Breast cancer breakthrough: vitamin D in combination with sun exposure is key to prevention
Tuesday, January 18, 2011 S. L. Baker
The new research, headed by Dr. Pierre Engel from INSERM (Institut National de la Sante et de la Recherche Medicale, which is France's equivalent to the National Institutes of Health in the U.S.), investigated data combined from a large, decade long study involving 67,721 post-menopausal French women. The analysis came up with clear, startling evidence that while vitamin D plays a role in reducing the risk of breast cancer, the addition of adequate sunshine exposure is the factor that substantially drops the risk even more.
The scientists found that women living in the sunniest places in the south of France, such as Provence, had only about half the risk of breast cancer of women residing in less sunny latitudes, such as Paris. Even women who had the lowest vitamin D intake but who got lots of sunshine had a 32 percent lower risk of breast cancer than their counterparts living in less sunny latitudes of France. What's more, the women who consumed the most dietary vitamin D from foods and supplements and who had regular, generous sun exposure had the most significant protection from developing breast cancer.Part of the answer is that as your serum vitamin D rises to the normal levels your bile changes to its natural state and flushes vitamin D from the gut. It does this because humans were not designed to get vitamin D from diet, but rather from sunshine. This natural flushing prevents vitamin D toxicity from the secondary dietary source.
In their research paper, which was just published in the journal Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers and Prevention, the French team concluded that a minimum threshold of vitamin D obtained from both sunshine and diet "..is required to prevent breast cancer and this threshold is particularly difficult to reach in postmenopausal women at northern latitudes where quality of sunlight is too poor for adequate vitamin D production."
They also noted that the minimal intake of vitamin D to reduce the risk of breast cancer is likely to vary with an individual woman's ability to metabolize or synthesize the vitamin from both diet and sunshine exposure. Adding that the average American and French woman has relative low levels of vitamin D and tends to get little exposure to sunshine, the scientists recommended "...an increase in overall vitamin D intake should be encouraged by food and health agencies."
The other issue is that sunlight on the skin does more than simply make vitamin D.
This is from an abstract in 2009 regarding how Multiple Sclerosis is prevented by something beyond vitamin D, and the answer is the other things UV radiation does to the human body when it is exposed to sunlight;
UVR can suppress the immune system through a number of mechanisms independent of vitamin D, including inhibiting antigen presentation, altering inflammatory cytokine levels, and inducing suppressor T-cell populations (32). Therefore, we suggest that UVR is likely playing a role in immunosuppression independent of vitamin D production.For all we know about sunlight and vitamin D there is still a lot we do not know.
What we do know is that man evolved naked under the sun for five million years, and it appears many of our proper biologic responses can be linked to sunlight on the skin.
Sunlight on the skin is one of the primitive inputs we were designed for. Sun exposure on ≥40% of the body, while never getting a sun burn is critical to long healthy life.
My parents make a perfect example.my father always hid under the umbrella at the beach, or used sunscreen, while my mother has basked in the sun her whole life. Dad is gone at age 73 and mom is as healthy as a horse.at age 82,
What all those biologic sunlight factors are we do not know yet, but the proper course is obvious.
To make full use of the sun year round you must live below 35 degrees latitude. For only in those locals is sunlight strong enough in winter to do any good.
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