Sunscreen might contain forever chemicals, but avoiding the sun isn't healthy either
Dad was right. Psychotic, but absolutely right.
Long before anyone had heard of “forever chemicals,” he was convinced that the chemical soup silently bubbling away in bottles of sunscreen was more dangerous to your health than the sun itself.
Sunscreen was, in fairness, just a small part of a litany of products that showed up on his own personal enemies list. It might have been one thing if he had just, like normal people, quietly avoided things he didn’t like, but his enmities came complete with afternoon-long diatribes against companies that he was convinced were out to get him.
In his world, fiendish, anti-American scientists at, say Procter & Gamble, manufactured Old Spice Deodorant as a delivery vehicle specifically designed to do him ill.
And they knew he knew, because he would write them lengthy letters informing, among others, the Bayer Pharmaceutical Corp. making it quite clear that he was onto them.
He had the general view that any consumer product applied to the skin, where pores have express passage to vital, life sustaining organs, was asking for trouble. This sub-category of suspicion fell under a general philosophic umbrella that anything artificial was bad, while anything natural was good.
Even as a kid, this reasoning seemed to me to be flawed. For example, great white sharks are “natural.”
But today, sure enough, sunscreen finds itself in a swirl of controversy, after some were pulled from the market after they were found to contain benzine, while others were found to have ingredients powerful enough to damage coral reefs.
Added to that is growing concern that, as we become a nation of light-avoiding, video-game-playing vampire bats, that sun avoidance is causing Vitamin D deficiencies, which are blamed for a host of health problems.
Still, the medical consensus still seems to lean strongly in favor of sunscreen, the benefits of which are said to, as of this writing, still greatly outweigh the risks of mainlining avobenzone, oxybenzone, octocrylene, et al. directly into your plasma.
Whew. Who to believe?
I give medical science credit for this: Now that we have the advantage of hindsight, we know that far greater percentages of people who refused to be vaccinated against COVID wound up dead than those who got the shot.
But then the very same medical community told us that opioids were safe. There is also this disquieting tendency for today’s miracle substances to become tomorrow's poisons.
If you are old enough, you remember the gazelle-like speed in which sugar-free soda labels went from “Now With Saccharine!” to “Contains No Saccharine!”
Of course if you are that old, you also remember that the sun-tanning aid of choice c. 1975 was pure baby oil, which instead of blocking the sun’s rays actually magnified them. It was common practice in those days to walk past the city pool and listen to 16-year-old girls sizzle.
But overall, a “healthy tan” was a sign of well-being, plenty of sun generally being associated with an active outdoor lifestyle. And sunburns were not the mark of shame they have become. If you came to class after the first warm weekend in May and you weren’t peeling, it meant you didn’t have a good time over the weekend.
So, back to the original question, I suppose sunscreen is indeed much like artificial sweeteners — not the greatest thing in the world for you, but preferable to pure, refined sugar.
You could stay out of the sun altogether, but as mentioned, that has risks as well. So life becomes a trade-off. If you’re the outdoors type, you live with the risks. Or if you’re not, you might think “What’s a little osteoporosis if you have good skin?”
More: Are water filtration systems an effective way to get rid of PFAS? Here's what a new study says
But if you listen to people on both sides of the argument, you get the idea that no matter what you do, you are, at some point, going to end up dead.
Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.
This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: What to do, avoid sunscreen or avoid the sun?
