You're going to go. Hello and welcome back to the Friday 5 with me Liz Earl lovely to be back in your

earbuds for a quick catch-up of the week from Liz Earl Wellbeing and beyond.

So last week I highlighted the importance of vitamin D in both supporting our immune system

and also in playing a role in protecting against coronavirus.

So of course I was especially pleased to see this at last

being picked up by the mainstream media and health care providers with public

health officials now urgently reviewing the potential for

vitamin D to significantly protect against the disease. Now this is of course

especially important right now because we'll all have been in enforced lockdown for many, many weeks, months even,

which has meant that we've had very little access to natural sunshine, which is one of the

main ways in which the body gets its vitamin D because it's synthesised through the

skin. One of the reasons actually why I am not a super fan of sunscreens but

more on that another time. So this also comes at a time when we know there are a higher number of cases among the black,

Asian and minority ethnic groups in the UK, all of whom are at risk of lower levels of

vitamin D as their darker skins allow less

vitamin D to be created, leaving them more of a potential risk of deficiency.

And this is especially true of cultures where women have to cover up in black robes for example when they're

outside. Now according to Professor Martino who's a specialist in respiratory infection at Queen

Mary University of London, Vitamin D can almost be thought of as a designer drug

for helping the body to handle viral respiratory infections as it boosts the

ability of cells to kill and resist problems and simultaneously dampens down harmful

inflammations which is of course one of the big problems with COVID.

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