WIR: Vitamin D3 supplementation to help ease sunburn
Research Paper: https://www.jidonline.org/article/S0022-202X(17)31558-0/fulltext
This is something that I have put into practice for myself and I find it really works. I think we can agree that we need sun. I think we can also agree that the benefits of the sun is dose dependent. It’s also easy to overdo it, especially when you’re enjoying outside activities and maybe forgot your mineral based sunscreen.
Vitamin D3 can be leveraged as an anti-inflammatory if taken either before, or shortly after over-exposure to the sun. It is a powerful hormone. My oncologist urged me to maintain good D levels.
Although considerable attention has been placed on vitamin D deficiency and optimizing supplementation strategies, appreciation for the diverse biological effects and long-term outcomes of vitamin D now include the modulation of immune responses, inflammatory disease, cardiovascular health, and carcinogenesis.
The effect is dose dependent. The research tried doses from 50,000 IU to 200,000 IU. Most people are deficient in vitamin D anyway, so you should probably be supplementing.
I personally take about 50,000IU if I get burned badly and want to mitigate the effects. It is pretty amazing.
“We hypothesize that vitamin D helps promote protective barriers in the skin by rapidly reducing inflammation. What we did not expect was that at a certain dose, vitamin D not only was capable of suppressing inflammation, it was also activating skin repair genes.”
Pay special attention to the ‘repair genes’ part. This actually feeds back into the concept of Melanoma: Over Sun or Under Repaired paper I looked at earlier this week. If we are working/playing/living inside, and using sunscreen that blocks UVB which is the wavelength the allows our body to make its own vitamin D, it’s not a huge mental leap to see why we would be under-repairing (which is what D does) when exposed to sun and the possible DNA damage resulting from the radio-frequency smog, which might be contributing to the melanoma trends.
Maintain your D levels, and mega-dose when you need extra help with an acute over-exposure.