Day 30-Happy One-Month Anniversary, Walkies!

Yes, it's Day 30 of Walk the Year, and it's been an excellent month. Do you even know how easy this is? 

It is. 

Do you want to know some of the benefits I've gotten from this simple, doable project?

• Excellent sleep every single night
• I'm developing really cool, functional leg muscles that I never had before (partly due to walking solely in my monkey-toe shoes)
• Happy dogs that aren't moronic and annoying when I work
• Noticeably better circulation in legs
• Better mood all the time
• Lost a few pounds
• Less occurrence of rickets

WTF? Rickets? Okay, I don't have rickets, because I grew up playing outside, thank the stars! However, I read some sad facts about the disease that you might want to know in a 2004 Washington Post article by Rob Stein. 

Pediatricians scattered around the country have been surprised to see children suffering from rickets, a bone disorder caused by vitamin D deficiency that had been largely relegated to a bygone era. A few doctors have come across adults who were disabled by severe muscle weakness and pain, sometimes for years, until they were treated for undiagnosed vitamin D deficiency. And recent studies suggest low vitamin D may be putting the elderly at higher risk for the bone-thinning disease osteoporosis and life-threatening falls and fractures.
 
But beyond bone and muscle problems, some evidence suggests a dearth of vitamin D may be associated with an array of more serious illnesses, including many forms of cancer, high blood pressure, depression, and immune-system disorders such as multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis and diabetes.

What the heck? Rickets? Shall we bring back polio next? 

In response, many scientists have begun pushing to sharply boost the official recommendations for how much vitamin D everyone should get daily, either by taking supplements, by eating more food that contains the nutrient or from the sun -- a major source of vitamin D.

Yeah, let's put the sun (being outside) LAST on the list of possible solutions. It's much more awesome if we can eat fortified food and take supplements instead. Gosh, I wish Pfizer would create a sun pharmaceutical!

Suggestions that people get more sun exposure, however, have sparked an unusually intense, and sometimes bitter, debate. Skin cancer experts are alarmed that people will disregard warnings about unprotected sun exposure, making them more vulnerable to what is the most common malignancy.

Okay, I don't want to go all Jim Jones on you here, but I need you to drink a little of my Kool-aid. Remove yourself from the whole thinking that only the sun/solar rays causes skin cancer because we've thinned our ozone (totally NOT arguing the thin ozone part, by the way). What other forms of prevalent radiation do we have in our lives?  

Howdy frickin' Doody. 


Here's some quick facts from a great site, SkinCancer.org:

• The vast majority of mutations found in melanoma are caused by ultraviolet radiation.
  
• The incidence of many common cancers is falling, but the incidence of melanoma continues to rise at a rate faster than that of any of the seven most common cancers. Between 1992 and 2004, melanoma incidence increased 45 percent, or 3.1 percent annually.

That's a HUGE increase! 45-percent from 1992 to 2004? Wow, it must be because we, as Americans, are spending more and more time outside in this last decade!

NOT!

Let's think about the aforementioned electronic appliances. Think back to 1992. How many folks had cell phones that you knew? How many had smartphones and iPads and laptops and how many people media-multi-tasked (walking/standing in line while cell phone talking/texting) that you knew or saw?

Okay, I have to get going and I don't have all the facts to back this up yet, and I totally got distracted from my original intention to talk more about Vitamin D. How I got on this high-horse is that I was mildly enraged reading about this rampant vitamin D deficiency and then reading other arguments that we shouldn't be outside because of skin cancer risks. I'm no scientist, but I feel like there's a giant pink elephant standing in the corner that no one wants to look at when it comes to this "why we don't get enough vitamin D" problem. 

This all makes me sound like a crazy conspiracy theory whack-a-doodle. 

But, take a step back and think about it. While you walk outside. 

Take care, Poodle, 
Dani