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Pale skin in general helps synthesize Vitamin D. The less melanin you have the more you absorb, this is why lighter skin happens at northern latitudes. Darker s
by annzabelle 4mo ago
Pale skin in general helps synthesize Vitamin D. The less melanin you have the more you absorb, this is why lighter skin happens at northern latitudes. Darker skinned people are more likely to need to supplement it.
- galleywest200 4mo agoMakes sense, thanks for the reply and clarification!
- bakul 4mo agoDarker skinned people in northern latitudes. Made worse for vegetarians like Ramanujan in England.
- chrisweekly 4mo ago"vegetarians" relevance?
- niels8472 4mo agoAnimal products are the primary natural dietary source of Vitamin D3
- bakul 4mo agoStrict Vegetarians don’t eat eggs. No D vitamin fortified milk in his days. Many vegetarians don’t eat mushrooms, the only plant based source of vitamin D.
- chrisweekly 4mo agoInteresting. Thanks.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- economistbob 4mo agoThat sounds like a hypothesis that brown folks migrated north and evolved to be light as opposed to "light skinned peopled moved to the north". The latter is the historically accurate situation.
- arjie 4mo ago> That sounds like a hypothesis that brown folks migrated north and evolved to be light as opposed to "light skinned peopled moved to the north". The latter is the historically accurate situation. Wait, no, that's inverted. Our ancestral state out of Africa was dark skin and we evolved light skin when we were no longer subject to the UV pressures there. It makes sense to me since the advent of light skin is quite recent in our species, and the darkest skin requires a bunch of pigmentation genes to be set just right, so random mutation can easily produce lowered pigmentation, so adaptation to the Vitamin D pressure would have been quite possible. I remember looking at this ages ago and it was pretty well-known at the time but I just took a second look and it seems it is still quite established though the advent of light skin among humans is not as smooth as previously thought: https://www.anthropology.net/p/the-evolution-of-european-pigmentation https://www.anthropology.net/p/the-evolution-of-european-pig... Just in a smell-test way, we'd have had to sustain these lighter skinned populations under intense UV selective pressure for a long enough time for them to migrate North out of Africa. That just sounds unlikely on its own.