![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() He has co-authored several studies investigating this effect, including a 2018 paper which found that exposure to an ultraviolet lamp produced measurable changes in nitric oxide levels in the blood. An alternative explanation is that vitamin D is simply an indicator of how much sun you’re getting, and the health effects come from something else in sunlight.Īs Jacobsen explained, the main proponent of the nitric oxide theory is a dermatologist in Scotland named Richard Weller, who in the 1990s first showed that your skin has a big reservoir of nitric oxide that can be activated by sunlight. But study after study has found that taking vitamin D supplements doesn’t change your risk of developing these conditions. The popularity of vitamin D supplements is easy to understand, because there are so many health conditions that seem to correlate with vitamin D levels, including cancer and heart disease. This is an important point for two reasons: one is that high blood pressure, by some estimates, is among the leading causes of premature disease and death in the world, affecting more than a billion people the other is the implication that there’s something about sunlight that can’t be replaced by popping vitamin D pills. One of the key planks of the argument in Jacobsen’s piece was that ultraviolet radiation from the sun triggers the release of nitric oxide from your skin into your bloodstream, where it has wide-ranging effects including lowering your blood pressure. The piece went viral-but unlike a lot of viral content, it contained enough carefully argued science to make me seriously question my sun phobia. The basic gist of the research he reported on: the risks of skin cancer, though real, are less serious than we think, while the benefits of sun exposure are far greater than we’ve realized. Last year, Outside contributing editor Rowan Jacobsen wrote a piece called “ Is Sunscreen the New Margarine?” that undercut decades of advice from public-health experts and (more worryingly) my mother. ![]()
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