11-22-2006, 07:02 PM
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 #1 (permalink)
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I'm Banned
Join Date: Nov 30 2000
Location: Ontario
Age: 45
Posts: 52,065
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How Sunlight Can Save Your Life ~ Part 1
It's the great cancer cover-up. Panicked into avoiding sunlight by health experts, we are now dying in our thousands from diseases linked to deficiencies of vitamin D. But still the exaggerated warnings come. Oliver Gillie reveals how sunbathing can save your life... How many times have you heard it: "There's no such thing as a healthy tan." Second only to "smoking kills", avoiding the sun is the health advice that has most permeated our conciousness. Young and old, rich and poor, everyone knows that exposure to the sun puts us at risk of skin cancer. But does it? What if the advice we've been given to avoid the sun is wrong? What if hiding your skin from those seductive rays is putting your health in danger? While every summer cancer charities and skin experts launch their annual campaign to persuade people, against their natural inclination, to cover up and stay out of the sun, there is growing evidence that lack of exposure to sunlight is responsible for a multitude of disease from multiple sclerosis and diabetes to several types of cancer and schizophrenia. And it's all down to a deficiency of vitamin D - some 90 per cent of which we get from sunlight. Most medical researchers have been slow in recognising the potentially lethal consequences of vitamin D deficiency. In part this is because vitamin D is not the only trigger for these diseases. However in the British Isles with our long winters and cloudy summers, it seems that insufficient exposure to the sun can make the difference between illness and health, between life and death. Dr Peter Selby, lecturer in medicine at Manchester Royal Infirmary, says: "Reducing exposure to solar radiation, far from preventing cancer, may have the opposite effect." He points out that a 10 per cent decrease in exposure to sunlight would not greatly reduce skin cancer but could lead to a 6 per cent increase in certain other cancers. And these extra cancer deaths, he points out, would exceed all the deaths from skin cancer put together. Continued at: How Sunlight Can Save Your Life
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