CHASING THE SUN

THE NEW SCIENCE OF SUNLIGHT AND HOW IT SHAPES OUR BODIES AND MINDS

LINDA GEDDES

Profile/wellcome, 240pp, £14.99

‘ Chasing the Sun is a readable and frequently fascinating guide to the benefits of sunlight,’ wrote James Marriott in the Times. Barbara Kiser, in the journal Nature, described it as a ‘deft study’, while for Caspar Henderson in the Guardian, its pages were filled with ‘remarkable findings’. These included the fact that ‘for every increase in daylight a patient’s stay in an intensive-care unit is reduced by more than seven hours’, and that mortality rates among heart attack patients were 5 percentage points higher in patients cared for in ‘gloomier rooms’. For him, the book was ‘most engaging when Geddes wrote about her own experiences’, from being unable to escape artificial light in Las Vegas (specifically designed to ‘induce a wakeful stupor that favours compulsive gambling’) to spending time with the Amish in Pennsylvania who ‘shun electric light’ and whose daylight exposure is therefore much greater than for the rest of us.

Marriott was stunned to discover that exposure to sunlight ‘reduces your chances of developing multiple sclerosis’ and also minimises cases of myopia. East Asia, he reported, ‘is dealing with an epidemic of shortsightedness because a culture of intensive schooling means children spend much less time outdoors than they once did’, whereas in Australia, the rate of myopia in children under seven is only 1 per cent, because they ‘spend four or five hours a day outside’. Geddes’s ‘lovely book’ filled Marriott with ‘longing for bright summer days, blue skies and a baking hot sun dispensing vitamin D and happiness to all who bask in its glow’. With the promise of spring upon us, who could possibly disagree?