Can the Quantity of Sunlight in the Birth Month alter the Longevity of Diabetics?

Can the Quantity of Sunlight in the Birth Month alter the Longevity of Diabetics?

By Marc Sorenson, EdD. Sunlight Institute

One of the more interesting research papers in recent memory demonstrates that the amount of sunlight during the month of birth may increase the life span of adult diabetics.[1] The researchers studied the death records of 829,000 diabetics, 90% of whom were type 2. Among the most interesting findings was that with rapidly decreasing ultraviolet radiation (UVR or sunlight) at the time of birth, lifespan decreased in better nourished, white female diabetic population.

Diabetic males, on the other hand, gained 6.1 years of life when exposure to sunlight was increasing at birth month, whereas females gained 2.3 years.

This all makes perfect sense, since fall weather is a time of rapidly decreasing sunlight intensity and a drop in temperature, which would decrease vitamin D and other photoproducts, and cause people to be outdoors less.

The researchers concluded that “Rapidly changing UVR at the equinoxes modulates the expression of an epigenome involving the conservation of energy, a mechanism especially canalized in women. Decreasing UVR at conception and early gestation stimulates energy conservation in persons we consider ‘diabetic’ in today’s environment of caloric surfeit. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries ethnic minorities had poorer nutrition, laborious work, and leaner bodies, and in that environment a calorie-conserving epigenome was a survival advantage. Ethnic minorities with a similar epigenome lived long enough to express diabetes as we define it today and exceeded the lifespan of their nondiabetic contemporaries, while that epigenome in diabetics in the nutritional environment of today is detrimental to lifespan.”

So as I see it, those who are programmed genetically for diabetes can increase lifespan by being born at the right time of year. If only their parents had known!

[1] George E Davis Jr* and Walter E Lowell. Variation in ultraviolet radiation and diabetes: evidence of an epigenetic effect that modulates diabetics’ lifespan. Clinical Epigenetics 2013, 5:5.

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