If you follow Major League Baseball, you’ve probably heard of Gabe Kapler.
Kapler enjoyed a respectable career as an MLB outfielder, and is currently the manager of the Philadelphia Phillies. He is also a bodybuilder who has appeared on the cover of fitness magazines. He remains quite the physical specimen, and shares his strength and conditioning wisdom in a personal blog.
And because that wisdom does not extend to physiology and biochemistry, one of his blog entries, has become quite infamous.* It deals with sun exposure and Vitamin D.
Vitamin D is produced in our skin, the largest organ in the body. Sun exposure – specifically UV-B rays – plays an essential role.
Synthesis of Vitamin D occurs relatively quickly once you’re exposed to sunlight. You do NOT need a tan for the process to occur.
Moreover, it’s not necessary for every inch of your skin to be exposed to sunlight, as Vitamin D produced in one part of the body will enter the circulation and get to where it’s needed.
Kapler was blissfully oblivious of those facts when he encouraged his male readers to occasionally expose their testicles to sunlight to stimulate Vitamin D and testosterone production.
Yes, the guy admitted to tanning his family jewels in the backyard, all in the name of (pseudo) science.
And you thought seeing your elderly neighbor mowing the lawn in nothing but his boxers was bad enough.
Kapler’s post is an example of people stumbling upon a valid scientific or medical fact, then drawing erroneous conclusions because the information is taken out of the necessary context and subjected to pretzel logic. His well-intended, laughably outrageous advice is actually dangerous: The only thing one might accomplish by saluting the sun with one’s privates is getting sunburned – and risking melanoma – on a particularly unfortunate spot.
So make sure to get a bit of sun to help your body make Vitamin D and keep your bones strong. A little bit goes a long way.
But don’t be like Gabe Kapler. When it comes to the “useful advice” scorecard, he gets a big ERROR next to his name.
Photo by Jose Morales on Unsplash
*If you absolutely must read the Kapler post – it’s still accessible despite widespread ridicule – type Gabe Kapler “Au Naturel” in your Google machine. I refuse to share the link as a matter of intellectual principle.