The Healing Sun: Sunlight and The Heart
The Healing Sun by Richard Hobday presents evidence showing an increase in disease with a decrease in sunlight exposure. This article relates: Sunlight and The Heart
How Sunlight Can Prevent Serious Health Problems
by Richard Hobday, taken from his book, The Healing Sun
Sunlight and The Heart
The western world’s number one killer is coronary heart disease. It accounts for one third of all deaths in industrialized countries annually, and 7 million deaths worldwide. If you are unfortunate enough to have a heart condition, or you come from a family with a history of heart disease, or high blood pressure, you will probably have been made aware of the impact that your lifestyle and diet can have on your future well-being. By keeping your weight down and taking regularexercise the likelihood of ill health is far less than if you pursue a sedentary way of life, eat convenience foods and smoke. As you may have gathered from chapter 1, sunlight has a marked effect on some of the imbalances in the body which are associated with heart disease. Not only does sunlight lower blood pressure and cholesterol levels, but the results of tests reported in the American Journal of Physiology in 1935 show that exposure to ultraviolet radiation can also increase the amount of blood ejected from the heart — the cardiac output — by as much as 39 per cent. If sunlight does influence the functioning of the cardiovascular system to anything like this extent, one would expect to see more heart disease when and where there was less available solar radiation.
More people die of heart attacks in the winter than in the rest of the year and, as with cancer, deaths from heart disease become more common with increasing distance from the equator. Blood cholesterol levels also increase with distance from the equator, and it is countries in the northwest of Europe, such as Britain, which have the highest cholesterol levels and deaths from heart disease. The highest incidence of heart disease in the British Isles is amongst less well-off families in Scotland, Northern Ireland, and the northwest of England. In a study published in the Quarterly Journal of Medicine in 1996, sunlight deprivation was identified as a potential risk factor. Bad housing, minimal participation in outdoor physical activities such as gardening and insufficient money for holidays in sunny places were cited as reasons for lack of sunlight exposure amongst this high-risk group.
Significantly, coronary heart disease is also particularly high amongst Indo-Asian immigrants in Britain who, as we have already seen, tend not go out in the sun. The researchers who carried out this study put forward the hypothesis that high levels of cholesterol in the blood may accelerate existing coronary heart disease but are not the cause of it. They suggest that it is a microbe — possibly the low-grade respiratory pathogen Chlamydia pneumoniae — which may be to blame, and that sunlight deprivation increases the opportunism of this organism in a similar manner to the way it favours tuberculosis. If this is the case, immigrants to this country who have no natural immunity to this pathogen, or whichever organism might cause coronary heart disease, would be at even more risk of infection once their immune systems become compromised due to vitamin D deficiency. Like cancer, in spite of a massive research effort, a great deal about heart disease remains unknown and unexplained. Sunlight or, rather, lack of it may have a much more significant influence on the genesis of heart disease than is currently recognized and in my opinion this needs to be thoroughly investigated as a matter of urgency.
Source: http://www.lifestylelaboratory.com/articles/hobday/sunlight-prevent-problems.html
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Tags: cancer, Health, heart disease, Richard Hobday, tuberculosis, vitamin d deficiency
This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 11th, 2024 at 3:29 am and is filed under Books.
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