SUNBATHING AND LONGEVITY

I recently came across an interesting piece of research from the Karolinska University Hospital in Sweden, which seems to indicate the health benefits of sunbathing.

Despite the indisputable increased risk of skin cancer, sunbathers are less likely to die from heart disease and more likely to live longer. The researchers even went so far as to suggest avoiding the sun could be as bad for us as smoking!

We all know that vitamin D from sunlight is essential for health. Deficiency of vitamin D has been linked with many disease processes, such as multiple sclerosis and heart disease.

Based upon a history of 29, 518 Swedish women aged between twenty-four and sixty-four, whose sun level exposure was tracked for twenty years, the researchers concluded that people who regularly sunbathe will live two years longer than those who always avoid the sun.

Most fascinating of all is that non-smokers who avoided the sun had a similar life expectancy to smokers who had the highest exposure to the sun, suggesting that sun avoidance has a similar risk factor to smoking.