Connection Between Disease and Sun Exposure!

Interviewer: When you say people in the northern latitudes then aren't necessarily flourishing, do you, is there research that shows maybe more disease in that part of the country? Or certain conditions that go along with vitamin D deficiency?

Dr. Lucinda Messer: Absolutely. One of the biggest reasons that led me to writing the book and to looking up the research was because auto immune disease is at an all-time high in the Seattle area. We have billboards that say, is it in the water? Is it the air pollution? Why is MS so prevalent here? And really we should have the same billboard for cancer as well. It's extremely prevalent in the northwest. Why in the northwest? I picked on the northwest because we have the highest cloud cover. So even though we have possibly up to two and a half, three months of vitamin d summer pertaining to the fact that we can actually grab it from the sun, potentially on those days, the limiting factor is the clouds. We have so much cloud cover that the cloud cover covers up our vitamin D. It filters out the ultraviolet B rays. UVB rays are what helps our skin photosynthesize the vitamin D. So, I think the average days of vitamin D summer for the northwest, 37 days a year. That's ridiculous. 37 days of the year that you can potentially get vitamin D. And then of course you have to be out mid-day and you have to not have any sunscreen on and you can't take a shower after you're out in the sun, and if you have dark skin it takes two and a half hours for me to get vitamin D. So there are a lot of things, a lot of reasons. But the cancer is epidemic up in the northwest, as is auto immune, and vitamin D controls both of those. Vitamin D can potentially keep those levels down when it's activated. In its activated form, it turns into calcitriol, the most potent vecal (sp) steroid hormone in our body. It actually hangs out and there are little vitamin D receptors and landing sites right next to the human genome, and if you are creating enough activated vitamin D in your body turned to calcitriol, it will actually lock into those genomic sites and activate proteins that suppress cancer or other proteins that actually help stop apoptosis, tumor growth, and other genes that suppress auto immune, the auto immune activity. So it has a million different ways it activates genes. But, it must be activated in your body first, and that's a huge problem because so many people just don't absorb, etc.