Take Vitamin S, Skip The Pill

Modern life is in dire need of sunlight, but without medicalisation and commercialisation

Modern life is lived indoors and out of sunlight. The case that journalist Rowan Jacobsen makes in his book In Defense of Sunlight: The Surprising Science of Sun Exposure, is that we need to get back out there. We are forgetting the heavens when, ironically, we are the heavens. Energy comes from sunlight, it animates all of Earth, and some of it finds you directly. It’s still free, legal, and widely available. So get sun, not too much, but go outside. 

The sun has no lobby, sunscreens do. US EPA admitted in 2006 that there is no evidence sunscreens protect from malignant melanoma. For people with darker skin, Jacobsen suggests, there’s simply no case for glooping up. Rates of melanoma in Asia and Africa are less than 1 per 100,000. 

Vitamin D has a lobby, a very successful one. It’s a $1.7bn and growing market. Because evidence is clear that people with high levels of the molecule clearly have healthier bodies. And the pills do raise the amount of D in people’s blood. But different RCTs have found this type of D has few health benefits. A 5-year federally funded US study gave half the participants 2,000 IU of daily D supplements, and half placebos. Result: it didn’t even prevent fractures, the one thing everyone “knew” Vitamin D did.

D was a red herring. Under the weak sun of Sweden, a 20-year study found avoidance of sun exposure to be a risk factor similar to smoking, in terms of life expectancy. But only UVB light can produce vitamin D. Where there is no UVB making it through the atmosphere Sept through April, it couldn’t be D that was reducing mortality.

Again and again, when complex natural ingredients or behaviours are reduced to a pill or product, the benefits get lost. This happened with the Mediterranean diet next, promoted by the olive oil lobby. It’s associated with higher nitrate stores in the skin. But these can’t protect the heart or lower blood pressure by themselves. That happens when ample sunlight liberates nitrate oxide from storage. 

Maybe our mitochondria sing because of infrared light. At 53% of the solar spectrum, it’s more than all visible light. When we are outside during the day, these photons pour into us even through our clothing. But the red LEDs that we strap on indoors, are just quackery. They don’t do anything to address how our energy diet has drastically shrunk.

Flooded with the “white” light of modern LEDs, our buildings trap us in biological darkness. It can’t feed our cells like full-spectrum sunlight. Strange thing is most cultures have known that the dark months are worse for mental and physical health. Instinctively also, it feels unhealthy to be cooped up without fresh air and light. Somehow, we have overridden all these instincts, decoupled from nature, turned it into a dragon, to be met only with the armour on.

As harmful as lack of sunlight is, just as bad is ALAN, artificial light at night. A candle at arm’s length produces 1 lux, the full moon 0.1 lux, a brightly lit office 400 lux. And the full stop of real darkness is no longer available in our cities. Jacobsen’s advice is to renew our relations with both night and day.

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