Why Sunlight Deficiency Is as Deadly as Smoking

The Sun: A Vital Component of Human Health

A groundbreaking study published in the Journal of Internal Medicine has revealed something absolutely amazing about the role of the sun in human health: a deficiency of sunlight could be as harmful to human health as smoking cigarettes.

A study conducted by Swedish researchers on a population of 29,518 women titled, “Avoidance of sun exposure as a risk factor for major causes of death: a competing risk analysis of the Melanoma in Southern Sweden cohort,” assessed the differences in sun exposure as a risk factor for all-cause mortality within a prospective 20-year follow-up of the Melanoma in Southern Sweden cohort. The women were aged 25–64 years at the start of the study and recruited from 1990 to 1992. When their sun exposure habits were analyzed using modern survival statistics, they discovered several things.

• First:

“Women with active sun exposure habits were mainly at a lower risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) and noncancer/non-CVD death as compared to those who avoided sun exposure.”

• Second:

“As a result of their increased survival, the relative contribution of cancer death increased in these women.”

The second finding may be a bit tricky to understand, so let’s look at it a little closer.

Because cancer risk increases along with biological age, the longer you live, the higher your cancer risk will be. Therefore, because increased sunlight exposure actually increases your longevity, it will also appear to increase your risk of cancer. But this does not necessarily mean that sunlight is intrinsically “carcinogenic,” which is commonly assumed.

Because heart disease is the No.1 killer in the developed world, and since sunlight reduces this most common cause of premature death, even if it increases the risk of the No. 2 most common cause of death (cancer), the net effect of sunlight exposure is that you will still live longer, which helps to contextualize and neutralize the “increased cancer risk” often observed.

Keep in mind, as well, that a huge number of cancers are overdiagnosed and overtreated, without sufficient acknowledgment by the medical establishment, whose culpability is rarely addressed. These “cancers” greatly inflate the statistics. With millions of so-called early-stage cancers like these—especially breast, prostate, thyroid, lung, and ovarian—being wrongly diagnosed and treated, the complexity of the topic makes determining the role of sunlight exposure and cancer risk all the more difficult to ascertain.

• Third:

Moving on—the point about the longevity-promoting properties of sunlight is driven home strongly by the third major observation:

This is a powerful finding with profound implications. To say that “avoidance of sun exposure is a risk factor for death of a similar magnitude as smoking” is to point out that sunlight exposure, rather than being the constant lethal threat it is perceived to be, warranting the slathering on, all over the body, of synthetic sunscreens virtually guaranteed to cause harm from toxicant exposure, is essential to our health.

In fact, according to the CDC, smoking is responsible for 6 million unnecessary deaths a year, and the “overall mortality among both male and female smokers in the United States is about three times higher than that among similar people who never smoked.” And so, sunlight exposure may be so powerful an essential ingredient in human health that it might be considered medically unethical not to provide access to it, or to advise more routine exposure to it.

• Fourth:

The fourth and final observation of the study was that:

Sunlight Attains Its Former Status As an Indispensable Component of Health

While we can say that sunlight deficiency may contribute to lethal outcomes on par with smoking, we can rephrase the information positively by affirming that the sun and its light may be as important to human health as clean food or water. In fact, compelling research suggests that energy from the sun drives the cellular bioenergetics of the biomachinery of our bodies through non-ATP [adenosine triphosphate] dependent processes.

Consider the work of Gerald Pollack, Ph.D., author of “The 4th Phase of Water” (see video below), who explains how infrared energy of the sun charges up the water molecules within our body (99 percent of the molecules in our bodies in number are water) like trillions of molecular batteries.

When pertaining to cardiovascular health, sunlight energy in the form of infrared-charged water molecules supports the heart’s job of pumping the blood throughout the blood vessels by producing a form of highly structured and energized water known as Exclusion Zone water, or EZ water, and which may actually provide over 99.9 percent of the biomechanical energy needed to push the 1.2–1.5 gallons of blood in the average adult body through the literally thousands of miles of blood vessels.

Provocative research also suggests the body contains a variety of photo-acceptors/chromophores (e.g., cytochrome C oxidase) capable of accepting and utilizing sunlight to generate so-called “extra synthesis” of ATP. Additionally, melanin may absorb a wide range of the Sun’s electromagnetic spectrum, converting it into useful energy and perhaps also biologically important information, even perhaps taking harmful gamma radiation and turning it into biologically useful energy.

Even something as commonplace in the human diet as chlorophyll has recently been found to act as a means to enhance the light-harvesting properties of animal cells. In fact, we reported recently on a study that found enhanced ATP production (without the expected concomitant uptick in reactive oxygen species production) through an intermediary of chlorophyll metabolites that end up