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posted by janrinok on Monday December 26 2016, @11:35PM   Printer-friendly
from the just-in-time-for-winter-here dept.

Sunlight allows us to make vitamin D, credited with healthier living, but a surprise research finding could reveal another powerful benefit of getting some sun.

Georgetown University Medical Center researchers have found that sunlight, through a mechanism separate than vitamin D production, energizes T cells that play a central role in human immunity.

Their findings, published today in Scientific Reports, suggest how the skin, the body's largest organ, stays alert to the many microbes that can nest there.

"We all know sunlight provides vitamin D, which is suggested to have an impact on immunity, among other things. But what we found is a completely separate role of sunlight on immunity," says the study's senior investigator, Gerard Ahern, PhD, associate professor in the Georgetown's Department of Pharmacology and Physiology. "Some of the roles attributed to vitamin D on immunity may be due to this new mechanism."

They specifically found that low levels of blue light, found in sun rays, makes T cells move faster -- marking the first reported human cell responding to sunlight by speeding its pace.

Bad news for our basement-dwelling brethren.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 27 2016, @12:53AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 27 2016, @12:53AM (#446206)

    They can afford to travel to where the sunlight is. And you know billionaires deserve to be healthy. Because they're rich and therefore better people.