What Every Sun Worshiper Needs To Know About Themselves
…And Why You Are Attracted To The Sun
Have you met grandma E Huxleyi?
Way down your evolutionary tree is a phytoplankton emiliania huxleyi that has existed for 750,000,000 years. In a laboratory experiment, Dr. Michael Holick exposed these ancients to artificial sunlight and discovered they make ergocalciferol or vitamin D2.[i] This proves the hormone Vitamin D is ancient. (See Do People Mispronounce Your Name? explaining why Vitamin D is really a hormone)
About 350 million years ago, give or take a few, your ancestors headed for terra firma — dry land. The ocean is a calcium bath, but dry land has relatively little calcium. The sunshine vitamin became essential for vertebrates to make bones from scarce calcium sources.
It is generally believed that hominids separated from other primates about 4.2–8 million years ago.[ii][iii][iv] That is, the path to modern humans started about 6,000,000 years ago in Sub-Saharan Africa. [v] Anatomically modern-appearing humans originated in Sub-Saharan Africa about 200,000 years ago.[vi]
“For hundreds of thousands of years, man has lived with the sun: Our ancestors were outdoors far more often than indoors. We developed a dependence on sunshine for health and life, so the idea that sunlight is dangerous does not make sense. How could we have evolved and survived as a species, if we were that vulnerable to something humans have been constantly exposed to for their entire existence?” ~ Dr. Frank Lipman, an internationally recognized expert in the fields of Integrative and Functional Medicine and practicing physician.
This is worth repeating — for 6 million years your ancestors were hunting and gathering under the Sub-Saharan African sun. You only left Sub-Saharan Africa about 70,000 years ago, minutes in evolutionary time.[vii] Except for the last ten decades most humans spent the last 10,000 years hunting and working the fields under the sun — mere seconds in evolutionary time.
Is it fair, given your history, to call sunshine a carcinogen — public enemy number one? How valuable is that classification when red wine, plutonium, salted fish, and birth-control pills sit side by side on the same list? This kind of exaggeration is dangerous. Most become skeptical and eventually ignore the carcinogen classification as everything in sufficient quantity is bad for you.
Too much water in your lungs will cause you to drown. Drink too much water and your cells explode. Water intoxication is a painful agonizing death. Should you avoid water? Eat too much food and over time you risk cardiovascular disease and diabetes. Should you avoid food? Drink one glass of red wine for a healthy heart; drink a bottle for cirrhosis of the liver. Are you getting the picture?
Sun avoidance is the wrong message. You spent the last hundreds of thousands of years under the sun. You are attracted to the sun like you are attracted to food, air, and water. This attraction is healthy and normal, in moderation. Sun avoidance and daily chemical sunscreen use is the wrong message. Sun enjoyment with sunburn prevention is the right message.
Endnotes
[i] Holick, Michael, Ph.D., MD (2010). “The Vitamin D Solution“. Penguin Books Ltd., P. 27.
[ii] Goodman, M., Porter, C.A., Czelusniak, J., Page, S.L., Schneider, H., Shoshani, J., Gunnell, G., & Groves, C.P (June 1998). “Toward a phylogenetic classification of primates based on DNA evidence complemented by fossil evidence”. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 9 (3): 585–598.
[iii] Purvis, Andy (29 June 1995). “A composite estimate of primate phylogeny”. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 348 (1326): 405–421.
[iv] Jay Kelley (1994). “Evolution of apes”. In Steve Jones, Robert Martin & David Pilbeam. Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution. Cambridge, U.K: Cambridge University Press. pp. 223–230. ISBN 0–521–46786–1 (see pp229–230 for a summary of DNA dating)
[v] Feng-Chi Chen1, & Wen-Hsiung Li (February 2004). “Genomic Divergences between Humans and Other Hominoids and the Effective Population Size of the Common Ancestor of Humans and Chimpanzees“. The American Journal of Human Genetics 68 (2): 444–456.
[vi] “Human Evolution by The Smithsonian Institution’s Human Origins Program“. Human Origins Initiative. Smithsonian Institution. Retrieved 2010–08–30.
[vii] Wolman, David (2008). “Fossil Feces Is Earliest Evidence of N. America Humans“ National Geographic
