Is this an exaggeration or can I really become ‘healthier’ by standing outside in the sun??
In: 1
This is just vitamin D. You can get it from food, but your skin cells can also make it by producing a different chemical that, when struck by UV light, breaks into chunks with one of those chunks being vitamin D.
Vitamin D is most likely what you are talking about, which is actually not a classic vitamin at all. Its a so called secosteroid.
Our skin is able to Generate vitamin D3 from UV-B rays. In the epidermic layer of our skin is most of something called “7-Dehydrocholesterol” stored, which gets transformed to Vitamin D3 when UV-B rays hit us.
Edit: Typo
You don’t absorb Vitamin D from sunlight. However, by absorbing sunlight through our skin, we are able to synthesize Vitamin D using materials already in our body. Humans are about the only animal on Earth that can’t synthesize Vitamin D ourselves without sunlight.
Your body doesn’t “convert sunlight into vitamins” just generally. It specifically only works for vitamin D. Specifically, the ultraviolet light from the sun interacts with a protein in you skin and that interaction turns the protein into vitamin D.
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