It's hard not to smile when the sun comes out, and harder still to not want to warm yourself in it. An important shift in medical thinking is underway, which holds that soaking up some rays can actually be good for you. What is most natural may also be most healing.
Sunlight supplies the body with most of the vitamin D it needs, which isn't really a vitamin but a steroid hormone call calcitriol. Scientists once thought the main function of vitamin D was to strengthen bones, and that only the kidney and the liver made and stored it. But in the last few years, scientists have discovered calcitriol receptors all over the body. Vitamin D can be absorbed through food or vitamins if you don't get enough sun, though David Feldman, M.D., professor of medicine at Stanford University Medical School, says it's hard to get from a vitamin what the sun gives us. The recommended daily allowance might be 400 i.u., but the body produces up to 10,000 i.u. on a sunny day.
Sunlight also appears to have curative powers. In the past few years, Donald L. Trump, M.D., chairman of medicine at Roswell Park Cancer Institute at the University of New York at Buffalo, and his colleague, Candace S. Johnson, Ph.D., discovered that cancer cells lose their ability to reproduce, invade, and spread when doused with vitamin D. The good cells live and the bad (cancerous) cells die. "We know that you can kill cells at a much more significant rate if you treat them this way, but we still don't understand how this happens," says Johnson.
Sun protection is important but that does not mean sun avoidance. You are better off spending as much time out of doors as possible.
Source: Spirituality & Health, July/August 2003