Whenever you have a day off from work, do you wish that it will be "pretty" outside? Do you reflect on "happiness" and "Good Times" and associate it with a beautiful summer day with the sun shining brightly down from the sky? Well, If you do, like I do, How could you see the sun as a bad thing? I know that you've heard that it's dangerous. That it causes skin cancer, and I'm not rebuking the statements, they will tell you to wear hats and sunscreen, and if we listened to every word, we would be prisoners inside of our own homes. There would be no afternoon's of swimming at the swimming hole, lake, or public pool. There would be no days with the family in the park. And no basking in the beautiful sun. We would be too scared to go outside. Dr. Robert Stern, chief of dermatology at Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess medical center says, "In my opinion, it's probably true that for people over 40, even people who have had a non-melanoma skin cancer, we have oversold the idea of having to be sun-phobic. For them, exposure has little risk." For kids, cautions Stern, it's another matter. Excessive exposure to sunlight has been linked to later Basal and Squamous cell skin cancers, as well as to Melanoma, a more serious form of skin cancer. Sunlight may even be an effective treatment for some diseases. In a recent study published in the Journal Lancet, Dr. Micheal F. Holick, an endocrinologist and leading vitamin D researcher ay Boston University School of Medicine and others showed that exposing people with mildly high blood pressure to UV-B can lower blood pressure, perhaps by correcting an underlying vitamin D deficiency. actually, vitamin D is not a vitamin at all in the normal sense, but is really a steroid-like hormone made, after exposure to the UV-B rays from sunlight, from a precursor of cholesterol in the skin. After an inactive form of Vitamin D is made in the skin, it is transformed in the liver and kidney to the active or hormonal form called 1,25 dihydroxy vitamin D. Indeed, several teams of researchers have recently found that the organs such as the breast, prostate and colon in which vitamin D seems to reduce cancer risk can also make their own stores of the vitamins active form, an important finding. INTERESTING FACTS: *Vitamin D is one theory for the evolution of different skin colors among human beings. *Human beings arose with black skins in Africa and then migrated outwards from there. Black skin is rich in melanin, a pigment that acts as a natural sunscreen, protecting against sunburn. *But, just like sunscreen of spf8 or higher, Melanin reduces the amount vitamin D the skin can make. That's fine for someone in Africa who spends a lot of time in the sun. Farther from the equator, however, people with light skin have an evolutionary advantage. With less available UV-B, light skin probably evolved so that humans migrating Northward would still be able to make enough vitamin D *Indeed, people who failed to make this adaptation would have had a difficult time reproducing. Insufficient vitamin D can lead to rickets, which causes defective bone growth. In women, this could mean such poor pelvic development that babies could not be born- and the mother's genes would not be passed on. Well, that's it. And as always, I hope this article found you happy and healthy, And it was a privilege to write an article for you to read. I hope you found the article to be both informative and entertaining. May GOD bless you always, and in always. |
