How is the sun so bad for us?

In Australia they have so educated the public that there are aussie children who are never exposed, they wear bathing suits that cover them neck to toes and wear a hat too.

The interesting part is that I recently read that many here are suffering from a vitamin D deficiency and are prescribed supplements.

I love the sun and have been exposed and over exposed all of my life. I don’t worry too much now. I figure if it is going to get me the damage is already done. If I were younger, I would probably worry more.

AGain I have read that because of the loss of the ozone layer the sun has more potency now than it did in the past. The UV rays are no longer filtered so more dangerous.

I’m from england town, what is this sun of which you speak, sounds fascinating :)

I’ve gotten 4 pretty bad sunburns this Summer already, and I still don’t use sunscreen. I’m sure one day I’ll regret desperately wanting to tan my pasty skin. That day is not today, however, because the tan is looking pretty damn good.

@livelaughlove21 I think my sister is the same age as you, and she loves to tan. I did, too, when I was a little younger (I’m 31) and I’ve changed my mind now that I have all of these fine lines on my face and a wrinkled forehead.

Not that I’m saying you should change your mind, just that hindsight changed my perspective as I got a little older. Now I’m more concerned about preventing wrinkles than being slightly less pasty.

The depletion of the ozone layer allows more ultraviolet radiation to get through to us. This is responsible for the increasing rates of skin cancer and other health problems. Our use of chlorofluorocarbons have caused the destruction of the ozone layer. There are some areas where it’s very thin. Australia is particularly affected by the thinning of the ozone layer. This thinning has been increasing since the 1970s which is why we weren’t so aware as kids. Nobody was thinking about skin cancer to the same level as we are now. So apart from the environmental changes, I think there’s also a much higher awareness of the dangers of exposure to the sun.

This skin cancer site includes a diagram that shows the level of ozone depletion over the years. This article from _The Conversation talks about how the Montreal Protocol has helped to save lives due to skin cancer by reducing emissions of ozone unfriendly chemicals.

Australia is one of the worst places in the world for skin cancer. As Rooey said, one of the downsides to educating people to be sun smart is that a large number of people may now be vitamin D deficient. However, this can also be caused by poor diet and sedentary lifestyles. The jury is still out on whether the answer is more sun and if we do expose ourselves to more sun there are times of the year when it’s safer. You can also increase your vitamin D levels by eating oily fish and the like.

Skin cancer is a horrible thing. My husband, who was never a sun worshipper but he has fair skin, looks much older than he is. He also has to visit the dermatologist every three months to have skin cancers burned off or cut out. I don’t think a tan in your youth is worth that in your middle years. That’s before we think about melanoma which is deadly. Australian women tend to look quite a lot older than their years because of the sun’s damage.

US Environmental Protection Agency site

@Bellatrix perfect answer, thank you. The graphics were really interesting.

I grew up in the sun, first in the San Joaquin Valley, then on the west coast of Florida. I remember burning badly sometimes from playing outside, especially at the start of every summer. It meant a couple of days of discomfort, but it didn’t slow us down much. There was no talk of a depleted ozone layer or skin cancer in the 60s and early 70s. I don’t remember anyone worried about skin cancer. Only movie stars wore sunglasses, certainly not kids. My mom and her glistening friends spent hours tanning by the pool basted in Johnson&Johnson baby oil. When I was 16 my skin was dark brown and my hair nearly white like my sibs. Then, in the 70s we began hearing about CFCs, Ozone depletion, and skin cancer. Sun glasses were still mostly a fashion statement. There were new products called sunblockers.

My Oceanography professor, a diver, boatsman, fisherman, and surfer, claimed that Ozone depletion was all bullshit. This was in 1973. He was saying something about the molecular weights of CFCs were too heavy to reach the Ozone layer and jets were poor delivery systems—planes couldn’t carry pollution high enough to reach the OL. Even Oxygen was too heavy with its two molecules, O2. He said to reach the OL, it would have to drop a molecule and become O1, which is Ozone. O1 is Ozone. It sounded reasonable, especially coming from a prof. and a waterman.

By 1980, people were starting to wear more hats, expensive UV-blocking sunglasses, and sunblock at the beach. Zinc had been popular with surfers, fishermen and other water people since the early 70s to protect the top of the ears and bridge of the nose from burning, but it had nothing to do with fear of skin cancer. I left to live in Europe for ten years and returned in 1991 to find that some of the old fishermen and golfers I had known were going blind from retinal damage due to long term UV exposure. People had facial scars from skin cancer removal, especially avid golfers. Young surfers, windsurfers, people who were born in the early 70s, were being diagnosed with skin cancer.

Then, after spending my first summer back in sailing competitions, I came up with a sore on my shoulder that wouldn’t heal. They dug out a chunk of precancerous cells. After all those years of exposure with no problems, I come back and start having problems right away after my first summer. Almost every water person I know has had little chunks of meat removed since I’ve been back in Florida. I don’t remember adults, old fishermen, golfers, recreational sailors, etc., having these problems when I was a kid. Things have really changed and they seem to be getting worse. I’ve witnessed the change and take the UV thing and climate change (I see other evidence of this on dive trips and gunkholing estuaries all over Florida, Yucatan, and the Bahamas) very seriously. It is sad. I am especially fanatical about my sunglasses. I really don’t want to suffer like some of the old codgers did in my time.

The ultraviolet light is much worse than it used to be. As a kid I could work outside to the point of heat exhaustion and not get sunburned much. (I wasn’t too bright as a kid). Now I have to watch it carefully to avoid a burn.

Well, most people throughout much of the world possess more melanin than northern Europeans, right? I’m not sure if lack of melanin was an adaptive advantage of itself in northern climates, or if it just could be selected out of the gene pool because it was not necessary.

I remember listening to an episode of the radio show Native America Calling and the topic was skin cancer among American Indians. I don’t remember whether they drew a causal line, but there certainly seemed to be a correlation between the rise in incidents of skin cancers and the advent of the modern diet.

You also might find this book of interest.

I really don’t think that I was aware of how quickly and how intensely the ozone layer changed. I was born in the early 80s, so I grew up being exposed to it happening – but I think I filed it away as something that has been going on for a long time and relatively slowly. I had no idea this question would end up with such informative answers.

20 minutes of exposure to sunlight a day is sufficient to build up your Vitamin D.

Sunscreen has just been shown to be the best skin anti-aging regimen that you can have. Source

UV rays are the culprit in skin cancers and wrinkling.

@marinelife right, I understand all of that perfectly.
But, logically, telling ancient humans (even many modern humans) to only be in the sun for 20 minutes a day is absurd. So, I didn’t really understand how we came to that point.

We know a lot more now. Human life spans were much shorter in the ancient past. Sunlight was not the enemy that would kill you. You’d die of something else first.

@marinelife that made some sense to me before I asked, but that’s what spawned the question of how we hadn’t evolved to be out in the sun for more time than that if we didn’t “know better” all along. Even if the sun wasn’t necessarily killing us off before other natural forces, it still wouldn’t explain how we hadn’t evolved better defenses if it was so destructive throughout the history of human exposure.

@DigitalBlue Before I say this I have to condition it with you’ll know I’m kidding, but others might not.
It’s all you light skinned freaks being so attractive to us that are darker skinned and spreading your genes throughout the population.

@marinelife It’s not very scientific, but my personal experiences in the past 60 years have me believing that this bloom of skin cancers began recently, within my lifetime. We don’t need to go to the 19th century and beyond to mine sports periodicals and personal diaries, all the anecdotal evidence you want resides in the memory of any octogenarian Florida golfer or fisherman. Ask him or her if, when they were in their teens and twenties, did they ever know of elder fellow sportsmen contracting skin cancers, suffering major skin damage (beyond wrinkles, which all women were aware of), or retinal damage resulting in blindness from the sun and I bet the answer will invariably be no.

For most of human history, a person who lived past age 50 was very old indeed. I think it’s possible that the sun has always been dangerous to those of us with fair skin, but we’re just now, in the last several generations, living long enough where accumulated sun damage mutates into cancer.

It’s all about dosage. We need sunlight to produce vitamin D. Misuse of sunscreen can actually lead to vitamin D deficiency (e.g. applying it 15 minutes before leaving the house).

It makes sense to check the UV Index weather forecast, if you experience sunburns.

I accidentally got burned so badly once that if I’d been working at the time I would have had to have taken 3 days off. I probably should have gone to the ER, but I didn’t. I wore nothing but a sheet for 3 days. I peeled 3 times and still got a tan out of it.

I had a sunburn in my teens than left scars. I was… in really bad shape. I was covered in blisters and my skin was peeling off in thick sheets, not like normal peeling sunburn skin. It was horrible. I actually had sunscreen on that day, I swear some of my worst sunburns have been with sunscreen on.

I was completely careless about it when I was younger, but now I actually do try to keep up with the sunscreen and staying in the shade, I try not to get burnt. Actually, I try to avoid getting any color at all. Particularly because I freckle, but overall the result is the same, I just don’t want the sun damage. I had enough in my youth.

Yesterday caught me off guard because it wasn’t especially hot or sunny, I was just out there all day. Luckily it isn’t bad at all. Won’t be trusting those mild days anymore.

My thoughts on this is we did not evolve well to what we need from the sun. I am extremely fair and as a child I had a few burns. As a teen I worked very hard at being tan. Now I have wrinkles I wish I did not have, and for the last 15 years I have very carefully protected myself from the sun and I am severly vitamin D dificient. I have narrowed down this dificiency to ccontribute to the muscle pain and weakness I suffer from. I take mega doses of D, which jas helped significantly. I also get a little sun here and there. My biggest regret is not being more moderate about sun exposure when I was young, so I could be out in it more now. I have been in the sun much more than usual the last couple of months, I actually have some tan, and my most recent D level was the highest number I have ever had since I have been testing my D. I had just a couple weeks before said to my husband was feeling good and able to do my zumba with less effort. I think it isn’t a coincidence.

My husband who is darker than me had a good D level when he was tested. Supposedly the darker you are the harder to absorb the D, it’s like a natural sunscreen, but my husband actually goes into the sun without protection because he does not burn and does not wrinkle (well relatively speaking he doesn’t) so his exposure is actually more than mine even though he has the darker skin.

I actually think the main reason there are pale people in the cold climates and dark people in the hotter ones is for camoflauge reasons. Very few people will even considering my hypothesis. Have you ever been to places full of glaciers? The ice it white and blue. Pale skin and blue eyes are going to blend in better. Even more moderate climates with four seasons, the trees are grey and snow falls in the winter. In the summer the trees brown up, and so does our skin. In the tropics the jungle is lush and shades of brown and black. If you live in the woods you see the coats of the deer change from brown like the trunks of trees in the summer to grey like the trunsk of the trees in the winter. Some Native Americans have reddish skin, and the lands were full of clay. People from the desert are a different shade of brown than those from Central America.

Anyway, I think evolution was trying to camoflauge us with nature and also let some D in and it just is not a perfect system.

The northern climates do have some foods rich in D. Herring, Salmon, many of the fish caught and consumed in great quanitities in the very cold climates have good quantities of D.

However, we see diseases like MS in higher rates in the upper midwest in America. There is a theory that lack of sunlight, basically lack of D might contribute to this. I believe it, and think it might be true for other neuromuscular diseases. Nothing is proven though. It also could be partly genetic, since we have people in the upper midwest who came to America from many of the colder countries in Europe.

Concerns about wrinkles and cancer are long term concerns. Concerns to stay safe in nature and not be attacked by other animals is an immediate concern.

(A little sun burn feels good though. It makes you feel like you DID some thing, like work hard, even if all you did was lay around in the sun.)

Well… in an evolutionary sense, there’s not really a good reason for us to have adapted any better to the sun than we have. Natural selection works when (1) a trait is heritable and (2) variation in that trait allows some individuals to leave more offspring than others. This leads, over time, to that trait becoming increasingly prevalent in the population.

But most humans don’t see the nastier effects of sun damage until so late in our lives that we’ve already reproduced, so a trait that effectively, for example, protects us from skin cancer due to sunburn would have no effect of our evolutionary fitness (the ability to survive to reproduce) at all. And so, it wouldn’t have any reason to become more prevalent in the population.

What a great question and answers. Being so pasty white, I’m glad to have learned something new from this thread.

Let’s remember that for a long time in history the whiter you were the better in terms of social class and beauty. People have been protecting themselves from the sun for a long time. It’s only in the last 70–100 years maybe that people in Europe and America wanted to tan. I’m not really sure exactly how many years, but I know my grandma used to sunbathe on the rook of her building in The Bronx and she would be about 93 if she were alive today. Previously, tanned skin was for the field hands and those who did hard labor. Then things changed and a tan meant enough wealth for leisure time and so tans demonstrated social status. The plethora of caucasians tanning themselves for years consistently in great numbers so we could see the effects is probably fairly recent. In my family I always say we die too young from heart disease to see if we will get cancer. Not that young people don’t get cancers, but you know what I mean. Now, modern medicine is keeping my heart disease ridden family alive mich longer than would have been possible years past.

Although, I do question melonoma and how it does or doesn’t relate to the sun. Some of the most deadly melanomas begin on the foot, a part of the body that usually does not see excessive sun. I know people who have protected their skin their entire lives because they had a parent die of melonoma, and still they themselves get melanoma very young, in their 30’s and 40’s.

@glacial Great point about making it to the reproductive years and then nature doesn’t concern itself anymore with how healthy you are that goes along with my idea of short term needs v. Ling term needs for evolution.

@JLeslie Yes, a lot of people conflate “fitness” as it is used in casual conversation (general well-being and healthiness) with “fitness” as it is used in biology (survival to reproduce). It makes for a lot of misunderstandings about how evolution works. “Survival of the fittest” has nothing to do with being stronger, tougher, etc.

And just to dovetail on @Bellatrix I tease my dark skinned friends telling them that because of their dark skin they never age. I know blacks and Filipinos who are 55 and look 35 because they are so sun damage resistant.

@ucme I thought your comment one of the funniest I’ve read on here.

@Adagio To be fair though, it’s been gloriously sunny here for, ooh…a couple of weeks now.
It wont last, but you can’t have everything.