Word: skins
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...northern climes, most white adults make all the vitamin D they need from casual exposure of their face and hands to the sun and need no dietary supplement. They get ill on 100,000 units a day. But in the tropics, Loomis figures, the white man's unpigmented skin could make a deadly dose of D: up to 800,000 units, he calculates, in a six-hour exposure of his whole body to the equatorial...
...According to a theory now elaborated by Brandeis University Biochemist W. Farnsworth Loomis, it is because of the human body's need to take in a certain amount of vitamin D, but not too much, that the human species has developed into three principal racial groups distinguished by skin color and loosely called black, yellow and white...
Loomis points out in the journal Science that vitamin D is no ordinary vitamin. Unlike the others, it occurs in virtually no natural foods.* It is synthesized in the skin under the influence of ultraviolet rays. The body needs vitamin D if it is to process calcium from food to make bone. Consequently, children need proportionately more vitamin D for their growing bones, and a D deficiency causes rickets...
...understanding (based on talking with many of these mothers) is much homelier. Through folklore, many women believe that the starch, in some fashion, enhances the production of vernix caseosa, thereby making delivery of their babies easier and quicker. Vernix caseosa is the slippery white stuff that covers the skin of newborn infants. It looks and feels like a thick starch paste, although its Latin name means "cheesy varnish...
...surprise, a friend of mine truly believes that starch is the reason her children were born with light skin. And she is not from the North or South, but came here from St. Croix in the Virgin Islands...