I completely agree with your natural perspective! I don’t know much about what goes on at nursing homes, but it would be a shame if they deprived their residents of such a simple, cost effective, and enjoyable way to improve their health and happiness. I suppose the mainstream fears associated with sun exposure would be the primary cause for this, and the fact that sun exposure can cause reactions with a number medications doesn’t help much either.

I am a believer in supplements as well, but I use them as little as possible. Although most people consider supplements to be natural, it really depends on one’s interpretation of what this means. While supplements are usually natural in the sense that they are not artificial chemical compounds, they are unnatural in the sense that they don’t come directly from nature and are pretty far removed from whole foods.

The light that comes from tanning beds is clearly not natural. However, the concept is not much different in my opinion than oral supplementation, but few people see it this way. I think this is an interesting topic, and although it’s a from a slightly different perspective than what I normally write about, I think it’s good to have some variety and get people thinking.

It seems to me that the preferred source of vitamin D is through production from the skin, and as such, I think it’s possible that artificial light could be a more appropriate source of supplementation than a dietary capsule. It can even be argued as being more “natural” because it provokes the body’s inherent mechanism for producing it’s own vitamin D. This is what inspired me to write about tanning beds, although I intended it to be more of a discussion than a recommendation.

Where my “natural bias” applies is in the fact that I think it should be a priority to get vitamin D from natural sunlight and not rely on supplementation regardless of whether it’s from a tanning bed or a capsule.