This evening there was a great story on Catalyst about vitamin D.Dr Norman Swan reported on the problem we're now encountering with Vitamin D deficiency. It turns out that it's not a vitamin so much as a hormone and it's made by the skin from sunlight. As a result of the skin cancer awareness campaign we're not getting enough sunlight for the skin to manufacture vitamin D and the problems this creates include auto-immune diseases such as diabetes.
The recommendation is that we should spend eight minutes a day in the sun with 15% of our skin exposed. This is for the summer time and needs to be longer in winter.
You can watch the report here http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/2514231.htm
I find it interesting that there's been such pressure to avoid sunlight to date and now we find that it perhaps wasn't such a good idea as we didn't consider all the issues involved. Rather than being the bad guy we find that the sun has potentially been our friend all along.
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