Saved by Sun Rays - Preventing Cancer to Solving Energy Problems
By Angsuman Chakraborty, Gaea News NetworkTuesday, August 9, 2005
Taking a daily 10 to 15 minute walk in the sun not only clears your head, relieves stress and increases circulation – it could also cut your risk of breast cancer in half according to Esther John, an epidemiologist at the Northern California Cancer Center. A study found that sunlight exposure lowered the risk of breast cancer by 30 to 40 percent. In The Breast Cancer Prevention Diet, Dr. Robert Arnot claims that national rates of breast cancer inversely correlate to solar radiation exposure. In other words, breast cancer occurs at a much higher rate in colder, cloudier northern regions than in sunnier southern regions. Johns Hopkins University Medical School conducted a ten-year epidemiological study that showed exposure to full-spectrum light (including the ultraviolet frequencies) is positively related to the prevention of breast, colon and rectal cancers.
The sun stimulates production of a hormone in your skin. Ultraviolet B rays, the kind of rays that give you sunburns, interact with a special cholesterol in unblocked skin. Once stimulated, this cholesterol triggers your liver and kidney to make vitamin D3. Vitamin D3 isn’t exactly a vitamin, but rather a type of steroid hormone that can drastically improve your immune system function. Vitamin D3 also controls cellular growth and helps you absorb calcium from your digestive tract. Most importantly, this hormone/vitamin inhibits the growth of cancer cells.
In laboratory tests performed on animals, vitamin D3 inhibited the growth of malignant melanoma, breast cancer, leukemia and mammary tumors. Vitamin D3 also slowed down angiogenesis, which aids the growth of cancer cells. Vitamin D3 stops cancer-aiding blood vessels from being formed, curbing the tumor’s ability to spread and disrupt other functions in the body. Donald R. Yance Jr. writes that vitamin D3 may also inhibit the activity of hormones such as estrogen in breast cancer, thereby decreasing its spread.
Since high doses of vitamin D3 are toxic, scientists have formulated vitamin D derivatives that can be administered to breast cancer patients. In tests, these derivatives have stopped the proliferation of breast cancer cells and sometimes have actually decreased the size of experimental mammary tumors. Further findings like these might point to yet another undiscovered function of vitamin D3: regulating the expression of protein products that prevent and even inhibit breast cancer.
What about skin cancer?
Dr. Richard Hobday, author of The Healing Sun, says our fear of the sun does more harm than good. Most recommended daily sunscreens block ultraviolet B rays, the same rays that trigger the production of vitamin D. The number of people who die from breast cancer, colon cancer, prostate cancer, ovarian cancer, heart disease, multiple sclerosis and osteoporosis — all maladies that sunlight could benefit — is far greater than the number of deaths from skin cancer. After reviewing 50 years of medical literature on cancer, Dr. Gordon Ainsleigh concluded that the benefits of regular sun exposure outweigh the risks of squamous-basal skin cancer, accelerated ageing and melanoma.
A U.S. chemist is trying to determine how the world will produce enough energy to supply 9 billion people by mid-century - and how to do it cleanly (without environmental pollution). His inspiration is the natural photosynthesis process.
Daniel Nocera, 48, is working to achieve an old, elusive dream: using the bountiful energy in sunlight to split water into its basic components, hydrogen and oxygen. The elements could then be used to supply clean-running fuel cells or new kinds of machinery. Or the energy created from the reaction itself, as atomic bonds are severed and re-formed, might be harnessed and stored.
“This is nirvana in energy. This will make the problem go away,” Nocera said one morning in his office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where the Grateful Dead devotee has a “Mean People Suck” sticker on his window. “If it doesn’t, we will cease to exist as humanity.”
