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In 1980, Dr. Garland and his brother, Cedric F. Garland, also an epidemiologist, published an influential paper, "Do Sunlight and Vitamin D Reduce the Likelihood of Colon Cancer?" The article, which appeared in the International Journal of Epidemiology, posited that vitamin D (produced by the body though exposure to sunshine) and calcium (which vitamin D helps the body absorb) together helped reduce the risk of colon cancer. The Garland brothers found their life work in 1974, when they attended a seminar that featured maps of the United States on which cancer mortality rates had been plotted by county. The mortality rates for colon and breast cancer were noticeably higher in many Northern counties than they were, for instance, in the Southwest. At the time, the disparity was unexplained. The brothers began to wonder whether the difference in available sunlight might account for it. Their research, first reported in the 1980 paper, led them to propose a correlation between geographic areas with low sunlight levels and colon cancer deaths. Their findings, which have been largely borne out by later studies, countered the longstanding blanket indictment of the sun as a public-health menace.