> It’s insanity to me that the only route people think you should get vitamin D is from the sun. In fact, most of us Caucasian Europeans should be getting it from our diet.
The fact that the skin of your ancestors rapidly evolved to become much lighter as they migrated to more polar latitudes tells you all you need to know about whether diet was an adequate source of vitamin D.
Light-skinned people are particularly well-suited to obtaining all the vitamin D they need from sunlight alone.
It is dark-skinned people currently living far from the equator who benefit the most from vitamin D supplementation, because the melanin in their skin reduces their ability to synthesize vitamin D from the meager amount of sunlight they get.
It wasn’t very rapid. In most of Europe white skin was introduced by famers migrating from the middle east who displaced the hunter gatherer populations at the beginning of the neolithic.
Maybe, but my point is that it initially appeared in the middle east (and probably in northern Eurasia at a similar time) but was likely first introduced throughout most of Europe by migrants/invaders from modern day Turkey.
The people who lived in Western Europe for likely longer that it took for white skin to evolve in the middle east/caucasus(?) region were much darker skinned.
Also given how long anatomically modern humans have existed several thousands years is not such a short period.
The fact that the skin of your ancestors rapidly evolved to become much lighter as they migrated to more polar latitudes tells you all you need to know about whether diet was an adequate source of vitamin D.
Light-skinned people are particularly well-suited to obtaining all the vitamin D they need from sunlight alone.
It is dark-skinned people currently living far from the equator who benefit the most from vitamin D supplementation, because the melanin in their skin reduces their ability to synthesize vitamin D from the meager amount of sunlight they get.