Embrace the sunkiss (responsibly!)

Advocating responsible sun time has a lot of stigma that comes with it. Generally speaking, if you’ve found yourself in the world of holistic health and wellness, you are very intentional with how you care for yourself and this shell of a body, intending a long, healthy life. We all hope for truthful information in order to make educated decisions. Science is ever evolving, ravenously curious, and only as reliable as the one deciphering the data. Allopathic dermatology has painted a grim horizon for those who enjoy the sun. However, many professionals are beginning to ask, have we gone too far? Did we miss the bigger picture? These are some of the questions I hope to address in this series. It is not that we have been lied to, but rather we have excepted the status quo without a return to the original inquiry as more research is collected and uncovered. This article was written for the critical thinkers, the holistic health junkies, and generally inquisitive minds. This is not to give you the answer, but to offer an alternative narrative based on recent research, to empower you on your journey to whole person well-being. Implementing small changes can result in radical shifts.

Let’s begin with some basics.

UVA vs UVB

Sunlight is composed of ultraviolet radiation, visible light, and infrared radiation. Ultraviolet radiation comes in three forms, UVA, UVB, & UVC. Only the first two make their way through the ozone layer and atmosphere, so for our purposes UVA and UVB are what we’ll be exploring here. While there are artificial sources of UV radiation such as lasers, black lights, and tanning beds, the sun is by far our most significant source.

UVA makes up 95% of the sun’s UV rays that touch the ground. They have higher wavelengths and lower energy levels which penetrate deep into the inner layers of the skin, therefore are responsible for longer-lasting pigmentation. These rays can easily pass through clouds and windows and are able to bounce off reflective surfaces like liquid water, ice, or snow.

UVB are mostly absorbed by the ozone layer and make up only 5% of the sun’s UV rays that hit the surface of the earth. They have shorter wavelengths and higher energy levels relative to UVA. UVB rays reach only as far as the epidermis where they interact with a protein in the skin to convert it into vitamin D3. UVB are solely responsible for our vitamin D3 production when sourcing it from the sun.

Many factors can impact UV light transmission. The season, time of day, latitude, altitude, and weather will affect the potency of UV radiation.

Synthesize

I invite you to question what you know of this essential nutrient we’ve deemed vitamin D, as the widely touted ritual of popping a morning multivitamin may be misleading if not fruitless. Vitamin D differs from virtually every other categorized vitamin as it is hardly a vitamin at all, but rather a prohormone (a precursor to a hormone), that is photochemically created by the body when sunlight (specifically UVB) interacts with cholesterol in the skin. Vitamin D is integral in the body’s complex process of all hormone creation, from estrogen to insulin to serotonin. Because of it’s implicit role in hormone function, low levels of vitamin D are associated with a higher risk of a multitude of health issues including but hardly limited to cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, stroke, and depression.

It’s true that there are limited sources of food that naturally offer some amount of vitamin D; most notably fatty fish such as wild-caught salmon, herring, halibut, and tuna, but also in liver, egg yolks, and wild mushrooms. Since the 1930’s several breakfast foods have been fortified with vitamin D such as milk, orange juice, and cereals. It’s worth noting that animal sources (& sunlight) offer us D3 whereas plant sourced & fortified foods offer D2. Both require undergoing a process in the liver before becoming useful, active D although one study found D3 to be twice as effective at increasing vitamin D levels than D2. Whichever food sources align with you, it is challenging to fulfill your D quota by diet alone and in our modern society of a largely indoor workforce and strict recommendations of consistent SPF protection, many are left with no choice but to supplement. In fact, over 40% of American adults and an estimated one billion people worldwide are deficient in vitamin D yet the AAD explicitly recommends against synthesizing any from the sun. Instead, they advocate supplementing.

Here is why we don’t.

The vitamin, when dissected from sunlight itself, continually falls short in reaping any measurable benefit study after study. I mean, encapsulated vitamin D is flopping really badly. In 2019, a 5 year study with a total of 25,871 participants concluded that supplementation did not result in a lower incidence of invasive cancer or cardiovascular events. This was one of the most rigorous, comprehensive trials of the vitamin ever conducted with disappointing results for the 75% of Americans consuming a capsule daily. Researchers are in the beginning of uncovering just how wrong we may have gotten it. While vitamin D levels were once thought to be a good indicator of health, the data implicates that likely, they are more of a gauge indicating if we are getting sufficient amounts of sunlight. With this in mind, supplementing does not reach the root of the issue. Popping a pill, while perhaps easier for some, is just not working to the advantage of the average, healthy person. On the contrary, we even risk overdosing with unsupervised supplementation, an outcome that just won’t happen when synthesizing from the sun. Vitamin D toxicity can look like calcium buildup in your blood (hypercalcemia) which can cause nausea and vomiting or in some cases bone pain and kidney stones. With our skin’s innate ability to generate and regulate vitamin D from sunlight, most of our vitamin D should be obtained from solar radiation and not supplements.