Rowan Jacobsen

speaker

1,919 appearances 4 recordings 4 series first heard Jul 2022 last heard 26 Jun

Rowan Jacobsen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.

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Age Better with Liz Earle · Why sunlight is key to a longer, healthier life – with Rowan Jacobsen · 26 Jun 2026 podcast

that people's level of D in their blood, their natural level, correlated with rates of every disease you can think of, heart disease, cancers, dementia, autoimmune diseases, depression, very strong relationship where if you have low levels of D, you have higher rates of all those diseases.

And D is actually a very good reflection.

Your amount of D in your body is a very good reflection of how much sunlight you've been exposed to.

So they knew if they told people, don't let yourself be in the sun, the D levels were going to drop and it looked like that was bad for health.

But the guess, and in retrospect, it looks overly simplistic.

was that, well, you know, if D is doing all these great things, all you have to do is take a pill to raise your D artificially, and you'll lower your rates of all these diseases.

It'll take care of it without the sun.

So that's what people were told to do.

That's what we're still told to do.

But we've now had some very, very large randomized clinical trials to test that, to make sure that D supplementation would lead to lower rates of disease.

and across the board in pretty much every case it has not turned out to do anything it hasn't delivered any of the benefits it was supposed to um which is still i mean it's still news to a lot of doctors who are still prescribing d pills or they may be just be doing it because you know patients want you to do something yeah i understand why doctors yeah they like pills um

But the D, the oral D clearly doesn't do the same as having natural high levels of D from sunlight.

So then the question is, was the D the thing that was working to prevent all these diseases all along?

Or was it just sort of like along for the ride?

It was just an indicator of sun exposure and other things about the sun were actually responsible for the benefits.

And I don't think we know yet.

Yeah, we're getting pretty complicated here.

But this is the cutting edge of our current understanding of what's happening.

You mentioned mitochondria earlier.

And I think they are going to be a big part of this story eventually.

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