Happy, healthy holidays

12/08/2008 by Tina.

The weather in England is wet and miserable, so it must be summer time! It rained so hard this morning that the drains turned to fountains and the roads to rivers.

Am I bothered though - NO! I’m off to France at the end of the week where days and days of sunshine are forecast. As are many glasses of wine

We need sunshine to make vitamin D, which is of vital importance because:

“…cancers grow most rapidly in people who have insufficient vitamin D. In April this year, Professor Giovannucci and colleagues reported the results of a major study of more than 4,000 cancers occurring in 47,800 men, known as the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study. He found that the men with the highest vitamin D index had a 17 per cent reduction in cancer, compared with the men who had the lowest vitamin D index - and they had an even greater reduction in deaths from cancer (29 per cent), showing that high vitamin D is associated with longer survival after diagnosis of the disease.

Doctors knowledgeable about vitamin D believe that it may be effective in treating cancer because laboratory work backs up the survey findings. Vitamin D is active in more than 30 different tissues of the body, where it induces cells to complete their development and enables cells that have developed wrongly to die off instead of forming a tumour.” (As reported in the Independent, August 2006)

In order for there to be sufficient vitamin D making rays, the sun’s UV index needs to be 3 or higher, which unfortunately for much of the year it isn’t. In temperate climates such as that of the UK it only reaches these levels in the spring and summer, and if today’s weather is anything to go by, sometimes not even then!

The body can store vitamin D for short periods of time (30-60 days) but as most of its production comes from UV light, it means we need to “make hay while the sun shines”, get out of our stuffy offices and houses and out into the rays. Fifteen minutes of unprotected sunbathing at least twice a week is sufficient, so there’s no need to bake yourself. And of course if you plan on staying out longer, Slip, Slop, Slap is the order of the day.

So, no prizes for guessing what I’ll be doing in France - I can hear my sunbed calling to me already. Oh, but all in the name of good health of course

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