“Just when we thought we had sun-smart behaviour sussed – moles diligently monitored, shade sails in the playgrounds, beach kit consisting of wide-brimmed hats, oversized sunnies, rash vest for thekids, sunscreen with a multi-digit SPF and  portable sun shade fit for a sheikh – the pendulum appears to be swinging the other way.”

“Reports of emerging research linking vitamin D with a host of potential health benefits have also highlighted its deficiency in a large proportion of our population – including children.  Around 90 per cent of the body’s supply of vitamin D is generated in our skin by direct exposure to sunlight.  ergo, should we ditch the sunscreen and revert to our wayward sun-worshipping ways?

It’s not that simple – of course.

Experts from various disciplines – including atmospheric physicists, dermatologists, epidemiologists, bone-health scientists and nutritionists – all have their own keen interests in the controversial vitamin.  There’s currently no agreement between them about the best approach to treat deficiency.”

The article is a must-read for anyone interested in the emerging research into the value of Vitamin D and how we as human beings should be absorbing it.  This magazine is available at newstands now or online.

More articles on Vitamin D deficiency

• What Do You Lack? Probably Vitamin D (nytimes.com)
• New Study Finds Link Between Vitamin D Deficiency and Dementia (shoppingblog.com)
• Vitamin D Deficiency and Diabetes (diabetes-treatment.suite101.com)
• Does Vitamin D Prevent Breast Cancer? (lifescript.com)

Related posts:

1. Vitamin D Deficiencies At Epidemic Levels
2. Leading NZ Newspaper Reports On Device For measuring Vitamin D
3. SAD? Then Catch the Sun

A New Zealand engineer has invented a “cutting-edge” device to calculate just how much sunshine we need to stay healthy.

It’s exciting to see such research take place as it opens up the possibilities for full-scale research into the manner in which Vitamin D is absorbed by humans.  The article states:

Around half of New Zealand adults have insufficient vitamin D and 4 per cent of women and 2 per cent of men are vitamin D-deficient.

With figures like that it’s more and more important that such investigation takes place.  The full article is available here:  http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10637754

Related posts:

1. Why are we Vitamin D deficient?
2. Sun helps to battle skin cancer?
3. Vitamin D Deficiencies At Epidemic Levels

The main contributors to SAD are reduced daylight hours and low fat diets. SAD affects you with depression, carbohydrate craving (a typical effect of low fat diet), increased need for sleep and lack of energy. It is a self-perpetuating cycle.

The Vitamin D, Melatonin and Diet connection

With the reduced sunlight (read reduced vitamin D production) and colder temperatures comes the reduced immune response to flues and head colds. SAD is emphasised by the following factors: increased melatonin, low cholesterol, low fat diets and sun block, and weight gain. These are all related. Not many health professionals have drawn the connection with low fat diets.

Low fat diets forced on us are probably THE major contributor to vitamin D deficiency. Think about the following vitamin D related conditions: cancer – more cases, heart disease – more cases, diabetes – more cases, obesity- more cases and the list goes on. Modern medical science tells us: Eat low fat – margarine is better than butter, cook with oils instead of animal fats, eggs are bad, low salt, high carbohydrate diets, low proteins (as they are associated with saturated fats), use sun block when you go outside. Most of these are old 1950’s thinking with no science back up.

Vitamin D production is closely related to diet as well as sunlight. 20 minute Summer time sun exposure on arm and face replaces the need to for vitamin D in foods. In winter that is not possible. There are a few another ways to get more Vitamin D:

1) Alternative light sources:

Not all light is the same. Light is rated in degrees Kelvin (k). White sunlight (5500K) will fragment into a spectrum of all colours like a rainbow when it passes through a prism. A normal household incandescent light bulb (approx. 4100K) does not create a true rainbow spectrum. Neither do those long fluorescent tubes with a harsher unflattering colour temperature. The new 5500K broad-spectrum lights, like the Viva-lite, simulating sunlight also include the so important near UV and mid UV range. When you put this light through a prism its spectrum is virtually identical to a rainbow. Both broad spectrum lighting and sunlight (at 5500K) are scientifically reported to help with lowering Stress hormone, Mood improvement, Fewer headaches, Slower aging of the retina, Increased productivity, and Reduced eye strain, increased Vitamin D production in the skin.

2) Foods and supplements

Best vitamin D foods to eat are cold-water ocean fish such as salmon, sardines, herring, and mackerel, foods with saturated fats, butter, eggs; milk and orange juice are now being fortified but both of these are suspect food sources because they are immunologically destructive. If you are a vegetarian and avoid the sun as well as milk and animal fats your vitamin D intake is at risk, especially in winter. You can get the RDA for vitamin D by eating 1.5 kg of beef, 2 kg of corn oil, or 100 kg of cabbage. I wonder who would eat that much of these foods. However the same RDA is reached with 50 gram of salmon, or 2 grams of cod liver oil. Think twice when you have a strict vegetarian diet.

To recap:

By now the light should be on: catch your sunlight, avoid sun block, and replace your indoor lights with Full spectrum Viva-lite light bulbs. The most important winter supplement is Vitamin D 5000IU/day (or take 2 to 3 omega-3 fish oil capsules/day), eat real foods that have vitamin D (oily fish, butter and saturated fats to zonal quantities).
If you are suspecting you are suffering from a combination of depression, sleep problems, repeated colds and flues I strongly advise you to seek professional help.

Click here to read the whole article… (by Peter Riddering, BHSc (CompMed), Naturopath)

Related posts:

1. Vitamin D Deficiencies At Epidemic Levels
2. Why are we Vitamin D deficient?
3. Health, Happiness and Sunlight Closely Linked

During the day, computer screens look good—they’re designed to look like the sun. But, at 9PM, 10PM, or 3AM, you probably shouldn’t be looking at the sun. This little software tool called “F.lux” is all you need to change it. It makes the color of your computer’s display adapt to the time of day, warm at night and like sunlight during the day.

It’s even possible that you’re staying up too late because of your computer. You could use f.lux because it makes you sleep better, or you could just use it just because it makes your computer look better. f.lux makes your computer screen look like the room you’re in, all the time. When the sun sets, it makes your computer look like your indoor lights. In the morning, it makes things look like sunlight again.

Tell f.lux what kind of lighting you have, and where you live. Then forget about it. F.lux will do the rest, automatically.

You can download this software freely. It is available for Mac, Windows and Linux. Here is the homepage…

Related posts:

1. New Year Amaryllis – Happy And Alive!

“This study was designed and executed by an advocate, not a neutral party, and the advocate failed to properly disclose that she is not a neutral party,” said Joseph Levy, vice president of International Smart Tan Network, the educational institute for the North American indoor tanning community. “That conflict of interest clouds some of the irregularities reported in the paper.”

Dr. DeAnn Lazovich, lead author of “Indoor Tanning and Risk of Melanoma: A Case-Control Study in a Highly Exposed Population,” set for publication in the June issue of American Association for Cancer Research, failed to disclose in the paper that she is part of a University of Minnesota group that initiated programs to discourage indoor tanning use three years before designing and engaging in data collection for this study. Those interactions may themselves have tainted subjects and controls used in the study. (http://www.cancer.umn.edu/research/profiles/lazovich.html)

The International Smart Tan Network has revealed that The University of Minnesota group engaged in deceptive practices in 2001 when, using a National Cancer Institute grant, it developed a bogus indoor tanning training program in order to obtain data from indoor tanning facilities for future studies. According to reports, the Minnesota group told salons they were attempting to help operators lower their risks, but the University of Minnesota refers to the same grant on its web site as an effort to reduce indoor tanning usage.
http://www.cancer.umn.edu/research/profiles/lazovich.html

Tanning advocates in New Zealand also see serious flaws in the study. Tiffany Brown of local sunbed business Get Brown Tanning said today, “There is a clear failure here to disclose a major conflict of interest. This really is quite deceptive research. Once again relative risk factors are used instead of absolute risk- a typical scare-mongering technique of the anti-tanning brigade.

‘In suggesting tanners double their risk of melanoma, the authors ignore the more telling figure that the absolute risk of melanoma is quite low for both tanners and non-tanners. The largest study to date shows that both indoor tanners and non-tanners have less than a 0.3 percent risk of contracting melanoma and most studies show no statistically significant difference between the two groups.”

The nature of “relative risk” figures in melanoma data was the topic of an article published by The Association of Health Care Journalists May 7 by Dr. Ivan Oransky, a Reuters Health editor.
http://www.healthjournalism.org/blog/2010/05/tanning-beds-what-do-the-numbers-really-mean/

Oransky quotes Dr. Lisa Schwartz, a general internist at Veterans Affairs Medical Center in White River Junction, Vt., and co-author of “Know Your Chances,” a book that explains health statistics to consumers.

“Melanoma is pretty rare and almost all the time, the way to make it look scarier is to present the relative change, the 75 percent increase, rather than to point out that it is still really rare,” Schwartz told The Wilmington News Journal’s Hiran Ratnayake, who interviewed Schwartz in a recent story on melanoma and indoor tanning.

On reading the study through, Brown found intriguing the authors’ continual mention of previous evidence of the relationship between melanoma skin cancer and sunbed use as being “weak” and inconsistent. “Why then did reputable scientists and researchers previously report there were strong associations in the research? Particularly, this new study does not confirm the often-commented conclusion made by the IARC report that risk of melanoma sky-rockets when tanning beds are first used under the age of 35.” The authors of the study state “With at least 29 reports to date, past history of indoor tanning has been only weakly associated with melanoma.”

“In fact,” says Brown, “18 of 22 previous studies show no statistically significant association. This new study simply adds to inconsistencies in the total dataset available about any relationship between sunbed use and melanoma skin cancer.”

The International Smart Tan Network point out the study showed individuals who had the most outdoor sun exposure in their lives had a 15 percent lower risk of melanoma when compared to those who had less sun. The paper is actually the latest in a line of studies showing that people who get the most UV exposure outdoors are less likely to contract the disease.

“Despite what the authors in this paper set out to prove, the fact remains that whatever relationship UV exposure has with melanoma is still not understood because paper after paper, including this one, continue to show that people who get more sun exposure have fewer melanomas,” said Dr. William Grant, founder of the independent Sunlight, Nutrition and Health Research Center (SUNARC). Grant, an independent advocate for UV exposure as the natural and intended source of vitamin D, published a peer-reviewed meta-analysis this year showing that indoor tanning is not a risk factor for melanoma in individuals with skin that can tan, with UV-related risk isolated only in the fairest-skinned “Skin Type I” subjects.
http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/New-Study-by-SUNARC-Shows-Tanning-and-Melanoma-Link-Scientifically-Flawed-1131725.htm

Brown believes tanning operators with excellent standards of care are uniquely positioned to educate the public about all aspects of ultraviolet light exposure as it relates to skin in a practical way. “We teach the basics of how the skin tans and burns to help our sun-loving clients understand why a ‘less is more’ approach is best. We’ve proven that education with regard to possible benefits of moderate UV exposure within the limits of risk-minimizing tanning behaviour actually serves to reduce the incidence of over-exposure and/or erythema (sunburn). And as this new study proves, that is a positive step in improving public health outcomes.”

Speaking for International Smart Tan Network Joe Levy said, “We think the promotion of this study has more to do with justifying a dinosaur mentality about UV light in an era when vitamin D research is proving that decades of overzealous sun avoidance may have skyrocketed SPF sales, but has caused epidemic-level vitamin D deficiency and great confusion in the world’s population.”

Related posts:

1. Sun helps to battle skin cancer?
2. Why are we Vitamin D deficient?
3. Vitamin D Deficiencies At Epidemic Levels

Published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, the study is allegedly the first to illustrate a definitive link between vitamin D deficiency and an accumulation of fat in muscle tissue.

Vitamin D is an amazing nutrient that protect the body from all sorts of diseases and problems. Researchers continually uncover new links between lack of vitamin D and disease, illustrating the fact that it is vital to good health. However recent studies have also found that most people are deficient in vitamin D.

“Vitamin D insufficiency is a risk factor for other diseases,” said Dr. Richard Kremer, the principal investigator of the study at the research institute.

“Because it is linked to increased body fat, it may affect many different parts of the body. Abnormal levels of vitamin D are associated with a whole spectrum of diseases, including cancer, osteoporosis, and diabetes, as well as cardiovascular and autoimmune disorders,” he said.

The main reason why people are generally lacking in vitamin D is because people spend much more time indoors than they used to. Especially with computers, people often spend their entire days inside cubicles where they are exposed to little or no sunlight.

Vitamin D is not produced in the body on its own. It is created when skin is exposed to sunlight. Some foods contain vitamin D, but in minimal amounts compared to what can be achieved from sun exposure. Most people also do not consume enough vitamin D-rich food to obtain adequate amounts of it.

The McGill study highlights an important link between vitamin D and obesity that, until now, has been largely ignored. Vitamin D deficiency contributes to decreased muscle and increased fat, which is a condition that is increasingly common in industrialized nations. Though diet also plays a role in obesity, it is striking to see vitamin D playing a role in the condition as well.

Perhaps the reason why vitamin D deficiency is linked to all sorts of serious diseases has more to do with the increase in visceral fat that it causes, which in turn leads to such health problems. This study seems to confirm that notion.

The best way to address vitamin D deficiency is to get more sunlight.

Viva-Lite is working with researchers to determine the optimal and healthy amount of UV light  in its lighting products to have a balanced Vitamin-D production in the body throughout the year (even when the sun is not shining).

We’ll keep you posted.

The content of this article is based on two other articles which you can read here:

• Natural News Story about Vitamin-D
• CBC News Story about the Study

Related posts:

1. Why are we Vitamin D deficient?
2. Sun helps to battle skin cancer?
3. Blue Light may Improve Alertness

From time to time we are checking the internet for what people say about Viva-Lite. That way we can learn a lot how our customers perceive our brand, products and services.

For example see this feedback on namahatta.org and how well Viva-Lite worked for growing Tulsi:

“We planted Tulasi at home last summer. When she was very little we bought her a 26 W Viva-lite full-spectrum bulb. She was doing well with it. She grew very strong stalk and large, green leaves. Recently we felt she needs more light. We arranged two 36 W fluorescent Viva-lite tubes for her. In Scandinavia there is hardly any natural light at this time of the year!

As far as I’ve understood, plants benefit mostly from certain wavelengths of light. In order to grow nicely, they need more cool or blue light. When they are blooming, they require some red wavelengths, too. Visual color temperature is measured by the degree of Kelvin. That’s what you have to pay attention to when choosing light for Tulasi.

Full-spectrum lights are as close as it artificially gets to a natural mid-day sun during the late summer. Viva-lite bulbs/tubes have 5500 K which resembles normal daylight. They imitate all wavelengths of light to some degree. Because they have a very high color rendering index (CRI), they don’t distort the actual color impression around them. Lights that have low CRI make everything look weird, either yellow or strangely blue.

The standard incandescent or halogen lamps have around 2500-3000 K, which is not useful for plants. They also emanate a lot of heat and waste energy.”

We couldn’t agree more. Visit namahatta.org to read the full article.

Related posts:

1. New Year Amaryllis – Happy And Alive!
2. The Colour Rendering Index (CRI)
3. Blue Light may Improve Alertness

Using the constructed base case, it has been shown that a switch to CFL is beneficial for Icelandic household economically. However, the benefit is much less than the public is led to believe in advertising by manufacturers. As shown in table 1, the break even point is somewhere between the 5th and 6th year. After 20 years, the savings amount to 9,7 Euros per year, for each household in Iceland.

It can therefore be concluded that Icelandic consumers are being misinformed about the true economic benefits of switching to CFL.

As mentioned earlier, the EU preparatory report by VITO, found the biggest environmental impact of lamps to be during their use phase. Their calculations assume the EU27 average for electricity generation, which is 31% from coal, 22% from oil and gas and 47% from renewable sources, of which 32% comes from nuclear power plants. Iceland obtains nearly 100% of its electricity and heat from renewable sources. The use phase therefore does not contribute to global warming. As has been shown, using parts of the EcoReport tool, adoption of regulation 244/2009 with universal household adoption of CFL in Iceland, results in more environmental costs both in Iceland and internationally.

This goes against the spirit and intention of EU regulation 244/2009. In light of these results it is logical to ask further. If nothing else changes, at what point is the electricity generation ratio of a country such that switching to CFL causes more environmental damage than good ?

Read the complete article on the PLDA Greenpages…

No related posts.

Participants carried out four everyday tasks, each at three illuminances: 50 lux, 200 lux, and 800 lux. Both objective performance and subjective preference were recorded. Subjects tend to perform better under brighter conditions, but the average results masked large individual variations. Indeed, most participants showed a large effect of lighting on performance in at least one task, but the optimal light level varied idiosyncratically from one subject to another. The best approach to provide optimal lighting for older people with low vision may be to individually assess their preference and performance at different light levels.

BJW Evans, BSc PhD FCOptom FAAO – Neville Chappell Research Clinic, Institute of Optometry, 56-62 Newington Causeway London, SE1 6DS, UK, Department of Optometry & Visual Science, City University, Northampton Square London, EC1 0HB, UK

H. Sawyerr – Neville Chappell Research Clinic, Institute of Optometry, 56-62 Newington Causeway London, SE1 6DS, UK

Z. Jessa, BSc MCOptom – Neville Chappell Research Clinic, Institute of Optometry, 56-62 Newington Causeway London, SE1 6DS, UK, Department of Optometry & Visual Science, City University, Northampton Square London, EC1 0HB, UK

S. Brodrick, IEng ACIBSE MSLL – Lighting Solutions, 5 The Croft, Marsh Baldon, Oxford, Oxfordshire, OX44 9LN, UK

AI Slater, BSc MPhil FSLL CEng MCIBSE – Thomas Pocklington Trust, 5 Castle Row, Horticultural Place, Chiswick, London, W4 4JQ, UK

Found in: Lighting Research and Technology, Vol. 42, No. 1, 103-119 (2010)

Related posts:

1. Conflict Of Interest In Melanoma Study
2. A review towards hybrid lighting systems

Image via Wikipedia

This paper reviews developments in hybrid light guidance systems.

In these daylight and electric light are simultaneously delivered into a building where they are combined and distributed via luminaires. The technology used in hybrid systems, both conceptual and realised, is discussed. The review speculates as to their likely performance in terms of daylight delivery; capital and running costs; user reaction to the systems; potential impact of the systems on the building which they light; and suitable design methods. It is noted that a substantial amount of work remains before the potential of hybrid systems may be realised, notably on their long-term economics and feasibility in different geographic locations.

MS Mayhoub, BArch MA – School of Architecture, University of Liverpool, Leverhulme Building, Abercromby Square, Liverpool L69 7ZN, UK, on leave from Al-Azhar University, Cairo, Egypt

DJ Carter, PhD – School of Architecture, University of Liverpool, Leverhulme Building, Abercromby Square, Liverpool L69 7ZN, UK, eb09@liverpool.ac.uk

Found in: Lighting Research and Technology, Vol. 42, No. 1, 51-71 (2010)

Related posts:

1. Study of lighting and low vision in older people
2. New fluorescent lamps awakens sleepy students