Are You Getting Enough UV Light?

Light shapes life - how is it shaping yours?

I use the Sperti vitamin D lamp (the Sperti D) everyday in the winter to maintain my vitamin D levels. I receive an affiliate commission if you use this link, so if you like my free content, please consider supporting my work by purchasing products that I’m affiliated with.

That I use a vitamin D lamp surprises many people, especially given that I live in Florida and eat a lot of fish. The truth is that it’s hard to maintain an optimal vitamin D level without ultraviolet light, unless you take supplements. I believe in UV light - for reasons I will discuss in this post.

Ultraviolet light is one of the most misunderstood and therefore under-appreciated tools for creating good health and longevity. Ultraviolet light gets blamed for skin cancer, because there is a strong literature linking excessive sun exposure (specifically sunburn) and tanning-bed use to skin cancer. The story is far, far more complex than that, and just because ultraviolet light is implicated in the causation of skin cancer does not mean that we should avoid it. Avoiding sun exposure for fear of skin cancer is like avoiding your car for fear of a motor vehicle accident. In fact, your car is arguably far, far more dangerous.

The devil is in the details, so let's take a good look at those details.

The literature on ultraviolet light and skin cancer is clear when it comes to how much exposure actually increases skin cancer risk. The more sun you get, the more likely you are to get squamous and basal cell carcinomas. These are superficial and easily treated, which is why they only kill several thousand people per year. Melanoma is more common in people who sunburn frequently, but it is not more common in workers who are exposed to the sun consistently at work (for example, electrical linemen). This means that consistency in sun exposure is key to avoiding an increased risk for melanoma.

All told, about 8,000 people per year die of the most dangerous type of skin cancer, melanoma. This is not an impressive number. Approximately 3.5 million people die per year in the United States in total. The top ten causes of death are all linked to a lack of sunlight, and I use different frequencies of light to treat all of these diseases.

More importantly, the more sun you get, the less likely you are to die. Are you more worried about wrinkles and skin cancer, or death? Would you rather be a pretty corpse at an early age, or live long enough to look like a wrinkled paper bag? No one relishes the thought of skin aging, but I assure you that avoiding the sun will just leave you ugly on the inside, wracked with pain and disability, and wishing you could trade your healthy skin for healthy organs.

What is the reason behind this? Sunlight contains light from infrared to ultraviolet. We're talking about UV today (more on the health benefits of sunlight generally is coming later...). Sunlight contains UV-A and UV-B light, each of which have different effects. UV-A makes you tan by triggering release of alpha-melanocyte stimulating hormone (which has many positive health effects). UV-B makes vitamin D in your skin. UV light in general has profound and diverse effects on your health, from triggering release of endorphins and endocannabinoids to changing your skin microbiome.

The bottom line is that your number one source for UV light exposure, and arguably your safest, is the sun. For this reason, prudent sun exposure is vital to life and anything less is dangerous. In fact, the data on sun avoidance suggests that avoiding the sun is as hazardous to your health as smoking.

I share a few pieces of advice with patients when it comes to sun exposure. The most important of these is to get as much natural light as possible, without burning. Light through a window or skylight won't burn you and increase your risk of skin cancer. The earlier or later in the day, and the lower your elevation, the less ultraviolet light you will get from sunlight. The atmosphere blocks UV light, which is why UV light intensity increases with altitude. Early and late in the day, sunlight has to transit more atmosphere than in the middle of the day, and so less UV light reaches earth. You can find out how much UV light you are exposed to outside right now by looking at the UV index. UV index is zero at dawn and, depending on latitude and season of the year, increases rapidly until solar noon (when the sun is directly overhead), and then starts to decline again. If you track how much you tan or burn with the UV index, you will quickly learn what your body can tolerate as far as UV light.

What if you can’t get much UV light from the sun, either due to your work schedule or a lack of UV light outside, then a UV lamp is the next best thing.

I never thought I would use UV lamps in my practice on a regular basis.

Then I started to see how powerful they were as clinical tools.

The UV lamp I recommend is the Sperti D. Just 5 minutes in front of the Sperti D is enough to keep (most people’s) vitamin D levels well within the normal range. For people who can’t spend much time outside or who live in a cold, dark place, the Sperti D is the best way to get vitamin D on a daily basis.

We will discuss more about vitamin D in my next post - Optimizing Your Vitamin D Level with UV Light.

Until then, be well,

Dr. Stillman

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