 We've been told our entire lives that the sun can cause skin cancer and that tanning beds are even worse. This didn't really make much sense to me considering that our hunter-gatherer ancestors, various indigenous groups, native people, needed to be in the sun for 10 to 12 hours every single day just to get enough food to survive. If you weren't outside hunting, fishing, harvesting crops, the majority of the day at all times of the year, you weren't procuring enough calories to sustain yourself. So this gave me the understanding that, okay, we need to be in the sun one way or another. Now, what are the modern solutions to this and what is the purpose of vitamin D3? I mean, we could obviously go out in sunbathe for several hours during the spring and summer months, but that's not practical for most people. We could supplement, which I will touch on later, and people seem to be very negative about tanning beds. But when I looked into the bulbs and the UVA to UVB ratio that occurs in tanning booths, it's actually identical to the sun. So it's safe to say that these tanning beds are a possible solution, but first let's look at the importance of vitamin D3 and understand why we're actually looking at going to a tanning salon. The first thing to note is that the vitamin D3 RDA is actually based on a statistical fallacy. They messed up. 400 IU of D3 is abysmally low compared to what it was supposed to be. Actually about 9,000 IU. So for all you comedians and clowns that are saying that you can go out in the sun with your hands and face exposed for 15 minutes in the winter with sunscreen on, I think that's the most ridiculous thing. Being out in the sun for 10, 12 hours a day throughout all of human history and then suddenly that's the solution, that's just to me anyone with half of a brain is going to think okay maybe there's a little bit more to this. So right now it's dead in the middle of winter in the northern hemisphere so there's definitely a concern for D3 levels at this specific period of the year but with the amount of sun exposure that most people get everyone is pretty much chronically deficient in vitamin D3. And in my opinion this is one of the largest problems that we have right now in the world essentially causing many problems ranging from energy levels to calcium metabolism. Vitamin D3 is a precursor to gene expression cell differentiation, the overarching most important processes in the body. Literally how every single cell is created. Let's take a look at some studies. This study shows that the active form of vitamin D3 has a very important role in cell growth and differentiation in a variety of tissues in the body. Another study here shows that vitamin D3 has a lot of gene related effects that go beyond its traditional role in calcium metabolism. Here we have a study showing vitamin D3 is incredibly effective in cancer therapy. I'm not going to show you guys a dozen studies on the importance of vitamin D3. I think everyone has that anecdotal experience of going to the beach and feeling you fork after several hours of sun exposure. We can assume that vitamin D3 is very important and that tanning beds are a way to get vitamin D3. The problem is skin cancer and people's concerns with skin cancer. It's very clear that the sun is a catalyst for skin cancer but even clearer that it is not the sole cause of skin cancer. The other primary factors from what I've surmised is the omega 3 to omega 6 ratio in the diet as well as the lack of fat soluble vitamins in the diet. What these do is impair the body's ability to heal the skin and increase the amount of inflammation as well as free radicals in the body that can lead to cancer, gene mutations, anything negative. The first study shows reduced skin cancer risk with higher plasma concentrations of omega fatty acids. The second study shows considerable benefits in omega 3 supplementation with reducing skin cancer. The third study shows omega fatty acids can protect against skin cancer and the final study again omega 3 supplements can prevent skin cancer. We can also safely say that vitamin A plays the most important role in wound healing including skin repair from sunburn and that most people don't obtain significant enough amounts of vitamin A due to the lack of quality animal foods in their diet. Another study here showing the importance of vitamin A that retinolic acid can actually cause death of cancer cells. I'm not here to convince people that the sun doesn't cause skin cancer, that tanning beds are safe. I'm here to present information and allow you to make your own conclusions. If the things that I've presented so far don't open your mind a little bit then you really need to do your own research and try to figure things out on your own. I know conventional wisdom is very hard to overcome for some people as it's something that we've been told our entire lives in culture but let's move on to actually getting our vitamin D3. So the options for vitamin D3 are pretty clear. We can get it from the sun, we can use a tanning bed or we can supplement and the problem with the sun obviously is the time of year, the UV index isn't high enough to get adequate vitamin D3. This is because the UVB and UVA rays aren't strong enough and the UVB rays which are what produce vitamin D3 vary depending on the time of day. This issue actually comes up in tanning beds as well because the UVB to UVA ratio is dependent on the type of bulb. This study here shows that wavelengths of UVA to UVB radiation is highly variable from 0.5% to 5% in some tanning beds. This study also shows extensive in vitro evidence that these rays have anti-inflammatory effects even in a tanning booth. This is very close to natural sunlight. The UVB to UVA ratio is typically 2.5 to 5% UVB to 90 to 95% UVA identical to some tanning booths. What we do need to keep in mind is that the UVB can be much higher at certain points in the summer up to 20%. So for anyone thinking that tanning beds are more intense than the sun, no. As someone who's been out in the summer heat at very, very high UV indexes for long periods of time, tanning beds don't really come close to peak summer UV. Another issue that ties into this is that tanning beds are time restricted so you can't just go and tan as much as you want and it can be inconvenient to go to the tanning salon every single day. It's also unaffordable and impractical for most people. Tanning beds can certainly help you keep your skin at a healthy glow which is my primary use and they can actually keep your D3 levels pretty adequate in the colder months of the year but unless you're going for the maximum time every day, even then you likely won't be able to fix a deficiency and even then it's dependent on the UVB ratio of those bulbs. So in regards to actually adapting to the sun, if you guys do want to go tanning at any point of the year and you have fair skin, you have to keep in mind our ancestors would be out at all stages of the year so their skin would slowly adapt as the UV index goes up throughout the year. They wouldn't just go outside for two or three days to the beach without being in the sun all year which is what we do. That's why we have problems because our skin doesn't darken and adapt to the sun's rays over the natural course of the year. Now to actually understand where our D3 levels need to be and how to achieve that, we can take a look at an indigenous Russian group and see that their D3 levels are between 48 nanomoles per liter and 70 nanomoles per liter. Most people's vitamin D3 levels are actually way below this, usually below 20 and we're not even looking at an indigenous group that had high amounts of sun exposure so it's safe to say that we need to take pretty severe measures to get back to where we need to be. So how do we get ideal vitamin D3 levels? For me there's really three options. You can tan 10 to 15 hours per week in the sun, you pretty much have to be naked laying outside for about an hour every single day. That's not practical for most people. The second option is going to a tanning salon and supplementing a slightly lower dose and then the third option is you can supplement a fairly high dose of vitamin D3. The biggest mistake that people make with supplementing vitamin D3 is that they don't take enough. The body can produce up to 100,000 IU of vitamin D3 per day in the sun and it literally takes about a year of supplementing 10,000 IU per day to fix a deficiency. So it's safe to say you can take an incredibly high dose of vitamin D3 to fix your blood levels. We really want to shoot for about 75 to 80 nanograms per milliliter is the best metric. At least what we can assume is the minimal ideal amount. And even if you don't have access to blood work or want to get blood work, you can definitely take a large amount of vitamin D3 initially to fix your deficiency and then taper down to a lower amount. The only thing that might happen is you could get insomnia but that only usually happens if you're taking vitamin D3 too close to bedtime. So I have a product on my Amazon shop that I've been using for a while. It's now liquid vitamin D3, 1000 IU per drop. I like this a lot because I rub it transdermally on my skin and I just rub it in. I don't have to worry about consuming the oil. Just be careful not to, as I said, take this right before you go to bed. It's going to keep you awake. You want to take it in the morning around the afternoon earlier in the day when you would have actually gotten sun makes sense. So if you guys do want a vitamin D3 protocol or consultations on this, you guys can reach out to me via email. On a final note, it's very important to get high amounts of the other fat soluble vitamins in conjunction with vitamin D3. K2 is very important for preventing calcification as well as bone health. And turkeys with improper vitamin ratios developed various deformities. Thank you guys for watching. Hopefully this answered some of your questions. I know this was kind of like all over the place and not really focused on tanning bed specifically, but hopefully you guys liked it. If you guys would like to support the channel, please subscribe, like and share the video. If you guys want to check out any of that stuff, it's down in the comments down below in the description. As I mentioned earlier, if you guys want to reach out for one-on-one consultations in regards to improving your overall lifestyle and health, you can reach out to me, frankatifano at gmail.com. And that email is down in the comments as well as a contact form on my website that you can reach out to me with.