"Some flimsy research conducted more than 50 years ago led the dermatology community to the faulty conclusion that diet has nothing to do with acne – that the skin lesions so many teenagers face in the mirror are an inevitable part of growing up. "
- One of my earliest big, 'Wait it's the entire system that's retarded' moments was having this taught uncritically via what seemed like it was a standardized system-wide video tutorial at a big city public school. I think the quote used was something like; "As you age you will get acne. Many myths claim that fast food has something to do with it, but don't worry that Big-Mac won't give you acne unless you rub it on your skin."
My Punjabi girlfriend says in India, pale and waifishly skinny is what's attractive. I wonder if there's also an element of differentiation, e.g. tanned is beautiful in fair-skinned societies while pale is beautiful in dark-skinned societies.
(3 of 3) There is a great deal of research, which should be known to everyone in the world, that severe COVID-19 symptoms are caused, to a very large degree, by low 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels. Average levels for people who do not supplement vitamin D3 or get much UV-B exposure on ideally white skin are typically in the 5 to 20 ng/mL range. Doctors in Boston - Quraishi et al. 2014 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamasurgery/fullarticle/1782085 and https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#00-50ngmL - show that pre-operative 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels, cause the risk or post-operative infections to be in the 45 to 25% range, while it is only 2.5% for those with 50 ng/mL or more circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D.
So, somewhat tanned white skin is strongly correlated with better health due to higher 25-hydroxyvitamin D, albeit with an increased risk of skin cancer. (The risk of all cancers are reduced by proper 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels. Here in Australia, we have very high levels of skin cancer, due primarily to summer UV-B exposure of low melanin skin, coupled with generally low 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels in winter and spring.)
Virtually all people today enjoy greater protection from high-elevation sunlight than our African ancestors did, due to better clothing, better housing, the use of vehicles - and hats, umbrellas and sunscreen. (UV-B is absorbed by glass.) In general, people who do not supplement vitamin D3 properly suffer profound diminution of their immune system. This is reasonably characterized as crippling, for some people, such as Arab == Muslim women with 5 ng/mL or less, even in sunny Israel: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.09.04.20188268v1. The lasting impact on their children is even more disastrous. This is yet to be properly recognised - and it would be easy to prevent with proper vitamin D3 supplementation.
So, for people with dark or black skin, it is now adaptive to have lighter skin in order to maximise 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels. These are generally too low in Africa, today, but not nearly as low as for white people in the USA or especially the UK etc. The levels of unsupplementing brown and black skinned people in the UK, Scandinavia, Germany etc. are disastrously low - and this is the cause of a great deal of their well-known health disparities.
Evolving such lighter skin now, in response to recent (a few thousand years, to a few centuries or decades) reduction in UV-B exposure for those living near the equator, would be a very slow process - driven solely by low 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels reducing the average number of surviving offspring who themselves are able to reproduce.
The influence of genes from northern Europe, in which tens of millennia of extremely strong selection pressures did get rid of most melanin in skin, is a more likely cause of lighter skinned people who descended in part from Africans without such a long period far from the equator. Those genes, generally, would confer other advantages as well for reproductive success in complex societies. But native African genes confer advantages for many aspects of liveliness - not least musicality and vibrant self-expression - which have been somewhat bred out of those who did well in more sedentary, regimented, societies.
Regarding acne: lots of butter, cheese, milk-chocolate and high omega-6 seed oils (also fats in beef??) surely increases the risk of pimples, acne and inflammation (omega 3s reduce inflammation). However, the apparent absence of acne and other inflammatory disorders in hunter gatherers is also likely due to factors beyond diet: Generally higher 25-hydroxyvitamin D than in more sedentary populations AND the hunter gatherers almost certainly being ubiquitously infested with one or more species of generally not very harmful helminth.
Does anyone have a reference for the healthily high levels of baby-neurodevelopment-enhancing-via-pregnancy-and-breast-feeding omega 3 fatty acids in the well-developed buttocks of the adult human female?
In the cattle-breeding field, it’s said that wide shoulders on bulls produce wide hips on female offspring, and wide-hipped cows give birth easily. A difficult birth in the wild can be deadly.
Interesting essay. I would only add these observations on sexual attractiveness:
* most normal men could probably agree on the aspects of the female body shape that most attracts them. But they would (and I would) feel it slightly bad form to spell them out too explicitly (on a family show like Substack!)
* I cannot enter the mind of a woman but it is my impression (backed by quite a lot of evolutionary psychological research) that attraction to males is less about the physical than about the exuding of virility (via success, confidence etc)
* I have written on this subject myself....a taster: "Nature is very unfair in its distribution of physical comeliness. This is something that will always cause disappointment and resentment in the less lucky ones. In the words of this Unherd article by a feminist writer: “we are all still pitted against each other in the great hotness contest, measured by others and ourselves against the fuckability standard”..... Nature it would seem is also unfair in its distribution of this rare 4.5% of male animal magnetism. There is, in other words, ‘unfairness’ in the mating experience for both sexes...." https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/the-less-desired
Yet, those members of our species without good health, symmetrical face, good posture, robust physique, and nice skin still always get a fitting mate to propagate their genes. Wonder what ultimate advantage such comparatively superior qualities confers if the bottom line - gene propagation - is only marginally differentially affected (?)
(2 of 3) Innate, instinctual (rather than learned) attraction to at least moderately suntanned people with white, or perhaps olive, skin may be explained by at least two mechanisms. Firstly, the fact that the person is outdoors (and so tanned) indicates they are fit enough to do so and not stuck indoors due to being sickly. (Conversely, rich or religiously cloistered people might spend more time indoors, making lack of tanning an evolved and/or learned signal for wealth and power.) Secondly, the fact that the person was tanned indicates that they have a higher 25-hydroxyvitamin D level, and so better immune system function, less risk of preeclampsia, pre-term birth, autism, ADHD and mental retardation (as a mother, for her babe in-utero) https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#3.3 , less risk of disease, less risk of dementia https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#3.2 etc.
In India, the preference for lighter skin can be explained by at least three mechanisms in addition to whatever learned, cultural, patterns have developed. Firstly, the second mechanism just mentioned: untanned indicates wealth and a life of leisure, management and/or contemplation rather than manual labor.
Secondly, it would indicate that the person's genes are, compared to those with darker skin, in a greater proportion drawn from the genes of people who survived for generations in northern Europe, far from the equator. Those ancestors evolved cognitive abilities (as measured in IQ tests and which increase productivity and so, potentially, reproductive success, in the modern world as well as in hunter-gather and agricultural societies) which significantly exceeded those of their African ancestors, and likely Africans today, on average. To the extent that this mechanism is true, there would be an evolved and/or learned preference for people with fairer skin, since this, in general, correlates with the genetically (largely) determined mental and emotional capacities which are well suited to complex, somewhat post-agricultural, societies, such as in India. This includes the capacity for years of long-term planning to survive harsh winters, and the ability to get along in and/or profit from dominating, complex, dense, stable, societies where survival depends on many activities beyond hunting and gathering. This includes especially the planning required for agriculture.
Thirdly, to the extent that India, with its monsoons (and so months of nearly zero UV-B light) and with its long history of having more housing than our African ancestors had, places people at risk of low 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels - which is absolutely the case today, and would have been for thousands of years - those with less melanin in their skin will have higher 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels and so be very much healthier.
Proper vitamin D3 supplementation, to attain 50 ng/mL or more circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D, requires average daily levels of about 70 to 90 IUs per kg body weight, with higher ratios for those suffering from obesity. (An IU is a ridiculously small unit for vitamin D3: 1/40,000,000th of a gram. Its origin is the amount a baby rat needed each day to avoid developing rickets.) For 70 kg without obesity this is 4900 to 6300 IUs. These scarily high numbers belie the fact that this is a very small amount. 5000 IU is 0.125 milligrams. This is a gram every 22 years - and pharma-grade vitamin D costs about USD$2.50 a gram, ex-factory.
Governments and many doctors operate on the basis that the target for health is 20 ng/mL circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D, so they only recommend taking 600 to 800 IU vitamin D3 a day (0.015 to 0.02 milligrams) a day.
Only with 50 ng/mL circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D can the body mount full-strength immune responses to cancer cells, bacteria, fungi and viruses - and, for most people, only with this level or more, can the immune system properly regulate "inflammatory" immune responses. These are mediated by cells such as eosinophils - the suicide bombers of the immune system - which destroy all cells, including our own. These inflammatory responses evolved primarily to tackle multicellular pathogens, which are parasites such as helminths - intestinal worms. The other immune responses work well against viruses and individual cells, but are useless against a large, multi-cellular, parasite.
All our ancestors, from pre-primate days to about a century ago in most developed countries, were ubiquitously infected by one or more species of helminth. The helminths, long ago (pre-human and pre-primate) evolved the ability to exude one or more compounds which down-modulate (reduce, attenuate) the indiscriminate cell-destroying inflammatory immune responses which target them.
We mammals have been unable to evolve regulatory systems which evade these downmodulatory compounds. The best mammals have been able to do is evolve inflammatory responses which would be overly strong in the absence of this ubiquitous down-modulation, so that with this down-modulation (which would vary greatly with species and degree of infestation), the level of inflammatory response is about right: effective to some degree without being overly destructive of our own cells.
Y'all can probably see where this is going . . . . Now we are all (in the West, not so much in Africa or India) dewormed, we have, in general - and especially for some individuals, according to their genetic makeup - overly strong indiscriminate cell-destroying inflammatory immune responses.
Please read the research cited and discussed at https://vitamindstopscovid.info/06-adv/. This concerns helminths, lack of helminths, immune responses, using helminthic infections (https://helminthictherapy.org) to suppress autoimmune diseases such as psoriasis, asthma and multiple sclerosis. It also concerns the Coimbra Protocol and other similar very high 25-hydroxyvitamin D protocols which successfully suppress the same, to striking degree, set of auto-immune diseases, including cluster headaches, migraine and lupus. I have never seen these two subjects discussed together. Leading vitamin D researchers seem to have no interest in helminths - I have been trying to interest them for the last few years. As far as I know, the helminth researchers do not think about vitamin D.
These protocols involve ~100 ng/mL (which is generally healthy - I have about this level) to 300+ ng/mL (elevated risk of hypercalcemia), 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels, under medical supervision, with low calcium diets, lots of water and monitoring of the blood calcium ion levels (which must be within a very narrow range) and parathyroid hormone levels (when low, indicating to the kidneys that there is sufficient calcium in the blood). They are highly successful, and not nearly well enough known - in part due to lack of randomised controlled trials, which its practitioners would probably consider unethical to perform.
The Coimbra protocol doctors explain the effectiveness of their protocol in terms of overcoming "vitamin D resistance". This is a vague theory and makes no sense, for various reasons. I do not know any proper explanation for why these protocols work, but they must work by enabling the body to reduce the genetically determined intensity of inflammatory response, in the absence of helminthic down-modulation.
One piece in the puzzle is the discovery by Chauss et al. 2021 (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41590-021-01080-3 explained at https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#chauss) that Th1 regulatory lymphocytes from the lungs of hospitalised COVID-19 patients (who have such severe symptoms due to their immune system being too weak to stop the virus from reaching the lungs and which produces excessively strong, self-destructive, inflammatory responses to the resulting lung infection) fail to transition from their pro-inflammatory startup program, to their anti-inflammatory shutdown program, despite detecting the signal (high level of a complement protein) to do so. The researchers elucidated, for the first time, the precise details of the 25-hydroxyvitamin D -> calcitriol intracrine signaling system in Th1 lymphocytes, though they mistakenly called it "autocrine signaling", which is somewhat different. The successful operation of this intracrine signaling system is essential to the cell's ability to transition to the anti-inflammatory shutdown process. The researchers found that there was nothing intrinsically wrong with these cells. They found that the failure was largely or solely due to the cell not obtaining sufficient 25-hydroxyvitamin D, which it can only do via diffusion from the 25-hydroxyvitamin D circulating in the bloodstream.
Here are some thoughts (in multiple comments due to length restrictions) on vitamin D, tanned fair skin, genetically dark or black skin, inflammation and helminths (intestinal worms).
Most doctors, immunologists, public health officials, virologists, epidemiologists, vaccinologists etc. are not aware of several important facts about the immune system. They tend to think of "vitamin D" as just another over-hyped nutritional supplement.
They understand the way vitamin D3 is hydroxylated, primarily in the liver, to become circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D, which is what is measured in "vitamin D" blood tests and which is required by the kidneys for the function described next. They tend to think of all three compounds: vitamin D3 cholecalciferol, 25-hydroxyvitamin D calcifediol (AKA "calcidiol") and 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D calcitriol as all being "vitamin D". They also tend to think of "vitamin D" as being a hormone. In 2004, Rheinhold Vieth https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/j.jsbmb.2004.03.037 pointed out that both these are serious errors. These are three separate compounds, with distinct roles in the body. Only calcitriol can operate as a hormone, but that it not its only role.
The kidneys hydroxylate some of the circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D to become a very low (usually less than 0.1 ng/mL) and tightly controlled, level of circulating calcitriol. This functions as a hormone to affect or control the activities of several cell types in multiple locations in the body regarding calcium-phosphate-bone metabolism. (A hormone is a blood-borne signaling molecule whose level is controlled, usually by one gland which produces it, and which affects the behavior of cells elsewhere in the body. It may also cross over into the cerebrospinal fluid.) This is part of a system involving osteocytes (cells in the bone), the parathyroid gland and the kidneys which regulates bone development and the absorption and excretion of calcium.
There is a broad awareness that "vitamin D" is important to the immune system. Many vitamin D researchers are unaware of Rheinhold Vieth's critique and continue to refer to all three compounds as if they were "vitamin D". The "vitamin D" receptor molecule is really the calcitriol receptor, since it binds most strongly to calcitriol and only very weakly to the other two compounds.
Most people in these fields think that the stable, very low, level of circulating calcitriol somehow "modulates the immune system", so that more calcitriol means a better immune response. This is not the case. The immune system is not affected by, nor does it affect, to any significant effect (except in granulomatous disorders and a few cancers), this circulating level of calcitriol. Many types of immune cell rely on a good level of circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D - 50 ng/mL (125 nmol/L = 1 part in 20,000,000 by mass) to run their intracrine (inside each cell) and paracrine (to nearby cells, by calcitriol diffusing a small distance, at levels much higher than the hormonal background level) signaling systems in order for each individual cell to alter its behavior in response to its changing circumstances.
The research which discovered these signaling processes is not well known and there is no peer-reviewed journal article or any textbook I am familiar with (I have not yet seen "Vitamin D, 5th edition") which explains this in a tutorial fashion. So I wrote such a tutorial, one version of which is in this page of citations and discussion of research on the vitamin D compounds and the immune system: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#02-compounds . If you read or at least familiarize yourself with the research cited there you will understand this crucial aspect of the immune system much better than most immunologists, doctors and even vitamin D researchers.
This page starts with recommendations on how much vitamin D3 to supplement, on average, per day, in order to safely attain at least the 50 ng/mL circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D needed for full immune system function. These are the recommendations of New Jersey based Professor of Medicine Sunil Wimalawansa, which he slightly simplified from those in his 2022 article in Nutrients: "Rapidly Increasing Serum 25(OH)D Boosts the Immune System, against Infections - Sepsis and COVID-19" https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/14/2997 .
The amount depends on body weight and obesity status, since people suffering from obesity have greater difficulty converting vitamin D3 into circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#obesity-deficit.
There is very little vitamin D3 (or the less effective D2) in food, whether it is fortified or not. There is no such thing as "vitamin D rich food" if the goal is to attain 50 ng/mL circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D the immune system needs. However, such foods can help attain the much easier to achieve 20 ng/mL the kidneys need in order to play their role in regulating calcium-phosphate-bone metabolism.
Short wavelength ultraviolet B light, around 297 nanometres, at the very top (frequency, and so energy per excited electron) fraction of a percent of the Sun's spectrum which reaches the Earth's surface h, breaks one of the carbon rings in 7-dehydrocholesterol, which is found in the skin, converting it to compound with the same set of atoms, which changes shape of its own accord and settles down to be vitamin D3 cholecalciferol. 7-dehydrocholesterol is the last step in one of the two chains of molecular modifications which supply the body's cholesterol.
UV-B is only available naturally in quantities sufficient to supply good amounts of vitamin D3 (as needed for 50 ng/mL circulating25-hydroxyvitamin D) from high elevation sunlight on a cloud-free day, without any intervening glass, sunscreen or clothing. Far from the equator, this can only occur in summer.
This UV-B is most effective for synthesizing vitamin D3 in white skin. Melanin absorbs it before it can reach the layers of skin which contain 7-dehydrocholesterol which is coupled to the circulatory system. This high level of melanin in the skin of Africans, and so in our ancestors, evolved partly to protect the skin against general damage from this high energy UV-B and in particular to protect the living cells from DNA damage, which can kill cells or predispose those which survive to becoming cancerous.
The ancestors of many modern humans evolved genes which created little or no cutaneous melanin after they moved to Europe, and especially northern Europe and Siberia, where there is not enough UV-B to generate enough vitamin D3 to generate 50 ng/mL circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D at any time of year, even with white skin, except perhaps in areas closer to the equator, in summer. (Circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D has a half-life of weeks or a month or so at lower levels, but a small, crucial, amount would enable people to survive, with difficulty, over the long winter months.) The small amounts of vitamin D3 and perhaps 25-hydroxyvitamin D in seafood surely contributed significantly to the very low 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels with which northern Europeans survived then, and to this day.
Really interesting piece. Well-written, just the right length and with facts I'd never heard before. Great.
"Some flimsy research conducted more than 50 years ago led the dermatology community to the faulty conclusion that diet has nothing to do with acne – that the skin lesions so many teenagers face in the mirror are an inevitable part of growing up. "
- One of my earliest big, 'Wait it's the entire system that's retarded' moments was having this taught uncritically via what seemed like it was a standardized system-wide video tutorial at a big city public school. I think the quote used was something like; "As you age you will get acne. Many myths claim that fast food has something to do with it, but don't worry that Big-Mac won't give you acne unless you rub it on your skin."
My Punjabi girlfriend says in India, pale and waifishly skinny is what's attractive. I wonder if there's also an element of differentiation, e.g. tanned is beautiful in fair-skinned societies while pale is beautiful in dark-skinned societies.
(3 of 3) There is a great deal of research, which should be known to everyone in the world, that severe COVID-19 symptoms are caused, to a very large degree, by low 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels. Average levels for people who do not supplement vitamin D3 or get much UV-B exposure on ideally white skin are typically in the 5 to 20 ng/mL range. Doctors in Boston - Quraishi et al. 2014 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamasurgery/fullarticle/1782085 and https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#00-50ngmL - show that pre-operative 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels, cause the risk or post-operative infections to be in the 45 to 25% range, while it is only 2.5% for those with 50 ng/mL or more circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D.
So, somewhat tanned white skin is strongly correlated with better health due to higher 25-hydroxyvitamin D, albeit with an increased risk of skin cancer. (The risk of all cancers are reduced by proper 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels. Here in Australia, we have very high levels of skin cancer, due primarily to summer UV-B exposure of low melanin skin, coupled with generally low 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels in winter and spring.)
Virtually all people today enjoy greater protection from high-elevation sunlight than our African ancestors did, due to better clothing, better housing, the use of vehicles - and hats, umbrellas and sunscreen. (UV-B is absorbed by glass.) In general, people who do not supplement vitamin D3 properly suffer profound diminution of their immune system. This is reasonably characterized as crippling, for some people, such as Arab == Muslim women with 5 ng/mL or less, even in sunny Israel: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.09.04.20188268v1. The lasting impact on their children is even more disastrous. This is yet to be properly recognised - and it would be easy to prevent with proper vitamin D3 supplementation.
So, for people with dark or black skin, it is now adaptive to have lighter skin in order to maximise 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels. These are generally too low in Africa, today, but not nearly as low as for white people in the USA or especially the UK etc. The levels of unsupplementing brown and black skinned people in the UK, Scandinavia, Germany etc. are disastrously low - and this is the cause of a great deal of their well-known health disparities.
Evolving such lighter skin now, in response to recent (a few thousand years, to a few centuries or decades) reduction in UV-B exposure for those living near the equator, would be a very slow process - driven solely by low 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels reducing the average number of surviving offspring who themselves are able to reproduce.
The influence of genes from northern Europe, in which tens of millennia of extremely strong selection pressures did get rid of most melanin in skin, is a more likely cause of lighter skinned people who descended in part from Africans without such a long period far from the equator. Those genes, generally, would confer other advantages as well for reproductive success in complex societies. But native African genes confer advantages for many aspects of liveliness - not least musicality and vibrant self-expression - which have been somewhat bred out of those who did well in more sedentary, regimented, societies.
Regarding acne: lots of butter, cheese, milk-chocolate and high omega-6 seed oils (also fats in beef??) surely increases the risk of pimples, acne and inflammation (omega 3s reduce inflammation). However, the apparent absence of acne and other inflammatory disorders in hunter gatherers is also likely due to factors beyond diet: Generally higher 25-hydroxyvitamin D than in more sedentary populations AND the hunter gatherers almost certainly being ubiquitously infested with one or more species of generally not very harmful helminth.
Does anyone have a reference for the healthily high levels of baby-neurodevelopment-enhancing-via-pregnancy-and-breast-feeding omega 3 fatty acids in the well-developed buttocks of the adult human female?
In the cattle-breeding field, it’s said that wide shoulders on bulls produce wide hips on female offspring, and wide-hipped cows give birth easily. A difficult birth in the wild can be deadly.
Interesting essay. I would only add these observations on sexual attractiveness:
* most normal men could probably agree on the aspects of the female body shape that most attracts them. But they would (and I would) feel it slightly bad form to spell them out too explicitly (on a family show like Substack!)
* I cannot enter the mind of a woman but it is my impression (backed by quite a lot of evolutionary psychological research) that attraction to males is less about the physical than about the exuding of virility (via success, confidence etc)
* I have written on this subject myself....a taster: "Nature is very unfair in its distribution of physical comeliness. This is something that will always cause disappointment and resentment in the less lucky ones. In the words of this Unherd article by a feminist writer: “we are all still pitted against each other in the great hotness contest, measured by others and ourselves against the fuckability standard”..... Nature it would seem is also unfair in its distribution of this rare 4.5% of male animal magnetism. There is, in other words, ‘unfairness’ in the mating experience for both sexes...." https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/the-less-desired
Very interesting, thanks. Dana Gioia offers another perspective here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAlMjfMfbB4
Agree with all this, but how about our sense of beauty in art and music: where does it come from?
Yet, those members of our species without good health, symmetrical face, good posture, robust physique, and nice skin still always get a fitting mate to propagate their genes. Wonder what ultimate advantage such comparatively superior qualities confers if the bottom line - gene propagation - is only marginally differentially affected (?)
(2 of 3) Innate, instinctual (rather than learned) attraction to at least moderately suntanned people with white, or perhaps olive, skin may be explained by at least two mechanisms. Firstly, the fact that the person is outdoors (and so tanned) indicates they are fit enough to do so and not stuck indoors due to being sickly. (Conversely, rich or religiously cloistered people might spend more time indoors, making lack of tanning an evolved and/or learned signal for wealth and power.) Secondly, the fact that the person was tanned indicates that they have a higher 25-hydroxyvitamin D level, and so better immune system function, less risk of preeclampsia, pre-term birth, autism, ADHD and mental retardation (as a mother, for her babe in-utero) https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#3.3 , less risk of disease, less risk of dementia https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#3.2 etc.
In India, the preference for lighter skin can be explained by at least three mechanisms in addition to whatever learned, cultural, patterns have developed. Firstly, the second mechanism just mentioned: untanned indicates wealth and a life of leisure, management and/or contemplation rather than manual labor.
Secondly, it would indicate that the person's genes are, compared to those with darker skin, in a greater proportion drawn from the genes of people who survived for generations in northern Europe, far from the equator. Those ancestors evolved cognitive abilities (as measured in IQ tests and which increase productivity and so, potentially, reproductive success, in the modern world as well as in hunter-gather and agricultural societies) which significantly exceeded those of their African ancestors, and likely Africans today, on average. To the extent that this mechanism is true, there would be an evolved and/or learned preference for people with fairer skin, since this, in general, correlates with the genetically (largely) determined mental and emotional capacities which are well suited to complex, somewhat post-agricultural, societies, such as in India. This includes the capacity for years of long-term planning to survive harsh winters, and the ability to get along in and/or profit from dominating, complex, dense, stable, societies where survival depends on many activities beyond hunting and gathering. This includes especially the planning required for agriculture.
Thirdly, to the extent that India, with its monsoons (and so months of nearly zero UV-B light) and with its long history of having more housing than our African ancestors had, places people at risk of low 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels - which is absolutely the case today, and would have been for thousands of years - those with less melanin in their skin will have higher 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels and so be very much healthier.
Proper vitamin D3 supplementation, to attain 50 ng/mL or more circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D, requires average daily levels of about 70 to 90 IUs per kg body weight, with higher ratios for those suffering from obesity. (An IU is a ridiculously small unit for vitamin D3: 1/40,000,000th of a gram. Its origin is the amount a baby rat needed each day to avoid developing rickets.) For 70 kg without obesity this is 4900 to 6300 IUs. These scarily high numbers belie the fact that this is a very small amount. 5000 IU is 0.125 milligrams. This is a gram every 22 years - and pharma-grade vitamin D costs about USD$2.50 a gram, ex-factory.
Governments and many doctors operate on the basis that the target for health is 20 ng/mL circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D, so they only recommend taking 600 to 800 IU vitamin D3 a day (0.015 to 0.02 milligrams) a day.
Only with 50 ng/mL circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D can the body mount full-strength immune responses to cancer cells, bacteria, fungi and viruses - and, for most people, only with this level or more, can the immune system properly regulate "inflammatory" immune responses. These are mediated by cells such as eosinophils - the suicide bombers of the immune system - which destroy all cells, including our own. These inflammatory responses evolved primarily to tackle multicellular pathogens, which are parasites such as helminths - intestinal worms. The other immune responses work well against viruses and individual cells, but are useless against a large, multi-cellular, parasite.
All our ancestors, from pre-primate days to about a century ago in most developed countries, were ubiquitously infected by one or more species of helminth. The helminths, long ago (pre-human and pre-primate) evolved the ability to exude one or more compounds which down-modulate (reduce, attenuate) the indiscriminate cell-destroying inflammatory immune responses which target them.
We mammals have been unable to evolve regulatory systems which evade these downmodulatory compounds. The best mammals have been able to do is evolve inflammatory responses which would be overly strong in the absence of this ubiquitous down-modulation, so that with this down-modulation (which would vary greatly with species and degree of infestation), the level of inflammatory response is about right: effective to some degree without being overly destructive of our own cells.
Y'all can probably see where this is going . . . . Now we are all (in the West, not so much in Africa or India) dewormed, we have, in general - and especially for some individuals, according to their genetic makeup - overly strong indiscriminate cell-destroying inflammatory immune responses.
Please read the research cited and discussed at https://vitamindstopscovid.info/06-adv/. This concerns helminths, lack of helminths, immune responses, using helminthic infections (https://helminthictherapy.org) to suppress autoimmune diseases such as psoriasis, asthma and multiple sclerosis. It also concerns the Coimbra Protocol and other similar very high 25-hydroxyvitamin D protocols which successfully suppress the same, to striking degree, set of auto-immune diseases, including cluster headaches, migraine and lupus. I have never seen these two subjects discussed together. Leading vitamin D researchers seem to have no interest in helminths - I have been trying to interest them for the last few years. As far as I know, the helminth researchers do not think about vitamin D.
These protocols involve ~100 ng/mL (which is generally healthy - I have about this level) to 300+ ng/mL (elevated risk of hypercalcemia), 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels, under medical supervision, with low calcium diets, lots of water and monitoring of the blood calcium ion levels (which must be within a very narrow range) and parathyroid hormone levels (when low, indicating to the kidneys that there is sufficient calcium in the blood). They are highly successful, and not nearly well enough known - in part due to lack of randomised controlled trials, which its practitioners would probably consider unethical to perform.
The Coimbra protocol doctors explain the effectiveness of their protocol in terms of overcoming "vitamin D resistance". This is a vague theory and makes no sense, for various reasons. I do not know any proper explanation for why these protocols work, but they must work by enabling the body to reduce the genetically determined intensity of inflammatory response, in the absence of helminthic down-modulation.
One piece in the puzzle is the discovery by Chauss et al. 2021 (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41590-021-01080-3 explained at https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#chauss) that Th1 regulatory lymphocytes from the lungs of hospitalised COVID-19 patients (who have such severe symptoms due to their immune system being too weak to stop the virus from reaching the lungs and which produces excessively strong, self-destructive, inflammatory responses to the resulting lung infection) fail to transition from their pro-inflammatory startup program, to their anti-inflammatory shutdown program, despite detecting the signal (high level of a complement protein) to do so. The researchers elucidated, for the first time, the precise details of the 25-hydroxyvitamin D -> calcitriol intracrine signaling system in Th1 lymphocytes, though they mistakenly called it "autocrine signaling", which is somewhat different. The successful operation of this intracrine signaling system is essential to the cell's ability to transition to the anti-inflammatory shutdown process. The researchers found that there was nothing intrinsically wrong with these cells. They found that the failure was largely or solely due to the cell not obtaining sufficient 25-hydroxyvitamin D, which it can only do via diffusion from the 25-hydroxyvitamin D circulating in the bloodstream.
(1 of 3) Thanks very much for this article.
Here are some thoughts (in multiple comments due to length restrictions) on vitamin D, tanned fair skin, genetically dark or black skin, inflammation and helminths (intestinal worms).
Most doctors, immunologists, public health officials, virologists, epidemiologists, vaccinologists etc. are not aware of several important facts about the immune system. They tend to think of "vitamin D" as just another over-hyped nutritional supplement.
They understand the way vitamin D3 is hydroxylated, primarily in the liver, to become circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D, which is what is measured in "vitamin D" blood tests and which is required by the kidneys for the function described next. They tend to think of all three compounds: vitamin D3 cholecalciferol, 25-hydroxyvitamin D calcifediol (AKA "calcidiol") and 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D calcitriol as all being "vitamin D". They also tend to think of "vitamin D" as being a hormone. In 2004, Rheinhold Vieth https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/j.jsbmb.2004.03.037 pointed out that both these are serious errors. These are three separate compounds, with distinct roles in the body. Only calcitriol can operate as a hormone, but that it not its only role.
The kidneys hydroxylate some of the circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D to become a very low (usually less than 0.1 ng/mL) and tightly controlled, level of circulating calcitriol. This functions as a hormone to affect or control the activities of several cell types in multiple locations in the body regarding calcium-phosphate-bone metabolism. (A hormone is a blood-borne signaling molecule whose level is controlled, usually by one gland which produces it, and which affects the behavior of cells elsewhere in the body. It may also cross over into the cerebrospinal fluid.) This is part of a system involving osteocytes (cells in the bone), the parathyroid gland and the kidneys which regulates bone development and the absorption and excretion of calcium.
There is a broad awareness that "vitamin D" is important to the immune system. Many vitamin D researchers are unaware of Rheinhold Vieth's critique and continue to refer to all three compounds as if they were "vitamin D". The "vitamin D" receptor molecule is really the calcitriol receptor, since it binds most strongly to calcitriol and only very weakly to the other two compounds.
Most people in these fields think that the stable, very low, level of circulating calcitriol somehow "modulates the immune system", so that more calcitriol means a better immune response. This is not the case. The immune system is not affected by, nor does it affect, to any significant effect (except in granulomatous disorders and a few cancers), this circulating level of calcitriol. Many types of immune cell rely on a good level of circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D - 50 ng/mL (125 nmol/L = 1 part in 20,000,000 by mass) to run their intracrine (inside each cell) and paracrine (to nearby cells, by calcitriol diffusing a small distance, at levels much higher than the hormonal background level) signaling systems in order for each individual cell to alter its behavior in response to its changing circumstances.
The research which discovered these signaling processes is not well known and there is no peer-reviewed journal article or any textbook I am familiar with (I have not yet seen "Vitamin D, 5th edition") which explains this in a tutorial fashion. So I wrote such a tutorial, one version of which is in this page of citations and discussion of research on the vitamin D compounds and the immune system: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#02-compounds . If you read or at least familiarize yourself with the research cited there you will understand this crucial aspect of the immune system much better than most immunologists, doctors and even vitamin D researchers.
This page starts with recommendations on how much vitamin D3 to supplement, on average, per day, in order to safely attain at least the 50 ng/mL circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D needed for full immune system function. These are the recommendations of New Jersey based Professor of Medicine Sunil Wimalawansa, which he slightly simplified from those in his 2022 article in Nutrients: "Rapidly Increasing Serum 25(OH)D Boosts the Immune System, against Infections - Sepsis and COVID-19" https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/14/2997 .
The amount depends on body weight and obesity status, since people suffering from obesity have greater difficulty converting vitamin D3 into circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/#obesity-deficit.
There is very little vitamin D3 (or the less effective D2) in food, whether it is fortified or not. There is no such thing as "vitamin D rich food" if the goal is to attain 50 ng/mL circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D the immune system needs. However, such foods can help attain the much easier to achieve 20 ng/mL the kidneys need in order to play their role in regulating calcium-phosphate-bone metabolism.
Short wavelength ultraviolet B light, around 297 nanometres, at the very top (frequency, and so energy per excited electron) fraction of a percent of the Sun's spectrum which reaches the Earth's surface h, breaks one of the carbon rings in 7-dehydrocholesterol, which is found in the skin, converting it to compound with the same set of atoms, which changes shape of its own accord and settles down to be vitamin D3 cholecalciferol. 7-dehydrocholesterol is the last step in one of the two chains of molecular modifications which supply the body's cholesterol.
UV-B is only available naturally in quantities sufficient to supply good amounts of vitamin D3 (as needed for 50 ng/mL circulating25-hydroxyvitamin D) from high elevation sunlight on a cloud-free day, without any intervening glass, sunscreen or clothing. Far from the equator, this can only occur in summer.
This UV-B is most effective for synthesizing vitamin D3 in white skin. Melanin absorbs it before it can reach the layers of skin which contain 7-dehydrocholesterol which is coupled to the circulatory system. This high level of melanin in the skin of Africans, and so in our ancestors, evolved partly to protect the skin against general damage from this high energy UV-B and in particular to protect the living cells from DNA damage, which can kill cells or predispose those which survive to becoming cancerous.
The ancestors of many modern humans evolved genes which created little or no cutaneous melanin after they moved to Europe, and especially northern Europe and Siberia, where there is not enough UV-B to generate enough vitamin D3 to generate 50 ng/mL circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D at any time of year, even with white skin, except perhaps in areas closer to the equator, in summer. (Circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D has a half-life of weeks or a month or so at lower levels, but a small, crucial, amount would enable people to survive, with difficulty, over the long winter months.) The small amounts of vitamin D3 and perhaps 25-hydroxyvitamin D in seafood surely contributed significantly to the very low 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels with which northern Europeans survived then, and to this day.
As we move into the technology age, height, and muscularity may become less important in males.