The Healing Sun: Colon Cancer and The Sun

The Healing Sun by Richard Hobday presents evidence showing an increase in disease with a decrease in sunlight exposure.  This article discusses the relationship of: Colon Cancer and The Sun

  
How Sunlight Can Prevent Serious Health Problems

by Richard Hobday, taken from his book, The Healing Sun

 

Colon Cancer and The Sun

With health campaigns warning against sunbathing because of the risks of developing cancer it easy to see why the cancer inhibiting properties of sunlight have been largely overlooked. Certainly, there has been little support for the hypothesis that sunlight inhibits the development of internal cancers from mainstream cancer researchers. This is not altogether surprising given the slowness with which the association between rickets and sunlight came to be accepted by much of the medical establishment.

During the 18th and 19th centuries, rickets occurred mostly at latitudes of 37 degrees or higher, in towns and cities where air pollution reduced the amount of sunlight that would otherwise have been available. There are some striking parallels between rickets and cancer of the colon, in that almost all western countries at latitudes north of 37 degrees in the northern hemisphere, or south of that latitude in the southern hemisphere, have high rates of colon cancer. It is the second leading cause of death from cancer, after lung cancer, in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Ireland and New Zealand and, as was the case with rickets, the problem is worse in areas with high levels of air pollution.

The first epidemiological research suggesting that vitamin D from sun exposure has a protective effect against colon cancer was published in the International Journal of Epidemiology in 1 980 by Drs Frank and Cedric Garland (see Table 3). They looked at the geographic distribution of cancer deaths in the United States and found that mortality from colon cancer decreased in areas of the United States with greater sun exposure, the number of deaths in the industrialized northeast of the United States being one third higher than in sunnier regions such as Hawaii, New Mexico and Arizona. Migration to a sunny latitude — from, say, New York to Florida — is associated with a decreased risk of colon cancer. Also, a childhood and adolescence spent in one of the world’s sunnier regions reduces the risk of the disease for those who migrate in the opposite direction, and the protective effect appears to last a lifetime.

 

Table 3: Colon Cancer and Latitude
Country	Latitude (°) I	Death rate per 100,000 population
Northern Ireland	54	16.4
Republic of Ireland	53	16.6
England and Wales	52	15.3
Netherlands	52	14.7
Germany	51	16.5
Belgium	50	15.5
Austria	47	15.2
Switzerland	47	12.2
France	46	11.2
Canada	45	13.5
New Hampshire, USA	44	11.5
New York, USA	43	12.4
Connecticut, USA	42	11.5
Rhode Island, USA	42	12.2
Massachusetts	42	12.1
Italy	42	10.5
New Zealand	41	19.7
New Jersey, USA	40	12.9
Spain	40	7.8
Greece	39	5.2
Japan	36	9.3
New Mexico, USA	34	9.1
Arizona, USA	34	8.8
Australia	33	15.8
Israel	31	11.8
Chile	30	6.1
Florida	28	9.9
Mexico	23	2.7
Hawaii, USA	20	8.5
Guatemala	15	0.5
Annual Age-Adjusted Death Rates from Colon Cancer per 100,000 Population by Latitude of Residence for Women in Selected Areas, 1986-1990. After Garland, C.F., Garland, F.C., and Gorham, E.D., ‘Epidemiology of Cancer Risk and Vitamin D’ inVitamin D: Molecular Biology, Physiology, and Clinical Applications, (Ed. Holick, M.F.), Humana Press, New Jersey, 1999

 

Source: http://www.lifestylelaboratory.com/articles/hobday/sunlight-prevent-problems.html

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Tags: cancer, colon cancer, Richard Hobday, rickets, sunbathing, vitamin d deficiency