Here is the evidence that sunlight is essential for health

Sunlight on the bare body is a person's principal source of vitamin D (Cholecalciferol).  It is essential for immune health and for preventing numerous kinds of diseases such as multiple sclerosis, autism, heart disease, diabetes, osteoporosis, depression, obesity and at least 30 different kinds of cancers.

Did you know that you can reduce lifetime risk of all cancers by about 60% just by boosting your vitamin D levels?

Did you know that the autism epidemic may be due to damage to the foetal brain from vitamin D deficiency in the mother?

Did you know that I have never had a client produce an optimum vitamin D blood test result?  

Did you know that rickets is now being reported in regions like Wellington and the Waikato?  

Vitamin D deficiency is epidemic within New Zealand.

In its failed attempt to reduce just one cancer (melanoma) the Cancer Society may be responsible for causing increasing rates of cancer overall!  All for the sake of revenue from the sale of sunscreens and related products it would seem.

If you do not believe what I am saying here, please read the evidence for yourself.  Here is the link to over 100 research articles about vitamin D and health by just one scientist (Veith).

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When running, what should I be doing to protect my skin from sunburn?

Gary
Re Vitamin D
Sun exposure is one of the major recommendations - fine. However I usually have a good covering of "30" sunscreen on all my exposed parts - I burn relatively easily.Does this sunscreen affect the generation of the desired vitamin D? I gather UVB is the radiation required to generate vit D but I suspect it is also screened significantly by the sunscreen.
So for a typical 2-3 hour run what should I be doing?
Regards
Peter

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Gary advises:

Sunscreen negates the health benefits of the sun with regards to vitamin D production. However; during a long run it is essential that you take steps to prevent sun burn which is what causes skin cancer.

I recommend that you cover up wearing a hat and a loose long sleeve shirt, or a T-shirt and then lathering sunscreen on the exposed areas. While there is debate about the toxic effects of sunscreen lotions, I remain in favour of judicious use in the meantime.

If you are fair-skinned, then your exposure of skin should only be for as long as is necessary to cause a slight pinkness by end of day. Nothing more is necessary for vitamin D production. Expose as much of your body as possible for no longer than about 10 minutes of midday sun - longer if you have dark skin. So, if you are running, whip the shirt off for about 10 minutes and then put it back on and complete the run.

Eating a handful or two of dark berries per day can give your skin some additional resistance to sunburn. Vitamin C and MSM reduce the damaging effects of sunburn. Take about 2,000 mg of vitamin C per day and up to 6,000 mg of MSM per day and see what happens. Incidentally, MSM will increase endurance and reduce muscle and joint pain. Both are available from my store http://www.myotec.co.nz/

For more information about this important topic, do a search of my website using key words like "sunlight" or vitamin D"

Sheltered lifestyle could be causing childhood rickets

More pregnant women may be Vitamin D deficient than previously thought, putting their unborn child at risk of rickets.

A study of 90 pregnant women who attend Newtown Medical Health Services in Wellington has found 87 per cent vitamin D deficient, with 61 per cent severely deficient in the vitamin.
The study, which appears in this week's New Zealand Medical Journal, highlights the magnitude of vitamin D deficiency among pregnant women.

The study, authored by Wellington Hospital endocrinologist Dr Carl Eagleton and Newtown Medical Health Services GP Dr Annie Judkins, was prompted by anecdotal reports of an increase in childhood rickets in southeast Wellington. Newtown, a small primary healthcare organisation, has had 10 cases of childhood rickets over the past three years.
The PHO, which caters to a diverse population, found vitamin D deficiency to be prevalent across almost all ethnic groups, regardless of whether subjects wore veils, or were dark-skinned - two risk factors.

Even among pregnant women of European descent, vitamin D deficiency was found in 67 per cent of those studied.

Only 22 per cent of subjects wore veils, while just over a third of the subjects lived in apartments, limiting any links to sunlight exposure and their ability to sit outside for periods of time.

All the vitamin D-deficient women studied received supplementation in the form of a vitamin D2 tablet.

Source: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/topic/print.cfm?c_id=314&objectid=10400452
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Gary Moller comments
I live next to Newtown and go past the local school most days. Dr Judkins was a medical student at the time she went to the Commonwealth Games with my sister Lorraine. Ann was a walker. It has always amused me that the mostly non-European Newtown children are not allowed outside without wearing floppy hats. For them, the odds of developing skin cancer from sunlight are as good as nil!

So far, not a single person I have had tested, including me, has come anywhere near having optimum vitamin D levels. Such has been the success of the Sun Smart campaign. Avoiding the sun and the wholesale use of sunscreens is condemning the entire population to lives dogged by ill health.

While the focus of medical attention seems frustratingly fixated on rickets, this disease is the least of the horrific diseases associated with vitamin D deficiency - most cancers for example. Why, oh why, do they keep going on about rickets!!!

If you want to live a life full of beans and disease resistant then get regular exposure of your body to sunlight. During winter and the days that you get no sunlight, take a vitamin D supplement. These supplements are cheap and freely available which might be why you hear so little from medical and pharmaceutical quarters about this extremely important nutrient. This should be supproted by a diet that is generous in fats and oils which the supply the fat soluble vitamins (A, E, D & K). Ooops - like sunlight, these foods are forbidden!

This health message is as important for children as it is for adults.

Vitamin D deficiency found in alarming percentage of teenage girls

A new study published in the Archives of Disease in Childhood has found that more than 70 percent of British teenage girls are deficient in vitamin D -- an essential nutrient for proper growth and development.

The researchers noted that the white girls in the study had higher levels of vitamin D than non-white girls, likely because of increased skin exposure and lighter skin pigmentation. Experts recommend that people with darker skin get more sunlight than light-skinned people, because it takes longer for dark skin to develop vitamin D.

"This finding is alarming not only because it shows such a high percentage of teenage girls are deficient in this essential nutrient," explained Mike Adams, a consumer health advocate and holistic nutritionist, "but also because health authorities like the American Cancer Society continue to scare people away from sunlight exposure with fear-mongering public service announcements that claim sunlight may kill you. In reality, sunlight exposure could save hundreds of millions of people from suffering the well-documented effects of vitamin D deficiency, which include osteoporosis, cancer, depression and calcium deficiency."

"Today, we are raising a generation of vitamin D deficient children and teenagers," Adams added. "And the future health care costs of such short-sighted public health policies are incalculable."

http://www.NewsTarget.com/019908.html

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Gary Moller comments:

I have been saying it for years and I will continue to say it for as long as is necessary to bring some sense to what can only be described as hysterical public health policies that run contrary to the growing body of research that confirms that we cannot live without sunshine.

Thanks to sunshine fear-mongering by public health experts, school officials, parent organisations, dermatologists, cancer groups and sunscreen manufacturers, we're raising an entire generation of children with virtually no exposure to sunlight and, hence, almost no vitamin D. This is especially so for our darker-skinned kids, including mine unless they go against the rules.

The only beneficiaries of the consequent epidemic of horrlble health consequences are the drugs companies who get to supply the expensive drugs to treat the consequences. After all, why should they promote sunshine for health? There's no money in that!

Why do we mostly get ill with flus and colds in winter?

Dr. Liu and colleagues at UCLA, publishing in this March's edition of the prestigious journal Science, showed that vitamin D might be, in effect, a potent antibiotic. Vitamin D increases the body's production of naturally occurring antibiotics: antimicrobial peptides. Antimicrobial peptides are produced in numerous cells in the human body where they directly and rapidly destroy the cell walls of viruses and bacteria, including tuberculosis. Furthermore, Liu showed that adding vitamin D to African American serum (African Americans have higher rates of TB) dramatically increased production of these naturally occurring antibiotics.
Science. 2006 Mar 24;311(5768):1770-3.

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Gary Moller comments:

Why is it that dark-skinned populations tend to be less healthy when:

• They shift further North or South?
• They move into cities?

If we get colds and flu due to getting cold, then why is it that people who work the skifields, including pro skiers always seem to be very healthy?

Why is it that flus and colds are worst during winter, despite the fact that these bugs are present in populations year round?

Why is it that flu outbreaks in the tropics are worst during the rainy season?

The answer may be due to my pet topic for some years now: Vitmain D deficiency which is present in populations and worst during winter. We are learning all the time just why the body produces massive amounts of this vitamin when the skin is exposed to sunlight. The latest finding is that it may exert a powerful antibiotic effect on both bacteria and viruses.

When people move North or South and into cities, they tend to get much less year-round sunlight and dark-skinned people are poorly adapted for low sunlight. During the rainy season in the tropics, there may be no sunlight for weeks on end. This is exacerbated nowadays in many lands by air pollution that blocks UV. People who work on skifields get constant exposure to high levels of UV radiation, thus producing vitamin D despite the cold.

Commonsense tells us that the human body must be making Vitamin D for very good reasons. The list of good reasons grows longer by the day.