One of the lovely byproducts I have been seeing from this Covid 19 scare is more people outside taking walks in the sun. At least in my neighborhood, I see people through my front door window walking up and down the street all day long. I expect this will slow down as the weather heats up, but for now, walks are something to do while at home that is very good for your immune health.
The benefit of walking goes beyond just getting exercise. A big piece of the benefit comes from your exposure to good old sunlight. I have called this vitamin S in the past. Nothing in a pill quite replaces the vital nutrition sunlight provides for us. Most of us know that it is sunlight exposure on our skin that produces vitamin D in our body. The old story is that 10 to 15 minutes of sunlight on our arms and neck will give us all the vitamin D we need. Unfortunately, this advice is outdated and wrong because it is based on the faulty belief that all we need is 400 iu of vitamin D3 per day. A few years back it was discovered that the original research on how much D we need had a math error in it, and we actually need 4000 iu of D3 – 10 times as much as they thought. So we need a
lot more sunlight exposure than we have been told each day – more like full-body exposure for 15 to 20 minutes every day. Those numbers are for light-skinned folks. The darker your skin the more sunlight you need, up to 10 times as much for very black skin.
Most people do not get the daily requirement for sunlight, so they have compensated by taking vitamin D capsules. We have been taught to fear the sun because sunburns years down the road might become skin cancer. Burnt skin develops damaged DNA in the cells, which can mutate years later. With healthy levels of sunlight that do not produce burning this is not a problem. For this reason, it is important to gradually increase your levels of sun exposure to prevent burning.
Taking vitamin D3 to compensate for a lack of time out in the sun is a good thing to a point, but it is not complete. Sunlight also produces something called cholesterol sulfate in the skin. Cholesterol sulfate is essential for blood cells to hold together and the inner layer of blood vessels to stay strong and not form plaque or hardening
of the arteries. Vitamin D capsules do not supplement this vital nutrient. We need the exposure of the skin to the ultraviolet B rays the sun emits to produce both D3 and cholesterol sulfate. (About 5% of the ultraviolet rays from the sun are B rays while 95% are A rays which promote tanning and skin aging.) Just as an aside bit of info, the herbicide glyphosate (Roundup) stops the body from making cholesterol sulfate, so eat organic to avoid this.
What really stimulated me to write this article was a recent release of information on Covid 19 infection severity and vitamin D levels in patients. This is really interesting. They found that in looking at all the variables they could measure, the one factor that was correlated with the severity of a Covid 19 infection was vitamin D level in the blood. The lower the D levels the worst the infection. Another study found that 98% of the cases in people that had D levels of 30 ng/dl or higher were only mild while in those critical or severe cases 96% were below 30 ng/dl. This is huge! This suggests that you can lower your risk of going severe or critical if you get a Covid 19 infection by 98% just by having enough Vitamin D in your system! Wait, before you cheer and breathe a big sigh of relief, this does not mean that you can just dose up on vitamin D and be safe. What you put in your mouth is not the same thing as what functions in your body. It has taken me over two years just to raise my vitamin D levels from 35 to 50 by taking 5000 to 10000 iu per day of vitamin D3.
Why does vitamin D affect Covid 19? Vitamin D is
actually a hormone, a hormone that among many other things promotes the formation of a type of immune cell called a Th17 cell. These cells act as the conductors of the immune cell orchestra. They keep everything in balance. Your immune system is made up of two halves called the Th1 and the Th2 cell lines. Th1 cell types are for attacking bacteria and viruses while the Th2 are for forming antibodies against toxins and allergens (this is super simplified). Th1 cells tend to be super inflammatory and produce a lot of inflammatory messengers like cytokines while Th2 cells are not so inflammatory. Covid 19 activates the Th1 cells which attack the Covid 19. But Covid 19 seems to trigger a super big response in some people producing what is called a storm of cytokines which actually cause the lung reaction that tends to kill those people. What those people seem to have is not enough Th17 conductors on board to calm the Th1 cells down enough that they don’t go overboard and kill the patient in their zeal to kill the Covid 19. In short, not enough vitamin D means not enough controlling Th17 cells to keep the Th1 cells in line. Th1 cells are like an uncontrolled military that is willing to blow up the planet with nuclear arms in order to win the war.
An interesting secondary discovery I made is that the cholesterol sulfate formed in our skin by sunlight prevents disseminated intravascular coagulation (DIC) which
basically means the blood starts clotting all over the place. This is one of the key findings from folks that have died from Covid 19 that doctors are puzzling over. Blood clots seem to be all over the place. I got this from the knowledge that this symptom is the main consequence of glyphosate poisoning, which blocks cholesterol sulfate formation by inactivating the eNOS enzyme that forms it. So sunlight is critical for stopping Covid 19 in two ways – through vitamin D formation and through the formation of cholesterol sulfate.
This is the big news for this newsletter – get some sunlight happening. Start slow and build up to about 15 minutes of full-body exposure. The best time of day for getting the proper UVB rays is 12 to 2 in the afternoon. This is possible to do while we are stuck at home, but if we are working this is difficult. Another alternative is to use a UVB special sunlamp designed for vitamin D production. I have checked everywhere for a modern LED version of this and it simply does not exist. When I contacted LED light panel manufacturers, I was told that it would be too expensive to make. The LEDs that produce the right wavelengths are very expensive. That means we have to use old school mercury vapor fluorescent lamps.
All the research on skin vitamin D production in the lab
over the last 50 years has been done with the same product – the Sperti UVB vitamin D lamp. It is basically the only product on the market for this application. They are built right up the road in Reno, Nevada. I contacted the company and got one for myself and Ellen to use. We started out with a three-minute exposure every other day and have built up to 5 minutes every other day after our shower in the morning. Never use the lamp before showering or bathing as the vitamin D forms in the very surface of the skin and can be washed off. It needs several hours to soak into the skin and be picked up by the blood supply. This way I can receive the benefits of sun exposure without having to be available to lay out in the sun between 12 and 2 in the afternoon. This is much more workable for us. Here is a link to order it if you would like.
Any way you can get it, with the whole Covid 19 thing going on, sunlight’s UVB rays are a crucial part of keeping us safe from the worst of this virus. The list of all the other things vitamin D does for the body (like bone formation and calcium metabolism) was covered in this newsletter from 2 years ago
. But the release of those new findings on vitamin D and Covid 19 symptoms compelled me to share this information.
Be safe and take care,
David