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Surviving the Summer Sun - Saving Your Skin Through Your Teeth Lowell Ponte, NewsMax.com What you eat and drink before going out into the sun this summertime could make the difference between getting a beautiful tan, a painful sunburn or skin cancer. Sip a Margarita before sunning, for example, and you increase your risk of ending the day with blistered lips and sizzling skin. The reason is that two ingredients in this drink – alcohol and lime oil – are both what scientists have identified as "photosensitizing" chemicals that increase our body's sensitivity and reactivity to sunlight. Many foods, drinks and other substances are photosensitizing or even phototoxic and make the sun's rays more dangerous. Other foods can help reduce damage from the sun's rays. This article will tell which things are safest under the sun, and what foods should be eaten in the shade or after sundown. This information could literally save your or your family's lives. Whatever you eat, you should in sunny summertime follow the traditional advice of physicians. Wear hats and skin-covering clothing, and avoid sunbathing between 10 A.M and 3 P.M. when the overhead sun's radiation reaches your skin through the thinnest part of Earth's filtering atmosphere. Lotions with a Sun Protection Factor (SPF) of 30 or more should be applied generously and repeatedly while in the sun, and users should never assume that such sunscreens make them immune to sunlight's damaging effects. Sunshine can be wonderful, even healing, in small doses. But sunshine is a powerful and hazardous form of radiation, more than half the energy of which penetrates you on invisible wavelengths of infrared and ultraviolet light. (Sunglasses not designed to filter out these invisible wavelengths can trick your eyes into letting down their natural defenses – squinting and narrowed pupils – and therefore such sunglasses can zap your eyes with this dangerous, eye-injuring invisible radiation.) Remember when as a child you put your hand over a flashlight and were surprised to see its light glowing through your hand? Sunshine, immensely more powerful than a flashlight beam, does not stop at the surface of your skin. Its rays penetrate into your body and interact with the chemicals there.
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Sunshine, for example, converts cholesterol in and under your skin into Vitamin D, a nutrient essential for your body's absorption of bone-strengthening calcium.
But the things you eat, drink and use also alter the chemicals traveling in tiny blood vessels beneath your skin. The sun's penetrating rays interact with these chemicals, often splitting off "free radicals." These highly reactive agents produce toxic byproducts that poison or irritate surrounding tissues and contribute to the swelling and leakage of tiny blood vessels in the skin – a painful process we know as sunburn. How your skin reacts to sunlight is influenced by the chemicals you choose to put into your bloodstream.
The Dangers Drink orange juice for breakfast and you are consuming Vitamin C, an antioxidant that helps neutralize free radicals. But if that juice includes orange oil from the fruit's rind, you are also consuming a photosensitizing substance. The same is true of summertime lemonade and photosensitizing lemon oil. Eat buckwheat pancakes for breakfast and you are feasting on a photosensitizing food. The same is true of natural vanilla in your summer ice cream. Carrots and celery, parsnips and parsley, and dill, fennel and figs all possess chemicals that make those who eat them a little, or a lot, more reactive to sunlight. The degree of this photosensitivity varies from one person to another.
Many people experience "photoallergies" triggered in their immune systems by photosensitizing chemicals. The resulting rashes, which typically appear 24 to 48 hours after sunlight overexposure, can look like eczema, hives or other allergic conditions. One reason why smokers seem prone to wrinkles could be that cigarettes contain pyrenes, photosensitizing chemicals that in the bloodstream increase the damage sunshine can do to smokers' skins. Some sunbathers slather their skins with mineral oil, but one of its effects is to make skin more reactive to sunlight. Many petroleum-based or coal-based chemicals are photosensitizing or phototoxic.
Ice tea is a summertime favorite, and green tea contains an antioxidant so powerful that its widespread use there may be one reason why the Japanese on average smoke twice as much as Americans but have only half our rate of lung cancer. But sunbathers should avoid "Earl Grey" tea. This beverage gets its distinctive flavor from Oil of Bergamot, a citrus extract that used to be found in African-American hair care products and "quick tan" lotions. (It elicited quick skin reaction to sunlight because it is photosensitizing.) Oil of Bergamot contains 5-Methoxypsoralen (5-MOP), a chemical highly reactive to sunlight and teratogenic (literally "monster-creating," a birth-defect-causing mutagen).
In a study published in the British science journal Nature, researchers at the University of British Columbia did more than warn sunbathers to avoid putting products containing this substance on their skins. They also ominously warned people to avoid going into a swimming pool where any other user of such quick tank lotions had been swimming. These scientists concluded that this chemical is too dangerous for sunbathers to touch, so it seems prudent to avoid drinking it in Earl Grey tea as well. Scientists have also identified photosensitizing chemicals in quinine and Quinine water, in various birth control pills and bodybuilder steroids, in nutrients such as selenium and riboflavin (Vitamin B-2), in deodorant soaps containing halogenated salicylanilides, and even in the musk ambrette in perfume. Many prescription drugs – from antibiotics to antifungals, diuretics, tranquilizers and one heart arrhythmia drug – are supposed to carry labels to warn patients that these medications increase sensitivity to sunlight. Users should take these warnings seriously, and ask your doctor and pharmacist about such side-effects of your prescriptions. Some over-the-counter drugs can also cause photosensitivity or phototoxicity, e.g., old-fashioned antihistamines for colds and allergies whose ingredients include promethazine, dimethothiazine, Triprolidine or Diphenhydramine hydrochloride.
The Protectants Sunburn is a serious injury. It ages your skin and increases your risk of skin cancer, including the potentially lethal cancer malignant melanoma. A single severe sunburn causes lifelong impairment to your skin's immune system, and repeated sunburns make this effect cumulative. If you got a bad sunburn one childhood summer, its damaging effects continue to affect your health. To reduce your and your family's risk of sunburn this summer, eat foods rich in the antioxidants Vitamin C such as cantaloupe and strawberries, Vitamin E such as nutmeats and tomatoes, and the Vitamin A precursor Beta Carotene such as cantaloupe and apricots.
Eggs are an excellent natural dietary source of the free-radical scavenging amino acid glutathione that can reduce skin damage from sunlight.
Taking antioxidant vitamins prior to sunbathing, as well as immediately after getting too much sun, has the potential to reduce at least a small part of the free radical damage a sunburn can cause in your body. Such substances therefore could almost be called photo-desensitizing because of their limited protective effect against sunshine's damage.
What to Do for a Burn
But what if you fell asleep in the sun or lost track of time, and now your skin is hot with a sunburn? If you reach for the local anaesthetic Benzocaine to cool the fire, be sure not to go back into the sun. Benzocaine is photosensitizing. To ease your agony you grab the nearest bottle of pain reliever. If it is ibuprofen, stop. Ibuprofen is also photosensitizing. The best pain reliever for sunburn is aspirin. Like a heart attack, much of the damage from sunburn happens in the minutes and hours after the initial injury. Part of sunburn's damage is associated with unleashed chemicals called prostaglandins. Aspirin can intercept prostaglandins. Swallowing up to four aspirin – but, as with all medications, only with your doctor's approval – can somewhat limit the chemical damage that continues for hours after your skin has been sunburned.
The only sure way to avoid a sunburn this summer is by using your head and strictly limiting your exposure to the sun's powerful radiation. But by being alert to which foods, drinks and other things increase or decrease your sensitivity to sunlight, you might save your skin with your teeth.
NewsMax Contributing Editor Lowell Ponte was for 15 years the Roving Science Editor of Reader's Digest Magazine.
Editor's note:
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