Mailer 02

"Treat your friends as you do your best pictures, and place them in their best light."
Jennie Churchill - Mother of Winston

I've been trying to put myself in a better light.

The daily mail recently reported that sun bed skin cancer risk had trebled. They based this startling claim on the fact that sun bed tubes now emit 2 to 3 times as many UV rays as 10 years ago. But hang on a minute. When was it ever proven that UV rays cause skin cancer?

Alongside the damage to the ozone layer that is usually blamed for the rise in skin cancer came a massive increase in the use of sunblocks - full of cancer-causing chemicals. While the amount of sunshine in Australia didn't increase, the use of sunblocks certainly did. The same thing then happened in the UK, fueling our own increase in skin cancer.

The Sun/Cancer link has never been proven. Most malignant melanomas occur on the soles of the feet, under the arm and on other areas never exposed to the sun. The cancers that do occur on sun-exposed areas are the relatively harmless basal cell and squamous cell cancers.

What we have in the UK is a complete hysteria of sun avoidance that has created an epidemic of Vitamin D deficiency. And guess what vitamin D prevents besides osteoporosis, winter blues, muscle pain and weakness, multiple sclerosis, type 1 diabetes mellitus, rheumatoid arthritis and heart disease? You guessed it, cancer! There are about 16 types of internal cancers for which vitamin D is a risk reduction factor.

Professor Michael Holick, the world expert on UV radiation, now thinks that for every one case of cancer we have avoided by staying out of the sun, we have created 20-30 more cases of breast and prostate cancer due to vitamin D deficiency.

There are only two ways of getting vitamin D. The most efficient method is to produce it in the skin from the action of UVB rays and the other is from food or supplements - cod liver oil being the highest source. Fish, egg yolks and liver are also high in vitamin D.

Researchers in the US took pieces of skin to different locations and tested how much vitamin D would be produced at different latitudes. Their conclusion - in winter (between September and April) skin would not produce any vitamin D at latitudes higher than 30 degrees. Unfortunately, London's latitude is 50 degrees.

So what to do?

To give you some idea of our levels of deficiency, people living in the tropics with little clothing, receive about 15,000IU's of Vit D per day. A strong dose of cod liver oil will give you about 1000IUs.

This month I had my vitamin D levels tested with a blood test. Although I eat more than my share of egg yolks, it still isn't enough to make up for the lack of UVB from sunshine which is impossible to get because we live in London. My levels were at the low end of normal and nowhere near optimal. I decided I needed to boost my UVB exposure. As I researched this I found the people that know most about UVB are the reptile breeders. Apparently reptiles get something called metabolic bone disease, known in humans as osteoporosis.

To combat metabolic bone disease in reptiles, they bathe their reptiles in UVB lamps. Whereas sunbeds emit 0.8% UVB, a reptile lamp emits 5 or 10% UVB.

I had to laugh at the irony of me reading the Daily Mail article while lying under a 5% UVB lamp.

I find about 20 minutes a day under the lamp keeps me feeling better although I would not recommend this course of action at this stage. For one thing the lamps cost about £50 each. For another, I never recommend anything I haven't tried myself and I haven't been doing this long enough yet. It's too early in my trials to know if this is an effective long-term solution and and these lamps do burn if you fall asleep. Safer would be a winter sun holiday and a cod-liver oil supplement. Be careful with cod-liver oil supplements - many come from North-Sea cod and are highly contaminated. Although you will get only 1/10 the amount of vitamin D, a purified fish oil may be a better bet.

The other consideration for Vitamin D is that you must have a well-functioning gall bladder. The gall bladder releases bile to digest fats. Without the gall bladder working properly, fats will not be digested and neither will the fat-soluble vitamins like Vitamin A and Vitamin D.

If you want to know whether your gall bladder is working properly, just ring Jane on 01442 800400 and ask for a check up. You don't need to have something wrong to have an MOT.

For a more detailed discussion of the Vitamin D issue click here.

Fluorescent Lights

While teaching a seminar on adrenal stress recently I found one of the chiropractors on the course was failing on every muscle test, especially ones associated with his adrenal function. Normally such individuals feel weak, run-down, tearful and unable to cope with stress. Not this guy. He was big, strong, robust. Something didn't make sense.

Eventually we turned off the fluorescent lights and bingo, all his weakness went away. WOW. We repeated the experiment many times on different individuals, only 10% seemed able to function normally under fluorescent lighting.

Back in my office, I noticed that the low-energy bulbs I had installed at great expense were, in fact, fluorescent. It's amazing how much more I get done now that I leave them switched off. I will be changing them back to halogen very soon.

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