PHP as root, but permissions denied?

[freebie]

I have a unix directory that has "root" as the "owner" and "apache" as the "group", with permissions 775 (ie, all for owner and users in the apache group). My phpinfo() output shows the PHP is being run as the root user. When I try to do a file upload, it returns that permissions are denied. I have to change the permissions to 777 to get it to work, but I'd rather not do that. Can anyone explain why, if php is run as root, that there are permissions issues?

[nemonoman]

check [man]umask[/man]

[freebie]

Thanks for the reply.
From what I read, it looks like a default umask of 0022 is used, and thus apache is getting blocked, so I need to use umask(0000);