Growing up, my parents would take my sisters and me to Turkey and Greece for 2-3 weeks during the summer. It was the perfect environment for my skin to heal from eczema, and it was something I’d always look forward to – aside the fun water sports we’d learn during the day underneath the hot, blissful Mediterranean sun. I´ll never forget my very first holiday in Turkey when I was 7, when I went into the sea and my skin was so painful due to exposed raw skin on various parts all over my body. My mum insisted that I stayed in the water as it was good for my skin. I didn’t realise at the time how loving she was being, I thought she was being mean! In days, the stinging sensation eased, and within a week my skin was better. It felt so good to have normal skin like everyone else.
Healing in the sun and sea was something that became a known Godsend in getting rid of my eczema, and indeed my sisters´. The few days in the sea salt would normally sting like crazy, but once those days were in the past, my skin would return to what I’d consider “normal.” On returning to England, the eczema was often back within a few weeks – unless it was sunny. (I’d just like to point out, I almost wrote “my” eczema. I always suggest people don’t associate themselves with whatever symptom as it can become an identity, and a programmed belief, triggering the nocebo effect, the opposite of the placebo effect, looked at later.) The sun in England seemed to have magical properties as well, it just wasn’t as consistent as the Mediterranean.
From my later teenage years, I decided I wanted to live somewhere in the sun as it makes me feel happier, it’s clearly more pleasurable, and it keep my skin looking healthy. Given the largest organ is the skin, and it’s the first indication that the body is out of balance (inflamed) when symptoms are present, I would say my good skin, is on the whole, an indicator of good health, under the surface. (That’s a personal rule of thumb, my no means scientific.)
So what’s so powerful about the sun? Is it just the sun or is it the sea and sun combination? Let’s start with the sun.
First off, all life on the planet utilises this the sun, in one form or another, and uses it to produce energy, heal, produce hormones and communicate. It can prevent disease and even prepare your body to produce hormones that it needs for optimal health each day.
A recent clinical review published in the The Journal of the American Osteopathic Association1 found that 1 billion people worldwide may have deficient or insufficient levels of vitamin D due to chronic disease and inadequate exposure to this nutrient.
It´s not an unknown phenomenon for people to block the sun when they are exposed, by slapping sunscreen all over themselves (with ingredients that are questionable).
Sunlight is a nutrient. See this interview with Brain Richards, founder of Sauna Space, for a way to “bio-hack” sunlight when we do not have access to it so readily.
Sunlight, specifically Ultraviolet-B (UVB) light, Ultraviolet-A (UV-A) and Infrared-A (IR-A) support the body’s production of the hormone, Vitamin D sulfate on the skin, melatonin and dopamine. The sun can even set the body up to better absorb sunlight itself, later in the day, protecting against too much sun. A slight tan is protective.
Vitamin D produced by the sun happens to be water soluble making it easy to be absorbed and used by the body. This in contrast to Vitamin D found in supplements which is not sulfated, does not share the same characteristics, and unsurprisingly, is not as effective as that from sunlight itself.
Exposure to morning and evening sun, where there is less UV light, prepares skin ready to receive UV rays later in the day according to a recent study. Sunlight protects the skin from the rays of the sun that could harm us later in the day! Sunlight protects you from the sun. Go figure.
In this study, researchers demonstrated that oral Vitamin D helps to reduce inflammation and heal damage from sunburn.
“The diverse immunomodulatory effects of vitamin D are increasingly being recognized. However, the ability of oral vitamin D to modulate acute inflammation in vivo has not been established in humans….20 healthy adults were randomized to receive either placebo or a high dose of vitamin D3 (cholecalciferol) one hour after experimental sunburn…..Compared with placebo, participants receiving vitamin D3 (200,000 international units) demonstrated reduced expression of pro-inflammatory mediators.
A blinded, unsupervised hierarchical clustering of participants based on global gene expression profiles revealed that participants with significantly higher serum vitamin D3 levels after treatment demonstrated increased skin expression of the anti-inflammatory mediator arginase-1 (P = 0.005), and a sustained reduction in skin redness (P = 0.02), correlating with significant expression of genes related to skin barrier repair. In contrast, participants with lower serum vitamin D3 levels had significant expression of pro-inflammatory genes.
The sun is necessary for all types of life on earth. Without it, life would cease to exist. We’re taught this in elementary school when learning about photosynthesis.
Interesting factoid of the chapter for you. In the 1930s, baby cages were used to ensure children living in apartment buildings got enough fresh air and sunlight.
According to Dr Jack Kruse, previously a neurosurgeon and pioneer in steering sunlight-based education on nutrition, reports that sunlight is more important than the food you eat. This reminds me of an interview four years ago with a friend and founder of Sauna Space, a company that manufactures infrared heat and light saunas. After healing himself of a variety of illnesses using light and heat, he researched this field in depth, and set up a business to bring them to the world. He was dumfounded by how powerful it was in reducing inflammation, alleviating skin conditions, speeding up injury recovery, and even helping with mental and emotional wellbeing.
Dr Jack Kruse2 states that when you set up your light environment properly, you can eat less food. He goes as far as to say you can build the body you want with sunlight, more efficiently you can with food. That’s quite the claim!
Introducing your body as an electrical system.
This will be looked at in greater depth in The Body Electric. Simply, think of the human body as an intricate electrical system, comprising many battery packs to keep it thriving. The battery needs to remain at peak efficiency to stay charged. The sun and Earth in combination work as the charger.
The sun provides us with electrons (as does The Earth), to power our human battery packs. This is achieved via our skin and eyes, or via the food we eat, chemically. The sun is a more efficient source of electrons than food.
The “battery packs” inside your cells are called mitochondria. They require the flow of electrons to function, and keep the body functioning and energised. This is called the ECT (Electron Transport Chain). Guess where the electrons come from to energise our cells? Food, the Earth, and the Sun. According to Kruse, we get 66% of our electrons direction from the Earth and the sun. In other words, we only get 34% of energy from the food supply each day.
When we have less sun, or live in fear of it, we eat more food to generate more electrons, and this can lead to weight gain and sickness. Stepping barefoot on the earth (or swimming in the ocean or sea) and by getting sufficient sunlight helps us to absorb these essential electrons.
This was a huge “aha” moment for me. The penny dropped. Finding this out made me realise why my family holidays in Greece and Turkey growing up healed my skin and made me feel so good. It was more than just not being at school in a stress free environment!
Sunlight in our eyes first thing in the morning around sunrise and also at sunset without sunglasses or normal glasses or contact lenses has been shown to set our circadian rhythm for the entire day. This helps us sleep better at night and keeps us Vital3.
Sunlight and Longevity
According to Kruse, cell division, cell time, and cell life is based on signals from light and this therefore impacts our longevity.
“In 1964, John Ott along with Dr. Irving Leopold studied the effects of light on rabbit retinal pigment epithelial cells. They documented that that retinal pigment epithelial would not divide unless they were exposed to low levels of ultraviolet light. Roeland van Wijk research has shown that every cell on Earth has to release ELF-UV light from its surface to stimulate mitosis. What this implies is that UV light is necessary for our health because the RPE in the human retina controls our eye clock! The eye clock is what controls our circadian rhythms in our cells and they all link coherently using light water and magnetism to control growth and metabolism. The effect is massive on our lifespan.”
There is much more to light than most of us realise. Sunlight can literally heal the body, and indoor light (looked at more in the sleep section) can be toxic. Based on some breakthrough discoveries, it appears that sunlight is the ultimate nutrient, as Brian Richards stated in our interview, and most of us are sunlight deficient, resulting in a Vitamin D deficiency.
If you think about it, we are the only species on the planet that restrict ourselves from natural sunlight. We are supposed to be outdoors and exposed to the sun. That doesn’t mean tanning ourselves until we burn of course, it means being intelligent about it, and exposing ourselves at time when it is not harmful, like sunrise and sunset, and depending on where you live in the world, at some stages during the day.
This quote from Kruse might boggle your mind…
“Never let your education limit you from learning new things. The authors (of a recent paper on Melanoma) appear to be shocked that they globally found UV FROM the sun shows no causative effect in melanoma cases. Let me say that again………ZERO ties to sunlight.”
What about if melanomas weren’t caused by the sun, and were in fact caused by artificial light? I know, it sounds absurd, based on what we have been told our whole lives. This study looks at that potentiality:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20347530/
This suggests that indoor artificial light is likely the bigger cancer concern – and not sunlight. Those with skin cancer tend to have an aversion to sunlight, sunscreen head to toe, and protect themselves from the nutrient that can actually protect them from skin cancer. It´s not unusual for additional skin growths to occur that must be treated.
This is something to consider: does it make sense that the sun causes cancer, knowing how it is the most powerful nutrient imaginable? Or does it make more sense that artificial light causes cancer?
This is directly from the peer-reviewed research paper:
Are Some Melanomas a result of Artificial Light? https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20347530/
“The incidence rate of cutaneous melanoma has been increasing faster than that of any other cancer in white-skinned populations over the past decades. The main risk factors for melanoma (i.e. exposure to sunlight, naevus count, phototype, and family history of melanoma) may not wholly explain the epidemiological trends observed for this cancer. The light-at-night theory postulates that increasing use of artificial light-at-night may contribute to the increasing breast cancer incidence through suppressed secretion of melatonin (a hormone produced in the dark and inhibited by light, which regulates circadian rhythms). https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20347530/
In other words, light at night and suppressed melatonin (from living an indoor life) may be the cause of melanoma, breast cancer and more.
In the biohacker community, the use of blue blocking glasses is growing rapidly. They are worn indoors to protect from fluorescent lighting and at night in front of computer screens and TVs. This is because artificial light at night, especially that from LEDs (Light emitting diodes) and CFLs (Compact Fluorescent Lights) emit lots of blue light. These are the energy-saving light bulbs. Remember the incandescent lights originally invented that have been phased out due to energy efficiency? They emit a fraction of the blue light.
Going back to ancestral times, we would not have this type of light. They would use firelight, candles, or later, incandescent light. This is another fascinating study I found on Science Mag.
Anti-Cancer Gene Triggers Tanning
“A tan is more than a sign of sun damage. It’s also a natural shield against skin cancer, particularly the deadliest sort: melanoma. Now scientists have found another surprising link between tanning and cancer: p53–a gene long implicated as a cancer suppressor–appears to be key to helping us tan.
The simple act of catching a few rays sets a complex biological process into motion. In response to ultraviolet (UV) light from the sun, skin cells called kerotinocytes begin pumping out melanocyte-stimulating hormone (MSH), which in turn binds to MSH receptors on pigment-producing skin cells called melanocytes. This starts a cascade of events that leads to melanin production and a nice brown tan. Defective forms of the MSH receptor are strongly associated with red hair and the inability to tan.” (Science, 2 March 2007)”
In Layman’s terms: tanning helps suppress cancer. No wonder I love to bathe in the sun and soak up the rays. It´s always felt amazing to me, going back to when I was 7. How do you feel when you’re in the sun?
Maybe it’s time to reconsider the narrative we’ve been told our whole lives that the sun causes cancer, and instead consider The Nature Codes, their function on Planet Earth, how Nature makes no mistakes. Might it be that humans are creating the cancer, rather than the source of the most powerful nutrient known to man?
How to use this information? Create time in your day to get into the sun, preferably around sunrise or sunset, although that’s clearly not realistic for everyone. If you’re in an office for work, it’s worthwhile getting out and about to reduce exposure to fluorescent lighting and get some real light onto your skin. It doesn’t necessarily have to be blistering sun, we still absorb rays through the clouds.
Have your skin exposed, and obviously be careful not to burn. 15 minutes in the morning on your naked skin, preferably grounded, can be a superb source of fuel for your body, for your immune system, and your mental and emotional well-being.
You might consider investing in a pair of blue-blocking sunglasses if you work at night on your screen. This blue light is causing harm and most people have no idea.
1 https://osteopathic.org/2017/05/01/widespread-vitamin-d-deficiency-likely-due-to-sunscreen-use-increase-of-chronic-diseases/
2 https://jackkruse.com
3 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2717723/