A few days ago a reader, nymph032001, left us in our Answers section a very interesting question: Vitamin D, sunscreen and skin cancer, how to find balance?
The importance of protecting the skin of our children is known to all. For a few years, given the alarming increase in cases of skin cancer, we are advised to protect the skin of our children with high protection creams, not expose them to solar radiation at the central hours of the day and all these guidelines that we implement obediently every summer. However, the concern shown by our reader is more than justified, Vitamin D is essential for good health and its deficiency can be more harmful than sun exposure itself.
It is important to be aware that the use of sunscreen creams almost completely blocks the production of Vitamin D on the skin. That is why finding the balance between sunscreen and Vitamin D production is so important.
What is Vitamin D for?
Vitamin D is known for its role in calcium synthesis, but less known is its role in the proper functioning of the immune system and in the prevention of many types of cancers and cardiovascular diseases. Moreover, even in patients with melanoma, the most aggressive form of skin cancer, the survival rate is higher in those patients with elevated levels of Vitamin D in the blood.
How is Vitamin D produced?
Although there are certain foods rich in Vitamin D, such as butter, it is virtually impossible to eat enough Vitamin D with food.
The most efficient way to synthesize Vitamin D is by sunbathing.
In countries where winter is long and dark, or in specific cases of sun allergies or skin diseases it may be indicated to take Vitamin D supplements, always under medical supervision. To get an idea, the droplets we give our babies until the fontanel is closed are precisely Vitamin D.
How much sun must be taken to produce enough Vitamin D?
It depends fundamentally on the type of skin of each one. People with dark complexions take longer to synthesize the same amount of Vitamin D as a person with light skin.
As we take color we will need more time to synthesize the same amount of Vitamin D. At the moment when the skin begins to turn slightly pink, Vitamin D is no longer produced and the skin begins to suffer the harmful effects of the sun.
In addition, as it occurs in the skin, it is necessary to expose a sufficient amount of it to the sun. The face and hands are not enough.
The thing is not there, depending on the latitude, the season of the year and the time of day, the synthesis of Vitamin D is more or less effective. The best hours are precisely those where the sun is most dangerous, between ten in the morning and two in the afternoon.
So this summer what do I do with the children?
We must try that our children are about twenty minutes in the sun, without any sun protection, between ten in the morning and four in the afternoon.
Ideally, we would take a walk of about twenty minutes, about eleven, in the sun and with little clothes. Then go back home, give them the cream, go down to the pool or the beach and follow the usual sun protection recommendations.
Another option is to go down to the pool or the beach without cream, let them play without bathing twenty minutes and then give them the cream. The problem is that if you then directly bathe part of the vitamin D that has been synthesized in the skin, it will be lost before being absorbed.
One last recommendation: eye with bath gel. Vitamin D, after being synthesized in the skin, takes a few hours to be absorbed. If we shower the children and give them gel throughout the body, we will eliminate Vitamin D that has not yet been absorbed.
So you know, this summer a little bit of sun without cream and you will find the perfect balance between Vitamin D, sunscreen and skin cancer.
