Rowan Jacobsen

They tested... They did some tests on dogs.

Actually, one of the guys figured it out.

He had a hunch that that's what it was.

They noticed that kids in the country wouldn't get rickets and kids in the city did get rickets.

So they're like, I wonder if it's sunlight.

So then a guy took dogs and this was, I think, Scotland...

stuck them in a... They actually thought it was dietary.

He stuck them inside in this little warehouse and fed them oatmeal, which is what everyone in Scotland ate at the time.

And the dogs got rickets.

And he thought it was the oatmeal.

He's like, okay, so something about diet.

But then he got lucky because he had deprived the dogs of sunlight.

And that's why they got rickets.

So then eventually they realized that...

light hitting cholesterol molecules in the skin actually converts the molecules to vitamin D. So vitamin D is like downstream of cholesterol, but it takes that same ultraviolet light that can screw up your DNA.

It actually breaks a bond in the cholesterol molecule, which allows it to, it gives it some movement and it flips around into a new form that's vitamin D. So once I figure that out,

Um, then they're like, son's really good for you.

So we had this era in like the twenties, thirties and into the forties when everyone thought son would cure everything.

And they like went after it hard.

Yeah.