HAMILTON, CANADA—A team of researchers has developed a way to look for signs of vitamin D deficiency in teeth by examining the remains of people who had been buried in rural Quebec and France in the 1700s and the 1800s. Teeth begin to develop layers of dentin, which requires an adequate supply of vitamin D to mineralize, before birth. So, anomalies found in the dentin would indicate that the subjects were not getting enough vitamin D in the diet, or from exposure to sunshine, at the time it was formed. “We correlated the age at which the tooth was forming, with the location of the defect in the tooth,” Lori D’Ortenzio of McMaster University explains in a report by The Canadian Press. The scientists also compared the samples to teeth from modern-day people, and when possible, examined the skeletons of the subjects. Defects in the dentin suggest that all of the subjects suffered from an extreme vitamin D deficiency, and an examination of their skeletons confirmed rickets, or weak and deformed bones, in some of the cases. For more, go to "Paleo-Dentistry."
