An argument for the sun
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All right, Sally Helm, co-host of Unexplainable. What do you got today? What are you working on?
Okay, well, first I want to ask you a question. When you think of the sun... What do you feel?
I immediately go to Teletubbies. Is that weird?
That's not what I expected.
You know, the baby sun wakes up in the morning and it's like really creepy. Okay, so I feel good. Warm, right?
Totally, classic effect of the sun, yeah.
Makes me happy.
Yeah. Yeah, the sun is good. This feels like a simple question. Well, okay, I'm going to just let you know that I read a whole book about sun and its effects on our bodies. Okay, okay. And I learned from reading this book that the sun has just like all of these mysterious effects on our body. And there's a lot that we still don't understand. I mean, if you think about it, it's more bizarre than we give it credit for.
How did historian and author Rowan Jacobsen come to study sunlight's effects?
It's like photons of light hitting us and ricocheting around.
Photons of light from 93 million miles away.
Yeah.
That somehow make us happy when we go outside.
Among many other things. So I really, I wanted to get into all this with the author of that book, In Defense of Sunlight. His name is Rowan Jacobson. And I have that interview for us today.
Amazing. Are you going to explain the sun?
I'm going to explain the sun totally and completely, and you'll never have any questions about it again.
Okay. Can I hear it?
You can.
Now?
Now.
Now? Now?
Rowan Jacobson, welcome to the show.
Thanks, Sally. Good to be here.
All right, we're going to go deep down the rabbit hole together here. I want to first, though, can you just give me a little bit of a hint of the ending here? Tell me, after doing all this research, how have you changed the way that you relate to the sun?
I think totally differently about... sunlight and about light in general. People don't realize all the light that surrounds us is actually being absorbed by our molecules. So I started seeing light as this physical force that's interacting with my body in a lot of different ways. What does that mean? Is it good? Is it bad? Is it both? But then if you want to get really cosmic for a moment here.
I do, please.
Well, so all of the energy in our bodies was once light. All of that energy was sunlight. Came from the sun, came to Earth, usually got absorbed by a plant, and then made its way to us. So it's just sunlight taking different forms. And our entire consciousness is basically this flow of light transformed into different types of energy that is just moving through our bodies all the time. Over the past few decades, we've all been kind of trained to feel a little guilty when sunlight hits us. And that went away for me once I'd done this research. And it fixed my relationship with the sun, in a sense.
Yeah, let's talk about the history of that a little bit. because you're right. I think a lot of us feel guilty about the sun because of skin damage, which we will get into. But you do, in your book, you take us back to a time when heliotherapy was actually all the rage. So tell us about that, like starting in the 1800s, peaking in the 1920s. What did that look like?
We are in a bit of a historical anomaly with this idea that sunlight is bad for us. That would have been a strange notion to most peoples throughout history, but especially this era, the heliotherapy era, which started in the early 1900s in both Europe and the U.S., and was really a reaction to two diseases that were rampant, tuberculosis and rickets. And both those diseases can be treated with sunlight. Rickets is a lack of vitamin D, and vitamin D is produced in the skin with the help of sunlight. And one of the things that vitamin D does is it helps to get calcium into your bones, so your bones get hard.
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