Your Best Health Under the Sun by Al Sears, MD and Jon Herring

The authors have addressed a controversial topic, which is not addressed in other alternative health books. One factor that makes Americans less healthy, they say, isn’t just poor diet, pollution, and lack of exercise: it’s a lack of sunlight.

They build a powerful case that sunlight is healthy for us in many ways. The best known is that the action of the sun on our skin is our source of vitamin D, a much more important vitamin for our health than is generally believed. Supplementation with artificial forms of this vitamin in our milk and other foods is not a real substitute for the real vitamin.

The list of benefits of vitamin D is found on page xii of the Foreword, and it’s a long one, starting with helping prevent 17 different types of cancer, through reducing the risk of heart attack, and ending with preventing intestinal and inflammatory disorders .

A strong indication that they may be right is the charts they publish listing countries in order of latitude (distance from the equator) and their death rate from breast and colon cancer.

There seems to be a strong correlation between distance from the equator (north, meaning people living in that country get less sunlight) and death rates from those cancers.

They also include a map of the United States, showing that prostate death rates are higher the farther north you live.

In addition, they note that cancer death rates among African Americans are higher than among whites, and say this could be due to the pigmentation of their skin, which blocks the absorption of vitamin D from sunlight. Therefore, African Americans need to spend more time in the sun to get the same health benefit.

They claim that we need more vitamin D than the standard advice of “your face in the sun ten minutes a day”. The more the better.

Part of the problem is simple geography. The further north you live, the less sunlight you will have, especially during the winter months.

While you can’t do anything to change that (other than moving to the tropics), the standard medical advice to stay out of the sun and put on sunscreen only makes your situation worse.

And skin cancer? There are three types: basal cell carcinoma, squamous cell carcinoma, and malignant melanoma.

The first two comprised 95% of all skin cancer cases, but only 25% of skin cancer deaths. They are easily treated. And they are associated with skin damaged by too much sunlight, ie sunburn.

The authors advise getting more sunlight, but not so much that you burn your skin. Take it easy until you’ve developed a protective tan. This prevents sunburn, which damages the skin and can eventually lead to skin cancer.

The kind that’s the real problem is malignant melanoma, and guess what, people get it on places that don’t get sunlight, like the soles of their feet. And interestingly enough, a tan can protect you from this terrifying type of skin cancer. Studies show that people who work outdoors have lower rates of malignant melanoma than office workers.

If the authors are right, sunscreens not only block healthy sunlight from your skin, they contain ingredients that can cause skin cancer.

This is meant as a popular book. For my part, I would like to see the United Nations World Health Organization (WHO) do a full and comprehensive statistical analysis of how the mortality rate of many different diseases correlates with latitude.

At this point, anyone who chooses to question this book can simply say that perhaps the authors “picked perfectly” his death from cancer.

Also, how can we account for anyone in the rate of infectious disease, which remains high in developing countries that tend to be clustered closer to the equator?

And there are two main loopholes. The author is not talking about tanning salons. I suspect they are not a healthy alternative to real sunlight, but I don’t know where they stand.

They recommend leaving the sunglasses on so our eyes can benefit from the sunlight, but what about the kind of sunglasses that block only ultraviolet wavelengths?

Hopefully, they will include sections on these topics in future editions.