This post discusses the difference between UV-A and UV-B rays, the role of melanin in protection against sunburn, the risks of wearing sunscreen, and the health benefits of exposing your body to the sun’s rays.
I am fair-skinned, of Norwegian stock. When I sunbathe, I’m talking about exposing my body (preferably nekkid) to the sun for short periods when the sun’s rays are relatively weak. I started off sunbathing for 15 minutes and have built up to one hour, but I usually sunbathe for about half an hour. I do not ever burn my skin.
I will not use sunscreen (big yuck!), so I am using the mechanism of melanin production to protect my skin from exposure to the sun. So I’d like to explain the process to you and the potential risk of using sunscreen, but again, I’m no expert. This is a complex subject. Please feel free to post any corrections to what I present below.
I write posts like this because I think people should make informed decisions about their health and their bodies. I’m not a doctor or a scientist. I’m just a very curious person who’s found out I’ve been lied to far too many times. My health is important to me, and it’s up to me to know the truth from the lie.
UV-B Rays
UV-B rays are responsible for the quick tan or burn you get from prolonged exposure. The quick tan usually fades and the burn often blisters and then peels. Overexposure (coupled with poor diet and life style) can lead to basal-cell carcinoma or squamous cell carcinoma. UV-B causes direct damage to your DNA when the DNA absorbs the ultraviolet photon, but most of the rays are efficiently converted to heat by melanin. The direct damage to the cells will signal the melanocytes (5% to 10% of the cells at the bottom layer of your skin) to produce more melanin.
Sunscreen is used to protect skin from UV-B rays, but it does not protect as well as melanin and can cause greater free radical damage to your cells.
Melanin is a molecule that acts as a photoprotective substance, dissipating more than 99.9% of the absorbed UV radiation as heat without generating free radicals. The more melanin, the more UV is absorbed and dissipated. Minor direct damage is natural (the suns rays are, after all, radiation), and it stimulates the production of more melanin for protection. The cells will be replaced.
UV-B rays are responsible for the production of Vitamin D and therefore are beneficial in moderation. Light skinned people have little melanocyte activity, dark skinned people great melanocyte activity.
UV-A Rays
These are longer rays that penetrate into deeper layers of your skin. They do not cause sunburn, but they will stimulate the melanocytes to begin melanin production. They make the melanin combine with oxygen to produce a tan. A tan from UV-A rays takes about 72 hours to appear and last longer than the quick tan produced by UV-B.
UV-A rays cause indirect damage to your cells through creation of free radicals and oxidation. Indirect damage is responsible for 92% of melanoma cases. Melanoma is cancer of the melanocytes and accounts for 75% of all deaths from skin cancer.
Many sunscreens do not protect against UV-A because they typically remain on the surface of the skin. However, when the sunscreen does enter into the skin it generates free radicals of its own and the indirect damage is amplified. The chemicals in sunscreen are harmful to the living tissues of the skin. Full-spectrum sunscreens are recommended for protection against both UV-A and UV-B.
Sunscreen Use Leads to Greater Incidents of Melanoma
In the American Journal of Public Health, Garland et al. wrote:
Although sunscreens, including PABA and its esters prevent sunburn, there has never been any epidemiological or laboratory evidence that they prevent either melanoma or basal cell carcinoma in humans.
Worldwide, the countries where chemical sunscreens have been recommended and adopted have experienced the greatest rise in cutaneous malignant melanoma, with a contemporaneous rise in death rates.
Controlled Sun Exposure Increases Health
William P. Grant, PhD, wrote in an article in Cancer, published by the American Cancer Society:
There are large geographic gradients in mortality rates for a number of cancers in the U.S. (e.g., rates are approximately twice as high in the northeast compared with the southwest). Risk factors such as diet fail to explain this variation. Previous studies have demonstrated that the geographic distributions for five types of cancer are related inversely to solar radiation. The purpose of the current study was to determine how many types of cancer are affected by solar radiation and how many premature deaths from cancer occur due to insufficient ultraviolet (UV)-B radiation….
The results of the current study demonstrate that much of the geographic variation in cancer mortality rates in the U.S. can be attributed to variations in solar UV-B radiation exposure. Thus, many lives could be extended through increased careful exposure to solar UV-B radiation and more safely, vitamin D3 supplementation, especially in nonsummer months.
I fasted at a retreat years ago in Palm Springs. One of my co-fasters was a hispanic woman who couldn’t stay in the sun for any length of time. She would break out in a rash. After just a week of fasting and eating only fruit, she was able to sunbathe for 20 minutes without any problems. The sun wasn’t her problem. Her health was her problem.
Other Factors to Consider
The sunscreen you wear doesn’t necessarily just stay with you. You go swimming in it. You get it on clothing and towels and then wash them. Chemicals from sunscreens enter into your bloodstream (who knows what they do then!) and are excreted in your urine. How many pounds of sunscreen are now in the groundwater? In the water you drink?
An article in The Times of India states that sunscreen is causing death to corral reefs. They caution that:
…banning of sunscreen was not necessary and pointed out two simple things swimmers could do to reduce their impact on corals: Use sunscreens with physical filters, which reflect instead of absorb ultraviolet radiation; and use eco-friendly chemical sunscreens.
Vitamin D Supplementation
Reinhold Vieth wrote beautifully for the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition:
Humans evolved as naked apes in tropical Africa. The full body surface of our ancestors was exposed to the sun almost daily. In contrast, we modern humans usually cover all except about 5% of our skin surface and it is rare for us to spend time in unshielded sunlight. Our evolution has effectively designed us to live in the presence of far more vitamin D (calciferol) than what most of us get now, yet there is no consensus about what vitamin D intakes are optimal or safe.
Unlike anything else used in the fortification of foods, the purpose of vitamin D is to correct for what is an environmental deficit (less ultraviolet exposure) and not to correct for lack due to classical nutritional reasons. With a few exceptions reviewed by Takeuchi et al (2), there is little or no vitamin D in the kind of foods that humans normally eat. Therefore, conclusions about the efficacy and safety of vitamin D must be in the context of the role of environmental factors.
The Bottom Line
The sun is the safest, most natural way to produce vitamin D. But don’t ever burn yourself. I just don’t understand why people are willing to smear chemicals all over the largest organ of their body. Those chemicals will make it into your bloodstream to join the million other chemicals ingested and inhaled, and it’s anybody’s guess what they’ll do.
If you are light-skinned, take it easy. You don’t have much melanin to absorb the ultraviolet rays, so you don’t need much exposure to produce vitamin D. Maybe 10 to 15 minutes a few times a week. If you’re dark-skinned or you live in northern latitudes, then you’ll need more exposure.
If you plan on being outside for some time, wear long-sleeved shirts and a hat. Sit in the shade. Take short sunbaths to build up your melanin so you can increase your time outdoors. Use sunscreen if there are no other options.
To me there’s a world of difference between synthetic vitamin D found in a bottle (preserved with toxic chemicals) and living vitamin D produced by my own body. And it feels so good to lay in the warmth of the sun on a cold winter day. It banishes the blues.
Other Links
http://www.vvv.com/healthnews/dsunscre.html
http://www.skinbiology.com/toxicsunscreens.html. (Be advised that my linking to this site does not constitute endorsement of their product, only appreciation for their information.)
http://www.healself.org/sun.html
Sunlight and Melanoma–Weston A. Price Foundation
See also: Why Not Sunbathe? Because the Sun’ll Kill Ya
Will Sunbathing Cause Cancer?
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It really helped thanks
The more there are sick people, the better for doctors and drug companies to make their billions. So, to create sickness and diseases they put poisons in their medicaments, calling them ’side effects’, they make people believe that the sun causes skin cancer, they almost force people to avoid the sun completely or using sunscreens. Off course, this is the source of hundreds of different diseases and premature deaths. Without the exposure to the health giving rays of the sun the human kind will be dying out and eventually, will cease to exist on this planet.
The system should be changed, so that health care and medicins should be government controlled and non- profit making, no cure no pay system. Only then there would be incentive for medical profession to keep people healthy. Only then doctors would regain their authority and trust of peaple.
my stock is small i have icthyosis a genetically skin disease that will not clear up im sick and tired of it cause it is itchy and burny and it hurts please help me
Isn’t icthyosis a genetic disease one is born with? I don’t know that there’s anything you can do. But you can practice healthful living to give your body its best chances. You might want to watch the video I posted yesterday on Joanne Unleashed called Learn How This Woman Healed Herself of Hypothyroid, Eczema, Anemia and Bullous Pemphigoid.