Is Sunlight Good or Bad for You

The picture to the right comes from Time Magazine. In 2007 Time Magazine chose vitamin D as one of the top 10 medical breakthroughs of the year. #10. Benefits of Vitamin D.

#9 new source of stem cells, #8 Early-stage Test of Lung Cancer, #7 Relief from Fibromyalgia: Lyrica, #6 No More Periods, #5 New Diabetes Genes, #4 Help for Dieters: Alli, #3 First Human Vaccine Against Bird Flu, #2 Test for Metastatic Breast Cancer, #1 Circumcision Can Prevent HIV. This article about sunlight was written November 4, 2012.

When writing articles, I like learning new things. In the above you will notice that most of the 10 are ways for the medical industry to make more money. I have another article called What Every Person Needs to Know About Modern Medicine. It documents how the purpose of medicine in America is to make money.

Psychology Today has an article called Vitamin D Deficiency and Depression. It has a theory that the reason for the increased rate of depression, is due to sunscreen!

The problem with vitamin D is that is very cheap or free if you get it from sunlight, while the above article has MSMBC saying that some medications have a 600,000% mark-up or 6,000 times the cost of the ingredients. A Viagra pill costs $13 so that is the cost to have sex for some people. I have seen some articles say that since vitamin D has many benefits and sunlight causes skin cancer then maybe people should get vitamin D from supplements.

Note that you can get too much vitamin D from supplements but not from sunlight. I am very observant of many details. Doctors and lawyers have a saying: "God is in the details." I noticed when searching for this information that there were many challenges to provide proof, with studies, of the benefits of vitamin D while with sunlight causing melanoma, there was not.

Latest news 2014: Scientists Blow the Lid on Cancer & Sunscreen Myth.

According to a June 2014 article featured in The Independent (UK), a major study conducted by researchers at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden found that women who avoid sunbathing during the summer are twice as likely to die as those who sunbathe every day.

The epidemiological study followed 30,000 women for over 20 years and “showed that mortality was about double in women who avoided sun exposure compared to the highest exposure group.”

Then when you look at the official information about sunlight causing cancer, there are big explanations of how this happens but no studies to back it up. Of course if you look up the studies there are no adult studies showing this. They just have a study with sunburn in children increasing chances of getting melanoma.

Note that here is a new August 2013 article about something that I just learned: Why Does the Highest Paid Model in the World Not Wear Sunscreen. It explains why Gisele Bundchen does not wear sunscreen and why it is not in her all natural ingredients skin care line of products.

Of course look at this. Say someone brings a pale white baby into the sunlight and keeps them there until they are beet red (as red as a beet) and the baby is constantly crying, do you need any studies to tell you that this could be called child abuse?

Here is an article on the CBS news called Is Sun Good or Bad for You. It says:

According to the American Cancer Society, skin cancer is the most common of all cancers. It accounts for nearly half of all cancers in the United States, and more than 1 million cases of nonmelanoma skin cancer are found in this country each year. So skin cancer is still a very serious issue for people who spend too much time soaking up the sun.

Now if you look on websites you will see that they say that the most common type of cancer for women is breast cancer. The most common type for men is prostate cancer. October is is breast cancer awareness month. November is prostate cancer awareness month. The most common type of cancer for everyone is colon cancer. Does any of this sound familiar?

It is false. So why do they say it if it is not true. They do not want to explain that the majority of skin cancer is not life threatening at all and is mostly cosmetic. So that is why they do not consider skin cancer the most common cancer. Let us look at deaths from cancers. Lung cancer has the most with 160,000 a year. Next is colorectal cancer with 51,700 deaths. Next is breast cancer with 39,500 deaths.

Then you have pancreatic cancer with 37,400. Then there is prostate cancer with 28,000 deaths a year. Then there is leukemia with 23,500. Then there there is Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma with 18,940. Then there is bladder cancer with 14,800. Then there is renal (kidney) cancer with 12,500. Melanoma is ninth with 9,000 deaths a year.

Sunlight and Disease by the Numbers

Your chance of getting melanoma, the only dangerous skin cancer, is only 1 in 4,000 for Americans in any year. The chance of woman in America getting breast cancer in her lifetime is 1 in 8. The only danger of sunlight, they say, is melanoma but it produces vitamin D that protects you from breast cancer. Also it helps with a pregnant mother or baby getting it to practically wipe out autsim and 1 in 85 children now get autism.

Here is an article called Is Sunlight Good or Bad for You? (The Real Answer Is Here!) by Psychology Today magazine. The author of this article is a medical doctor (Rob Siegel M.D.). He talks about sunlight and vitamin D and says that there is not much information on this as far as he knows. Doctors are trained to use drugs not nutritional supplements. Of course this magazine has different writers.

I have an article, Are Autism and Cancer Caused by a Vitamin D Deficiency. It has a quote from Psychology Today magazine (the same magazine above) that says:

In recent years we have been told to avoid the sun. Anyone reading women's magazines, in fact, will have been advised to put on sunscreen on face and hands "just in case" as those few moments walking from the car to the workplace or grocery store might be enough to cause aging and cancer cells to go nuts in our vulnerable skin.

We slather on sunscreen and sunblock, which for the most part completely blocks the UVB sun rays that increase our cancer protective vitamin D and allows in some cancer causing UVA - to me that sounds like a silly thing to do!

Could a lack of sunshine and suboptimal amounts of vitamin D be a possible cause of autism spectrum disease in our children?

If you want to read the article above, it also has other sources also that say that lack of sunlight in pregnant mother and baby causes autism. It has a video by an MD for all women that are pregnant. This doctor says that it is more stressful to have a child with autism than a child with a fatal disease AND YOU CAN PREVENT IT!

Here is an article about this by webmd.com called Sunlight: Good or Bad for Cancer Risk. It says:

Jan. 7, 2008 -- If you are deficient in vitamin D, getting a little sun may actually reduce your risk of dying from certain non-skin cancers, according to a new report. And that benefit may outweigh the risk of getting skin cancer.

Sunlight triggers production of vitamin D, which in turn has been shown to help reduce the risk of dying from breast, colon, prostate, and lung cancers. [Note the numbers above showing that these cancers kill the most people]

Less important in the debate, he adds, is the risk of getting non-melanoma skin cancers from sun exposure. "Squamous and basal [two other forms of skin cancer] are easy to cure," says Setlow.

If you ever start investigating the studies about skin cancer, you will find some interesting things. Like a study in England found that most skin cancers are on people who work in an office all day and are never in the sun. Also lifeguards in Australia have the lowest rates of melanoma. Many people get melanoma on parts of the body that are never exposed to the sun. Wikipidia says that sunscreen and sunblock cause skin cancer.

Could all this be a scam to make money?

They only caught Lance Armstrong after he won 7 Tour de France titles (all taken away from him) and after his Livestrong foundation raised $500,000,000 (a half a billion dollars). So is the following possible? Since sunlight is free and gives people free vitamin D and a tan that makes them look better, they could convince people that sunlight is bad just like they did with coffee. I have the article 17 Health Benefits of Drinking Coffee.

By convincing them that sunlight is bad for humans while being a great thing for all the other animals, they need to buy sunscreen and sunblock creating a billion dollar industry. Also billions more are spent on skin dyes to make pale skin look like it got a real tan. If pigs had money to spend, then they would say that sunight is bad for pigs.

What Does the CDC Say About This

The CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) has a map and chart of the rates of melanoma in each state. Take a look at it. It has the 4 rates of melanoma from highest to lowest. Note that on it, you have the states that are furthest from the equator getting the weakest sunlight like Washington, Oregon, Minnesota, Vermont, New Hampshire and Connecticut. These states have the highest rates of melanoma. See map above. Does this agree with the idea that sunlight causes melanoma.

But what about this. You have states like Arizona, Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi that are closer to the equator than the other states with the lowest rates of melanoma. Now clouds block sunlight. But Arizona, where I live, is dessert and so it is the sunniest state but is a state with the lowest rate of melanoma.

Also Arizona has place with high elevations, like Phoenix with a 1,100 foot elevation, Tucson at a 2,643 ft elevation, Sedona at 4,423 feet and Flagstaff where the train station is at 6,903 feet (note that different sources disagree). At the high elevations, the sunlight is stronger since it goes through less atmosphere. Also the attitude of people here is the less rules (like wearing sunscreen), the better. For example people in Arizona do not need any type of license to carry a gun.

Over 10,000 years ago, everyone lived off the land in villages or tribes and they shared everything. There was no money so there was no rich and poor. Daniel Quinn has a book about this called Ishmael. It won a $500,000 cash award as the best book to change the world according to the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship. Wikipedia says:

The Turner Tomorrow Fellowship Award was created in 1989 by Ted Turner, to be awarded to an unpublished work of fiction offering creative and positive solutions to global problems. Ishmael by Daniel Quinn won the award in 1991, which will not be awarded again, and was selected out of 2500 entries by a celebrity panel including famous sci-fi writer Ray Bradbury. The award was worth $500,000, the largest single sum ever awarded to a single work of literature.

This article definitely has a lot of numbers in it. Ishmael was made into a fictional story to teach about anthropology. Many anthropologists disagree with him but maybe they are jealous of not winning $500,000. A news reporter told Albert Einstein that over 100 top physicists in the world think that his theory of relativity was nonsense. He replied that if it was nonsense, then it would take only one top physicist to say so.

This was before they did the precise mathematical equations during an eclipse that proved the theory of relativity as a mathematical certainty. The next day Albert Einstein was an overnight celebrity and the front page of the New York Times said:

Lights All Askew in the Heavens | Men of Science More or Less Agog Over Results of Eclipse Observations

After Ishmael, Quinn wrote My Ishmael and the Story of B to teach about anthropology even more. I read all 3 of these books. Decades ago Prem Rawat said that man does not understand that if you cut the same branch that you are sitting on, it is not a great idea. Some high school and college classes require students to read the above 3 books.

Vitamin D

The link under the picture above with the article from Time Magazine says:

Researchers have long known that the "sunshine vitamin" boosts bone strength by encouraging the body to absorb calcium. But a slew of new studies published in 2007 suggests that the vitamin has a lot of other benefits: Diets high in D may ward off diabetes, gum disease and multiple sclerosis — and maybe even cancer.

Now some suggest getting vitamin D from supplements instead of sunlight. That is fine since studies have been done with supplements. What have they learned about vitamin D in the last 5 years? Well in November 2010, they tripled the RDA of vitamin D that is not a vitamin but a steroidal hormone. Also in the last 3 years 7 books on Vitamin D have been written by 7 MDs including Vitamin D for Dummies.

This has never happened before with any nutrient or hormone. Also there is the October 2012 book called A World Without Cancer by an MD who is the sister of the governor of New York and it has a chapter about vitamin D. The book is all about the scam of raising money for a cure for cancer when doctors just want to keep treating it is that is much more profitable. The book explains that we know enough now to prevent most of the cases of cancer.

Now if you get vitamin D from sunlight, that is the best way and it is free. But the reason that all this research on vitamin D took place was because they saw that people who lived closer to the equator and got more sunshine (even before the sunscreen scam started) had less incidence of many diseases including cancer. See Vitamin D Prevents Breast Cancer. It says:

Moores Cancer Center is proposing that cancer is a vitamin D deficiency. The doctor of public health there and professor of University of California, San Diego, Cedric Garland, states that enough vitamin D (lifeguard levels) will virtually eradicate breast cancer!

Harvard Medical School article Time for More Vitamin D (health.harvard.edu) (This article was first printed in the September 2008 issue of the Harvard Women Health Watch) says:

Hardly a month goes by without news about the risks of vitamin D deficiency or about a potential role for the vitamin in warding off diseases, including breast cancer, multiple sclerosis, and even schizophrenia.

However, in one of the few randomized trials testing the effect of vitamin D supplements on cancer outcomes, postmenopausal women who took 1,100 international units (IU) of vitamin D plus 1,400 to 1,500 milligrams of calcium per day reduced their risk of developing non-skin cancers by 77% after four years, compared with a placebo and the same dose of calcium.

The Lancet (world's leading general medical journal and specialty journals in Oncology, Neurology and Infectious Diseases) says (Lancet 2004 Feb 28;363(9410):728-30.):

Exposure to intense bursts of ultraviolet radiation, especially in childhood, starts the transformation of benign melanocytes into a malignant phenotype. Paradoxically, outdoor workers have a decreased risk of melanoma compared with indoor workers, suggesting that chronic sunlight exposure can have a protective effect. Further, some melanomas form on sun-exposed regions; others do not.

Not only is this scam making billions of dollars for people, it is also causing untold suffering. Rickets was cured decades ago but now it is coming back since people are not getting enough vitamin D. See How Much Vitamin D Should You Take Daily. The new video below tells about a study that found that vitamin D from sunlight stays in your blood 2 to 3 times longer than vitamin D from a supplement.