Sunnertime

When we were kids playing in the sun was the bomb. Picnics, playgrounds, swimming and beaches.

We basked in the sun to get a tan. Tans were cool. They made you look healthy. Like you were a Beachboy, or a movie star, or at least from California. If you went on vacation and came back without a tan people assumed that it had rained everyday. Teenaged comparisons of tan lines made for some interesting times...

We slapped on Coppertone (that was really just moisturizer) to keep from getting burned but it never worked. The first time out something would be crispy that evening and out would come the Noxema followed by a few days of peeling. It was normal. A right of passage to summertime.

We didn't know we were also making up some good ol' vitamin D. Few of us knew about vitamin D back then, nor cared to. Vitamins were something god-awful tasting that your mother took down from the cupboard in the morning and made you swallow... or mine did. If we had known back then there were vitamins that you could make simply by the sun touching your skin, we would have thought that was a much cooler way of doing it.

But now folks are encasing their children in layers clothing and shellacking themselves in SPF 1000. Your doctor frowns at you if you have a tan. The worry warts are shouting from the heights about the risk of skin cancer and that has everyone dashing from car to the safety of buildings like vampires who will burn up in the sunlight.

So, being the curious person I am, I decided to read up on it.

Turns out, we all need between 5 and 30 minutes of sunlight on our skin twice a week to allow the UVB rays to stimulate the body's manufacturing of vitamin D. From November to March here in Canada it's almost impossible to get our quota. UV fortified foods, like milk, help. By the way, because it can be synthesized by humans it is not a real vitamin (vital food substance). All vertebrates need sun to allow the body to produce strong bones and prevent rickets in children and osteomalacia in adults. For feathery birds, furry mammals, and some abnormally hairy people, oils are secreted from the skin, subjected to the sunlight and orally ingested when they groom themselves.Which, in the case of abnormally hairy people, might not ever happen.

Happy days in the sun. Too much has always been bad for you. Too little is as well... just sayin'.