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Toggle Health Problems and D

Ways to increase teen vitamin D

Teens spend so much time with multimedia without the sun

A higher percentage of teens are deficient now than even a decade ago - with major health consequences

Methods to replace the vitamin D from lack of sun include:

  1. get outdoors – but hard to change any person’s behavior
    But being outdoors not help much if any of the following:
      cloudy, not middle of the day, dark skin, sun screen, wear excessive clothes, winter and far from equator
  2. get vitamin D supplements – but hard to change any person’s behavior
  3. Use food fortified with vitamin D – but will take decades to change fortification around the world
  4. Have mothers (perhaps secretly) add vitamin D to their food
    drops, pulverized sublingual, powder (no product available as of Feb 2012), etc.
    Somewhat similar to giving cod-liver oil ( a good source of Vitamin D and Vitamin A) a century ago, but fortunately vitamin D has no taste
  5. Have a small UVB LED attached to their multimedia device/laptop

Notes on #5: UVB LED

Need to find out the milliwatts of UVB output by LEDs
Need to study the optics – what % of UVB from LED will get to the face (30%?)
Calculate the UVB/vitamin D per 8 hours for type 1 skin
See if that amount of UVB would create any skin damage if used for years
See if the UVB intensity is such that glasses would be required (note: human eye will not see ANY light)
– virtually all glass blocks UVB, no prescription lenses needed
Expect that it can be powered by USB – first guess: LED will use less than 5% of laptop power consumption

See also VitaminDWiki

Less than 20 nanograms/ml of vitamin D

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