The New York Times published this article a couple of days ago on the snowballing body of scientific evidence coming out regarding the extreme importance of Vitamin D in the human body. I’ve touched before on the link between Vitamin D and Type 1 Diabetes, so most of this wasn’t news to me (but may be to you, and is well worth reading). What was news to me, though, was this little tidbit:

“The rising incidence of Type 1 diabetes may be due, in part, to the current practice of protecting the young from sun exposure. When newborn infants in Finland were given 2,000 international units a day, Type 1 diabetes fell by 88 percent, Dr. Holick said.”

If you read my other post then you know that Finland is the country with the highest rate of Type 1 Diabetes, which makes a lot of sense from the Vitamin D perspective because they get no freaking sunshine up there at the top of the world.  So all we had to do was ignore every baby book and our pediatrician who told us 1) not to take her in the sun before 6 months old, and 2) then to always slather her with suncreen, and we could have prevented this? Drive a stake through my heart, why don’t you.

Now, of course, we know it’s almost certainly not as simple as all that. She needed a genetic component. She probably also had a viral component. Still – they dropped their rate by 88%.  Instantaneous death by mommy guilt. Somebody put me out of my misery.