Tools & Tips
The Sunny Side of Life

As far back as 1941, research gathered by the Australian doctor Frank Apperly of the University of Melbourne showed that sunlight can help protect against all kind of cancers, including breast, lung, prostate and colon cancers, reports What Doctors Don't Tell You (Oct. 28, 2006). He studied statistics from North America and discovered that people who live closest to the equator have fewer cancers. This isn't so surprising, given that sunlight is the richest source of anti-carcinogenic vitamin D.

Apperly's work attracted little attention at the time, but two recent studies have given his research renewed credibility. The first was conducted at England's Imperial College London. According to a publication of the British Medical Journal Online (Oct. 17, 2006), women between the ages of 10 and 29 who absorbed more vitamin D than a control group had a 40 percent lower chance of developing breast cancer later in life. Similar results were reported from a comparable study at the University of California San Diego, where women with elevated signs of vitamin D cut their chances of breast cancer in half. Vitamin D is present in such foods as eggs, liver, cod liver oil and oily fish such as salmon, sardines, trout and tuna. But it's difficult to get enough of it from a balanced diet; the best source is the sun.

How do researchers reconcile these findings with studies that have shown that sun exposure increases the chances of developing skin cancer? Apparently, the heat of the sun is the culprit, not UV rays, according to Apperly. This remains a controversial thesis, but certainly merits further investigation.

ODE Magazine
May 2007