Recently, the Resolution of the President of Turkmenistan approved the Strategy for prevention of vitamin D deficiency for 2023–2028 and the Action Plan for the its implementation. Our newspaper has told about the importance of vitamin D for health, which is difficult to overestimate, and the ways of “replenishing” it.

The main function of vitamin D is to help the body absorb calcium and phosphorus from food through the walls of the small intestine. Now, it is grouped together with hormone-like substances, although initially, discovered by an American scientist Elmer McCollum in 1922, it was considered only as a vitamin. Despite the name (vitamins are organic compounds that cannot be synthesised by the organism and therefore must be derived from the food we eat), vitamin D is not actually a vitamin. It belongs to a group of biologically active substances, including cholecalciferol (vitamin D3) and ergocalciferol (vitamin D2).