The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Tanning Booths as a good source of Vitamin D??? NOT

As I flipped through the newspaper this last weekend, my eyes were drawn to a promotion for tanning but with the deadly information left out: Tan for a can, get your Vitamin D in February.
The Good is the fund raising focus: cans of food for the Back Pack Program and money to People’s City Mission. The Bad is the suggestion of getting Vitamin D from the treatment in a tanning salon, and The Ugly is the statistically significant risk of having a skin cancer for your “good deed” contribution. The Skin Cancer Foundation (www.skincancer.org) and The American Head Dermatology website (www.aad.net) are good sources for the science behind the erroneous choice of using the tanning booth as a source of vitamin D. A health/nutrition website womentowomen.com had an excellent explanation that a tanning bed’s unit is around 95% UVA rays, where as the UVB wavelength is the source of triggering the vitamin D synthesis. Therefore, it gives a very tiny source of vitamin D compared to the skin cancer risk.
As I mentioned in my last blog, the recent results from the 73,000 nurses study, one tanning booth exposure in your teen years increases your risk 10% for basal cell carcinoma and greater than 6 exposures per year increases the risk to 82%. While basal cell carcinoma isn’t near as deadly as melanoma, it can result in some very unfortunate scars and the burden of skin cancer being a pre-existing medical problem to obtaining decent health care insurance for the rest of your pre-medicare life. Melanoma is becoming the number one cause of cancers in 15-29 year old females. Including all ages groups, it is the cause of one death an hour in the United States. The current risk is one of every 59 people who will be diagnosed with this deadly disease in their lifetime. With the popularity and misinformation from the tanning industry, that will only become worse.
I will trade a 15 minute skin cancer screening for your canned food contribution to the Food Bank of Lincoln or Center for People in Need every Friday morning for the next 3 months; March, April, and May. You need to promise yourself to take better care of your skin and understand you have to damage your skin to make it change color and the tanning booth has a very great long term skin health risk.

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P.S. Fortified foods such as milk, yogurt, some cereals, and fatty fish such as salmon, tuna, and pharmaceutical supplements are safe sources of vitamin D.