My 10-year-old sister and I spend many a weekend watching Discovery Health.

The unfortunate thing about weekend programming is that the boring stuff — live births, infomercials — is typically what gets crammed into the morning hours.

But after every “Special Delivery” marathon, there is almost always something to make up for the lack of guts and glory. On “Big Medicine,” a patient of Houston’s Methodist Weight Management Center was admitted to the hospital. After being tested for a bucket-load of disorders, a routine blood test came up with the answer: rickets.

That’s right … rickets — the disease you get when you are a pirate in 1743 and you don’t have enough vitamin D in your diet because you are cooped up swabbing the deck.

Surprisingly, vitamin D deficiency is alarmingly common.

Although most of us aren’t stricken with rickets as a result of being stuck inside a sunshine-less weight-loss center, the effects of deficiency are severe and ought to be explored.

Vitamin D is well known for its role in maintaining bone health.

However, according to “Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine,” it has been discovered that many of the body’s tissues contain vitamin D receptors, rendering them capable of transforming the nutrient into its active form.

Consequently, many recently conducted studies maintain that significant increases in vitamin D supplementation should be considered, as vitamin D has been found to be an important factor in the prevention of cancers, cardiovascular and autoimmune diseases, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and infections.

Author of, “Is Vitamin D deficiency casting a cloud over your health?,” Dr. Marcelle Pick explains, “[M]any of today’s conventional clinicians … may not be in the habit for testing for vitamin D deficiency or … familiar with treatment.”

This is unfortunate, especially because 85 to 90 percent of people aren’t getting enough of the vitamin.

Getting enough D, said Pick, “isn’t as simple as drinking more fortified milk” or, I suspect, spending time in the Tempe sun between classes.

In fact, it would take gallons of fortified milk a day to reach optimum D levels, and the SPF 15 we are supposed to be wearing every day is enough to ward off the UVB rays required for D conversion.

Hopefully you are now wondering what you can do to increase your intake of vitamin D. Unfortunately, we are on the same page here: All these discoveries are radically changing ideas about how much D is enough.

The daily recommended vitamin D intake is 5 mcg for most adults.

However, the consensus among experts is that this is far too low.

But don’t take my word for it.

Ask your doctor to have your vitamin D levels tested. Talk to him or her about how much D is safe, or advisable, to include in your diet. Allow yourself some limited sun exposure, take a multivitamin and eat nutrient-rich foods.

Of course, I bet we’re doing all that anyway.

Still, I’m not sure the medium pizza I devoured for dinner last night, after spending the day in front of the computer, got me much D … or much of anything else either.

Kristen is experimenting with nutritional supplements. Reach her at kckelle2@asu.edu.