrition suggests. The investigators recruited a group of 479 school children ages 5-12 from Bogota, Colombia, in 2006 and followed them for about 30 months. They measured vitamin D in blood taken at the beginning of the study, and then examined the link between vitamin D levels and changes in three indicators of body fat over time: body mass index, waist circumference and subscapular-to-triceps skin fold ratio.

Researchers found that the kids with the lowest vitamin D levels at the beginning tended to gain weight faster than the kids with higher levels, who added that children with the lowest vitamin D levels had more drastic increases in central body fat measures. Vitamin D deficiency was also linked to slower growth in height among girls but not boys.

Of all the children tested, 10 percent were vitamin D deficient, and another 46 percent of kids were insufficient, which meant they were at risk of becoming deficient. Bogota, Colombia is in a subtropical zone where one may not expect to find a lot of vitamin D deficiency since the assumption is that sunlight is abundant there.