MORE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM TURNED ON ITS HEAD
Scientists are excited about a vitamin again. But unlike fads that sizzled and fizzled, the evidence this time is strong and keeps growing. If it bears out, it will challenge one of medicine's most fundamental beliefs: that people need to coat themselves with sunscreen whenever they're in the sun. Doing that may actually contribute to far more cancer deaths than it prevents, some researchers think.
The vitamin is D, nicknamed the "sunshine vitamin" because the skin makes it from ultraviolet rays. Sunscreen blocks its production, but dermatologists and health agencies have long preached that such lotions are needed to prevent skin cancer. Now some scientists are questioning that advice. The reason is that vitamin D increasingly seems important for preventing and even treating many types of cancer.
In the last three months alone, four separate studies found it helped protect against lymphoma and cancers of the prostate, lung and, ironically, the skin. The strongest evidence is for colon cancer.
The thinking is this: Even if too much sun leads to skin cancer, which is rarely deadly, too little sun may be worse.
In other news, I have lost 7 pounds in 7 days eating eggs and meat every day on the South Beach Diet. Eggs were never bad, we just thought they were.
2 comments:
I eat a dozen or more eggs a week and my Cholesterol is always normal. Men's Health is a big egg booster though they suggest you remove half the yokes.
This was my favorite news story of the weekend. Marci and I couldn't stop laughing about it. The way evolution works, if you buy into that sort of thing, is that if there is an intense natural energy source in the environment, you can wager that the energy will be beneficial in some way to the critters that exist in that environment. People in the DuPont Age are so quick to assume better living through chemicals that our culture has developed a fear of sunshine of all things. Now we find out that lubing up is the real killer. I love this type of stuff.
On a side note, I have never been afraid of eggs, no matter what dire warnings were issued by the establishment. Anything that animals will kill each other to get to must be beneficial.
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