Skin fairness is a better predictor for impaired physical and mental health than hair redness.
Sci Rep. 2019 Dec 2;9(1):18138. doi: 10.1038/s41598-019-54662-5.
Flegr J1,2, Sýkorová K3.
- Redhead – Red hair - vitamin D
- People more likely to freckle are more likely to get prostate cancer (low vitamin D) – April 2013
- Photosensitivity (sun allergy) and vitamin D
Overview Dark Skin and Vitamin D contains the following summary
FACT - - People with dark skins have more health problems and higher mortality rate than those with light skins
FACT - - People with dark skins have low levels of vitamin D
FACT - - People with light skins who have low vitamin D have health problems
OBSERVATION - - The health problems of whites with low level of vitamin D are similar to those with dark skins
CONCLUSION - - People with dark skins have more health problems due to low levels of vitamin D
African American Health Disparities are associated with low Vitamin D - Grant Feb 2021
Low Vitamin D increases health problems - independent of skin color
Blacks die more often than whites of many diseases (they have less vitamin D) – 2012 contains the following summary
Cancer Facts & Figures for African Americans Cancer.org
- “African Americans have the highest death rate and shortest survival of any racial and ethnic group in the US for most cancers”
- Has a huge number of tables and charts, Note: Vitamin D is not mentioned
Leading Causes of Death as of March 2018
| All Ages Death rate | Black | White | Ratio |
| Heart diseases | 217 | 171 | 1.27 |
| Cancer | 199 | 170 | 1.17 |
| Cerebrovascular diseases | 51 | 36 | 1.4 |
| Diabetes | 40 | 19 | 2.0 |
Rates per 100,000 Age adjusted Non-Hispanic
Download the PDF from VitaminDWiki
RED highlight for those with p value = 0.005 (very likely, normally p = 0.05)
About 1-2% of people of European origin have red hair. Especially female redheads are known to suffer higher pain sensitivity and higher incidence of some disorders, including skin cancer, Parkinson's disease and endometriosis. Recently, an explorative study performed on 7,000 subjects showed that both male and female redheads score worse on many health-related variables and express a higher incidence of cancer. Here, we ran the preregistered study on a population of 4,117 subjects who took part in an anonymous electronic survey. We confirmed that the intensity of hair redness negatively correlated with physical health, mental health, fecundity and sexual desire, and positively with the number of kinds of drugs prescribed by a doctor currently taken, and with reported symptoms of impaired mental health. It also positively correlated with certain neuropsychiatric disorders, most strongly with learning disabilities disorder and phobic disorder in men and general anxiety disorder in women. However, most of these associations disappeared when the darkness of skin was included in the models, suggesting that skin fairness, not hair redness, is responsible for the associations. We discussed two possible explanations for the observed pattern, the first based on vitamin D deficiency due to the avoidance of sunbathing by subjects with sensitive skin, including some redheads, and second based on folic acid depletion in fair skinned subjects, again including some (a different subpopulation of) redheads. It must be emphasized, however, that both of these explanations are only hypothetical as no data on the concentration of vitamin D or folic acid are available for our subjects. Our results, as well as the conclusions of current reviews, suggest that the new empirical studies on the concentration of vitamin D and folic acids in relation to skin and hair pigmentation are urgently needed.
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