Originally published July 8 2005
Lower prostate cancer risk linked to vitamin D from sunlight
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
New research suggests that those with high sun exposure are 49 percent less likely to have prostate cancer.
Sun-exposed white men are less likely to get prostate cancer than their less tanned brethren, a new study shows.
That's no reason for men to recklessly sunbathe.
The greater a person's lifetime sun exposure, the greater a person's risk of skin cancer.
But the finding does indicate that vitamin D -- which humans can get from sun exposure -- protects against prostate cancer.
Also protective are genes that let some people's bodies use vitamin D more efficiently, find Esther M. John, PhD, of the Northern California Cancer Center; Gary G. Schwartz, PhD, of Wake Forest University, and colleagues.
"It's a pretty impressive finding," Schwartz tells WebMD.
Schwartz first proposed a link between prostate cancer and vitamin D in 1990.
That's when he noticed that the populations most likely to get too little vitamin D are the same populations most likely to get prostate cancer.
That resembles essentially the same people who most often got what used to be called rickets, a bone-deforming disease linked to lack of exposure to sunlight," Schwartz says.
"So I argued that if vitamin D deficiency causes one disease -- rickets -- there is no reason why it cannot cause another disease -- prostate cancer -- later in life."
People living in the north and elderly people tend to get less time in the sun than young people living in southern climes.
Unlike other vitamins, a person's main source of vitamin D isn't food; it's sunshine.
Schwartz and colleagues found that prostate cancer cells are less likely to behave like cancer cells when exposed to vitamin D.
Moreover, Schwartz notes that prostate cells are able to process vitamin D. In fact, the surface of a prostate cell bears a molecule called a vitamin D receptor or VDR.
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