A Vital Topic

Today's topic are the evils of sun screen.

Yes, I know a lot of you think sun screen is the second coming and some of you might have noticed that I'm stating that there are more than one evil associated with sun creme with my use of a plural verb and subject, but there is a dark side to these oozie bits of body goo.

Firstly we should suggest that there may be a couple of good things about it.  One being that the skin is protected from UV ray damage and yes, if you have delicate skin, this can be useful.   Skin cancer is one issue and there are little things that seem to thrive in the sun and not covered.

However, the goo also blocks the skin from creating Vitamin D.  We've all heard the horror stories that 30% of all Americans are short in their vitamin D levels and this is going to cause problems and please take our super-dooper vitamin D tablet, now, daily, and forever.

By the way, vitamin D is not a vitamin but a hormone.  I understand that there are about 4 different types in the body.  One of the interesting things that it "seems" to do is to protect you from heart attack!  As one doctor put it, swapping heart attacks for skin cancer might be the best trade off; we can easily cure skin cancer.  My prediction on all of this is that we have the first generations coming into late adulthood who have been spared that childhood beach back burn and who think that a bit of tan is the devil's work.  We shall see if life long use of these chemicals will be an issue.

I also read a scientific paper's abstract the other day that measured how much of the active ingredients in sun screen were modifying body chemistry with their use.  Of course they were slathering the subjects with daily usage and over 70% of their bodies.  They did see the chemicals show up in the blood work.  Dangerous?  Hard to say, but the paper did suggest that more research was required!  If you are not familiar with scientific papers, the last is always a request for more research funds.  There are a lot of folks out there who are deathly afraid of chemicals, who always eat "organic" and whose bodies are very sensitive to strange ingestions, and those folks might want to tread carefully around the sun screen displays!

Finally, in a new area of interest, I've found and can confirm that there is another reason to avoid the use of these dangerous chemicals...  I discovered this while slapping some on my face this morning.  Yes, I use it, don't eat organic, but keep the old arms and legs out in the sun for proper vitamin D generation.  I conclude from my inadvertent discovery, n = 1, that sun screen is dangerous because you can get this stuff in your eye and if that happens it will sting.  It's close to two hours after my application to a lower lid and I'm still feeling a burning sensation!

Be careful out there my friends and moderation in all things!  Ah, I guess, in moderation too.