Phytic Acid and Nutritional Rickets in Immigrants

Vitamin D Deficiency and Nutritional Rickets in Children

“…The association with vegetarianism, high-fiber diets, and cereals of high extraction suggests that dietary factors play a role. Support for this comes from two studies which have documented healing of rickets on removing chapattis from the diet [240,241], although this is not a universal finding [88].…”

Reduced plasma half-life of radio-labelled 25-hydroxyvitamin D3in subjects receiving a high-fibre diet

“…The fibre content of the Asian diet varies widely, but in one study rachitic Asian children were consuming over 200 g chappatti flour/d (Ford et al 1976), which would provide approximately 20 g cereal fibre in addition to that derived from other sources. Previous theories to explain the possible link between high-extraction flour consumption and Asian rickets and osteomalacia have included incrimination of the high phosphate content (Ford et al 1976), and the high levels of phytate leading to interference with calcium absorption (Wills et al 1972). The possibility that dietary fibre could be involved by interrupting the enterohepatic circulation of vitamin D metabolites has received little attention.…”

Does inadequate diet during childhood explain the higher high fracture rates in the Southern United States?

“…Poor Southerners subsisted largely on a diet of corn and salt pork early in the twentieth century [46,49]. A diet high in cereals such as corn might have been particularly disadvantageous because cereals bind calcium in the bowel and prevent their absorption [41,43,50] To make matters worse, the South had the lowest per capita production of milk of any part of the United States in 1929 [47]. Weaning infants early was common in the United States early in the twentieth century [51], and weaned infants in poor Southern families may have been given non-milk-based liquids low in calcium, which further contributed to inadequate calcium intake.…”