Have you ever wondered if wearing sunglasses could mess with your body’s ability to soak up important vitamins, like vitamin D? A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that wearing sunglasses with UV protection can actually cut down on how much vitamin D your body makes. The researchers noticed that people who always wore sunglasses when it was sunny had lower vitamin D levels than those who didn’t wear sunglasses.
Did you know that the sun helps keep a lot of our body functions, including our eyes, healthy? When the sun hits your skin, it can make Vitamin D in just 15 minutes. This vitamin helps your body absorb minerals like calcium and phosphorus, which are important for keeping your immune system strong. Sunlight also helps your body know when it’s time to sleep or wake up. Your eyes soak up sunlight through special cells called rods and cones, which helps your body’s internal clock and makes melatonin. As you get older, this becomes even more important because your eyes don’t absorb as much light, which can make it harder to sleep.
Sunlight’s Critical Effects On Our Hormones
Here’s a surprise you might not have expected: did you know that depending too much on sunglasses could actually mess with your hormones?
Getting some morning sun, especially when the light hits your eyes directly without any glass in the way, can kickstart your brain’s pituitary gland behind your eyes, which then releases important hormones like: Thyroid-stimulating hormones (TSH) – tells your thyroid gland to start making its hormones.
The Real Danger: Your Circadian Rhythm
Our body’s sleep-wake cycle is all about the sun. The light from the sun tells our body when to sleep, wake up, and even affects our hormones. If we were out in nature all the time, our body would naturally line up with the sun’s movements. We’d wake up with the sun and go to bed with it! This is super important because light signals our body to release certain hormones and get energized.
The sun’s light comes in different colors, from red to blue. Red light is longer and feels warmer, while blue light is shorter and more energizing. We get a lot of blue light in the morning, which tells our body it’s time to wake up. As the day goes on, there’s less blue light and more red light, which tells our body it’s time to get ready for sleep. The amount of UV light also changes throughout the day, with the most at late morning and afternoon. UV light helps our body make important hormones like melatonin and dopamine, which are key for our sleep-wake cycle. But, if we wear sunglasses, we’re blocking the sun’s important signals, and our body can’t tell time right. This messes up our body’s natural rhythm, leading to problems like not having enough energy, hormonal imbalances, issues with how we use food, and problems with thinking and memory.
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