Vitamin D and the flying ant

During my Thanksgiving road trip I soaked up a lot of radio. At one point I caught an AM station “infomercial” that was extolling the virtues of vitamin D. Hey, it was either that or We Built This City on Rock and Roll playing on the other station. I clearly made the right choice.

And the timing was right, too. After all, the holidays are always accompanied by troubling stories about the ill effects of eating too much, drinking too much, or getting beaten by a mob at the local shopping mall. It’s the American way. So if we can mitigate those risks by taking health advice from a radio infomercial, well, I’m all for it.

This isn’t the first time I’ve crossed paths with the vitamin D gig, so I’ll make random observations about what I’ve heard.

The infomercial guy basically said this: Vitamin D is naturally produced by the skin when exposed to sunlight, but since modern times have reduced our skin’s exposure to sunlight, many people have a vitamin D deficiency and this can cause all sorts of health woes. The infomercial was selling vitamin D pills so people could eliminate this deficiency.

I first heard about this a little over 10 years ago. That’s when an old-school general practitioner basically told me the same thing that the infomercial guy said. The old-school doc was a solid guy and an independent thinker. The vitamin D notion seemed sensible and the doctor himself seemed sensible.

The following year I happened to be talking to a big-time doctor who was also a professor at a prestigious research university. I asked him about the old-school doc’s take on vitamin D. The big-time guy wasn’t having any of it.

Well, not at the time, at least. But two years later he changed course and was in accordance with the old-school guy, and was advising people to get tested and to use supplements to treat vitamin D deficiencies.

This isn’t the last word on the gig, because it wasn’t the first. For that I have to dial things way back to when I was in college. We had one lecture by a dermatologist about the risks of sun exposure. I’m not talking about “over-exposure.” I’m talking about any exposure.

The doctor was not a fan of the California suntans that many of us had. He told us that the sun’s rays were radiation and that any amount of this radiation was a hazard. This guy wore a wide-brimmed hat (he showed us this) whenever he was outside in the daytime and he said that he always wore a long-sleeved shirt when outside. It worked. His fair skin, almost translucent, betrayed no hint of exposure to the sun’s glow.

As for me, my college suntan is the least of my worries. But I hope my overexposure to the sun in the tropics doesn’t come back to haunt me someday. This was an occupational hazard of flying helicopters (usually with no doors) over the reflective surface of Pacific’s waters. I was like an ant under a magnifying glass. But, heck, it beats office work.

Some of my peers are in the same predicament, owing to the rigors of the aviation, maritime, or military realms. So you won’t find any of us pooh-poohing the dangers of the sun’s radiation. We’re too busy forking over co-payments so the dermatologists can inspect our sun-baked hides.

Still, I wonder now, as I wondered during that lecture in college, whether severing our relationship with the sun entirely might harbor unforeseen consequences, given that we did, after all, evolve under the sun’s rays. This vitamin D thing, or, more precisely, this lack of vitamin D thing, brings such a notion to mind.

While I recall that the sun was an unmitigated health villain in the 1980s, so much the worse because of dire warnings about the earth’s thinning ozone layer back then, I also note that more recently a doctor on TV advised people that the sun was the best way to get vitamin D. So the conventional wisdom, or at least that portion of it that I see, has apparently changed.

Still, don’t ask me for any answers. Slobs like me, mere civilians in this stuff, don’t always have a clear reading of what’s what in the medical world.

Anyway, now that we’ve got that behind us, it’s time to resume our holiday festivities. The guests are just arriving now. There are brews sitting in tubs of ice. The DJ, looking cool and mysterious in aviator shades and a wide-brimmed hat, is scanning the AM radio so we can get this party started.