Sunlight: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

We’ve all had that experience where we’ve gotten too much sun. That night you’re laying in bed but you can’t sleep. All the sheets come off and you can’t make the air conditioner run quite fast enough to be cool, because you are on fire.

All of that because of a little sunshine. Soon it will be the season of sunshine and we all have a tendency to get a little too much at times. It happened at my house with some friends visiting over the weekend a while back. There was a young lady who was just white as a sheet but she was pinker than my wife’s roses when she left.

Sunlight – is it a good thing? Is it a bad thing? Well, yes. Like many other things it is good in small quantities but bad in large quantities. There’s been this huge debate for so long about sunlight and sun protection. At one point in time the standard medical dogma was “avoid all sunlight”. Well, that made cancer rates go up. We’ve specifically learned now that not getting enough sunshine (because of Vitamin D production) is a cause of cancer. Let’s go back to the concept of moderation; everything in moderation.

What type of sunlight do we get? There are two major types that are of concern; UVA and UVB. These are part of the sunlight spectrum, way down on the ultraviolet end of the wavelength, that tend to be damaging and yet also can be very helpful. For instance, Vitamin D is manufactured when that particular wavelength of sun hits us. Vitamin D is a wonderful thing. It gives us strong bones. It’s essential for incorporating calcium into the bones. It prevents rickets, osteoporosis later in life. So there are a lot of good things that Vitamin D does.

The scare with sunlight has been melanoma. Melanoma rates have been dramatically rising. There was this “stay out of sunlight because you’ll get melanoma” mantra that doctors would repeat. But now you have to scratch your head and say, “Did melanoma rates rise after people went indoors under fluorescent lighting for most of their life, or when they were out in the sunshine most of their life?” That makes you beg the question: is not some sunlight good for you? Again, standard medicine has come full circle to say yes, you need some sunlight every day, even to prevent melanoma.

Sunlight is a particularly interesting topic to me, so I'll continue to talk more on this subject soon.