Found this article with large assortment of health benefits related to exposure to the sun. The introduction is reproduced below and if you go to the page, all of the topics have links to discussion of each. Interesting reading on a lot of common modern maladies.

SPI

Top 16 Proven Health Benefits of Sun

Why Avoiding Sun Will Kill You: 15 Proven Science-Based Health Benefits of Sun

A large number of public health messages over the past century have focused on the dangers of too much sun exposure, such as aging, skin cancer and DNA damage. However, in reality, today’s science tells us that exposure to the ultraviolet radiation (UVR) in sunlight has many beneficial effects on human health.

Indeed, most people are aware of the impact of sun exposure on Vitamin D production, which is a very important factor. However, there is a host of other health benefits that have been overlooked in the debate over how much sun is necessary for optimal health. This article will dive into the science to uncover the various ways in which sun exposure, at the right times and intensities, is a vital component of good health.

Sunny day

CONTENTS
Introduction
Sun Exposure Decreases Risk of Dying
Top Health Benefits of Sun Exposure
1) Sunlight Increases Vitamin D Levels
1.1) Ideal Vitamin D levels
2) Sun Exposure Sets Circadian Rhythm (Important!)
3) Sun Exposure May Protect Against Cancer
4) Sun Exposure Can Protect Against Heart Disease and Lower Blood Pressure
5) Sun Exposure Makes You Happier and Combats Depression and SAD
Sun and Serotonin
Sun and Dopamine
Sun and Vitamin D
6) Sun Exposure is a Nootropic and Improves Brain Function
7) Sun Exposure Protects Against Brain Disorders
Schizophrenia
Alzheimer’s
Parkinson’s
8) Sunbathing Encourages Dental Health
9) Sun Exposure May Reduce Diabetes
10) Sun Increases Wakefulness
11) Sunlight Increases Sex Hormones
12) Sunlight is a Natural Pain Killer
13) Sunlight is Good For Your Eyes
14) Sun Exposure Treats Arthritis
15) Sun Protects Against Autoimmunity
When Sun Might Be More Important
Mechanisms by Which Sun Benefits Health
Recommendations
Safety
Bipolar
Why People May Get Skin Cancer From Sun

This was posted by a writer that I follow. I have held the arguments to be true for a long time.

July 24, 2017

Coffee, Sunshine, and the Elite Healthcare Mandarins

Dear Reader,

It’s summer here in South Florida. Nearly every day, thunderstorms roll in around noon. Power surges and temporary outages caused by lightning are so frequent, I’ve stopped resetting the clock on the microwave.

With the ground soaked and temperatures in the 90s, leaving the house in the afternoon is like stepping into an outdoor sauna. Naturally, the snowbirds have gone back north. I miss Canadian diphthongs, but traffic’s lighter and lines in stores are shorter.

This is my favorite time of the year. There’s usually sunshine for an hour or two in the late morning before the storms. Because I work at home, I have coffee in my swimsuit by the pool, one of the most powerful anti-aging therapies.

I mean that. I realize that coffee and sunshine are both considered toxins by many people. Many people, however, are wrong. Evidence is overwhelming that coffee and sunshine significantly reduce the incidence of serious diseases, assuming you don’t overdose.

It’s odd that some of the most effective and convenient health aids are ignored or even shunned. Our culture, after all, reveres health and youth. The question, therefore, is why so many people are so uninformed about such a basic health issue as sunshine.

It wasn’t always that way. When I was young, parents were continually telling kids to “Go outside and get some sun.” Some parents—usually mothers—may have just wanted an hour or two of quiet, but there was a bigger reason.

In the first few decades of the 20th century, scientists proved that a component of sunshine cured the childhood form of osteomalacia, the bone softening disease known as rickets. The US and Canadian governments established programs to educate the public about the benefits of sunshine and the vitamin D it produced in the skin.

Additionally, synthetic vitamin D was added to milk. By the time World War II arrived, the memory of widespread rickets was beginning to fade. By the end of the 20th century, direct sunshine was being villainized as a public health threat by the medical establishment.

Like so many other widely believed medical canards, the scientific case was never there. Whether you believe that humans are the result of evolution or divine creation, it’s weird to think that nature or God made such a huge mistake that humans must avoid sunlight like hybrid vampires.

In fact, we don’t just tolerate sunshine. We seem to need it. And it’s not just about ultraviolet B that creates vitamin D in the skin.

Scottish scientists revealed in 2013 that people who get more sun have lower blood pressure and incidence of stroke than those who don’t (http://www.ed.ac.uk/news/2013/sunshine-080513). This is because sunshine is used in the skin to produce the components of nitric oxide (NO). NO is essential for vasodilation which increases blood flow.

In 2014, they showed that sunshine slows the development of obesity and type 2 diabetes (http://www.ed.ac.uk/news/2014/sunshine-241014). In neither case is vitamin D responsible for those benefits. In fact, sunshine in Scotland’s northern latitudes provides little of the ultraviolet B needed to produce vitamin D.

Just last year, scientists at Georgetown University Medical Center showed that sunlight energizes T cells, the warriors of our immune systems. Once again, this is not due to vitamin D, which also boosts immune function. It may, in fact, explain why people who get a lot of sun have fewer dangerous melanoma skin cancers.

Some people who get too much may get nonmelanoma skin cancers, but they are basically harmless and easily removed. Ironically, a very recent Case Western Reserve clinical trial (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/07/170706125020.htm) indicates that very high levels of vitamin D may reduce sunburn’s pain, swelling, and skin damage associated with cancers.

It’s preferable, of course, just to avoid sunburn. That doesn’t mean that you slather on the sunscreen whenever you go outside, however. Rather, you should get moderate exposure to build a base that protects your skin from burning, while getting the many varied advantages delivered by sunlight.

Those advantages are remarkable. Vitamin D, even in supplement form, seems to cut the risk of major diseases by about half. Michael Holick, the scientist who turned around the scientific community on the subject, estimates that getting everybody’s serum D levels up to optimal ranges would cut societal healthcare cost by 25%.

I think that number is too conservative. I’ve spoken to Canadian scientists who believe the benefit would be significantly greater. In fact, one group told me that a combination of sunshine and D supplementation would balance both the Canadian and US healthcare budgets. Given the new research on blood pressure, stroke, obesity, type 2 diabetes, and immune function, they’re probably right.

You will occasionally read about some paper refuting the notion that vitamin D improves everybody’s health. In fact, that’s correct. We know that, for some reason, some very healthy people don’t seem to need high serum D levels.

That’s not a refutation of the value of D or sunshine, though. It’s just proof that there are great variations among individuals. We need personalized rather than scatter-shot medicine. In the meantime, most people would benefit significantly from intelligent vitamin D and sunshine therapy. Incidentally, those who aren’t helped by increasing D and sunshine moderately aren’t hurt either.

The easiest and most effective solutions to our biggest challenges exist in biotechnology. New Zealand has already proven that the concept is sound (https://www.vitamindcouncil.org/vitamin-d-supplementation-program-cuts-down-on-health-care-costs-in-new-zealand/). The failure of our healthcare bureaucracy to actively pursue anti-aging strategies may be the single greatest public policy failure of our time.

Seventy years ago, the US government actively and rightly encouraged moderate sun exposure. Today, we know that the benefits of sunshine and higher vitamin D dosages are even greater, but officials are silent.

There are, thankfully, important exceptions. One is the network of scientists at grassrootshealth.net (http://grassrootshealth.net/). They deserve your support.

This article was written by Emilia van Hauen and posted here with her permission. Please secure the author's permission prior to reposting anywhere else.

http://www.emiliavanhauen.com/

BALLS AND SAUSAGE THERAPI
A summer holiday with daily tours on a nudist beach gave me some thoughts about nakedness and life quality.

Written by Emilia van Hauen, cultural sociologist, www.emiliavanhauen.com

When I was young, I once had a boyfriend who was very upset by the size of his … equipment. Yes, sorry, hope you didn’t get something wrong in the throat, but just a moment and you'll understand why I started the article in this way. For it was in fact an unusually beautiful model not belonging to the category “Small”.

But he felt bad and had terrible complexes over it, and I wish that I had had him with me on my daily walks during the holidays, which I just got back from. Every morning I went through a nudist beach, where everything hung loose and could be looked at, and I named it quickly “Balls-and Sausage Beach”. Of course I mostly looked out at the water, but occasionally my eyes stuck in a breast, a penis, balls or a pussy and many times I had to hide a smirk behind my sunglasses.

Smirk, not because it was embarrassing, but because every time I was surprised by the unlikely diversity of what I saw. I love the fact that certain body parts are available in all shapes, sizes and colors, with and without hair, with or without wrinkles, with or without fillings.

And dimensions are certainly not an obvious feature, because I looked left and right breasts that just as well could belong to two different women, so different were they in size. I saw balls, which were MUCH longer than the penis, and it was not because they sat by a cocktail size sausage.

But it was not only the normally hidden parts of the body, which I got free insight in. It was as much the rest of the body, which quite clearly was shown with a different freedom than on the beach, where I came from. Big hairy beer bellies, man boobs, oiled shiny butts in every imaginable design, men with stretch marks, women with cellulite the most incredible places, several layers of meat in the back, navels that fell out and in, women with narrow hips, so they looked like men from the rear, and women with wide hips, so they got a bottle figure, men with narrow hips and a birds chest, men with soft hips and full beard.

Almost everything you can imagine, plus a whole lot more, filled my field of vision in those weeks. I stored it as a tribute to the human biodiversity and not the least to the freedom of body. Occasionally I also had to turn my face rapidly toward the sea, when a naked man with hairy butt stuck it high in the air in a unobstructed view to everything, because he wanted to correct his towel. Or a woman who practiced yoga and thus initiated the rest of the beach in her internal anatomy. It was simply too exposed and intimate for me, but I could at the same time do nothing else than enjoy the fact that they dared doing it in the open. Being so free in their bodies.

All of this is only interesting because different studies show that only half of the Danes are satisfied with their body, while about 25 percent are totally dissatisfied with it. If I had had my boyfriend then with me on the beach, I'm sure he would have been much happier with himself. He would discover that he certainly had nothing to be unhappy about, which could have given him many years with a slightly better quality of life.

Studies that concern this topic are normally related to women and their self-esteem. Women's social status and value are culturally and historically much more linked to beauty than men's is and therefor it is perhaps logical that women's self-esteem is generally lower than men when it comes to their appearance. Voxmeter made together with Dove a survey among Danish women aged 15 to 60 years, which showed that more than 50 percent have a negative view of their own body, which means that 44 per cent of them find that their self-esteem will be reduced, while 31 per cent will be in bad mood due to it. For 22% it does affect the sexual life negatively, 17 per cent feel diminished compared to other people, while about 16 percent are seeing their quality of life deteriorated.

In the case of young people it is really problematic. According to a study from Sex and Society from 2010, 12 percent hate their bodies and 16 percent are dissatisfied with it. When you dig into what they are most dissatisfied with, you see this ranking:

1. Stomach (42.6%) 2. Weight (39.7 percent.) 3. Hair (31.9%.) 4. Body shape (30.3%) 5. Sex organs (29.3%).

And it is precisely here that the article title finds all it’s real value: If all young people came on a week's stay at a nudist beach, it would with no doubt do wonders to the way they value their own bodies – and indeed their partners body as well. It is really chocking that almost one-third are dissatisfied with their own genitals!

Today many young people don’t shower after sport activities and at the same time there is such a free access to porn, where it is often the more streamlined (read: surgically corrected) bodies that are shown, and for men the generously grown penis scale that will be exposed, so that alone gives them a fairly wrong reference to start comparing their own (or their partners ) body with others.

Just five days on a nudist beach, where they will be exposed to all types and forms of human bodies, would probably help them to get a more positive and free view of their own bodies – and thereby find greater joy of life and not least confidence in themselves.

I know! It is probably unrealistic. But wouldn’t it be nice, if they already from the beginning had a wider view at the human body, so that they understood it as a tool for enjoyment rather than an object of embarrassment?

The adults could also learn quite a lot of it here, so in other words “just go out there naked and be happy”. And maybe even giggle slightly down into your towel, because yes – there might be some funny moments where some bodies will surprise you !

Free translation by J.Valckenaere and Emilia van Hauen of the article originally published in Jyllandsposten 31.07.16.

… We Just Don't Know It Yet

I watched the MTV Video Awards last night primarily to see what Miley Cyrus was (or was not) going to wear. I have been following Miley and her public stance on body freedom for some time and I find her outspokenness on the topic to be quite refreshing and reassuring.

Take this comment when she appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live looking like this:

<img src="http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/sites/default/files/custom/Stephanie/Sam/Miley_Cyrus_Jimmy_K%23135772F.jpg">

"Humans aren't afraid of the human breast," she told Kimmel. "It's the nipple that's the issue. …Like, I'm showing my boobs and no one has a problem but the nipples are covered so somehow that's okay. So America's actually fine with tits, it's nipples they don't like. Which is what you have (referring to Kimmel), which is insane, because the nipple, what you can't show, everyone has, but the jug part, that everyone doesn't, you're allowed to show underboob. I've never understood the way that works."

You can see a video of the whole scene here: http://www.hulu.com/watch/836970

Sadly at the end of the piece she is disses the reality of humanity on a nude beach, but one would hope that her attitude would moderate with adequate exposure to that type of environment (pun intended).

"I'm a vegan nudist." – Miley Cyrus

The important point is that Miley is using her world wide celebrity platform to embrace the goodness of nudity, using her body freedom to draw more than a few million eyeballs to the MTV Awards while she is at it. But people are soaking it up, especially young people. You don't hear young people watching the MTVA's saying, "That's so rude. Why is she showing so much skin?" More likely, you hear them saying "I love that and I love Miley!"

Which brings me to my second point. The world is becoming increasingly accepting of social nudity.

Case in point: WNBR.

World Naked Bike Ride events take place all over the world (and somewhat surprisingly) even in the ultra prudish United States. They take place largely without recrimination and most often accompanied by cheers (not jeers) from happy onlookers.

Every time the world sees or reads about another World Naked Bike Ride, most people become a little more accepting of social nudity.

Case in point: Free the Nipple Campaign.

The Free the Nipple campaign has been gaining a lot of steam in the last year, thanks largely to a fair amount of media attention and support of a number of popular celebrities including Miley, Rihanna, supermodel Cara Delevigne, Lena Dunham (herself a strong advocate of regular social nudity), Scout Willis (daughter of Bruce Willis and Demi Moore), Chelsea Handler, Jon Stewart and others.

Public breastfeeding is an allied cause that has garnered the support of many famous people including Alanis Morrisette, Alyssa Milano, Angelina Jolie, Miranda Kerr, Gwen Stefani, Kristen Bell and many more.

Every time the world hears about Free the Nipple or the right to breastfeed in public, they become a little more accustomed to the idea that exposure of the female breast is not necessarily a sexual act, but can be an ordinary part of daily life.

Case in point: Nude Recreation.

"The Coolest Way to Beat the Heat: Take a Nakation", Nude Cruises, Clothing Optional Resorts, World Record Skinny Dip. All of these programs are well promoted and receive a significant amount of (increasingly positive) attention in the media. Most notably, none of them were widely known to the public (if they even existed) even as few as twenty years ago. Today, the mainstream public has a growing variety of means to experiment with various forms of social nudity.

Every time someone hears about some form of legitimate nude recreation or (shockingly!) decides to try it, the power of acceptance of social nudity increases by a small amount.

So how is all of this noteworthy?

The answer is that in today's marketplace of ideas there is quite a bit of positive momentum behind the idea of social nudity. That is where we differ from the past. Before the age of the internet that allowed much of this information about social nudity to come out in the open, it was hidden in the closet. Now admittedly, much still remains in the closet, but as has been described above, that is dramatically changing, and changing for the positive. Twenty years ago, it was very difficult to find a large body of mainstream voices speaking out in support for the cause of social nudity. More likely, whenever any kind of nudity was referenced in a public setting, it was charged with potentially criminal wrongdoing.

This is all so very similar to the struggle for gay rights. Back in the '60's gays were totally in the closet. Their adherents gathered in very private places and their existence was hardly ever mentioned in the public light of day. That all blew open with the Stonewall riots in 1969. Today, gay freedom rights is almost a fait accompli. Two things drove that outcome over the last 50 years. First, the generational issue. As more and more people came out of the closet, increasing numbers of non-gay people, led by younger kids, learned first hand from friends and family members who were gay that they had nothing of which to be afraid. They learned that gay people are normal people too. Second, again aided by the spotlight of the internet, the whole story of gay culture became much more widely known. With that knowledge came increasing acceptance.

Fifty years ago, if there was discussion about being gay, it was with condemnation. Today there is a balanced positive response to that condemnation. Since younger generations are more quick to accept the positive message, the opposing voices are literally dying out.

That is the exact same thing that is happening with the idea of support for social nudity. The positive message is increasing, balancing out the traditional negative message and a younger audience is responding favorably with an attitude of "what's all the fuss about?" The only major difference between the gay rights struggle and the nude rights struggle is that we don't have to live with limited access to mass media to carry our message to the public, resulting in a quicker rate of change.

It is easy to believe that this rising tide will continue and that in the not too distant future we will see the balance of positive sentiment to negative sentiment tipping in our decided favor.

So you see – We have won the war … we just don't know it yet.

Nudely yours – SPI Maker

Covered (no pun intended) today on Huffington Post – An article featuring Mark Haskell Smith's "Naked at Lunch: A Reluctant Nudist's Adventures in a Clothing Optional World" and "The Nakeds" a new novel by Lisa Glatt where the story line is built around what appears to be our beloved former nudist hangout Elysium in the 1970's.

A really in-depth, fair, balanced and very well done picture of our culture. Be sure to send her your compliments in the comments section.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/25/nudism-problems_n_7647806.html?utm_hp_ref=arts

Back in March, a French citizen filed suit in the French courts alleging that Facebook's censorship of his placement of nude art on his FB page constituted a violation of his free speech rights. The court agreed to consider the case.

Quoting from the article: "At the end of the day, this is about the fact that the public square, where freedom of speech used to be enforced, has moved in under the terms-and-services umbrella of a private corporation, where they enforce their own arbitrary limits of what may be expressed and not. That means our fundamental rights have effectively moved into the hands of private interests. I welcome a challenge to this doctrine and an enforcement of freedom of speech, once a public discussion forum – like Facebook – has grown large enough to be a de-facto public location, if not the de-facto public location."

Certainly I would love to see Facebook go down in flames on this one but I don't give it strong odds of prevailing, as Facebook's argument will surely be 'if you don't wish to abide by our rules, you don't have to use Facebook'. To which the appropriate response would be that Facebook constitutes a de-facto monopoly and should thus be subject to certain instances of public regulation. I'll be looking forward to how this turns out.

You can see the entire article here: https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2015/03/french-court-says-french-freedom-of-speech-may-trump-facebooks-censorship/

I am a big fan of fashion, it is artistic, innovative and expressive. Nudity in fashion has always been part of the art-form. The very well informed thelibertineezine.com features a wonderful historic look at nude fashion photographs published in Vogue. Many of the images provide an inspirational look at a possible life in a clothing-non-compulsory world.

You can see it here: http://thelibertineezine.com/2012/11/10/preview-the-nude-in-vogue-complete-special-edition-veruschka-by-helmut-newton-for-vogue-russia-winter-2012/