Updates and Live Streaming Saturday @ 10am EST

#WeAreReading

Greetings family

It’s been a minute since I last emailed so my apologies. I’ve been busy with various things in the last few weeks which I’ll share below. Firstly, we’ll be reading Chapter 12 of Blueprint For Black Power this Saturday at 10am Eastern Standard Time (U.S.). Hope you can join us live:

From February 2024, I now leave the full live streams on YouTube rather than making them exclusive to paid supporters. The reason for this is that I realised that putting up a paywall meant that fewer people were able to view the videos. This runs contrary to my intention of getting this insight to as wide an audience as possible. In contrast, the Yurugu series has been getting consistently high viewing figures as more people discover it.

If you are a paid supporter, I hope this change sits well you. Your support is hugely important to me. It helps me to cover the various costs involved in the work I’m doing (e.g. web hosting and streaming software). My long-term aim/dream is to be able to justify cutting down the amount of days I work in my actual job, and devoting more time to African-centred content creation.

Mindfulblackdad.com

I’m continuing to build out mindfulblackdad.com, and have added the following article recently:

Sunlight and Black Health

Those of you who follow me on YouTube (subscribe here if you aren’t!) will know that I’ve been studying the topic of sunlight and health for several weeks now. Every time I learn something, I go down a new rabbit trail of discovery which delays my actual presentation further! I wanted to share one nugget from my research with you.

Sunlight, Breast Cancer and Dark Skinned Women

You may already know that exposure to sunlight is correlated with a lower risk of breast cancer in women. This isn’t hugely surprising because exposure to sunlight is correlated with a whole load of positive health outcomes (lower blood pressure, lower risk of cardiovascular disease, better mental health, etc). But I’ve come across a fascinating study in Puerto Rico which found that the association between sunlight exposure and lower breast cancer risk is stronger in darker-skinned woman.

The study found that among all participants, the women with the highest sun exposure had a 53% less chance of breast cancer. This is incredible in itself, but the protective impact of sunlight was stronger among darker-skinned women. Among them, those who had medium sun exposure had a 58% lower risk of breast cancer, and those who received the highest sun exposure had a whopping 67% lower risk.

I hope this gives you an insight into why I have become obsessed with sunlight and health lately. It’s my firm belief that the single most important thing we can do for our health (mental and physical) as Black people in particular is to get as much direct sunlight exposure as we possibly can every day, starting as early in the morning as possible. I will get my study completed as soon as I can, but in the meantime, the following video is an excellent and very thorough overview of this whole area.

Right, that’s all for now. I hope you are all well and I look forward to seeing you around on the Interwebs (hopefully Saturday during the live).

Peace
Ely