Love Sunshine

Time to Cover up? Too late.

As the sun finally comes out in strength, so do the public health messages frightening the living daylight out of us. Cover up is their theme. I find this particularly apt, given the true and shameful history of sunbathing. I tell this story in my book, but I was advised against being too cheeky or controversial by my editor. I also expected a lot more flack when interviewed by radio presenters. But, apart from the first one I encountered when publicising the hardback last year, all of those I've spoken to since have been sweetness and light on the sun safety controversy. It was his very first question, and it completely threw me: 'Why have you written a celebration of sunshine? Aren't we told to get out of it, and to avoid it?'* I think I faffed out some limp riposte, and kicked myself immediately afterwards when I thought of all the clever cutting things I should have said. And I was primed with notes the next time round, but the next time never came.

So, for what's worth, this is what I should have said. Cover up? I'm glad you mentioned that. Let me tell you about the most shameful cover up of all. The very same people who now tell us to get out of the sun, are those who encouraged us to make the most of it in the first place. Sun-bathing was invented, and promoted by public health authorities between the wars, not by the fashion industry that has been allowed to take the rap for it. Slip, slap, slop is their mantra. But they certainly slip up on the facts, slap down the wrong culprits, and are very sloppy in their grasp of history. Read all about it in my fascinating, controversial book (a precis of this story is found in the SunLounge section of my website, here). Incidentally, the photo above is not an early session of the Human League, complete with half-naked junior fan club, but an artificial sunlight clinic from the 1920s, exposing wee nippers to larges doses of UV light. Just proving the young have always been susceptible to the fashionable allure of the sun tan.

But we now know better, don't we. Do we? Why should we trust one set of ‘experts’ telling us to get out of it, when another set not 50 years before threw their equal conviction into telling us to get out into it? Given the sun is the source of all life, it would be odd that this stuff that we’ve been living with for millennia was intrinsically so bad for us. Especially as our ancestors were hunter-gatherers, then agriculturalists. We evolved spending a good deal of time under the elements.

But skin cancer is on the rise, we are told. That's the media simplifying things again. There are a few dermatologists and epidemiologists (the study of health in populations), who are prepared to speak out against the general of the sun being public health enemy no. 1. Looking into it, it would appear that the rise of skin 'cancer', is due to a re-classification of what are actually benign growths. In fact about 95 per cent of skin cancers are basal or squamous cell epitheliomas, which do not spread from the skin and kill. Medicine has become more cautious due to the fear of litigation. It's safer to be class all growths as potentially suspicious, rather than run the risk of being sued for negligence. Epidemiologists have also calculated that there is a far greater death toll from vitamin D deficiency than from deaths conclusively attributable to exposure to sunshine.

The point is, it’s just so one sided. When I published a piece on the history of the sun tan in a national newspaper they provided a sidebar called sunbathing by numbers, which provided some figures such as '1,800 people die from melanoma disease each year'. What, globally? More people die of trouser-related mishaps. '10-15 minutes in the sun provide the vitamin D your body needs daily'. When? Where? In winter in the northern hemisphere it jolly well doesn't. There is, in fact, no agreed optimum intake for Vitamin D, and there is no toxicity from sunlight synthesised vitamin D, which cannot be said for food supplements.

But not just in the national media, the so called expert research journals also show their true colours when reporting this issue (the skin care and pharmaceutical companies do spend an awful lot of money in advertising in these journals, o, and funding research). I discovered this little gem in a reputable dermatological journal. The paper’s title declared its hypothesis: that ‘UV Light tanning [is] a type of substance-related disorder’. A psychological illness in other words. To prove this the researchers modified questionnaires used for alcoholics and drug-users to apply to tanning. They substituted drink or fix for ‘tan’ – eg. “when you wake up in the morning do you want to sun tan?”; or “do you try other non-sun-related activities, but find you really still like spending time in the sun?” – and descended on sunbathers minding their own business on Galveston Island Beach, Texas.

Now, I’m no scientist, but even I can see this is totally spurious from a methodological point of view. Not only were the results underwhelming, there was no control. I might easily have taken the same questionnaire and descended on a troupe of church goers in bible belt America and asked them the very same questions, substituting tan or sunbathing for 'prayer' or 'church-attendance', and got probably more conclusive results. Does that make churchgoing a substance related disorder (especially high church where they swing that holy smoke about). What’s evident and quite staggering is the need to defame this practice, and that a scientific journal is prepared to publish such unscientific piffle. Why? Because there are vested interests in scaring us out of the sun.

If this appears paranoid and conspiratorial check this out: "The Sun Safety Alliance, Inc. (SSA) is a communication and educationally focused not-for-profit organization with the mission to reduce the incidence of skin cancer. SSA is dedicated to creating national awareness of skin cancer as an important health issue. SSA believes that a concerted focus on skin cancer prevention, education, and awareness is the only way to change generations of behavior." One of their main recommendations is this: "Use of sunscreen with SPF 15 (for children under six, SPF 30 is recommended) or higher during the first 18 years of life can reduce some types of skin cancer by nearly 78%." Most of their advice involves slapping the stuff on, all year round. Their board members and business partners? You've guessed it, commercial organisations such as the National Association of Chain Drug Stores Foundation, and the manufacturers of healthcare products. Fear sells, but the sun is free. Enjoy.

*These views were particularly galling, given the presenter was interviewing me from the Costa del Sol (where the radio station was based), and I was in rainy London. Like the corpulent, sated poor house governors in Oliver Twist, he could not imagine how we poor orphans might be asking for a little more.