Guilty pleasures: Is there a safer way to soak up the sun?

Better than tomatoes (Image: Peter Roos/plainpicture)

Only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun, the song goes. Catching too many rays causes wrinkles and freckles at best, and deadly cancer at worst. And yet nothing feels quite as good on the skin as the warm kiss of the sun’s rays. This feel-good factor – which may even elicit a response akin to addiction – might have evolved from our need for sunlight to make vitamin D.

“Nothing feels so good as the sun’s warm kiss – but is it deadly?”

What’s a prudent person to do?

The one thing nobody should try to get away with is sunburn, which not only hurts but has been shown to double the risk of melanoma, the rarest but most dangerous form of skin cancer. “All sun exposure causes cell mutations that may eventually lead to cancer, but sunburns exacerbate this effect,” says Eleni Linos at the University of California, San Francisco. “It’s a very intense dose.”

How much sunning you can do in relative safety varies from person to person. “It really depends on your skin type,” says New York-based dermatologist Michele Green. The darker the skin, the higher the concentration of melanin, a pigment that shields skin cells from the damaging effects of UV rays. “It is kind of like a natural sunscreen,” Linos says. People with Mediterranean, olive-toned skin, for instance, are half as likely to develop melanoma than those with very pale skin.

To help you navigate the issues, there are wearable devices that tell you how long you can reasonably spend in the sun without protection to get a vitamin D boost. Then there’s sunscreen: an SPF of 15 means the user can stay in the sun 15 times as long without burning.

Taking anti-inflammatory painkillers can reduce the risk of common skin cancers by around 15 per cent, but doing so regularly carries its own risks. A more tasty solar defence could be to eat tomatoes. A small study recently looked at the effect that eating 55 grams of tomato paste daily for 12 weeks had on how 20 women’s skin reacted to UV exposure. “Those that were on tomatoes had increased sun protection in their skin,” says Mark Birch-Machin at Newcastle University, UK, one of the study’s authors. The key is the tomato’s antioxidant properties, he says, adding that green tea and blueberries might have similar benefits. The foods are no substitute for sunscreen, however. “They just provide a little bit of extra protection,” he says.

Read more: “Guilty pleasures: Which bad habits can you get away with?“

This article appeared in print under the headline “Getting away with sunbathing”