Tanning...

I recently engaged in a discussion with some co-workers of whom I happened to be eavesdropping in on at the time. They were discussing the benefits of a new company gym pass that allowed free tanning and were excitedly pursuing the topic. I just had to drop in and give my two cents on the matter; "Tanning, really? Why would anyone still go tanning?" The response I got was from one of my male coworkers while the rest went awkwardly silent. He informed me that he tanned because he was going on a 5 day hike and didn't want to get the burn while hiking. "Okay" I told him, "I can sort of see the logic behind that thinking, but..."

Let me pause right there, wasn't there this huge stink about how bad tanning was for your skin and how it has some pretty direct correlations with skin cancer and that you'd have to be an idiot to willingly subject yourself to harmful UV radiation without wearing protection back in the early 2000s? How is this still a discussion that we have to have, especially among educated, bright, young adults?

Lets review some of the basics:

The Healthy Part of Sun Exposure:
This is when you have a healthy amount of time in the sun. Your body actually uses the it to help produce Vitamin D, an important substance that helps in the absorption of calcium and phosphorus, it also aids in the communication channels of our cells throughout our bodies. You don't even actually need tons of exposure, 10 minutes outside is probably good enough for most people, but feel free to spend some additional time doing some moderate intensity physical activity (30 minutes would be perfect); such as gardening, a light jog, a brief walk through a park, etc...
With healthy acute exposure to the sun you may also have some skin pigmentation darkening to help naturally in defense of the suns UV rays.

The Harmful Part of Sun Exposure:
Sunburns - this is probably the most common and well known part of harmful sun exposure, it is often characterized by redness of the affected area, increase pain susceptibility and depending on the severity of the burn may involve painful blisters (2nd degree and may also need skin grafting of the entire dermis layer is destroyed) and blackness or whiteness and will be dry (3rd degree). This may also result in leathery looking skin and at this point has pretty much destroyed the skin.
But what you may not have known was that it can take only 15-30 minutes in midday sun to receive a sunburn without adequate protection.
For a good amount of protection (depending on your type of skin) you should probably use a broad-spectrum sunscreen of SPF 15 at least. If you are fair skinned or have blond hair, blue eyes, or red hair then you may want to consider a higher SPF. Feel free to learn more about sun blocks here.

Premature Aging of the skin - We all know what this looks like. You've seen the men and women who look like they could be easily in their 30's or 40's but because of their tanned leathery skin they appear to be closer to the 50's and 60's. This occurs because of a chronic exposure to UV radiation which in turn breaks down the collagen and elastin in the skin.

Suppression of the Immune System - There are actually a lot of fancy words I could use here to try to convince you of how the UV Radiation messes with the T-Lymphocytes (your white blood cells) and how that in turn causes problems with the identification structures that the body uses to identify cancer cells and other cancer inducing issues and how it then is less able to destroy those things and promote the growth of tumors, but I'll bypass that and simply say, that unhealthy UV exposure can further cause cancer (not just skin cancer). As always, feel free to learn more from this website

Eye Damage and Skin Cancer - I've combined the two since I think my point is beginning to be made: Unhealthy sun exposure (or UV radiation) can be very harmful and so intentionally tanning is stupid. Interestingly enough one of the prevalent skin cancer types has a name very similar to the pigment cells that cause tanning, Melanoma; whereas the pigment cells are called Melanocytes which form Melanin (the pigment granules that are essentially what cause you to look tan). In case you are wondering this is not a coincidence. So again, intentional tanning equals dumb.
As as you might imagine from the heading of this section, UV radiation can also cause a lot of eye damage which can result in a lot of seeing problems (which cost a lot of money to fix).

I'll go ahead and close my rant now, but finish with this:
Please... Please! Let's be wiser consumers of knowledge. We have these nifty little devices that fit in our pocket capable of accessing the worlds knowledge on a huge variety of topics. Most of them we can just talk to and it will pull relevant searches for us to learn more about.
Now I know this rant didn't include all the topics, some of the sources sited aren't the best or most reliable and so forth, but that's okay. I really just wanted to give you an idea of how easy it is to pull relevant data quickly.

My advice, also check both sides of the story. Try to find relevant sources (journals, articles, and websites from .gov and .edu sites are typically pretty reliable).

I hoped this helped. If you have a topic that you'd like to learn more about, a "fad' that you've heard so much about but would like to know more let me know. I'd love to learn more about it and give my 2 cents worth.

- Braden