Wintering: How I learned to flourish when life became frozen

by Katherine May

But sunlight is one of the key ways in which we synthesise vitamin D, along with eating oily fish (another declining habit), eggs and meat, and supplementing it through fortified foods and vitamin pills. The British winter months, from October to March, have never contained enough UVB radiation to enable the production of vitamin D, but many of us are no longer getting enough in the summer, either, and our children are beginning to feel the effects. A clinical review paper by Professor Simon Pearce and Dr Tim Cheetham, published in the BMJ in January 2010, found that there has been a resurgence in childhood rickets, the disease that causes weak, soft bones and perhaps even skeletal deformities.