The drop in secular vitamin in Scotland defies modern lifestyle changes

People living in Scotland has been shown to be 400 hundred years old suffer from similar seasonal drops during winter at their vitamin D levels despite the enormous changes in lifestyle and diet during the intermediate period.

Archaeologists and scientists of nutrition at the University of Aberdeen have joined forces with researchers from the Irish Atlantic technological university and the State University of Boisse (United States) to examine the long impact Term of life in a region with low winter sun levels.

Their conclusions, published in the newspaper Scientific relationshipshave been obtained using a new method to detect vitamin D in humans hair Samples – The first time it has been applied to archaeological remains.

The researchers compared the levels of vitamin D in the hair of volunteers who have lived in the Aberdeen region for at least two and a half years to those analyzed in a rare specimen of hair preserved of a fucked fucking of St Nicholas Kirk, Estimated would have lived in the city in the 16th or 17th century.

Vitamin D is essential for healthy skeletal growth and is increasingly recognized for its role in the development of chronic disease, inflammation and immunity. But in Scotland, the sun is only strong enough to allow our body to produce our own vitamin D between April and September.

In addition to hours spent outside, vitamin D levels can be increased by diet such as fatty fish and supplementation.

Archaeologist Kate Britton, who led the research team which included scientists at the start of his career Orsolya Czére and Elea Gutierrez, said that a clear seasonal variation could be detected in modern and historic hair samples.

She said: “We could expect that with modern methods to improve our vitamin D intake through food and supplementation, this seasonal variation would be less important.

“In recent years, there have been large large -scale health promotions around the advantages of completion with vitamin D during the winter.

“Likewise, we could reasonably expect that a medieval population has probably spent a greater proportion to the outside and those who live in coastal areas like Aberdeen in the past may have consumed a greater proportion of their Food from local sources such as fish.

“But what this unique study has shown is that the levels in many of our modern participants were similar to those of our archaeological sample, and that the levels were always higher in summer and lower in winter in people who lived in the same city of 400 years apart.

The study is a world first in the application of a new technique to measure vitamin D using hair in an old specimen and it opens a new window on the life of those who live in the past.

“In archeology, a lack of vitamin D is generally identified by skeletal manifestations such as rachitism, but that only informs us about the most extreme deficiencies and cannot be quantified,” added Professor Britton.

“Hair use in this way is a significant step forward in the growing field of metabolomics in archaeological sciences.

“If we can measure something like vitamin D, we could also be able to use these cutting -edge techniques to examine other aspects of health in the past by hair, such as stress levels, or even the consumption of previous population drugs.

The study also suggests that examining vitamin D by hair rather than blood offers potential advantages to understand health today.

As the hair grows around one centimeter each month, scientists can detect changes over several months rather than taking an instant in time as could be obtained via a blood sample taken from a medical framework.

Professor Baukje de Roos, a scientist in nutrition from the Rowett Institute of the University of Aberdeen who was responsible for collecting hair samples from modern participants, and with Gary Duncan carried out vitamin analysis D in the hair, “our results also support previous research which has shown that weight loss Can mobilize vitamin D from adipose fat and considerably increase vitamin D levels in our blood and hair.

“It is important that we are a better understanding of how vitamin D in the hair compares to the levels of vitamin D in the blood, which is currently used to assess vitamin D deficiency on a global scale.

“The method to measure vitamin D in the hair opens up new opportunities to monitor and better monitor and understand how diet, supplementation or weight loss affects our vitamin D levels through seasons and in different contexts. That. Could help healthcare professionals to provide better advice and recommendations in the ways we can better support vitamin D and health. “