It must have been about a decade ago that I first became aware of the alleged dangers of exposure to the sun and the ‘link’ between over-exposure to ultra-violet radiation and skin cancer*. Looking back, it was a ‘consciousness raising exercise’ that mushroomed from ‘never heard of it’ to widespread health-panic with remarkable speed.
Assisted, perhaps, by the miserabalisit anti-hedonism of the Nineties and the suspiciously convenient dovetailing with the doleful predictions about ‘global warming’, we should have been more sceptical. But medical opinion was converted and few people have the confidence to fly in the face of such an august edifice. The new orthodoxy was nailed down with copious amounts of ‘official’ advice to stay in, wrap up, cover up and, if you are foolhardy enough to venture out in the sun, only do so after smothering yourself with gallons of sunblock.
But that was then, and this is now:
A scientist is claiming too much sunscreen can lead to vitamin deficiency.
Professor Michael Holick of Boston University is advising people to spend up to 10 minutes a day in the sun unprotected to guard against a lack of vitamin D.
He said: “In our efforts to protect people from the sun we’ve thrown the baby out with the bathwater.”
So Professor Holick just a publicity-seeking iconoclast or is this the heretical opening shot of a debunking campaign?
Perhaps the only danger we really need to worry about are the risks arising from an over-exposure to ‘experts’.
[Note to professional scare-mongers: ‘cancer’ is the panic word of our age. Linking lifestyle choices to heart disease or kidney failure just doesn’t cut the mustard.]
Pherecydes is an old Scots name. I carried that and a bunch of other Brittanic surnames into the Texas sunshine with me, lo, those many years ago.
After swimming in the sunshine, working in the sunshine…even sunning in the sunshine, I now have large excrescenses emerging on my body. Hard ones. Soft ones. Black ones. Brown ones. Scaly ones.
But I am very old and no one cares. And though they itch they do not bleed…yet. A dermatologist calls them “geriatric keratosis” or something like that but I would stay out of the sun anyway, with or without suncream, lest you end up looking like me.
Too much sun *does* cause skin cancer. And we *do* need exposure to the sun to get vitamin D.
It’s not necessarily the fault of “experts” if some people are so stupid they take things to ludicrous extremes.
I fear both statements are true, but both must be taken as warnings “to do all things in moderation”.
Too little sun and we get a Vitamin D deficiency. This isn’t new knowledge. It’s a fact known for most of the previous century. Too much sun causes skin damage like the above poster noted, or even skin cancers. UV is used for serious biohazard protection and sterilization. Why? Because it cuts the bacterial DNA up into little bits. It can do the same to some skin cells. The solar UV is nowhere near as intense as an antiseptic dose… but a few cells here, a few cells there and pretty soon it adds up to a real tissue.
Ozone depletion is real but not as severe as the scaremongers would have you believe. It’s mostly polar and I’ve read recently that it is already abating due to the decrease in CFC release.
I seriously doubt it has had much of any affect in any non-polar climates. However, solar UV has *always* been a major cause of skin cancer in people who are not adapted to bright sunlight: ie palefaces who left Europe for sunnier climes.
Melanin, which causes skin colour, is an adaptation to bright sunlight.
In the USA, dairy products have vitamin D added to facilitate the body’s use of calcium. If this isn’t enough, you can always take dietary supplements. I make it a point to stay out of the sun, I’ve seen too many baby-boomer women turn to leather at 40…
Don’t the Australians wear lots of sunscreen? And aren’t they pretty much the healthiest people on the planet?
Oh give it a few years and with the help of a little genetic modification we will all be able to use implanted cuttlefish genes to make our skin as light or as dark in whatever colour and pattern we want so that suncream – or clothes for that matter may become things of the past in summertime 🙂
Alice is absolutely correct. However, there is a curious culture of puritanism among some medics that would make it our first duty to live as long as possible even if it means removing every possible pleasure from our lives.
As for Australians, it rather depends what you mean by healthy… They do have the highest rates of skin cancer, which is why they wear a lot of sunscreen these days.
We don’t have to make a choice, but given the choice of rickets or a small squamous cell cancer I think I’d take the treatable cancer. (Fortunately melanoma, the nasty skin-cancer that kills people a lot is generally understood not to be sun-linked.)
A weird thing about being an Australian is that on this issue, I see Britain being about 25 years behind Australia. This is because Australia has much hotter weather and in the 1970s had skin cancer rates that were simply horrifying. Britain’s rates were and are nowhere near that level. At that point the medical establishment (with government money) launched a massive skin cancer awareness that contines to this day. Part of this involves telling people to wear sunscreen, but the bulk of it is simply “Do not go out in the sun”, or if you do then
wear a hat and a shirt. (This is rather more important than the sunscreen aspect of it). Believe it or not, Australians have followed this advice, and the skin cancer rate has dropped considerably. It is true that the skin cancer rate in the UK is lower than Australia simply because of the much cooler weather here, but one big change in British lifestyles that has occurred in recent years is that a large portion of the population goes to places with warmer climates and lies in the sun for a week or two every year. This is a large contributory factor to higher skin cancer rates. (This isn’t especially speculative stuff. It’s about as good as scientific evidence gets).
(The worst kinds of skin cancer are exceptionally nasty, too. I’ve known people who have discovered a lump on their skin and have been dead two months later).
The other thing I really notice here in the UK is simply that suntans are still fashionable here, and in Australia they are not. In Britain, people deliberately go out into the sun to get a tan, and if I look at fashion models in magazine spreads and advertisements, in Britain they have tans. In Australia, they don’t. I read an article on this in New Scientist a few years ago in which they showed an advertisement for sunscreen, in which the same photograph was used in both a British and an Australian version of the advertisement. The photograph had been doctored in photoshop or similar so that the model’s skin was quite different in colour for the different advertisements – brown for the British one and much lighter for the Australian one.
In Australia, nobody attempts to get a tan any more. Tans are not fashionable. It’s a very big difference in attitude.
Skin cancer is certainly bad news, my uncle died of it very quickly, and painfully. But… regular sun exposure isn’t closely linked to skin cancer, childhood severe sunburn is. Big difference there. Plus, sun exposure is linked to lower rates of many other kinds of cancer.
Come on folks, we are designed to be out in the sun all day every day, not cooped up inside. It is the being inside, and getting too pale that leads to the sunburn that leads to cancer many years later. Get outside every day, get brown.
Michael Jennings is exactly correct.
Here in Australia, in general we don’t have to worry about wind-chill factors, how to drive safely in fog, what to do if caught in a snowdrift, etc.
But here, too much sunlight can kill you.
Until Brits started to go to sunnier climes ( ie anywhere else on the planet except Ireland) this wasn’t a problem. There’s a reason why Europeans have white, almost transparent skin – it’s so they can make maximum use of what little sun there is to make Vitamin D.
So when going to Minorca, the Canaries etc, do what we do : wear a long-sleeved shirt, a broad-brim hat, and sunscreen.
This is especially important with young children. Sun damage when young greatly increases the chance of skin cancer when you’re older. Older people can get away with it, youngsters can’t.
Tom Bridgeland does make an interesting point – getting sunburnt as opposed to suntanned is one of the pointers for cancer… although constant suntan does cause slow year on year skin damage – though if you like wrinkles that’s not a huge problem!
Does anyone know of a site with comparative data on sunTAN versus sunBURN – I did a quick google without any success!