My grandmother would be distraught. She grumbles when researchers make a new finding and “they” change what’s recommended for your diet and your health.
They change their bloody minds all the time! Don’t eat salt, salt is fine; eggs cause high cholesterol, no they’re fine, eat all the eggs you want.
OK that’s kinda paraphrasing her, but you can see where she’s coming from. She doesn’t consider the science behind it, with some new research finding a possible correlation between eggs and high cholesterol, then the next research group debunking the last. And the way it’s reported on current affairs programs doesn’t help, they can make the latest diet research sound like a commandment from on high about what to eat or not eat.
So she will be nonplussed as well about Vitamin D lowering cancer risk, because where do you get Vitamin D from? That’s right, that cuddly warm ball of nuclear fusion in the sky, the Sun. Your skin turns the ultraviolet rays from the Sun into little packets of Vitamin D that your body spreads around and uses for tonnes of cool stuff that apparently helps to prevent all kinds of disease, including schizophrenic tendencies in fetuses.
But what a conundrum! The Sun is evil! I wish I had a clip of the stupid current affairs story I saw a few months ago at my parents’ house, with a teenage girl walking along the beach with full-length clothing on and a big floppy hat, only her pearlescent white hands and face showing. She didn’t feel the need to bow to society’s pressure to have a healthy-looking tan (that’s right, I don’t care what anyone says: a tan looks healthy), she was just fine all covered up, no sun on her ghostly white skin and no friends either, I would bet. You pay the highest price for being a pasty independent thinker when you’re a teenager.
So she won’t get skin cancer like all her more socially well-adjusted peers, but her lonely life probably won’t last particularly long with the selection of diseases that Vitamin D alledgedly helps to prevent:
- heart disease
- lung disease
- cancer
- diabetes
- rickets
- high blood pressure
Sure you can take a Vitamin D tablet and stay out of the sun, and not go outside because you might get a melanoma, or hit by a bus, or brutally murdered by some psychopath who’s watched too many of those crime shows that compete for the most gory and perverted crime scene with 12-year old girls bound to tables half naked, as their blood drips into a water container. Or you might be run off the road by some idiot going to buy gas for his barbecue, and getting impatient he exceeds the speed limit by five kilometres per hour, at which point all hell breaks loose and babies are instantly orphaned. Paying attention to the road conditions instead of talking to your annoying, moronic child would be preferable.
So now I’m going to go lie naked in the midday sun until my skin turns lobster red and I slip on smooth surfaces because of all my weeping sunburn blisters.
But really, I think we need to just take everything in moderation (including moderation), with exceptions for some things like cigarettes, asbestos and brylcreem, which you should avoid; and sex, which you should have copious quantities of.
