02/19/08 Living Without Sunshine

I have lived where the sun shines the majority of the time and my mother lives where it doesn't, in rainy Portland. She is always telling me to wear sun screen to protect myself from skin cancer. Now I get to tell her a thing or two about how her lack of exposure to sunlight also increases the risk of cancer not to mention a host of other ailments. We have all been hammered on until we are blue in the face (rather than tan) &to wear sunscreen and we have listened well, so well, that physicians are discovering many of us have sub par levels of vitamin D and they are attributing this deficiency to a resurgence of childhood rickets, soft bones and the NW's high rate of multiple sclerosis. A leading vitamin D researcher, Bruce Hollis interviewed recently by the Seattle Times commented that the soar radiation in northern Oregon and Washington is too "puny" to maintain health levels and that the amount of the D in most multivitamins isn't enough considering the fact that 15 minutes in the sun in shorts and a tank top would generate 5,000 IU. I would hate to count the number of IU's I must have generated all those years in the sun . E gads I could be my own source of alternative energy!