Want to Protect Your Brain From Alzheimer’s? A 16-Year Study Suggests a Simple Thing to Do Right Now

I’ve written here before about my long and occasionally expensive relationship with my dermatologist — the product, I’m pretty sure, of Irish ancestry combined with years of swim team and summers spent lifeguarding as a kid.

In fact, I have an appointment with him today. These days I’m pretty religious about sunscreen, which he strongly endorses. But there’s apparently a catch, that I think a lot of people might have missed.

It’s that Vitamin D — sometimes called the sunshine vitamin because your body produces it when your skin is exposed to sunlight — is one nutrient where my otherwise sensible SPF habits might be working against me.

Block enough sun, and you may also be limiting how much vitamin D your body makes naturally. You can get some from food — fatty fish, egg yolks, fortified milk — and it’s in most standard multivitamins.

But sun exposure is the primary natural source for most people, which means those of us slathering on SPF 50 every morning may be quietly running low without knowing it.

I bring this up because of a new study that made me think about my vitamin D levels in a way I honestly never had before.

Poetic justice?

Researchers at the University of Galway followed 793 adults with an average age of 39 — none of whom had dementia — and measured their vitamin D levels at the start of the study.