Bed of lies?
The question was bound to come up sooner or later. In fact, it HAS come up a few times here in the eTips and in Nutrition & Healing. But last week the topic of tanning beds and vitamin D finally went mainstream. With more and more mainstream attention (finally) being paid to the fact that vitamin D is a major player in cancer prevention and overall good health, people are starting to doubt the long-standing scare-tactics -- I mean “advice” -- to stay as far away from the sun as possible, and to cover up head to toe when you do have to venture outdoors. As you know, the sun’s rays are the best, most natural way to get vitamin D: As the UV light gets absorbed by your skin, it sets of a chemical reaction in your body that leads to production of this essential nutrient. But, unfortunately, anyone who’s ever watched a weather forecast knows that the sun isn’t always as reliable as we’d like. And people living in northern latitudes are at an even bigger disadvantage, since the sun’s ultraviolet rays just aren’t strong enough to make a substantial impact most of the year. So it’s no wonder the tanning bed industry took all these drawbacks and used them to its own advantage, launching a new ad campaign this month with the slogan “Go get a tan. Your body will thank you.” The Indoor Tanning Association has invested big bucks in this new campaign. Along with the TV commercials, there’s also a website, sunlightscam.com, that exposes the supposed conspiracy going on between dermatologists and the sunscreen industry with their dire warnings about the sun’s ties to skin cancer. But whether or not there’s a “shocking sunlight scandal” going on, the Indoor Tanning Association is leaving out one major detail: Tanning beds AREN’T sunlight. That’s not to say that tanning beds are necessarily bad for you. They just may not be the easy answer to upping your vitamin D levels that the Indoor Tanning Association would like us to believe. As Dr. Wright explains, the sun and tanning beds have two types of radiation -- UVA and UVB. Most salons use tanning beds that have 95 percent UVA radiation because it penetrates deeper into your skin and gives you a longer-lasting, golden brown tan. The salons shy away from the UVB radiation because it only affects the outer layer of your skin, causing you to burn more easily and the tan to fade more quickly. But all of the vitamin D benefits come from the UVB rays -- not from the UVA rays typically used in tanning beds. So the short answer to the tanning bed question is that you can get vitamin D from them. But keep in mind that it’s a bit more complicated than that. Just make sure that you do your research. The closer the spectrum of wavelengths emitted by the tanning bed lamps is to the spectrum of solar wavelengths reaching planet Earth, the safer it will be. As Dr. Wright always says: The best -- and safest -- results come from copying Nature. Source:
“New ads claim tanning is good for you,” ABC News (www.abcnews.com), 3/27/08 | 
