Vitamin D & Valentines Day
Happy Galentines Day too =^.^=
Male Gaze & Women’s Vitamin-D Deficiency
#GamerGuy: Why are women more likely to buy/use umbrellas than men?
#GamerGirl: Lighter skinned women have higher value in the intimacy market → parasols help avoid sunlight → better chance to attract the gaze of Magic Mike (risk: Vitamin D deficiency)
Gender Socialization & Women’s Vitamin D Deficiency
- Asia: Male Gaze → women’s desire to have whiter skin → avoid sunlight → women more likely to buy parasols → parasols & umbrellas depicted as a woman’s accessory for centuries (Sangster, 1855) → 1623 painting by Sir Anthony van Dyck of Marchesa Grimaldi with her parasol.
- India (Sonam Joshi & Aashmita Nayar, 2016): daughters receive less nutrition than sons → desire to have whiter skin complexion → avoid sunlight
- Islamic women wearing veil → less exposure to sunlight. Also, would Islamic women’s infection rate have been lower than men’s in pre-mask March/April due to wearing burka/niqab/chador?
BaeGirl: Wait, why is Vitamin D important?
#GamerGirl: With insufficient levels of vitamin D, innate immunity cannot fight infection & acquired immunity is triggered explosively, which leads to a cytokine storm and hyper-inflammation, which causes organ damage and leads to death.
BaeGirl: Ahh, so it’s important to have a sufficient level of VD to allow our immune system to naturally fight infection.
Bae Girl: So if you have low Vit D your first line of defense gets ‘overrun’ and then ‘devastated’ by the cytokine storm of acquired immunity (specialized cells). Think I got it. Thanks.
Innate immunity = first line of defense — macrophages, neutrophils and others.
Acquired immunity = specialized cells, B lymphocytes — antibodies — and T lymphocytes — killer cells.
Vitamin D = the main natural molecule with the most important immunomodulatory effect, regulating & enhancing both defenses (innate and acquired). That’s why it’s called an immunomodulator (Baeke et al., 2010 — https://www.sciencedirect.com/.../pii/S1471489210000378...) .
https://twitter.com/gu_bellini/status/1360672523084566532?s=20
Easy D-cision: Add VitaminD as a layer against COVID19
Mohammed Sistanizad et al., February 2021: Twelve patients in the placebo group and 5 in the vitamin D group died within the 28 day study period. The duration of mechanical ventilation was 15.7± 9.3 for vitamin D vs. 22.6± 9.1 days for placebo. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/.../abs/pii/S1876382020314529)
Nogués et al., January 2021: In patients hospitalized with COVID-19, Vita-D (calcifediol) treatment at the time of hospitalization significantly reduced ICU admission and mortality. (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3771318)
Castillo et al., 2020: “The vitamin D endocrine system have a variety of actions on cells and tissues involved in COVID-19 progression. Early 25-hydroxyvitamin D) treatment to hospitalized COVID-19 patients significantly reduced intensive care unit admissions. VD seems to be able to reduce severity of the COVID-19.” (https://www.sciencedirect.com/.../abs/pii/S0960076020302764)
Reminder: Contraception & Vitamin D
A study of Danish women found that contraceptive use was positively associated with Vitamin-D levels (Moller et al., 2013).
Brunettes, dark haired, & darker-skinned people are ‘more likely to have a vitamin-D deficiency due to the melanin in their skin mitigating the absorption of the sunlight needed to convert Vitamin D & facilitate the maturation of immune cells’ (Evans & Lippman, 2020-UCSD Team; Zhang & Liu, 2020). The prevalence of Vitamin D deficiency is higher for Black Americans & Hispanic Americans than White Americans (Araujo et al., 2009; Jacobs et al., 2008; Yetley, 2008; Zadshir et al., 2005), higher among Asians than non-Asian Britons (Shaw & Pal, 2002), and it’s higher among Hispanic men than Hispanic women (Forrest & Stuhldreher, 2011). The finding regarding Hispanic men relative to women is unique considering that the majority of Vitamin-D deficiency studies in China, Singapore, South Korea (Nimitphong & Holick, 2013), India (estimated 90% hypovitaminotic VD; Goswami et al., 2000), around the world have generally found higher deficiencies in women (Glerup et al., 2000).
Thus, research suggesting a beneficial role of contraception in relation to Vitamin D may be particularly relevant for individuals with darker skin tones.
Here’s a D-lightful Finding =^.^=
A study of Black American women (N = 1,662) found that Vitamin D levels were 20% higher for those taking estrogen-containing contraception (Harmon et al., 2016).
Vitamin D crucial to activating immune defenses
Date: March 8, 2010
Source: University of Copenhagen
Summary: Scientists have found that vitamin D is crucial to activating our immune defenses and that without sufficient intake of the vitamin — the killer cells of the immune system — T cells — will not be able to react to and fight off serious infections in the body. The research team found that T cells first search for vitamin D in order to activate and if they cannot find enough of it will not complete the activation process.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/rel.../2010/03/100307215534.htm
Infective Dose & Loudness
Loudness of speech is associated with aerosol emissions (Anfinrud et al. 2020; Asadi et al., 2019; Barreda et al., 2020; Fears et al., 2020; Lindsley et al., 2013; Milton et al., 2013; Pung et al., 2020; Santarpia et al., 2020; Seminara et al., 2020; Shao et al., 2020; Stadnytskyi et al., 2020; Xie et al., 2009).
Males have louder voices than women & they love the sound of them (Holmberg et al., 1988; Maria Sodersten et al., 2005; Ramya Konnai et al., 2017).
Thus, when a group of unmasked males hang out, an asymptomatic male is likely to give his bruhs a higher infective dose: The infective dose is the minimal quantity of virions necessary for infection to occur (Watanabe et al., 2010; Yezli et al., 2011).
“Female patients are able to achieve viral clearance significantly earlier than males” (White & Kirby, 2020).
Males are generally more susceptible to infections than females (Jaillon et al., 2019), and COVID19-positive males are more likely to shed than females (Mizumoto et al., 2020), and males shed (M = 18 days) for a longer duration of time than females (M = 15.2) (Xu et al., 2020).
Nelson et al., 2020: “Even when female testosterone is pathologically raised in polycystic ovarian syndrome the values are still a fraction (˜1/20th) of that observed in males.”
Sidenotes
Someone moving from NY to CA (~2,800 miles) isn’t an immigrant changing countries the way someone moving from Dunkirk France to Veurne Germany (~16 miles) is changing countries. For example, both the country of Norway & the continent of Australia — revered for modern/progressive ideals & expressed values of multiculturalism/diversity — require immigrants to go through orientation courses on egalitarianism in which immigrants are warned that any acts suggestive of polygyny, arranged marriage, & underage marriage will be met with severe criminal penalties. Australia takes it even further: they force hopeful immigrants to pass an egalitarian values test.
Example questions:
“I understand women have the same rights as men?”
“Is it legal to strike my spouse? “
“I understand that it’s not permissible to force my children into a marriage?”
“Is it appropriate to prohibit girls from the same education as boys?”
Canada
Canada’s asylum system is focused on keeping a low sex ratio because countries with excess males who can’t find wives obviously have more crime (there are fewer women to marry to keep the males in check). As such, Canada will generally refuse to accept a male asylum seeker if there is no female with him.
France
France has a strict policy when it comes to hopeful-immigrants who entered a polygynous marriage in another country: polyamorous families can apply for 1-year residence permits. Once they agree to decohabitate (divorce/separate) they can receive the normal 10-year permits that other families receive.
United Kingdom
The UK is more welcoming: they recognize all polyamorous marriages that took place in other countries, though they only allow a woman to bring one of her husbands/ a man to bring one of his wives to settle in the UK as the official spouse.
Utah
The Utah moved in a similar direction during COVID as quarantine put a strain on relationships. Thus, in May 2020, Utah ruled that polygyny is no longer a felony (unless the extra husbands/ extra wives were coerced into it). Research suggests that Utah is the thing between Nevada & Colorado.
Thus, Western countries & similar democracies could be considered based on how the interaction of their multicultural ideals & gendered immigration policies are associated with the overall Romantic New Deal narrative.
