October 2024 – Sam Kelly Fitness

I have as a pale person been a life long sun avoider. I thought that doing so was the right thing. That it was the best path for health. I may well have been wrong!

Most people are aware that during COVID those who in the early days prior to vaccines had a higher level of vitamin d had a higher chance of surviving. This was regardless of age. So much so that vitamin d pills were recommended wide scale. Except pills turned out to do next to nothing. It seems more likely that the higher vitamin d levels were a proxy for sun exposure.

Maybe we are wrong about being able to get vitamin d (which is actually a hormone) of a type that is bioavailable enough to prevent anything other than severe deficiency from supplements or food. Oral vitamin d certainly doesn’t seem to work to modulate the immune system the way our own vitamin d made from sun exposure does.

What else are we wrong about when it comes to sun exposure.

According to two studies one which originally set out to prove sun exposure in Swedish women increased their risk of death due melanoma and did pretty much the opposite and the other the UK biobank study.

Both show strong and it really seems to be very strong evidence that sun avoidance is linked to a higher risk of all cause mortality. In other words sun avoiders were just more likely to die.

I’m going to add a few excerpts from journal pieces and articles along with the relevant links and then discuss.

“UVR is a skin carcinogen, yet no studies link sun exposure to increased all-cause mortality. Epidemiological studies from the United Kingdom and Sweden link sun exposure with reduced all-cause, cardiovascular, and cancer mortality. Vitamin D synthesis is dependent on UVB exposure. Individuals with higher serum levels of vitamin D are healthier in many ways, yet multiple trials of oral vitamin D supplementation show little benefit. Growing evidence shows that sunlight has health benefits through vitamin D–independent pathways, such as photomobilization of nitric oxide from cutaneous stores with reduction in cardiovascular morbidity. Sunlight has important systemic health benefit as well as risks.”

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022202X2400280X

“Living in locations with higher UV levels, for example Cornwall, was associated with a lower risk of death from cardiovascular disease and cancer – 19 per cent and 12 per cent, respectively – than living in areas with lower UV levels, such as Edinburgh or Glasgow.

Sunbed use was linked to a 23 per cent lower risk of death from cardiovascular disease and a 14 per cent lower risk of death from cancer, compared to non-users. It is possible that people who use sunbeds may also seek out greater sun exposure and so this result may reflect broader sun seeking behaviour, the team says.

Those with a higher estimated UV exposure had a slightly increased risk of being diagnosed with melanoma – a type of skin cancer – but their risk of dying from the condition was not raised.”

https://www.ed.ac.uk/news/2024/uv-rays-may-boost-health-in-low-sunlight-countries

“Abstract
Background
Sunlight exposure and fair skin are major determinants of human vitamin D production, but they are also risk factors for cutaneous malignant melanoma (MM). There is epidemiological evidence that all-cause mortality is related to low vitamin D levels.

Methods
We assessed the avoidance of sun exposure as a risk factor for all-cause mortality for 29 518 Swedish women in a prospective 20-year follow-up of the Melanoma in Southern Sweden (MISS) cohort. Women were recruited from 1990 to 1992 and were aged 25 to 64 years at the start of the study. We obtained detailed information at baseline on their sun exposure habits and potential confounders. Multivariable flexible parametric survival analysis was applied to the data.

Results
There were 2545 deaths amongst the 29 518 women who responded to the initial questionnaire. We found that all-cause mortality was inversely related to sun exposure habits. The mortality rate amongst avoiders of sun exposure was approximately twofold higher compared with the highest sun exposure group, resulting in excess mortality with a population attributable risk of 3%.

Conclusion
The results of this study provide observational evidence that avoiding sun exposure is a risk factor for all-cause mortality. Following sun exposure advice that is very restrictive in countries with low solar intensity might in fact be harmful to women’s health.”

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/joim.12251

In other words those of us living in north of the equator climates where the UV index drops below the point where vitamin d synthesis is possible for months at a time may be harming our health by avoiding summer sun.

Advice that is sensible in higher UV index climates could actually be dangerous in darker climes. Could the health advice we have been given for decades be very, very wrong.

Note I’m not suggesting extreme sun exposure and certainly baking to the point of burning. But as with everything there is a middle ground and maybe the sun advice in the UK needs to find it

If you would like a female personal trainer, yoga teacher or Pilates instructor in Alnwick Northumberland who is well versed in different types of training including working with health issues please get in touch.

When someone is feeling less than wonderful it’s common to try something and after a while it’s amazing. They start to feel better. Feel better to the point where yoga, Pilates, weight training whatever it happens to be becomes a passion. They want to tell everyone how fricking amazing Pilates is, how they felt awful beforehand, but now they feel pretty good.

But then it stops working, but that’s ok they try something new. Maybe going plant based or paleo and that becomes the new magic pathway. Then that stops working and so on.

So what gives? Possibly a few things. Firstly there is a very reductionist and polarising attitude towards life at the moment and it’s prevalent in the health and fitness space particularly. People are in particular camps, they are yogis, or weight lifters or runners. You can see fitness folk arguing in the comment sections of social media about which is better and why. Each of the adherents arguing their case as to why they are right, why weight lifting is better for far loss, or runners have the best VO2 max and that’s more important. How yoga reduces cortisol which does xyz.

Reality is we need a bit of all of them. We need some cardio for heart and lungs, strength training to prevent sarcopenia and frailty in later years and yes mobility too. Because what’s the point of the first two if you can’t get off the floor due to zero mobility?

So that’s a possibility, you had a piece of the movement puzzle but not the whole thing which meant that for example if someone was dealing with POTs they made progress through running but needed strength work also to improve blood flow.

Perhaps someone started a program but haven’t progressed. In other words still doing the same exercises again and again without any progressive overload. Without making them harder. When that happens the body responds to the stimulus but then gets to that stimulus, unless it’s made more challenging in order to again introduce stimulus detraining can even occur.

Or maybe once someone has an exercise routine sorted their body starts to change and needs better nutrition, more sleep. Other pieces of the puzzle.

If this has happened to you think of the following

What is the quality of your sleep like?

How much daylight do you get each day?

How many steps do you take a day?

How much blue light are you exposed to?

Do you have time away from blue light before sleep?

How much of your diet is real food? Doesn’t matter what your preference is but looks at how much is something that would have existed before processed food.

Do you have time to relax? Are you genuinely de-stressing?

Are you too comfortable all the time? Do you ever deliberately get out of breath, too hot, too cold or hungry?

Weirdly the body responds to adversity the rule of hormesis. In other words the biological phenomenon where a low exposure to a potentially harmful agent, like a toxin or stressor, can have beneficial effects on an organism. At a low dose of course.

Obviously I’m not saying try and do all these things at once, a total life overhaul is unsustainable BUT if you found an exercise routine that is working or a dietary pattern that helps you but you feel you are no longer getting results. Don’t stop what was working and do something entirely different, maybe tweak it. Make the exercise tougher or add in cardio/strength and then look at sleep or steps. Then after a few months add something else.

The reality is for optimal health we eventually need to look at all of it. Rather than expecting a magic bullet we need to accept that the human animal needs to eat well, move regularly, get daylight and sleep effectively. Any single piece of the puzzle missing can leave you feeling less than awesome.

If you would like to have a personal trainer with a holistic approach working out of a private home gym in Alnwick Northumberland get in touch!

Month: October 2024

Have we been dangerously wrong about the sun?

When the magic fix no longer feels magic