SUN POWERED

Experiment 001

Reading time: 16 minutes

Turn the sun off and give us a month.

Photosynthesis stops the same day. The plants go first, and everything that eats plants is on a countdown behind them. The water stops moving, because the water cycle is only the sun lifting the ocean into the sky and dropping it back on us as rain. The wind stops, because wind is air the sun heated unevenly. Inside a week the average surface temperature on this planet is below minus 18 Celsius, and the oceans start to freeze from the top down.

A month is generous.

Everything here is stored sunlight

The sun does not only run this planet. It built almost everything on it.

Coal is compressed plant matter, buried before it could rot and pressed into rock over millions of years. Crude oil and natural gas are mostly ancient plankton from the sea floor, put through the same process. The wood in your fireplace is a tree that spent thirty years catching light. And the food on your plate is the shortest version: a plant caught the light, and either you ate the plant or you ate the animal that ate the plant.

Every fuel we have ever burned and every meal anyone has ever eaten began with light hitting a leaf.

Which means we are all solar panels. Plants, animals, you, me, every living thing on this planet pointed at the same star.

The first thing humans ever agreed on

I have said for years that the sun is the closest thing we have to a representation of God, or at least to the power people mean when they say the word. I mean that as an argument, not as worship. I was an altar boy in an Orthodox church as a kid, so I know exactly how much work a symbol does. People cannot hold energy in their hands, so we give it a shape. An icon, a cross, a flame, a book. The sun does not need one. It is the energy itself, and everything alive is running on it right now, including you.

Every civilization that got here before us worked this out with no instruments at all. Ra in Egypt, Helios in Greece, Kinich Ahau for the Maya, Amaterasu in Japan, and the sun is still on their flag, and on more than a dozen other national flags. Long before anyone had a word for a hormone or a wavelength, the first thing humans called a god was the thing they could feel keeping them alive.

And now we are told to hide from it.

I am not a doctor and this is not medical advice. Skin cancer is real and nothing here is an argument for burning. This is my research, what I found, and what I actually do.

What the sun does to you

Ask what the sun does for you and everybody thinks vitamin D. Here are the ones with the most behind them.

One thing first. The sun reaches you through two separate doors, your eyes and your skin, and they do completely different jobs. Your eyes run your internal clock. Your skin does everything else. Keep those two apart and most of the contradictions you have read about the sun sort themselves out.

Vitamin D, which is not a vitamin

Start with the name, because the name is the problem. Vitamin D is a steroid hormone, and your body builds it out of light. Your skin holds a cholesterol precursor, UVB converts it, your liver and your kidney finish the job, and what comes out binds a receptor inside your cells the way a hormone does. It got called a vitamin in 1922, before anyone understood what they were looking at, and that one word made a century of people treat it as a nutrient you top up.

You can also get it from food, and the list is shorter than people think. Eggs, salmon, sardines, cod liver oil, and a handful of others. And a lot of that is stored sunlight too. The fish got it up the food chain from plankton that made it under UV. The egg depends entirely on the hen: one that gets outside produces far more of it than one that only gets it from feed.

Then there is the pill, which is where almost everybody ends up. And the pill is stored sunlight too, which nobody tells you. Most of the D3 on the shelf is made by shining ultraviolet on lanolin, the grease from sheep’s wool. The vegan version comes from lichen. The same trick your skin does, run in a factory. Note that the pill has never managed to reproduce what the sunlight studies keep showing. The system was built around light, and everything else is a workaround.

This is what vitamin D does, and it is a lot. It pulls calcium and phosphate out of your food and drives them into your bones, which is why a serious shortage shows up as rickets in a child and soft, weakened bone in an adult. It works on muscle strength and on how often older people fall. It regulates your parathyroid gland. It switches on the antimicrobial peptides your immune system uses as a first line against infection, and it tunes the immune response, which is where the most interesting recent trial result turned up, on autoimmune disease, and that one did come from a pill. It is involved in how cells grow and when they stop growing. And receptors for it sit in around thirty different tissues, including your brain, your heart, your gut and your pancreas. Almost nothing your body treats as a nutrient gets that kind of access.

Where I am currently based, the sun stops being an option for a third of the year. From November to early March it never climbs high enough over Montreal to make any vitamin D at all. Not a little. None. It can be a sunny, cloudless winter day, you can stand out in it for an hour, and your skin will produce nothing. The problem is the angle of the sun, not the weather. Montreal is not a special case either. It is latitude: the further north you live the longer that window lasts, and most people living through one every year have no idea it is happening.

So through those months I supplement. Besides the four eggs I eat most days all year round and the fish I eat regularly, I take 10,000 IU a day. I read enough research on the benefits of high doses to convince myself and I am running it as an experiment on my own body. Note that the official ceiling is 4,000. I am telling you what I do, not handing you a protocol to copy.

A few things worth knowing before you copy anybody. It is fat soluble, so take it with your biggest meal. The same dose lands completely differently in different people, because of your genes, your body fat, how well your gut absorbs it and whether you have enough magnesium to activate it. And the K2 everybody tells you to take alongside it does have research behind it, mostly on bone and on arterial stiffness, but none of it tests the thing people actually take it for, which is protecting you from a high dose. The only number that means anything is the one you get back from blood work, not the one on the bottle.

Your circadian clock

There are cells in your retina that are not there for seeing. Their only job is to report how much light is around to a clock in your brain, and that clock sets your cortisol, your body temperature and your hunger, and schedules your melatonin for roughly fourteen hours later. The light that lands in your eyes at seven in the morning is what decides whether you get sleepy at eleven that night.

Those cells measure light accurately. Your conscious brain does not. Your eyes adjust in seconds, so a lit room and the open sky both arrive as simply bright, and that kitchen at seven in the morning feels no different to you than the same kitchen at nine at night. A well lit kitchen is around 500 lux. Outside on a sunny morning it is 25,000. Fifty times the light, and none of it feels fifty times brighter. So you sit indoors believing you have had plenty of light, and your clock has had almost none.

I own a 10,000 lux mood light. I bought it years ago because a friend swore by it, and then it sat on my desk collecting dust, because I make a point of not being here in winter. Now it lives on my bedside with a different job. On gloomy mornings, when I am up before the sun, or when I just cannot get outside, I turn it on for ten minutes before I get out of bed. Not for my mood. To tell my clock the day has started.

Researchers sent people camping for a week with no artificial light at all, nothing but daylight and a campfire, and their whole clock moved, most of it in the first two nights. Melatonin started arriving more than two and a half hours earlier. They were falling asleep at a normal hour instead of at midnight.

The fire is probably part of why it works. A flame has almost no blue in it, so it never tells your brain the day is still going, the way a screen does. Neither does moonlight.

Which is the problem with what we replaced fire and candlelight with. The same blue light that sets your clock in the morning is the thing that wrecks it at eleven at night. There is a fix, and a lot of it comes down to the kind of bulb you screw into your lamp. That one gets its own Lab Note, and it is coming.

Nitric oxide

Three scientists took the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1998 for working out what this one molecule does, and most people have still never heard of it.

It relaxes and widens your blood vessels, which is why Viagra works, and it is a large part of how your blood pressure gets regulated. It keeps blood from clotting where it should not. It drives blood into muscle while you train and helps build new mitochondria there. It carries signals through your immune system. It moves blood to your brain, and it turns up in learning and memory. It even helps wounds heal.

Food raises it. Beets and leafy greens carry nitrate, and bacteria in your mouth and your gut turn that into nitric oxide. Your body also makes some of it from arginine, an amino acid you get from meat, fish, nuts and seeds.

The sun skips all of that. Your skin is already carrying a store of nitric oxide, waiting, and UVA releases it straight into your circulation. No eating, no digesting, no converting. One step.

For a molecule nobody talks about, nitric oxide is doing an enormous amount of work in your body, and I will come back to it.

Red and near-infrared light

I own a red light panel. A fancy one, and I did a lot of research before spending the money. The marketing on these is aggressive and the science underneath it is real, but the quality of the panel matters more than either. Plenty of the cheap LED panels out there are not strong enough to do anything at all, which makes them a waste of money and a daily waste of your time.

The research on the mechanism is solid. Those wavelengths are absorbed inside your mitochondria, the part of the cell that turns food and oxygen into usable energy. There are hundreds to thousands of them in a single cell, and when they start failing, the cell starts failing. How well your mitochondria are still running has become one of the clearest markers we have of how well you are aging.

And this is where nitric oxide comes back. It parks inside those same mitochondria and slows them down. The leading explanation for red light is that it knocks the nitric oxide loose and frees the mitochondria to work. One molecule, two jobs, both switched on by light.

The wavelength decides the job, because it decides the depth. Red, roughly 630 to 700 nanometers, works at the surface, which is why the evidence is strongest for skin and for hair. Near-infrared, up around 800 to 850, goes deeper into tissue, which is where the work on recovery and on pain comes from. It runs on a spectrum, and each band reaches a different layer of you and goes to work on the mitochondria sitting at that layer.

Here is what nobody selling you a panel mentions. Roughly forty percent of the energy in ordinary sunlight is already red and near-infrared, landing on all of you at once, over far more of you than any panel covers. Nobody invented this. The panel isolates one slice of daylight and hands it to you indoors, at a dose you control.

Which is what most treatments are. Isolate the thing, concentrate it, sell it back to the people who cannot reach the source. Same as a vitamin D pill. Worth paying for when the real thing is not available. So I run the panel religiously from November to March, the same way I run the vitamin D protocol. From April it goes surgical: a gloomy week, a faster recovery after a hard week in the gym. The rest of the time I go outside, because the original is out there and it has never sent me a bill.

Mood

Bright light for seasonal depression performs about as well as antidepressants do in clinical trials, and a mood lamp is nothing more than that. There is also a study where ultraviolet drove a real opioid response in mice, with real withdrawal when it was blocked. The researchers used the word addiction as a warning.

Nobody needed the paper. Look at where the first civilizations went up. Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley, the Yellow River, and the Andes. Every one of them landed in the same warm band of the planet, roughly between ten degrees south and thirty five north, where the light was reliable and things grew. Everything built further out from that band cost more work: thicker walls, stored fuel, and food that had to be preserved through months when nothing came out of the ground. The ones who can get away still fly back toward it every winter, and the ones who cannot count the days until March. They built temples to it. We build airports to reach it.

Sunlight does one more thing for me. I am fifty, and the only thing about aging that actually bothers me is my reading vision. Distance is perfect. Close up, without glasses, I am done.

Then I found a free hack by accident, and you should test it if you wear reading glasses. A few years ago I got out of the pool, picked up my phone and started reading until I realized I had no glasses on. My optometrist friend explained it best: bright light shrinks your pupil, and a smaller opening gives you a deeper range of focus, exactly like a pinhole. One more reason to be out in the sun. The moment I walk back inside, I cannot read a text message if my life depended on it.

It is not a fix, and finding a real one is a mission I am on. That one gets its own Experiment as well.

The research on the benefits of the sun is still unfinished. New findings keep arriving, because the money went to the risks first.

One rule for everybody

Slip on a shirt. Slop on sunscreen. Slap on a hat.

Australia launched that in 1981. A marketing campaign built on a real problem, in the country with the worst skin cancer rates on earth at the time. It worked, and it got exported to every country that had a summer, where it never changed.

Australia has since rewritten it, and the new version is three sets of advice where there used to be one. The palest are told to stay out of the sun whenever the UV index hits 3, and to get their vitamin D from supplements instead. The darkest are told they do not need sunscreen routinely. Everybody in between is told to wear it any day the UV index hits 3 and to deliberately spend controlled time outdoors most days, for the vitamin D. Their own sentence for it: the balance of risks and benefits is not the same for everybody. So the country that wrote the rule split it in three, and North America is still running the 1981 version.

The real science was never about minutes. How much sun is safe for you is a fraction of your own burn threshold, and your starting point is inherited from people who lived at one latitude for thousands of years. Which makes how much sun is safe a question about your ancestors. Mine were Phoenician, calibrated for the eastern Mediterranean, and I am running that hardware in Montreal, at forty five degrees north with four months of no usable sun attached. A Scottish woman in Dubai has the same problem pointed the other way. One sentence was never going to fit both of us.

And hiding has its own cost. A famous Swedish study followed nearly thirty thousand women for twenty years and found that the ones who avoided the sun died earlier. This alone cannot prove the sun was the reason. But thirty thousand women followed for two decades, with the ones who stayed indoors doing worse and no study since finding the opposite, has to count for something.

Then there is the finding that reorganizes the whole argument. Researchers pooled the studies on melanoma and sun exposure and found two completely different patterns inside the same data. People who are outside every day show no increase in melanoma risk at all. The office worker who spends the year indoors and then takes one intense week somewhere sunny carries a real one, and a pattern of repeated sunburn roughly doubles it.

The reason is that skin adapts. Regular exposure thickens the outer layer and builds pigment, so the dose reaching the cells that matter keeps falling. Skin that has not seen real sun since October has none of that, and a Caribbean afternoon lands on it at full strength.

I know this one firsthand. Even though I try to keep a base tan all year long, three months of a Montreal fall takes most of it back, so I land in Sint Maarten at the end of December with a lot of it faded. My friends have me out on the boat the first day, and then again the next day, and the next. No shade, no protection, and the water throwing the light straight back up at me. This is exactly the pattern the research describes, and it is why I burn on the rare occasions I ever do.

One instruction sits above everything else in this section. Do not burn. It is the only part of the old advice that never expired, and now you know why it was the part that mattered. Everything else is a dial rather than a switch, and where you set it depends on your skin and where your grandparents came from. If you are pale, build up slowly. And stay out of tanning beds, which fire concentrated ultraviolet at unadapted skin on purpose. That is the exact pattern the research warns about, sold to you as a service.

What I do

I am lucky enough to be able to keep a baseline all year. Every winter, and for over twenty years now, I leave for the Caribbean or somewhere else sunny, sometimes weeks, sometimes months, sometimes back and forth. I even started a flip flop company somewhere in the middle of that, which tells you a bit about my lifestyle.

Then I build on it every spring. The moment the sun is out, I am out in it, and from the day the pool opens until the cold arrives in October I am outside for a good part of every day. This is the part most people skip, and it is the whole thing: I never let it go completely, so my skin never has to start over.

Now the part people argue with me about.

I have not worn sunscreen in over twenty years.

That does not mean you should not, and I want to be precise, because this gets heard wrong. I have no problem with protecting yourself from the sun. Shade, a hat, a shirt, and if it comes to it a mineral sunscreen, zinc oxide or titanium dioxide. Protecting your face is a real thing and you are not wrong to want to, because UV breaks down collagen and that part is not in dispute.

My problem is what is in most bottles. The chemical filters in them cross your skin and get into your blood. That is not a theory, it has been measured in people, in the FDA’s own clinical trials. Nobody has established how much harm it does yet, which is not the same as establishing that it does none. And it is not only sunscreen. It is makeup, moisturizer, serum and whatever else gets slapped on. You put a chemical film on the largest organ you own, and then you go and cook it in the sun for six hours. So I put nothing on my face or my body.

For what it is worth, I am fifty. I have almost no wrinkles or loose skin, while out in the sun with no sunscreen. I am in no way giving you skin advice. I eat real food, no junk and nothing processed, and I supplement with collagen. That, and maybe some good genes, must be doing a lot of the work here.

Last winter, for the first time, I did not go south. I was engulfed in a project, I had friends visiting from out of town, life happened. But I did everything I have just told you about: the panel ran all winter, the vitamin D was locked into the protocol, the mood light was on beside the bed. And by February the winter caught up with me anyway. Which tells you the sun is doing more than anything we know how to bottle or reproduce with a lamp.

That same winter my sister made a more permanent move. She was done with Canadian winters and not happy here anymore. Rather than complain about it for another decade, she spent the past couple of years traveling around Europe working out where to go. She chose Nice, in the south of France, sold her place, took her cats and never looked back. A few months in, she is happy and alive again.

So I did not solve that winter with my protocol. I patched it. My sister solved it.

If you take one thing out of this

Go outside in the morning for ten minutes. Not through a window, not through a windshield, and no sunglasses. Do not look directly at the sun. Just be out in it. Not for the vitamin D, because at that hour there is barely any UVB in the sky. Do it for the clock.

Ten minutes outside ends the guessing, and everything downstream of that clock starts running on time.

Do not be scared of your source of life. You are sun powered, and you are allowed to go outside.

Experiment 001 is complete. You just read it.

Georges

The long version of who is writing this is on the About page. Fifty years of taking things apart, in one place.

Usually one Experiment on Sunday. Lab Notes in between. Free.