Stirring the Cauldron

New Moon Newsletters from Jessica Prentice

New Moon of Long Nights

December moondark kitchen notes
from Jessica Prentice

The moon is new! We have entered the lunar phase known as The Moon of Long Nights in The Old Farmer's Almanac. In this moon we will move through the winter solstice -- the longest night of the year.

I have been thinking a lot lately about the meaning of winter and of its effect on our lives. This autumn I had the opportunity to attend two wonderful conferences on the East Coast: The Women in Sustainable Agriculture Conference in Vermont, and the Wise Traditions in Food, Farming, and the Healing Arts Conference in Virginia. At the first, I thoroughly enjoyed the company and conversation of the attending women farmers, many of whom were from northern states where winter has a very different meaning than it does here in California. I gave a presentation with a Wisconsin farmer who has a 900-member CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) farm. I was shocked to realize that they can only offer their standard vegetable share for 4-5 months out of the year. This is as long a harvesting season as the weather allows. Here in the Bay Area, most farms harvest from their fields year-round.

At the second conference, the presentation that most caught my attention was a talk about vitamin D. It brought home to me another aspect of winter -- one shared by Americans regardless of the temperature -- the lack of sunlight. The man giving the presentation was John Cannell, MD, founder of the Vitamin D Council. He is very concerned with the health implications of vitamin D deficiency. This deficiency appears to be very widespread, and is implicated in cancer, depression, mental illness, diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, obesity, Multiple Sclerosis, osteoarthritis, muscle weakness and falls, chronic pain and other common diseases. Severe deficiency causes rickets, and this is why vitamin D began to be added to the U.S. milk supply in the 1930s. Unfortunately, you would need to drink 40 glasses of fortified milk a day to get enough vitamin D to give you the optimal levels.

The easiest way to get vitamin D is to synthesize it from the sun. When people lived an agrarian, pastoralist, or hunter-gatherer lifestyle, spending most of the day out-of-doors, this could happen naturally. Light-skinned people synthesize adequate vitamin D for the day in about 20 minutes of midday sun exposure during the summer. Dr. Cannell described this as a brilliant evolutionary strategy: once we have synthesized all the vitamin D we need from the sunlight, we become vulnerable to burn -- a built-in control that prevents us from synthesizing toxic amounts of this nutrient.

It takes longer for dark-skinned people to synthesize enough vitamin D from the sun. This makes sense when you think of the sunlight-rich areas in the equatorial belt where many dark-skinned people evolved to live: Central Africa, the Amazonian rainforest, and South Pacific Islands. In these areas, people can synthesize adequate vitamin D from the sun throughout the year as long as they live their lives outdoors -- which traditional cultures in these areas always did. The pigmentation in their skin prevents them from burning; the slower synthesis of D prevents toxicity. Such evolutionary adaptations between human beings and the sun are fascinating to contemplate.

The farther you get away from the equator, the fewer months of the year you are able to synthesize adequate vitamin D from the sun. Peoples who have lived in very northern latitudes for millennia had to develop a different strategy to get adequate vitamin D: they had to get it from their food. There are only a few foods that are naturally very rich in vitamin D, and -- surprise, surprise -- these are foods that characterize the traditional foodways of many of Earth's northernmost dwellers: seal, cod liver, salmon, herring, mackerel, sardines, oysters, fish roe, and lard from pastured hogs. In all cases, the vitamin D concentrates in the fatty portions of the animal.

When thought of in this light, it is no longer surprising that the way of eating amongst the Inuit was to dip each morsel of fish or meat into seal oil before eating it. This ensured adequate vitamin D where sunlight was insufficient to supply it. It also becomes logical that a whole industry should have arisen around the extraction of cod liver oil among Nordic peoples, and that this oil should have been the one supplement that many Europeans and European-Americans took each day until World War II. When you could not hope to eat enough oily fish every day to get adequate vitamin D, you got it from the place it is most concentrated -- the oil of the liver. This also helps explain why indigenous people in one part of the world would thrive on a diet that is made up of 90% animal foods, like the Inuit, while others would thrive on a diet made up of 90% plant foods, such as that of West Africans. Their access to sunlight and so to vitamin D is at opposite ends of the spectrum.

It also seems that much of the fear-mongering of recent decades in regards to sun exposure has been based on faulty premises. Skin cancer rates have risen as rates of exposure to the sun have fallen. Much evidence now shows that exposure to the sun can be preventive against cancer rather than causative of it. (Check out this article: Could Too Little Sun Cause Cancer?) Since science seems to be so often used to serve corporate and business interests, I find it difficult to know how to read scientific studies to ascertain the "truth." I often find myself relying on common sense, intuition and broad historical shifts to figure out what I believe about a particular scientific "fact." Our ancestors spent their days out-of-doors working in the fields without developing melanomas -- so has all the advice to assiduously avoid the sun at all costs been somewhat misplaced? And if so, what is causing the rise in skin cancer?

This week I heard a radio interview with Swedish researcher Olle Johansson. The interview focused on the adverse health effects of exposure to radio frequency radiation from wireless technologies. Sources of radio frequency radiation include television, FM radio waves, cell phones, computer screens, and wireless internet access. Dr. Johansson's latest article reports research that shows a strong connection between these technologies and melanomas on the skin. I highly recommend listening to the interview if you have a chance. It will be available for free online until Tuesday December 6th: yourownhealthandfitness.org/radioshow.html

More fear-mongering? I don't think so. It only makes common sense to me that diseases that appeared during the modern era and have been affecting people at rapidly rising rates during the modern era should stem from aspects of our modern lifestyle -- not timeless aspects of life such as sunshine. It also only makes common sense to me that every technology will have impacts on the human beings that use it -- whether that technology is fire, the domestication of seed plants and animals, television, cell phones, or genetic engineering. Many of these impacts are only visible with the 20-20 vision of hindsight. Our modern lifestyle includes many technologies that are spreading through human societies at unprecedented rates -- we have all witnessed this with email and cell-phones. Modern foods are spreading equally rapidly -- hydrogenated vegetable oils and soft drinks are now consumed even by peoples living in remote areas of the Earth.

Besides, there is no money to be made by people soaking up the sun, but there is a great deal of money to be made selling them products to protect them from the sun. There is also a great deal of money to be made by the communication technologies that are contributing to the "electrosmog" that Dr. Johannson is studying. If you want to distinguish unnecessary fear-mongering from prudent caution, I suggest you follow the money.

In the meantime, I am finding myself in love with the sun, and full of appreciation for the mysteries of human life on sunlit Earth. I am encouraging myself to spend more time out of doors. For the past year or so, I have made a concerted effort to take about 20 minutes a day around noon to sit outside on my deck, strip off some (or all!) of my clothes and synthesize some vitamin D. At the same time, of course, I get to feel the warmth and the great gift of light and life that comes from the sun. Even during the winter, I try not to be more cave-man than the cave-men by spending all day holed up in a dark room with my modern technology. I try to get outside and soak up whatever natural light there is to enjoy.

But I know that that is not adequate to provide my body with the vitamin D it needs -- especially during the Moon of Long Nights. So I also make sure that I take my daily tablespoon of high-vitamin cod liver oil. I know very well why I am doing it, and I know that I am carrying on a very old and wise tradition -- which makes it very easy to swallow.

Blessings to you all this holiday season -- when each of us in our own way gives thanks for the gift of light, and the return of the Sun.