I haven't a clue - not sure if there is even any way to gauge that. I just Googled 'UK vitamin deficiency' - I don't know if this helps -
http://www.gpnotebook.co.uk/simplepage. ... -200933361
I suspect that that is true of not just vitamin D too. Vitamin D deficiency does seem to be a problem for many people - but then no one ever bothers to test for it unless the deficiency symptoms were really bad and blatantly obvious so how would one know?
Even if one had obvious symptoms they can often be construed as something else or not be tied in to a specific deficiency. In the Daily Mail on Tuesday was a report about a woman who developed neurological problems. The Medical Profession could not find a reason and it was only through her own endeavours (and the internet) she discovered that she may have Pernicious Anaemia. Although her blood tests were 'normal' her Doctor decided to try her with a B12 injection and within a few hours she started to recover. Turns out that normal blood tests quite often don't pick it up.
My Doctor acknowledged to me that sometimes people can have what they term as 'sub-clinical' deficiencies - in other words, you are deficient but it does not show on tests. It may be evident in the blood but not necessarily getting into the cells for some reason.
Doctors just aren't looking for deficiencies. As so many have some sort of gut damage (even when they don't know it) that can cause malabsorption issues too.
I understand that some Diabetics can present with vitamin A deficiencies too because they lack the ability to convert Beta-carotene, for instance.
Personally I would think that the UK diet would be pretty devoid of particularly the fat-soluble vitamins and essential fatty acids, simply because low-fat is so highly promoted by the Establishment. Not only that but the high-carb and particularly high-sugar aspects of the Western diet actually depletes the body of essential vitamins and minerals.
If the food was good and full of nutrition (which most of it isn't) and the sun was healthy (and not likely to damage us from the depletion of the ozone layer) and the water was pure, clean and life-giving (instead of being polluted and full of chemical derivatives) then we might stand some chance of getting a decent level of nutrition from our environment, but at current levels that ain't happening, so unfortunately deficiencies are more likely to be the norm rather than the exception.
I remember reading an article where a couple who grow organic food in Pembroke had some of their vegetables compared nutritionally to the same type of vegetables from a supermarket. Virtually all of it contained much higher levels of nutrition and some of their veg had as much as 90% more!
Supplements are not always the answer - many of those are artificially derived and may not be of a form that the body can either use very well, or even at all. Sometimes they make for very expensive urine!
Sorry to sound like a doom-mongerer, but unfortunately that's the way it is in this wonderful modern technically advanced age we 'intelligent' humans live in. We can get a man to the moon but can we grow or rear good food that is not devoid of nutrition, drenched, or adulterated with chemicals or had other obnoxious stuff done to it?
No, these days they give us what people of 100 years or more ago would have considered normal everyday good nutritious food, slap an 'Organic' label on it and charge us three times the price. The rest is probably not even fit for the compost heap. How kind.
