Sun Exposure and Heart Disease

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Sun Exposure and Heart Disease

Exposure to artificial sunlight, or UV lights, has been shown to improve various aspects of cardiovascular health. Let’s discuss the details.

If you have questions about heart disease, click here.

Sun Exposure and Heart Disease

Dr. Michael Ruscio: Hi, this is Dr. Ruscio. And let’s discuss if sun exposure is good for your heart. A recent study was published, and these researchers actually looked at what would happen in a group of subjects if they exposed them, over the course of six months, to UV light. So this might be the kind of light that you see from a tanning bed. It’s UVA, UVB light, full spectrum light that is similar to the sun.

And what these researchers showed was that exposure to UV light over the course of six months was able to decrease blood pressure, improve pulse rate, improve heart rhythm, also allow the blood to carry more oxygen and allow the participants to participate in more workload, and decrease lactic acid, all things that are favorable for your heart. Or all these markers mean that essentially your heart and your cardiovascular system are getting healthy just from exposure to artificial sunlight.

So how does this pertain to the question that people usually have about getting exposure to sunlight or artificial sunlight, which is cancer? Well, we’ll be doing a follow-up review of a study very soon that goes into this question in much more detail. But the short story is one of the most comprehensive and recent reviews has shown that sun exposure actually protects against 11 of the 22 most common types of cancer and had no correlation with malignant melanoma of the skin.

Again, that’s a whole separate issue. But to touch on it briefly, it seems that the sun-is-unhealthy-for-you philosophy or position has been way overstated and that sun, especially even for cancer, actually seems to be cancer protective.

Now, this would mean within reason. It doesn’t mean spending four hours a day in the sun every day. But getting total-body sun exposure to the point where you notice a slight color change in your skin is something that can be very helpful.

If you’d like more of a detailed guide as to how to obtain safe sun exposure, we did perform a pretty thorough review of this with very specific recommendations that can be found on our website, DrRuscio.com. And if you go to the search box in the upper right hand corner, you can type in “sun exposure” or maybe “vitamin D.” Search that term. And you’ll see this come up in the results.

In any case, coming back to this study at hand, it seems that UV exposure, artificial sunlight, UV light exposure, has the ability to improve various parameters of your cardiovascular health. And other research shows us that there does not seem to be a risk of malignant melanoma skin cancer, and even that sun protects against 11 of the 22 leading types of cancer.

So get some reasonable sun exposure. It’ll be good for your heart and helpful for your immune system. This is Dr. Ruscio. And I hope this information helps you get healthy and get back to your life. Thanks.

If you have questions about heart disease, click here.

What do you think? I would like to hear your thoughts or experience with this.

Discussion

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