This coming Monday, I will be giving a brief talk at the Marion Council on Aging entitled “How To Become a Better Sleeper,” which will piggyback off of my prior series of posts on the topic. The talk should be about half an hour long, with some time for Q&A afterwards. If you are in the area, please feel free to drop in.
If, like me, you came of age in the 1980s and 1990s, you probably don’t remember a time when you weren’t warned to stay out of the sun. The message for the past few decades has been that sun exposure = skin cancer, and that if you absolutely have to go out during daylight hours for more than a nanosecond, to please not do so without first donning sunscreen and a full suit of body armor.
It’s true that excessive sun exposure can cause skin damage and increase the risk of skin cancers. But there’s (pun intended) a wrinkle to this. And that is that limiting sun exposure might also increase your risk of getting lots of other diseases, including heart disease and virtually every other known cancer. I’ll discuss some data about this in a moment, but first I want to just share some thoughts about sun exposure in general:
The photo above is of John D. Rockefeller. The founder of the Standard Oil Company, he is considered by many historians to be the single richest human being who ever lived. Mr. Rockefeller was simultaneously a ruthless businessman and a very generous philanthropist, and is thus remembered as both a villain and a hero of American history. But for the purposes of this article, what’s relevant is that Mr. Rockefeller lived to the age of 97, and remained mentally sharp and physically active right up until almost the very end of his long life.
I’ve mentioned in a prior blog post that I’m a history buff and that I sometimes wonder whether we can learn anything from the past about better health habits. So it was that while reading a biography of Mr. Rockefeller a few years ago, I was struck by something – John D. Rockefeller was a devotee of circadian medicine, nearly a century before the field was even invented.
I’ll come back to John D. Rockefeller in a moment, but first: what is Circadian medicine?
