Tanning beds and skin cancer — the prophet of profit
I must admit, today was the first time I’ve been called disgusting by someone I wasn’t dating.
A little background: I compile “Health Notes,” which appear in the weekly Healthy & Fit section. They’re short “news you can use” items from scientific news services, from browsing websites from the CDC, NIH, WebMD, Medline Plus, and bulletins from researchers, private and public.
This study I wrote about found tanning beds could be addictive. That means people considered tanning bed junkies would be more at risk of skin cancer because they spend more time cooking. The cancer community has stacks of data that link all forms of skin cancer, including the deadly melanoma, with the same types of sun radiation emitted by tanning beds. Just go to the, FDA, NIH, CDC or American Cancer Society portals and type, “skin cancer and tanning beds” into the search engines. There’s too much to read in one sitting.
The gentleman who called identified himself as someone who owns tanning beds. He said there’s a $10,000 reward for anyone who can prove that tanning beds cause skin cancer. I won’t use the guy’s name; he’s not the first person to rant at me about what the industry perceives as my prejudice against tanning beds. He’s just the first person to call me disgusting, and there’s no law against that.
Still, this is my rub: It irks me when public people make statements that depend on the public not knowing the facts. So let’s clear this up:
No one has proven that tanning beds cause cancer. In fact, no one knows definitively what causes any cancer.
The term, “causes” cancer is misnomer for both sides of the cancer aisle. Doctors who define what is a cause, instead, identify a set of conditions including genetics, environment, lifestyle and other factors. When researchers find combinations of conditions, and statistics show that under those conditions, more cancer appears than among people who don’t face those conditions, then, people are considered at higher risk.
When the factors result in cancer so regularly that it’s a given — for example, nearly all of the firefighters who fought the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl came down with or have died of cancer — scientists feel safe calling the conditions a “cause.” But they can’t say how.
Medicine has done a championship job of fighting cancer that exists. But they have no idea how to stop if from existing other than to remove those conditions — smoking, too much alcohol, tanning beds coupled with excessive sunshine.
So the scientific information shouldn’t say tanning beds cause cancer. But science needs to keep the word out that people who use tanning beds face a higher risk of developing skin cancer than people who don’t.
Frankly, that’s all I’ve ever written. So your $10,000 is safe. Wish I could say the same for your clients.
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I've written exclusively about health since the inception of the Health & Fitness section. I'm an off-road biker, altitude hiker and was into adventure sports until a fall down a Colorado mountain turned my lower back into abstract art. But I'm coming back. 
Tanning is not an addiction: UV light is an attraction. Just like humans are attracted to food, water and air, we are attracted to sunlight. We need it to live.
Consider this: Saying that UV light is harmful, and therefore people should not tan, is akin to saying that exercise “damages” muscles, and therefore people should not exercise. To call UV exposure “damage” is to use a micro-definition of a macro-phenomena: It just isn’t true.
Consider this: UV exposure is the body’s natural and intended way to manufacture vitamin D. And we now know that no less than 60 percent of Americans and 97 percent of Canadians are vitamin D deficient.
A suntan gained in a non-burning fashion will make 10,000 - 25,000 IU of vitamin D the natural way. In comparison, a glass of whole milk contains just 100 IU of vitamin D.
It now appears that people need thousands of IU of vitamin D daily to get to natural vitamin D levels. There’s no other way to get there without UV light — diet and supplements fall way short.
Now consider that the $35 billion cosmeceutical industry has made record profits telling you to wear sunscreen 365 days a year - which is totally unnecessary most of the year in St. Louis. Instead of marketing sunscreen as a product to prevent sunburn on days when sunburn is possible, they’re telling you to wear it every day - even in your makeup - and they’re profiting from this misinformation.
The indoor tanning community does a better job teaching sunburn prevention than those who sell and market sunscreen products with over-the-top sun scare messaging. That’s the story you should be telling here. Instead you’re falling into “sun scare” propaganda.
For more information on vitamin D, visit the independent Vitamin D Council’s web site: http://www.VitaminDcouncil.org.
For more information on the professional tanning community’s scientifically supported positions read the reports at http://www.TanningTruth.com.