Is Your Sunscreen good for you? Really?

Picture Courtesy of Pixabay

In an age when misinformation is rife - when most of us are starting to question what governments, the media, Big Business and Big Pharma are telling us – is there another big lie we are being told?

That sunscreen is good for you, and that sunshine is bad.

“Stay out of the sun.” They tell us. “Or your skin will be damaged and you will get sick.” “If you really must go out in the sun, buy some sunscreen, and use it repeatedly.”

But is this good information?

Really?

Or yet another example of Big Business lining its pockets at a cost to our health?

Just like they tell us to buy pharmaceuticals to supposedly help us with the myriad of health issues we are afflicted with these days - drugs which have side-effects, and often make those conditions worse - are these agents of our misfortune also telling us to spend hundreds of millions of pounds every year on something else they claim is healthy?

But which is also inherently dangerous.

Is this yet another example of their agenda of giving out misinformation which makes our lives more difficult?

I believe so – and there are a number of reasons why.

Firstly, because of the old adage that you should not put anything on your skin that you wouldn’t eat. Well…would you eat sunscreen?

But before you answer, let’s look at some of its ingredients.

Most sunscreens contain zinc dioxide which when exposed to sunlight releases free radicals which damage DNA. Damaged DNA can increase the chances of skin cancer.

Hmmm, food for thought. (Pardon the pun!)

Added to this, many sunscreens contain retinyl palmitate, which speeds-up the growth of cancerous cells. Not something I’d want to expose myself to, and definitely not eat.

Another common ingredient in sunscreen is titanium dioxide, which although generally considered safe in small quantities, an increasing number of products are now including titanium dioxide nanoparticles.

And these nanoparticles are not so safe.

They easily penetrate your skin, get in to your bloodstream and then your brain, causing nerve damage and quite possibly cancer. While studies have shown that they can cause genotoxicity (a destructive effect on a cell’s genetic material) DNA damage and inflammation.

With these chemicals added, suddenly sunscreen doesn’t seem so harmless.

But it doesn’t end there.

Because chemical sunscreens are absorbed into the bloodstream and spread all over the body, they are able to disrupt the endocrine system and interfere with the normal function of the body’s hormones such as testosterone, thyroid, progesterone and estrogen.

This disruption can cause early puberty and premature breast development in girls, and smaller and un-descended testicles in boys. It can also cause abnormal foetal development, and breast, ovarian and prostate cancer.

Furthermore, because sunscreen will protect against sunburn it is assumed it will also protect against skin cancer. But science doesn’t back this up. There is no consistent evidence that sunscreen will protect against basal cell carcinoma or melanoma. This may be because people wearing sunscreen could be lulled into a false sense of security and spend longer in the sun at the wrong times, thereby increasing their risk of burning – but don’t bank on that.

And the complications don’t end there. Sunscreens actually inhibit one of the most beneficial reasons for sun exposure, the production of Vitamin D. A vitamin which most of us are seriously deficient in.

This becomes increasingly alarming when we realise that Vitamin D deficiency is linked with breast and colon cancer - two of the most common and dangerous forms of cancer. While sufficient levels of the vitamin has been shown to actually enhance DNA repair (and so lower the chances of skin cancer), lower the risk of death from heart disease, reduce the chances of Parkinson’s disease, bone disease, high blood-pressure and blood clots.

And sunscreen interferes with this.

So, to sum up.

We seem to be spending our hard-earned cash on expensive products, because of misleading and scaremongering evidence, in an effort to reduce our exposure to the sun, when we actually need that exposure for optimum health. We then splash these suspect chemical products on our skin in the hope of reducing one type of cancer while increasing our chances of developing a host of other dangerous ones.

When all we needed to do was sunbathe, without burning, to reduce our risk of melanoma.

I believe that while avoiding sunburn is a good idea, the use of sunscreen to achieve this, based on emotional and inaccurate advertising, is at best dubious, and at worst, dangerous for our health and our pockets.

Please think carefully before you go out in the sun. Don’t buy into the hype and do your own research.

As ever, all is not what it seems in Mainstream Land. Seek the truth, and thrive.