| What Is Rickets?
Rickets happens when the body does not get enough vitamin D. Vitamin
D helps the body use calcium to make bones. When children have rickets,
their bones do not form properly. A child who has not learned to walk
gets a curved spine. A child who has already started to walk gets curved
legs. Our bodies can make vitamin D in sunlight. It is also found in
nuts and seeds. Today, vitamin D is added to milk to make sure children
do not get rickets.
What Is Scurvy?
Scurvy happens when people do not get enough vitamin C. Vitamin C is
found in fresh fruits and vegetables, especially oranges, grapefruit
and lemons. Scurvy causes bleeding gums and loose teeth. People with
scurvy also have trouble fighting infections.
Nutrition and Health
When Miss Rogers found children with rickets and scurvy, she also
saw problems with their teeth. She wrote:
Children often lose their first teeth under three years of age.. .while
many of eight and ten years have the second teeth hopelessly decayed.
13
When Miss Rogers visited newborn babies, she saw that most mothers,
even the younger ones, had already lost most of their teeth. These serious
dental problems also tell us that people could not afford good food.
The fresh food they did eat was often old by the time they bought it.
When fresh foods get old, they lose most of their vitamins.
In outports, people would buy all their food for the winter when they
sold their fish in the fall. They dug the vegetables out of their gardens
and put them into root cellars before the ground froze. Many families
ran out of food by the end of the winter. This is why older people talk
about "the long, hungry month of March." By March, many families
would have nothing left but flour and tea. Any vegetables they had were
old. It was hard to live on the food people had in the spring.
|