Of all of the vitamins and nutrients which are required by the human body,

there are 13 of which are considered essential nutrients.

And that means they can't be produced within our bodies.

One of those essential vitamins can be produced in our bodies, but it requires a little bit of help to make it.

It's a vital component of human health, yet an enormous percentage of the world's population is deficient in it.

Learn more about vitamin D, aka the Sunshine Vitamin,

on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Before I get into the weeds about what Vitamin D is and how it works, I should start with the history of Vitamin D.

The history of the Vitamin begins in the ancient world with a diagnosis of the disease that we know as

Ricketts. Ricketts is a disease that affects the bones of children when they're

growing. It can result in deformities, soft bones, bow-leggedness,

exaggerated foreheads, and in severe cases death.

Ricketts was first recorded in the second century by Sonorous of Ephesus, who was a doctor

who practiced medicine in Alexandria and Rome. He noted the deformity of bones

in certain infants. In 1645 the English Dr Daniel Whistler identified Ricketts as a

specific disease and not just as a collection of symptoms that afflicted children.

Rickets would appear in children throughout history and nobody was sure what caused it.

John Snow, the man who famously figured out how to stop cholera outbreaks, thought that it came

from bread treated with the substance known as alum.

But it wasn't until the 20th century that researchers began to discover treatments for

Ricketts that actually worked.

The first came from the German doctor Kurt Holt Shinsky, who immediately after the First World War

discovered that Ricketts could be treated with exposure to ultraviolet lamps.

...