Saturday, January 14, 2012

Sunshine!

I've been meaning for a while to pull together some thoughts about sunshine- arising from the success of my summer holiday in 2010.

We went somewhere a great deal sunnier than usual - that is not in Great Britain (which is currently sunny - but is without exception overcast and wet during the "summer" holiday season). The upshot was the disappearance of the Splodge. Remember the Splodge? It ended up covering my chest with the shape of a mirror imaged Australia - and seems to have been caused by penicillin and the penicillin-like mould in Stilton cheese.

And during that summer holiday it disappeared - "burnt" off by the rays of the sun in spite of my using copious quantities of as hyposensitive sun cream I could find. At the time it felt like hot sun and plenty of fresh salt water made the difference - but maybe there's a simpler explanation.

I was talking to somebody about this - and they said: "Maybe you need to move to somewhere sunny". - like Australia?

Since then there's been plenty of evidence suggesting the benefits of vitamin D - which comes from sunlight. Only this week some European experts called for everyone to get  a daily ration of sunlight:
http://www.englemed.co.uk/12/12jan121_vitamin_d.php

Here's another one, also from sunny Spain last year:
http://www.englemed.co.uk/11/11may191_asthma_sunlight.php

There is a lot more. I've read other reports suggesting that vitamin D may help reduce inflammation.

It all adds up. So I'm doing my best to get my 15 minutes daily exposure to the sun. Not sure we're moving to Spain yet!

RAS

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Why is the picture of Australia backwards?

RAS said...

It represents the shape that covered my chest - the Splodge -rather than any desire to emigrate to Australia!