This is a long but interesting read. The relationship between sun exposure and MS and melanoma may need reconsidering!
disallowed/lifestyle/health-and-wellness/here-comes-the-sun-defending-our-summer-rays-20181120-p50h2j.html
Here's the first few pars:Watching the cricket with Dad in the last summer of his life, the skin cancer ads were on high rotation. Enormous black melanoma cells split and rampaged through animated arteries as we sat there in awkward, painful silence. Those same cells were rampaging through his body and he'd be dead by autumn. "There's nothing healthy about a tan," said the urgent, formal voiceover.
Dad was the sort of bloke who, proudly, had never sunbaked in his life. He claimed to have been sunburnt only once, when he was 12, in Cairns in 1942. By contrast, when I was that age, in the 1970s, tanning was almost a competitive sport. You'd get that first burn out of the way sometime in late spring, peel a layer, and you'd be set for summer. My brother had a melanoma cut out last year, one of 14,000 Australians to do so in 2017. This is said to be Australia's "national cancer" and it is my family cancer, too. Aside from a first cousin's fatal lung tumour, I can't think of any other cancer that any blood relative has had.
You'd think I'd be slip-slop-slapping with the best of them with my fair-skinned children. And I do, I do, but every time I lather on the factor 30, I can't help wondering if it's doing any good. Global melanoma rates continue to rise. The only demographic anywhere in which it is falling, we're told, is Australians under 40, demonstrating the flow-on effect of this country's ground-breaking "Slip, Slop, Slap" campaign which began in 1981. I was surprised, however, to find that this isn't the full story. Fewer are dying, but when researchers burrowed into the stats coming out of GP clinics in Queensland, they found that young adults are getting the cancer in greater numbers than my generation did at the same age.
At the same time, there's a lot of new research on the benefits of sunshine that has nothing to do with the well-known, but probably overstated benefits of vitamin D for conditions such as heart disease, diabetes, prostate cancer, breast cancer, obesity and multiple sclerosis. People with more of the "sunshine vitamin" in their system have fewer of these diseases. Yet giving people vitamin D pills in trials appears to do almost nothing to fix them. This has raised the notion that vitamin D might just be an indicator of how much sun you're getting and that maybe there's something else in the sun that's good for you. And it has made a lot of smart people question that urgent voiceover's claim that there's nothing healthy about a tan.
... continued
