STUDY ANALYSIS: Sunlight, Metabolism and Fat Loss

Who would've known the sun is good for you!?

A new study tells us plenty about the state of the medical industry and the extent to which we’ve been conditioned to distrust our basic instincts—with terrible effects for our health.

I talk a lot about how cholesterol is the most heavily demonised thing in the world of health and nutrition over the last century or so, and I’d stand by that choice if forced to.

Since the 1950s, people have had it hammered into them that consumption of cholesterol and saturated fat will, quite literally, clog your arteries with goop and cause you to have a heart attack or stroke. This—wrongful—demonisation of cholesterol has been pivotal to the disastrous shift away from a diet based in whole foods, including animal products like meat, eggs and dairy, to a new diet built around novel foodstuffs like refined grains, vegetable and seed oils and heavily processed foods made in factories by corporations and sold wrapped in plastic on supermarket shelves.

The whole argument was built on profound public ignorance of basic lipid science—just because saturated fat is “hard” when it’s hanging off the side of a delicious rib-eye steak, doesn’t mean it goes “hard” in your veins and arteries—and also, perhaps more importantly, the growing prestige of scientists and doctors as “experts” who decide for us exactly how we should all live.

Never mind that science is an ever-evolving field, in which previously established orthodoxies can be overthrown in the blink of an eye, you only need to look at the average scientist or doctor to see that they have pretty much nothing to tell anybody about how to live.

To my mind, the only other "thing” that comes close to being as widely demonised, with as terrible effects for our health as the demonisation of cholesterol (and with it basically all animal foods), is the sun.

We’re told, as a matter of course, that we must avoid sunlight like the plague. If you go out in the sun without sunscreen on, you’re taking your life in your hands. Your skin WILL age. You WILL get cancer. So slather on even more of that sunscreen and don’t worry about all the heavy metals and endocrine-disrupting chemicals it contains—you don’t want to get cancer, do you?

Truth is, of course, the sun is good for us. In fact, it’s not just good for us: it’s essential for our health.

And now we’re starting to get some decent studies that substantiate this fundamental truth that we feel every time the sun hits our face and makes us smile and feel warm and full of life all of a sudden.

Take this new study, for example, from the Journal of Investigative Dermatology: “UV Irradiation Increases Appetite and Prevents Body Weight Gain through Upregulation of Norepinephrine in Mice.” That’s basically a complicated way of saying that sunlight exposure helps regulate your metabolism and keep weight off.

Sunlight is good for you! And yet… We’ll get on to the “and yet” in good time.

First, let’s look at the main meat of the study.