The D-student

Now that summertime has arrived, so too has the annual rite of vacation-plan braggadocio. It’s pretty tame this time around, though. That’s because many of my pals, after decades of overexposure to the sun, are trying not to tan their hides. Well, make that what’s left of their hides after the dermatologist has carved out various and sundry chunks. So maybe this year, Buffalo is a better play than Bali.

After all, the afterglow of what we used to call a “healthy glow” might not be so healthy after all.

On the other hand, nobody ever heard of a healthy pallor.

The sun seems to be cast as both hero and villain. I’ve watched the plot veer back and forth over the decades, so I’ll mention some of the recent action.

One twist in the plot is that the sun isn’t the only character on the stage. Vitamin D, which is produced by the interaction of sunlight with our skin, is also a major player. And what about sunscreen? We’ll have to look at that, too.

The Journal of the American Osteopathic Association, in May 2017, published a report, “Vitamin D Deficiency, Its Role in Health and Disease, and Current Supplementation Recommendations,” authored by Kim M. Pfotenhauer, D.O. and Jay H. Shubrook, D.O. The gist is that Vitamin D is really important for good health. However, 1 billion people are Vitamin D deficient, says the report. “Insufficient sunlight exposure” is listed as one cause for Vitamin D deficiency.

I first heard about this Vitamin D thing from an old-school doctor a bunch of years ago. He was nobody’s mule; he was very much his own man, and I liked his independence of mind. He said that a lack of Vitamin D increased the risk of certain types of cancer, and he therefore advised taking Vitamin D3 supplements. I suspect that if you went to his office and downed a triple-bacon-cheeseburger, washed it down with a glass of jet fuel (stirred, not shaken), and then fired up a cigar for dessert, the ol’ boy would not bat an eye. Heck, he’d probably dig a Macanudo out of his white coat and join you. But if you shorted yourself on Vitamin D, well, you’d hear about it for sure.

Well, I was sold, and I became a D-student; “D” for Vitamin D, that is. However, this take is hardly universal. Several items in the health news have recently taken a dim view of vitamin supplements, saying that if you take them you’re just flushing your money down the commode.

Meanwhile, the magic lotion that was supposed to keep the sun’s bite at bay might have harbored an unintended consequence. People may have gotten a false sense of security, and, with it, more sun damage that they bargained for. This hinges on a distinction between frequencies in the ultraviolet chunk of the light spectrum. One range of frequencies, called UVB, causes the visible burns and is blocked (at least to a large extent) by sunscreen formulations.

So, no burn, no problem, right?

Well, not so fast. There’s another range of frequencies, called UVA, that’s apparently not blocked by all the formulations out there, and which doesn’t cause visible burns, but which has been implicated in skin damage, to include, yes, skin cancer.

Incidentally, UVA is a longer wavelength than UVB, and, in fact, UVA actually borders the visible end of the spectrum. It penetrates the skin deeper than UVB does.

The Journal of Investigative Dermatology, October 2003, had a report by Haywood et al, “””Sunscreens Inadequately Protect Against Ultraviolet-A-Induced Free Radicals in Skin.” I’ll admit that high school chemistry did not equip me to understand the entire report, but we did talk about moles a lot, which seems like a good mesh with matters dermatological.

Anyway, here’s the nut quote: “Despite the extensive use of sunscreens during the last two decades, the incidence of skin cancers is still increasing.”

So let’s summarize this stuff. Too much sun, we know, can mess up our skin and even trigger cancer. Too little sun, on the other hand, might cheat us out of vital Vitamin D. Vitamin D pills can help plug that gap, unless it’s the case that vitamin supplements don’t do any good, as asserted in some quarters. Meanwhile, sunscreen, long trusted to keep us safe from the sun, could conceivably sucker us into overexposure that harbors invisible (at the time) damage, though specifics on this count will depend on the exact formulation of sunscreen being used.

Facing all these tradeoffs and contradictory factors, I’ve decided to confront them with a contradictory force of my own. Not to intimidate you with my scientific prowess, but I will simply offset the Avagadro phases by amplifying the interference pattern of their quantum waves. So here’s my plan for the summer: Wherever I decide to go on vacation, I’ll just go somewhere else instead.

And they say that D-students aren’t bright. Ha!