The amazing health benefits of heliotherapy

You’ve probably already heard that you should supplement vitamin D. In fact, your doctor may even test your blood levels of D at your yearly physical.

What you don’t know though is that the vitamin D you’ve been taking may be missing a vital piece of the puzzle that boosts your immunity, helps you heal and even fights off infections and cancer.

You see, we used to get vitamin D from sunlight.

But thanks to today’s indoor lifestyle, most of us get little if any sun each day, much less enough to experience any health benefits.

That’s the reason you hear so much about taking vitamin D supplements…

The missing piece of the puzzle

Sunlight contains ultraviolet or U.V. rays.

We’ve all heard it. In fact, they’re the reason that we’ve been conditioned to slather on sunscreen before going outside.

Our doctors tell us to block them out or risk skin cancer.

However, those U.V. rays actually serve a very important purpose.

They activate a peptide called cathelicidin.

This peptide is what gives vitamin D its antimicrobial or germ-killing properties.

In fact, studies have shown that cathelicidin stimulates your immune cells and helps your body kill off infections.

This peptide synthesized thanks to U.V. light exposure has even been shown to destroy Tuberculosis.

The lost cure

It’s amazing that as far as we’ve come technologically, many of our modern “cures” are often less effective than the simple things we used to use.

Prior to modern medicine, doctors had used sun exposure for hundreds of years to heal their patients.

It was a treatment known as “Heliotherapy” or sunlight therapy.

Records of using sunlight as a cure go back to the late 1700s when a French doctor discovered that his patients’ leg wounds healed faster when their skin was exposed to the sun.

A Danish doctor then showed that solar radiation could help treat smallpox, lupus and tuberculosis. In fact, his work with lupus earned him the Nobel Prize.

By the turn of the century, solaria — buildings designed to optimize exposure to the sun’s rays were in use across Europe to treat patients with tuberculosis, lupus, cuts and scrapes, burns, arthritis, rheumatism and nerve damage.

And, researchers proved that sunlight could kill the bacteria that caused tuberculosis and other diseases and cure rickets, a bone disease caused by a deficiency of vitamin D.

Yet, with the advent of antibiotics, heliotherapy fell out of use and with it our understanding of how important sun exposure is to our health.

A sensible sunlight plan

Considering that low levels of vitamin D have been associated with an increased risk for many chronic diseases, including autoimmune diseases, heart disease, infections, diabetes and even schizophrenia, it’s obvious that optimizing your D levels is extremely important.

For most people, a sensible plan for sun exposure provides all the vitamin D and that powerful antimicrobial peptide, cathelicidin, that you need.

There are a number of online calculators that you can use to determine your optimal sun exposure time but they can get a little complicated.

So, here’s a basic method you can use to make it easier.

First, determine how long it takes in the sun for your skin to turn pink. This will vary by time of year. For example, it takes less time during the intense sun of the summertime than it does in the fall or winter.

Then multiply that time by 25 – 50%. This is the amount of time you want to spend in the sun three times per week with your arms and legs exposed. The more fair your skin, the lower you should err on your time in the sun.

Be sure to cover the skin of your face by wearing a hat or applying sunscreen since it’s more sensitive and more prone to show signs of photo-aging.

There’s only one kink in relying on the sun for supplying your body’s vitamin D demands. When we reach a certain age the mechanism that worked so well to convert sunlight on our skin to vitamin D works much less efficiently.

Previous studies have shown that supplementing vitamin D didn’t appear to boost cathelicidin, the germ-killing peptide. But it was a just a matter of using the wrong kind of vitamin D.

Vitamin D3, also know as cholecalciferol, is the type of D the body synthesizes from sunlight, and it has been shown to increase antimicrobial activity.

Enjoy your time in sun, safely, and look closely at your vitamin D supplement bottle to be sure it contain vitamin D3.

Sources:

1. Guo C and Gombart AF. (2014) The antibiotic effects of Vitamin D. — Endocr. Metab. Immune Disord. Drug Targets. 14: 255-266.

2. The rise and fall of sunlight therapy — Los Angeles Times

3. Sunlight and Vitamin D — Dermato-endocrinology

4. Effect of vitamin D ₃ on the antimicrobial activity of human airway surface liquid: preliminary results of a randomised placebo-controlled double-blind trial — BMJ