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Trust Marandure

There are millions of red corpuscles constantly flowing through very small blood vessels throughout every part of the 3,000 square inches of your skin. And there are also tiny oil glands just beneath the skin which biochemistry call sterols. As sunshine strikes them, substances within them, called ergo sterols, are irradiated and transformed into Vitamin D. Carried to all parts of your body, Vitamin D enables you to have strong bones, teeth, and nails.

Every living thing in our world is dependent upon the sun. Without sunshine, nothing could live. Sunlight is composed of energy wavelengths of various types. We will here focus on our attention on the visible rays, along with the infrared and ultra violet rays. In this brief report you will learn part of this miracle of what sunlight can do for you and how it can bring you better health and a happier outlook on life.

In 1877, it was discovered that sunlight can destroy harmful bacteria. Today, it is used to treat bacterial infections. Sunlight on the body dramatically lowers high blood pressure, decreases blood cholesterol, lowers excessively high blood sugars, and increases white blood cells.

Adequate sunlight on your body will love your respiratory rate and will cause your breathing to be slower, deeper, and even easier. Your resting heart rate will decrease, and after exercise it will return to normal much more quickly. Sunlight increases the capacity of the blood to carry more oxygen and take it to your body tissues. Even a single exposure to the ultraviolet light in sunlight will greatly increase the oxygen content of your body. This effect lasts for several days. Bronchial asthma patients who can hardly breathe are able to inhale freely after a sunbath.

Interestingly, the many beneficial effects of sunlight are heightened if a person combines sunbath with a regular programme of physical exercise. For example, fatigue and exhaustion tend to be lessened and the capacity for work is increased. It is now known that part of this is due to an increase in glycogen content of the blood and muscles following exposure to sunlight and exercise.

The strength of the heart is steadied and deepened. The pulse rate is lowered because the heart muscle is pumping more blood at each beat. This enables your heart to rest more between beats. In addition, the blood output is increased by an average of 39 percent for several days after a sunbath. Many people worry about their blood pressure, yet regularly taking sunlight on the body lowers it.

Sunbaths alone will lower blood pressure by an average of 8 percent. When combined with exercise, sunbaths lower blood pressure by 15 percent.

And there are those who are diabetic that worry about their blood sugar levels. It has been discovered that exposure to sunshine has an insulin-like effect on the body — it lowers the blood sugar. And it does this in the right proportion. Those who have no diabetic problem experience almost no change in blood sugar levels while diabetics have a striking lowering of it. It is now known that this lowering is caused by the fact that sunlight on the body causes glycogen (stored sugar) to be increased throughout the body, enabling the blood sugar to be lowered. Higher storage levels of glycogen result in more body energy for longer stretches of physical activity, with more endurance and less fatigue. (WARNING — A diabetic taking sunbaths should try reducing his insulin intake, lest he injects too much.)

And then there is stress. We all encounter tension and problems throughout the day. Sunlight can help you to easily glide through the day. A deepened sense of well-being results and better sleep comes at night. You feel better and live better. Because you are more relaxed, the crisis of life is met with less difficulty. Sunlight on the body both calms the nerves and increases adrenalin. This relaxation is not merely mental, it is physical also. Both gastric and duodenal ulcer patients have been found to improve under the beneficial effects of sunshine.

The wealth of new scientific insights on the restorative power of sunlight continues to unfold. Sunlight lowers blood cholesterol, an excess of blood cholesterol is one of the problem leading to heart and artery disease. The basic fact under the truth goes back to the year 1904, when it was discovered that sunlight changes the cholesterol just under the skin into vitamin D. Because there is so much cholesterol just under the skin, when it is changed by sunlight into vitamin D, cholesterol from the blood is sent to take its place, thus lowering the cholesterol in the blood. Researchers now know that when cholesterol is removed from the blood –cholesterol stored within the plaques deposited on the artery walls takes its place. The result is a beneficial reduction of the dangerous deposits that accompany hardening of the arteries leading to strokes. Two hours after a sunbath, an average of 13 percent reduction in human blood cholesterol occurs.

Research was done to disclose that sunbaths help people with hardening of the arteries of the brain. Their improved mental performance and memory indicates that those harmful blood vessels deposits were lessened by the exposure to sunlight. Incidentally, one insight that came out of this and other researches was the fact that the patients were helped more by frequent short exposures to sunlight than by infrequent longer sunbaths. Proof of this was shown in the electrocardiograms — almost twice as good in those receiving shorter, more frequent sunshine on their bodies.

Dramatic evidence of the importance of sunlight on the body is to be found in dark-skinned races. Of all the races dark-skinned Africans are the most susceptible to rickets. The solution is vitamin D, but in order to manufacture it in the body, blacks must have their bodies in the sunlight more than the light-skinned races. Because blacks require more on their bodies for health than whites, blacks tend to have more jaundice, higher blood pressure, tuberculosis, and diabetes.

About the writer: Trust Marandure is a Naturopathy practitioner based in Bulawayo. He can be contacted on cell; 0772482382 or email tgmarandure @yahoo.com