Sun Exposure- A Question of Balance

This is an informative article on sun exposure from the Wall Street Journal. As with most things, the amount of sun exposure is a question of balance: you can get too much and you can get too little.





Sunshine: Harmful and Healthy

Posted By Jacob Goldstein On July 15, 2008 @ 8:33 am In Heart Disease, Cancer | 1 Comment

Sunshine is bad for you. Getting too much of it increases the risk of skin cancer.

Sunshine is good for you. Getting too little of it — and the vitamin D it produces in your body — puts you at higher risk for big killers like heart disease and several types of cancer, WSJ's Melinda Beck notes today in her Health Journal column.

So what's a health-obsessed American to do? Going out in the sun for a few minutes now and again without sunscreen (gasp!) might not be such a bad idea.

"Sensible sun exposure can provide an adequate amount" of vitamin D, a review article in the New England Journal of Medicine said last year. "Exposure of arms and legs for 5 to 30 minutes (depending on time of day, season, latitude, and skin pigmentation) between the hours of 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. twice a week is often adequate."

Foods such as oily fish like salmon and fortified milk also have vitamin D. But a person sitting outside in a bathing suit in New York City gets more vitamin D in 20 minutes than from drinking 200 glasses of milk, Beck notes.

So vitamin D supplements can also be helpful — particularly for people living above 42 degrees latitude (Northern California out west; Boston in the east), where the sun's rays are too weak during the winter to get our bodies' vitamin D engine cranking.

Not surprisingly, the sun-starved Canadians have been taking a hard look at vitamin D data. One recent analysis pooled data from a number of randomized trials and found that people who took vitamin D supplements had a lower mortality risk than those who took placebos. That finding, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, was cited last month in this CBC article.

And Canada's cancer society now recommends that people take daily supplements of 1,000 IU of vitamin D during the fall and winter, the article says.

Vitamin-Fortified Bonus: Check out this vitamin D podcast from Quirks and Quarks, a CBC Radio science show that's among the Health Blog's favorites. You can hear an interview with Cannell and get the observations from a passel of Canadian researchers working on vitamin D.

Photo by fdecomite via Flickr

http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2008/07/15/sunshine-harmful-and-healthy/print/

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In my opinion, most of the vitamin D supplements readily available are not the ones to take . Whenever possible, sun exposure is better and if you need a supplement make sure it is derived from whole foods so it comes with the cofactors (such as polyunsaturated fatty acids) it needs to be helpful. I prefer and prescribe Standard Process vitamin D for this reason.