Over the last century, humans in many parts of the world evolved into sun-fearing creatures. Here in the United States, for example, most people strive for jobs that keep them indoors all day, limiting their sun exposure to the twice daily commutes. When we do go outside for extended periods of time, we dare not confront the dreaded UV rays without our sunblock savior. Of course, when I say we “evolved” into these cave people, I’m not being scientific. Species evolve to become more fit, so why would humans evolve to be so vulnerable to our own sun that we have to avoid it almost completely? We wouldn’t, and we didn’t.
Astronomer Bob Berman, author of The Sun’s Heartbeat: And Other Stories from the Life of the Star That Powers Our Planet, explains why our current relationship with the sun is a harmful one that might actually cause more health problems than it helps prevent.
Berman begins with the story of how our relationship with the sun went so astray. He calls it the “Sun-tragedy.” About 50,000 to 70,000 years ago humans started moving away from the equator to places with as low as 10 percent the UV intensity. Since we rely on sunlight for vitamin D production, these migrations led to severe vitamin D deficiencies, causing rickets. Women with rickets cannot give birth, so they and their children die in labor. Enter evolution (the scientific kind). Now we have white people who have less natural sunblock and can therefore create more vitamin D from less sunlight. All was right with the world for a while, but then agriculture was out and manufacturing was in. With it came cars, air conditioning, UV-blocking windows and finally sunblock — our defense against skin cancer — in the 1980’s.
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“The metamorphosis was complete: we had become like the Morlocks in H.G. Wells’s book The Time Machine, shielded almost totally from sunlight’s UV,” Berman wrote.
Now scientists are sounding the alarm on vitamin D deficiency because (surprise!) it’s pretty important.
“Spending just ten minutes in strong sunlight – the kind you get from 11:00 AM to 3:00 PM between April and August – will allow your body to make as much vitamin D as you would get from drinking two hundred glasses of milk”, Berman reported. “This is astonishing. Asks John Cannell (MD, executive director of the Vitamin D Council) rhetorically, “Why does nature do this so quickly? Nature normally doesn’t do this kind of thing.”
The implied answer, of course, is that we were designed to have a high and steady level of this vitamin in our bodies. Yet as more and more people are tested, researchers are finding serious vitamin D deficiencies in virtually all of the population of the United States, Canada, and northern Europe. The reason? According to Cannell and the other doctors on the Vitamin D Council, we have been hiding from the Sun for decades.”
Ironically, studies have shown that vitamin D (i.e. sunshine) is actually an incredible anti-cancer agent. One study in particular reported that women who were on average 62 years old had a 60 percent reduction in all kinds of cancers after four years of taking large amounts of vitamin D.
According to the Center for Disease Control, nearly all infants in the U.S. are vitamin D deficient, and evidence suggests there may be a correlation between vitamin D deficiency and autism.
“According to Cannell, the highest autism rates occur in areas that have the most clouds and rain, and hence the lowest blood levels of vitamin D. A Swedish study has strongly linked sunlight deprivation with autism. Moreover, blacks, whose vitamin D levels are half those found in whites living at the same latitudes, have twice the autism rates. Conversely, autism is virtually unknown in places such as sunny Somalia, where most people still spend most of their time outdoors. Yet another piece of anecdotal evidence is that autism is one of the very few afflictions that occur at higher rates among the wealthier and more educated – exactly the people most likely to be diligent about sunscreen and more inclined to keep their children indoors.”
Berman made clear that linking sun exposure to autism is dangerous and could open up a “can of worms,” so he hesitated to make any definitive statements but recommended that parents get their kids out in the sun a bit more.
The bottom line is that our bodies wouldn’t make vitamin D if we didn’t need it (evolution is pretty good at getting rid of biological processes that waste energy). According to Berman, Reader’s Digest declared last year that all vitamin supplements were “a scam” except vitamin D! Natural selection is amazing, but it’s not magic. It couldn’t have predicted our indoor lifestyle, so surely our bodies are still expecting a healthy dose of sunshine for vitamin D production. Maybe one day humans will actually evolve into Morlocks, but until I say we soak up a few more rays now and then.
Photo: Robert S. Donovan, Flickr, CC
