There’s a link between sun exposure and melanoma alright, but it’s not what you’ve been told.

Sunlight doesn’t cause this deadly skin cancer… but a lack of it sure will!

I’ve been telling you that for years — decades, even. And now the studies are starting to catch up to me. The latest one shows that vitamin D can protect women from melanoma.

Of course, the number one source of vitamin D is the sun. But even your number 2 option — a quality vitamin D3 supplement — offers first-rate benefits.

Researchers looked at data on 36,000 women between 50 and 79 years over seven years. They found that the women who were taking D3 supplements had less than half the melanoma risk of women who were taking a placebo.

Men, women and children all need D — and as we spend less time in the sun (and slather on greasy, cancer-causing, sun-blocking goo when we do go out), our melanoma rates shoot right up.

One study out of sunny Australia a few years back found that office workers were more likely to get melanoma than lifeguards. It’s also a fact that melanoma is more common in gloomy Ohio than in the Sunshine State of Florida.

But read the coverage of the newest study, and it’s like the sun doesn’t even exist: The Reuters report on this study ran nearly 800 words… and not once did it mention sunlight.

Unbelievable!

Meanwhile, another new study claims daily aspirin use can slash your melanoma risk — but why on earth would you mess with a drug with serious known health risks when you can just get a little more sunlight and take a vitamin D supplement instead?

You’re not lactose intolerant — just mentally ill!

There — feel better?

I didn’t think so — but researchers behind a new study claim that most people who think they have the condition really don’t. They’re just head cases — and their mental problems are the real reason for their rotten guts.

And who knows? That might even be true to some extent.

But who cares — you CAN have your milk and drink it, too, if you know what to drink… and that’s true whether you’re really lactose intolerant, or only think you are.

More on that in a moment.

First, the new study: Italian researchers tested 102 people — 77 women — who believed they were lactose intolerant, and found only a third of them really were.

The rest showed signs of the psychological problems that are often linked to gastrointestinal issues, according to a Digestive Disease Week presentation.

Now, I have no doubt that lactose intolerance is badly overdiagnosed.

But c’mon… mental problems, two thirds of the time — is that the best they can do?

I won’t get into the hows and whys of the lactose tolerance test, which involves drinking lactose and blowing up balloons (really) — but I will say it’s so sensitive that it can be thrown off by a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon… or at least an antibiotic prescription taken a month earlier.

Water, vitamins, seafood — even running to the clinic to make your appointment on time can all mess up the results, so it’s not what I’d call a perfect test.

But like I said earlier, none of this really matters — because most victims of the dairy blues can chug milk until they start to moo… if they drink the right stuff.

That means making a break from pasteurized supermarket swill and switching to farm-fresh raw milk.

Not only is the real thing loaded with the friendly bacteria and enzymes needed to aid dairy digestion, but it also delivers more crucial nutrients per sip than anything else you could possibly raise to your lips.

It’s nature’s leading cure for everything from allergies to autism — and more people are discovering the benefits every day.

The only problem is finding it.

Drinking to forget? You’ll have to try a lot harder than that — a steady booze habit can actually save your mind, not erase it.

It’s beyond all doubt at this point that alcohol is practically a brain preservative — and now, a new study from those booze lovers in Germany confirms it again.

Prost!

Researchers tracked more than 3,200 people 75 years old and up who did not have dementia at the start of the three-year study, and divided them into groups based on booze levels: nondrinkers, light drinkers, moderate drinkers, and heavy drinkers.

(I’ve been to Germany, and I didn’t notice ANY non-drinkers… but I digress.)

In any case, researchers say those who tipped a glass or two a day were 30 percent less likely to develop with dementia and 40 percent less likely to suffer from Alzheimer’s disease than nondrinkers

Now, if this study had been on broccoli instead of booze, researchers would conclude that you should eat more broccoli.

But they’re always afraid to make that leap when it comes to liquor — and this case is no different. The researchers are saying that seniors shouldn’t have to stop drinking… but it doesn’t mean they should start, either.

Bullpucky!

If you’ve been holding off on drinking out of some vague sense that it’s wrong, crack open a bottle and find out what “right” tastes like.

Moderate drinking won’t just lower your dementia risk — it’ll also protect your heart, lower your diabetes risk, prevent cancer, and even help you live longer.

But let’s face it: You can get too much of any good thing, especially booze — and if you drink yourself into a blind, stinking stupor every night, you’ll actually boost the odds of dementia, not shrink it.

Just use a little common sense here — keep it to a couple a day, and you’ll have nothing to worry about, except for rising beer prices.

They’ve even taken to calling it “bad” cholesterol, as if something your body NEEDS could ever actually be bad.

Now, a new study confirms what I’ve told you all along: LDL cholesterol isn’t the bad guy after all.

Researchers from Texas A&M University put 52 non-exercising people between the ages of 60 and 69 through a rigorous workout, and found that those who gained the most muscle mass afterwards had the highest levels of LDL cholesterol.

Nevermind that you don’t need a rigorous workout to stay fit (or any workout at all, for that matter)… the study is a perfect illustration of the relationship between LDL cholesterol and muscle function.

The researchers didn’t make the obvious connection, so I will: This is precisely why people who take cholesterol-lowering drugs like statins suffer from muscle pain and even muscle disintegration as their LDL levels plummet to supposedly healthy levels.

The researchers also wrote in the Journal of Gerontology that LDL serves another crucial function: as a warning of problems elsewhere in the body.

And once again, this is a page right out of my Douglass Report newsletter — because I’ve been telling you for years that high cholesterol levels are a symptom… not a disease on their own.

But while your doc will hit the panic button when LDL hits 160, all I care about is your total cholesterol: Keep it between 200 and 300, and you’re golden.

Higher than that, and you’ve got a problem — but a cholesterol med won’t solve it anymore than an ice bath will cure the infection behind a high fever.

You need a doc who can figure out — and correct — the cause of that rise.

You know the speech I’m talking about. It’s the one doctors deliver in their Most Serious Voice right after taking your blood pressure, sentencing you to bland low-sodium meals for the rest of your life.

But as I’ve told you time and again, a low-salt diet won’t lower blood pressure OR protect your heart — and now, the latest research shows it can actually boost the odds of any early death by more than 500 percent!

Researchers from the University of Leuven in Belgium tracked 3,861 people 60 years old and younger for a median of nearly 8 years, and found absolutely no link at all between sodium and blood pressure levels.

Repeat: No link at all between sodium and blood pressure levels.

Overall, they found a 4.1 percent rate of death from heart-related conditions among those with the lowest intake, 1.9 percent among those with moderate intake, and 0.8 percent among those with the highest.

That means patients with the lowest salt intakes were more than five times more likely to die of cardiovascular disease than those with the highest, according to the new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Now, this might fly in the face of everything you’ve heard in your doctor’s office… but it’s perfectly consistent with the studies I’ve been telling you about.

One study last year found that seniors with the lowest salt consumption had the highest risk of bone breaks and an early death.

Even one of the authors of the new study says that in his 25 years of research on salt, “it was almost impossible to find an association between blood-pressure and 24-hour sodium excretion.”

Tell THAT to your doc next time he opens his trap about sodium and blood pressure.

Now, put 22 teaspoons of sugar into the glass.

Builds up fast, doesn’t it?

You’d have to be clinically insane to put that glass to your lips and knock back all that sugar… but that’s exactly what you’re doing, every single day, if you’re an “average American.”

Put it all together, and you get 355 calories in added sugar a day — or almost an entire meal made of white stuff. And over the course of a week, it adds up to a pound and half of sugar.

One food industry analyst in the news, Phil Lempert, says that’s about double what you should be eating… but I’ve got news for Phil: You’re only half right, pal.

You shouldn’t be eating ANY added sugar, period.

But instead, we’re going in the opposite direction. Want to know what you’re grandkids are eating? Add another five teaspoons to that glass.

And these are just averages. If you’d like to see what millions of Americans at the high end are eating, you’d have to add almost 20 more teaspoons — 46 in all!

That’s enough to cause an 8-ounce glass to runneth over with sugar — and that’s why America is fatter and sicker than ever before.

We could slash disease rates in this country overnight if we’d simply stop adding sugar to everything from bread to salad dressing.

But that’s not going to happen.

So look out for yourself: Read food labels carefully… and if you see added sugar in any of its guises, treat it like a hand grenade and get rid of it as fast as you can.

I know some people who start to sweat every time they forget where they left the keys!

But it’s not always as simple as that — because not every dementia victim shows the “classic” forgetfulness, especially early on.

One form of the disease, frontotemporal dementia, is marked by some very different warning signs: An inability to pick up on sarcasm and obvious lies.

Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco recruited 103 patients with different forms of dementia and 72 healthy seniors to watch videos in which speakers were obviously lying or being sarcastic.

It was so obvious that the healthy adults had no problems spotting it… but those who suffered from frontotemporal dementia missed it completely.

Other known early warning signs of the disease include personality changes, loss of inhibitions, antisocial behavior and even a sudden change of religions.

It’s not especially common — it makes up just 5 percent of all dementia cases — but there’s one age group that’s particularly at risk.

And it’s not who you think.

This condition, once called Pick’s disease, hits early — striking as young as 20 years old, but more commonly in the 40s and 50s.

Because of the early age and because it doesn’t “look” like classic dementia, most docs think it’s just a midlife crisis or run-of-the-mill depression and send the patient home with an antidepressant prescription.

If this sounds like the symptoms of you or someone you know, don’t take an anti-depressant, take a trip to your doctor. Talk to him about getting a proper diagnosis, and then take it from there.

And isn’t it convenient how most of these tips end in a sales pitch?

But you don’t have to waste your time OR money on any of that nonsense, because none of it will extend your life — and some of it might even end it.

Now, a massive study uncovers the REAL secrets to healthy aging… and I’m going to save you a trip to the bookstore, because my longtime readers already know what’s in this volume.

Heck, a summary of all 272 pages of “The Longevity Project” reads like a summary of my Douglass Report archives: Exercise won’t help you to live longer, you don’t have to eat your vegetables, stress and worry can be good for you, and being too optimistic can kill you.

And it’s backed by some rock-solid data: The study tracked 1,528 Californians for almost their entire lives, starting in 1921. It went on for so long that the researcher who started it, Lewis Terman, died more than half a century ago!

Fortunately, generations of researchers continued the project — and the latest team has concluded that “many common health recommendations are ill-advised or simply wrong.”

They say steady daily movement like gardening, dog-walking and even visiting museums is more likely to lead to a longer life than an endless series of exercise failures.

The researchers also found that people who worry and suffer some stress — the creative stress that keeps you focused and driven — live longer than the carefree types we’re supposed to envy.

In fact, worry-free people don’t worry enough — they’re so optimistic that things will always work out that they’re seldom prepared when things don’t actually work out.

Even marriage doesn’t matter as much as most people assume: Married men in the study lived longer than single men and divorcees… but divorced women lived nearly as long as married ones.

Men, you might not like hearing this — but it looks like you need her more than she needs you!

I’d tell you not to worry about it… but maybe you should. After all, a little worry is a good thing.

I’m not a fan of any kind of potato — but there’s one in particular that’s far worse than all the others.

And you’ve probably got one in your home right now.

It’s the couch potato — and while no one doubts that plugging your meat in a seat is unhealthy at any age, a new study finds that little kids who watch the most TV already have the earliest signs of heart disease.

Australian researchers randomly selected 1,492 6-year-olds from 34 schools in the Sydney area, and asked the kids’ parents to fill out questionnaires on how much time each day the children spent watching TV, using a computer, and playing outside.

They found that the average kid spent just 36 minutes a day being physically active… and nearly TWO HOURS a day parked in front of a screen, according to the study in Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis and Vascular Biology: Journal of the American Heart Association (try saying that five times fast).

Then, the researchers photographed the arteries in the backs of the children’s eyes, and found that the couch potatoes had narrower blood vessels — and that each hour of tube time lead to a narrowing of 1.53 microns.

That’s a number so small it’s impossible to picture — but in real-world terms, it’s enough to raise systolic blood pressure readings by 10 mmHg.

The researchers say they have no idea what this means for children, and plan to follow these kids to see what happens as they age.

But we don’t need a study to know that narrow blood vessels lead to increased heart risk in adults. If that process is starting years earlier — in kindergarten! — the long-term news can’t possibly be good.

That’s not the only problem with TVs, computers and video games. Other studies have linked glowing screens to sleep issues, developmental problems and even stupidity — especially if your kid is inclined to mimic wrestling moves or cartoon stunts when he does go outside.

I know most kids would react to a TV-free home as if they’d been sentenced to Alcatraz… but that’s the best way to make sure your child is safe.

And if you can’t quite kick the tube to the curb, at least curb the number of hours your kids spend watching it.

Today, more women than ever are suffering from early menopause — and a new study finds common household chemicals may be the reason.

Researchers looked at data on nearly 26,000 women between the ages of 18 and 65, including blood levels of perfluorocarbons (PFCs) — hormone-disrupting chemicals found in everything from clothing to cookware.

When they isolated data on women between the ages of 42 and 51, they found that those with the highest blood levels of PFCs were 40 percent more likely to have already experienced menopause than those with low levels, according to the study in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism.

Naturally, the chemicals industry is already blabbering about how the study doesn’t prove a link — but since these are the same people who want you to think BPA and phthalates are safe, you can’t take it from them.

Take it from me instead: One major PFC, the chemical PFOS (perfluorooctane sulfonate), is known to lower levels of estradiol — a form of estrogen.

The lower your estradiol, the earlier your menopause — and the earlier the menopause, the higher the risks you’ll face in your later years: Studies have found that women who go through the change early are more likely to battle everything from heart disease to osteoporosis.

The best way to avoid exposure to PFCs — and believe me, you want to avoid them even if you’ve already gone through menopause — is to skip products that claim to be stain-resistant, waterproof, no-stick, flame-retardant, etc.

All of those properties are created by PFCs, proving again that “better living through chemistry” can come with a terrible price tag.