Though milk is often fortified with vitamin D, from grade school health classes on we've learned that much of the vitamin D we receive is from exposure to sunlight. In addition to keeping bones strong and healthy, vitamin D and sunlight may play an important role in the development of food allergies and eczema.

_A recent collaborative study between European and British researchers has found an association between exposure to sunlight and the development of food allergies and eczema.

_Focusing on Australia, researchers were able to study a wide variety of climates and regions with widely varying amounts of sunlight. In areas with less sunlight (the southern part of the country), they found that children were nearly twice as likely to develop allergies to eggs and peanuts or eczema.

_While this research is still in the early stages, it gives some early indications as to what may be behind these increasingly common conditions, and more importantly, how to possibly prevent them in the future.