Stay the %*#@ out of tanning salons.

[Ezliving_Jim]

210. a public service announcement

Posted by Fred Otteson March 10, 2007 07:56AM

Categories: general

Stay the %*#@ out of tanning salons.



Fredrick OttesonPost-summer (November), and you can see the remnants of our annual tans. I am on the top-left, my brothers and female cousins are also present.


All of you Harrisburg women, drooling with anticipation of getting to the tanning salon, so as to appear as if you went to Florida in late March... well, frankly, you're nuts. See, here's the thing - you know better. With a few exceptions, the only ones in Miami that are still saturating their skin with sun are those with natural skin tones that can absorb, without risk, greater amounts of UV radiation. So yes, you'll see tan and lovely women and men in Miami, but their DNA is Latin, or African-Antillean, etc. If you're white-skinned, like me, you don't try to get a tan, you try to avoid one. Assuming you're literate.

When I moved here from Miami, in late March of 2003, it was like having moved back in time to the California beach town I grew up in. A high percentage of the women were excessively tan. Judging by the snow outside, the brown was acquired in a tanning salon. It was shocking how "back in time" it seemed. It's a practice pretty much abandoned all over the country, or at least the big cities I've been in during my life, since the late 1980's.

My two brothers and I grew up in a popular beach town in southern California. We are of Norwegian-German ancestry, and so not surprisingly, when we were very young, we had white hair. During the summers, our skin would darken until it looked Mexican, or equivalent. Women used to stop our mother, us in tow, and question our heritage. Then they would run their hands through our blonde hair, allegedly a good luck charm. It may well have been the origin of my need for attention. Anyway, the point of all this is that our hair was very, very white, and our skin each year - carmel brown. Having later traveled the world, I have occasionally seen this in South America, and it is a striking combination. Being that I was only a child, I just found it a pain in the ass, because stupid older women kept making fusses. I found a photo (I'm in the top-left) of us taken in late November, when most of the summer tan had faded. We got lots darker than that.

And we weren't alone in skin color. None of the mothers worked, so all of the kids and their moms spent the day at the beach. Every day. From probably 10am until 3pm. Sometimes longer. Sometimes the fathers would come on their days off, or sometimes after work, they'd join us for an hour or so before sunset. And we all learned how to body surf, play volleyball, etc., but most of our time, especially that of the moms, was spent lying face down or face up on a towel in the sun. I believe that because of juxtaposition of the percentage of non-Latin skin types, the amount of leisure time available, and the recent interest in beach activities - ours may well have been one of the first groups of casualties. Certainly within a decade, medical science started loudly warning of the risks of over-exposure.

When I became aware of girls, maybe age 10, it started with crushes on mostly older women. There was the set of twins, in their early 20's, aunts of one of my best friends. There was a young teacher or two. And of course, I was aware of my friends mothers, who were now in the neighborhood of 30-35. And I remember commenting to my own, darkened mother at maybe age 11, that so-and-so looked a LOT older than the 30 or 35 I knew her to be. This comparison was made with people who were similar ages but worked, say a teacher. Teachers were seen at the beach on weekends, but they could not do the full-monty, the 10-3, daily browning that we children of the sun and our mothers absorbed.

What happens when you take a 25 year old woman and tan her excessively for 5 to 10 years is that her skin will develop thousands of little wrinkles. Once these have shown up, premature aging is completed.

The skin itself has become less supple, drier, and rougher, and I suppose it is this drying/compression that creates the many wrinkles. "Leathery" was the word I used 40 years ago, to describe the skin of my Germanic friend's mother. And then, when we hit about 16 or so, the authorities realized the risk and we significantly cut-back our beach time, and in my case, at age 17.5, I moved to a cold climate, and I spent the rest of my life avoiding the sun, correctly assuming that I'd been on the extreme end of exposure levels for years, and that alone was probably enough for concern.

So yesterday, they froze off a small, 1/2" by 2/3" patch from the top of my left arm. It's no big deal, and liquid nitrogen freezing of surface skin patches is absolutely painless and nothing for anyone to ever angst over.

And it's not skin cancer, but there was a reasonable chance it would be in a few years. This was the second time this area's been excised. And this is not a big deal, but what is a big deal is that having received that much sun, having tanned so very deeply, year after year, having experienced several serious sun burns each spring, to get the tan started - I do worry about every blemish I receive.

I suppose that it's partly a function of having spent so much time in area where there are many dark-skinned beauties, but I find the pale, supple, and rosy skin of central PA's Germanic population to be incredibly attractive. And I'm not just saying that to keep the local girls out of the tanning salons. My son, who also had white hair as a youth, but because his father was wiser, also pale skin, was literally followed by packs of admiring young girls when we'd visit South America. If you're a Latina trying to look pale-skinned, you're going to look ridiculous. The reverse is true too, and with the knowledge we have today - oh so stupid.

Source

[Ezliving_Jim]

My response:

Mr. Otteson is in the dark about tanning. He appears to be living in a knowledge time warp from his childhood on the subject. Science has moved on.
Perhaps he could read a book, "Solar Power For Optimal Health" by Dr. Marc Sorenson or "The UV Advantage" by Dr. Michael Holick.

Or perhaps he could read the conclusions of a study published in the journal "Cell" by Dr. David Fisher from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute at Harvard Medical School.

In a study in the March 9 issue of the journal Cell, researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute report that the protein, p53, is not only linked to skin tanning, but also may play a role in people's seemingly universal desire to be in the sun – an activity that, by promoting tanning, can reduce one's risk of melanoma.

A protein known as the "master watchman of the genome" for its ability to guard against cancer-causing DNA damage has been found to provide an entirely different level of cancer protection: By prompting the skin to tan in response to ultraviolet light from the sun, it deters the development of melanoma skin cancer, the fastest-increasing form of cancer in the world.

"The number one risk factor for melanoma is an inability to tan; people who tan easily or have dark pigmentation are far less likely to develop the disease," says the study's senior author, David E. Fisher, MD, PhD, director of the Melanoma Program at Dana-Farber and a professor in pediatrics at Children's Hospital Boston. "This study suggests that p53, one of the best-known tumor-suppressor proteins in our body, has a powerful role in protecting us against sun damage in the skin."

There is even the possibility that p53 protects against skin damage in a second – and previously unsuspected – way. The protein not only causes skin to tan in response to sunlight, it may also underlie people's desire to spend time in the sun.

See: http://www.dana-farber.org/abo/news/...n-tanning.html

Watch the video:
http://www.dana-farber.org/video-pla...discussing+p53

Don't blame yourself for having skin cancer. It is not your fault. In all likelihood, nothing you did caused it. It's probably genetic.

Tanning in moderation is healthy behavior. Don't sunburn. Sunburning is very damaging to your skin and doesn't help the tanning process.

Always protect your eyes from UV light.

Vitamin D deficiency is a national epidemic with many unhealthy consequences. One or two sessions a week in a tanning bed will process all the healthy vitamin D3 a human body can use.

Talk to a tanning consultant at your local tanning salon for more information.