A DOCTOR issued a stark warning to parents breastfeeding their babies, as missing out on a key vitamin could stunt your little one’s growth.
A London-based GP shared the example of a child whose legs started bow inward ahead of their second birthday.
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The toddler’s parents visited a doctor, who revealed the tot was also walking differently from other children its age, Dr Sermed Mezher took to TikTok to share.
It was also flagged that the two-year-old had a widening at its wrists.
The issue lay in the child’s diet – namely, what it hadn’t been given.
The tot’s parents revealed they had exclusively breastfed their child up to nine months old.
Read more on babies’ health
But they hadn’t given any vitamin D supplements during this time.
“Vitamin D is an essential part of a growing child’s bone strength,” Dr Mezher said, “and you can’t get it from breast milk.”
Vitamin D helps regulate the amount of calcium and phosphate in the body – these are nutrients that keep bones, teeth and muscles healthy.
A lack of essential vitamin can be serious and lead to bone deformities such as rickets in children, which it seems the two-year-old suffered.
Rickets can make your bones soft and weak and less able to grow normally. It can also cause pain, making little ones reluctant to walk.
Other features of the condition include bowed legs, thickening at the ankles, wrists and knees, a waddling walk and soft skull bones.
The TikTok doc’s warnings are in line with NHS recommendations for children’s diets.
To avoid the risk of rickets, it recommends that once babies reach six months of age, their parents give them daily vitamin D supplements until they’re five years old.
That is unless unless they’re having 500ml or more of first infant formula each day.
When you buy your baby vitamin supplements, make sure you read the label to check they are age appropriate.
Babies up to the age of one only need 8.5 to 10 micrograms (mcg) of vitamin D a day.
But children over that age need 10 mcg.
The NHS also recommends that children over the age of five and adults take a vitamin D supplement at certain times of the year.
That’s because many of us actually get the vitamin from sunlight – the body creates it from direct when sunlight on the skin when you’re outdoors.
But between October and March, the sun tends to be too weak for your body to make it.
You can also get vitamin D from food, but it’s difficult to get the amount you need.
What are good sources of vitamin D?
Vitamin D can be found in a small number of foods.
These include:
- oily fish – such as salmon, sardines, herring and mackerel
- red meat
- liver
- egg yolks
- fortified foods – such as some fat spreads and breakfast cereals
Though in some countries cow’s milk is considered a good source of the vitamin because it’s fortified, that’s not the case in the UK.
Who’s at risk of a vitamin D deficiency?
According to the Department of Health and Social Care, those at risk of a vitamin D deficiency include:
- breastfed babies
- formula-fed babies who are having less than 500ml (about a pint) of infant formula a day, as infant formula is already fortified with vitamin D
- adults who aren’t often outdoors, who are in a care home or who wear clothes that cover most of their skin when outdoors
Is there such thing as too much vitamin D?
If you take vitamin D supplements, 10 mcg a day should be enough.
Having too much of the vitamin might actually be harmful – over a long period of time it can cause too much calcium to build up in the body, weakening the bones and damaging the kidneys and heart, according to the NHS.
