Art De Vany: Suntans and meals

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Suntans and meals

May 17, 2005 08:39 AM

A little storm here over my apparent approval of a suntan. And a little controversy over whether my meals are "evolutionary".

The latter is easy. We do live in today's world and have available foods our ancestors could not have eaten. Most of these are based on the four starchy crops that supply about 60% of the world's calories. The idea of evolutionary eating, and it is a model to guide thinking more than a prescription, is to try to avoid foods that are far removed from natural plant and animal sources. I have called my diet PaleoMed because it has a big Mediterranean component in the olives, olive oil, and spices.

Remember, Evolutionary Fitness is a fusion of the Stone Age with the High Tech; it is not an attempt to mimic a lost lifeway. It is a Darwinian approach to life, health and fitness that is fully grounded in the modern science of complex physiological systems.

As for suntans.

They are good for you. Sun damage is caused by severe episodes of sun exposure, such as "tanning" by the pool for hours. Extreme events drive the sun-cancer connection, just as huge meals shock your insulin response system. Each leaves their mark and this imprint can evolve along many paths with consequences far down the road. It is the issue, at the heart of much of my research, of the influence of extreme events versus "averages" which everyone seems to focus on. I can't go into this here; read about this later in my book.

Moderate exposures are nothing but good, even if you get a few wrinkles. Melanin builds gradually in response to sun exposure and the antioxidant content of the skin also increases in response to repeated, gradual exposure. Most people are so undernourished and so challenged in their antioxidants that they may have too little defense to sun exposure. It is, after all, the interaction of the subject and the treatment that conditions the response to sun exposure. If you exposure yourself stupidly and have inadequate antioxidant defenses, then you increase your risk. So little is known about the probabilities that risk is not really the right term to use here; the unknown probabilities are probably shifted unfavorably is about all we can say.

There is a predilection among pale-skinned individuals to be sun seekers, probably an adaptation of our ancestors who lived in high latitudes and wore protective clothing. Remember, it is technology that lets humans live in diverse climates. This evolutionary engineering changes body shape to a more barrel shape to retain heat in Northern climates and linearizes the body to conduct heat in Equatorial latitudes. Skin color also adjusts. The photoreflective properties of skin color perfectly match the sun exposure in the environment of the evolutionarily adapted human living there. The matching is so subtle that forest dwelling humans in the Amazon have skin color perfectly attuned to their photo load.

Clothing, not body fat, is the other technology that matches humans to their climate. Eskimos living in the old ways carry no more fat than Paraguayan hunter-gatherers. If fat were how we were protected from cold, we would all be fat heads. But, only some of us are.

Our skin makes vitamin D. Why? Because there was not enough of it in the ancestral human diet. Sunlight is required for that to happen. It is one of the wonderful evolutionary paradoxes created by modern medical advice: protect your skin, lose your skeleton. You will lack vitamin D without exposure to the sun. Nothing is free.

Ever wonder why the Irish are so ruddy-cheeked and so enthralled with the idea of fairness, as in she is the fairest of the fair? Ruddy cheeks are the result of blood vessels near the surface of the skin. Fair skin lets the sunlight reach these blood vessels. A woman who is fair makes plenty of vitamin D in her milk and her babies are healthier. A baby with adequate vitamin D, a hard thing to come by in a cold climate where children are swaddled and seldom in the sun, will be less apt to develop skeletal asymmetries such as rickets or club foot. She, and her children, will have better skeletons and will develop more symmetrically because they get more vitamin D in a place where many others will lack it. Conversely, and sadly, a black child raised in, say, Chicago, may lack vitamin D even if she is otherwise well-nourished. Black skin does not produce as much vitamin D, which is why among some African populations vitamin D is excreted from the upper lip, where it may be taken into the mouth as another pathway to sustain the critical level of vitamin D.

The modern plague of osteoporosis has to be linked in some measure to a lack of vitamin D from too little sunlight. This is another of those confusions of proximate explanations --- you get skin cancer from the sun --- and a deeper explanation that puts sun, skin color, and individual characteristics in their full setting.

· Evolutionary Fitness

Comments

Posted by: Flower Online at September 12, 2006 2:19 AM

I am 40 years old and have skin cancer even though I was never a real sun worshipper and when Baby Faces 50 came out I was probably the first to buy it.

At 35, when I found out that my very sickly son was likely suffering from celiac disease I did an elimination dietfor the whole family and found that we had all been suffering for our ingestion of wheat/gluten (among other things).

Assuming that he inherited his celiac (an autoimmune disease that causes malabsorption) from me, I began to research the possibility that, if I had been malabsorbing for years, perhaps it was a deficiency that made me a 'victim' of the sun.

With our requirement for vitamin D, it just didn't make any sense to me that it was 'the sun' that did it. I did find some reports that say the sunscreens are creating the worse skin cancers. Therefore, I had to find something else to protect myself as my previous research has me convinced that I require the sun's vit. D contribution to maintain healthy bones.

It may not have been the sunscreen that gave me cancer but the sunscreen allowed me to sit in the sun longer without burning... which I did quite readily. Therefore, I wanted to find out why I would burn so readily and see if I could put a stop to that on an internal level.

Lo and behold, I did find out that testing with niacin, applied both internally and externally, has been done on mice. The mice that had a higher niacin load both ways did best with the sun.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?CMD=search&DB=pubmed

This was interesting because when we first started supplementing niacin I would flush with doses that were quite low... like 50mg or even less. (Usually it takes 100 mg to get a niacin flush.) My assumption now, maybe wrongly, is that I have probably been very short on niacin for many years.

This summer, I made up some coconut oil and put some niacin in it. I also continue to supplement it at the rate of 50mg several days per week.

I have the children on roughly the same regimen.

This year we have not been nearly as careful as other years and yet have not been burned.

Hmmmm... Do our results mean anything? Maybe, maybe not. I like to know what other people find but this is the first place I've found that believes, as I do, that the sun is not the bad guy. So, I thought I'd throw in my experience and hope it's helpful to someone, somewhere, at some point in time.

I also am hoping to see more feedback so that I can decide whether I'm headed in the right direction.

Kind regards,
KimS

Posted by: kipasa at August 3, 2006 3:13 PM

The Healing Sun by Richard Hobday, recommended by Dr. Mercola at his site www.mercola.com, explains why the sun is so important and the importance of vitamin D. Todays advise to shun the sun at all cost is illadvised but ofcourse don't be careless either.

/Rolf

Posted by: Rolf Vagerstam at May 18, 2005 12:09 AM

Milk and vitamin D. Our ancestors were weaned from mother's, not cow's milk, by about 3 years of age. No hunter-gatherers consume milk beyond that age. And no adult does in any ancient culture.

You do get Vitamin D from dark, leafy vegetables. Hence, you will see plenty of kale and spinach in my meals.

Cow's milk has proteins that are foreign to human physiology. They may trigger auto-immune diseases as the immune system confuses these proteins for your own tissues. This is known as molecular mimicry and is one of the (I suspect) major progenetors of modern autoimmune diseases. Unfortunately, I know more about this than I care to as I have two family members with severe autoimmune diseases. Pathogens may also trigger this response.

If you are lactose intolerant, as almost all adults are but those from cultures that have long practiced dairying, then the milk will create an acidic stomach and you will lose calcium because your system will take calcium from your skeleton as an antacid.

More milk in, less calcium. Another wonderful, but hard to grasp and often exploited by advertisers, paradox.

Posted by: Arthur De Vany at May 17, 2005 8:24 PM

Art, you say "You will lack vitamin D without exposure to the sun", but you can find vitamin D in many foods, milk especially.

How do you explain this, or are you saying that you do not absorb the vitamin D in foods, you only can aborb it from the sun?

Posted by: Chris at May 17, 2005 5:49 PM

Wheat, rice, sorghum, millet. Potatoes came a bit later from Peru, but could be included.

I surely had no reference to you in my post regarding slavish. Hope you did not take offense.

Not palest, fair in the sense of pleasing appearance, which if evolutionary clues are to be reckoned with would imply fitness in reproduction. However we regard the meaning of "fair", it is true that the surface blood vessels and clear skin are effective for making Vitamin D in a place where sun exposure is slight. It is particularly important to an infant in swaddling since only the face is often exposed in the cold climate.

I don't get the last point. Sorry. Vitamin D won't turn their skin darker. It is lighter so they are more able to make it.

Posted by: Arthur De Vany at May 17, 2005 1:48 PM

Those four starchy crops - corn, potatoes, wheat, and ?

I do enjoy your writing and appreciate the truth of if, but there is a certain slavish (as you say) devotional element and a bit of pounding square pegs into round holes. Much of what you say about skin color and geography is generally true but some of it is circular. Your analysis of the word fair, for example. Yes, it can mean light colored or pale but the primary defintion is "Of pleasing appearance, especially because of a pure or fresh quality; comely" Of course, I can't vouch for exactly what the Irish found (or find) appealing about fairness, but I don't think fairest of them all means palest of them all.

Further, if those fair (pale, you say) maidens start producing a lot of Vitamin D due to sun exposure, they are no longer fair (pale).

Posted by: Fugate at May 17, 2005 1:12 PM

dear art
Thanks for clearing it up.
As for wrinkles you said"a few wrinkles" so I would guess that the aging effects of the sun
on the skin in "moderate use" my be overrated too.
sincerely
barry

Posted by: barry bocchieri at May 17, 2005 11:45 AM

Suntans and meals

May 17, 2005 08:39 AM

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