Increasingly rising sale of vitamin D may indicate both people's growing awareness of health and a form of epidemic deficiency of this particular type of nutrition. It depends on why and how the intake of this vitamin witnesses a sudden upswing. The cutting point, as mentioned in a report carried in this newspaper on Tuesday, is post-Covid time. It would be much too simplistic to conclude that people cloistered mostly within the four walls during the pandemic and deprived of sunshine, the easiest and best source of vitamin D, became deficient in the vitamin. If that would be the case, coastal fishermen exposed to sun more than the average population, were unlikely to have high prevalence of this vitamin deficiency. An associate scientist at the BRAC University's James P Grant School of Public Health informs this in addition to his disconcerting revelation that the average vitamin deficiency among people here is normally quite high.
The abundance of sunshine in this part of the world should have provided the necessary vitamin D human body requires but scientists are of the opinion that people with darker skin absorb less vitamin D from the sunshine than they require because of genetic constitution. But this is the vitamin responsible for enabling human body to maintain calcium in blood and bones for building and maintaining the two. It helps in using calcium and phosphorus to build bones and support healthy tissues. Moreover, it keeps the nervous system, musculoskeletal system and immune system healthy. Severe vitamin D deficiency can cause rickets in children and in older people cystic fibrosis, obesity, kidney and liver diseases if the conditions are not treated in time. Fortunately, vitamin D can be obtained from foods and in case there still remains deficiency, it can be supplemented by fortification of certain common food items.
The problem here, understandably, is with the low-income segments of people whose diets are mostly not balanced enough and lack nutritious contents including vitamin D. They can neither afford costly diagnostic tests nor vitamin supplements. Better they avoided those. It is quite reassuring, though, that this problem can as well be overcome if proper policies are adopted for fortification of foods. In cases of countries in the region, the best candidate for fortification is edible or cooking oil. India and Pakistan have already opted for this measure and Bangladesh can follow suit. It has already gone for fortification of edible oil with vitamin A. The good news is that the authorities are working on the issue in order to expand the policy of fortification of vitamin A in edible oil for inclusion of vitamin D.
To that end, the Food Safety Authority is assigned the task of developing the food fortification law and a technical working advisory committee of the ministry of health is reportedly concentrating on the particular aspect of fortification of vitamin D in edible oil. Clearly, the objective is to make such fortification mandatory for companies refining imported cooking oil in crude form or locally produced oil. In this case, the mills extracting oil from mustard seeds and other oil seeds should also be brought under the purview of the law. Not only the low income segments of society, but people in higher brackets of income can also have nutritional deficiency on account of unbalanced food intake. This needs to be addressed as well.
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