Everyone loves spending a day at the beach, having some fun in the sun, and coming back with a nice accumulative bronze from the day. Unfortunately, there has been tons of negative press towards tanning in the past as we are all aware of the warnings of UV light causing skin cancer. However, there has finally been good news reported from a recent study as to why some scientists believe tanning is good for you.
According to the article, a team of dermatologists ran a study on 24, 20 year old volunteers, where every single one of them laid down in tanning beds. They all laid there for 20 minutes with the lamp on and the UV rays hitting them, and then had their blood pressure measured immediately after. The second time around, they laid in the beds for 20 minutes again, just without the lamp on and no UV lights hitting them. What they found from this simple experiment was that while laying in the bed with the lamp on, the patient’s blood pressures were a lot lower than they were with the lamp off. “Following the sessions with the UV lamps, however, the volunteers experienced significant decreases — 2 mmHg — in blood pressure that lasted about an hour” (Maass). With these outcomes, the scientists claimed that respectively, spending time in the sun lowers your chance of a heart attack by about 10% and from that statistic, they have concluded that the benefits of being in the sun do in fact out way the dangers.
Though in order for the benefits to truly outweigh the dangers, assuming skin cancer and a decreased risk of a heart attack are the only factors, than statistically, the number of deaths from heart attacks must be significantly higher than the number of deaths from skin cancer. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 12,212 people in the US died from skin cancer in 2013. In the same year, about 600,000 people died from heart attacks which actually one quarter of US’s total deaths for the year. So evidently, lowering the risk of a heart attack does without question outweigh the dangers of getting skin cancer.
Undoubtedly, these dermatologists were correct with their idea and their outcomes. Though these these two factors are not the only benefits or dangers that being exposed the UV rays account for, they are by far the most significant and severe than the others, which can be found on this website..http://healthresearchfunding.org/pros-cons-tanning-beds/ which accurately lists and describes many of the other pros and cons of tanning.
http://www.cdc.gov/cancer/skin/statistics/
http://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/facts.htm
http://theweek.com/article/index/243886/is-sun-tanning-good-for-you-after-all
But really who doesn’t like a good tan, still waiting for the perfectly safe tanning machine to wash my pale sorrows away. On that note, I wish the study would have gone into more detail about the 24 subjects that agreed to take part in this testing. Meaning, if all 24 of these people loved to tan and felt relaxed by its warming and bronzing effects, it is likely that their blood pressure would decrease due to pure relaxation.
Your article is interesting but I have to question the legitimacy of your conclusion. Without trying to sound rude you can’t really say that tanning is ok for everyone based off of one study that had a very similar population and extremely small number of people studied. While i certainly understand your logic in saying that the risks of dying from tanning are far lass then the amount of people who die from heart attacks you can’t concretely say that one will be able to prevent the other. Especially considering the overwhelming amount of much larger studies that have been done showing the multitude of negative side effects of tanning. There are much safer options to people if they want to reduce the risk of having a heart attack this website offers some tips http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/heart-disease/in-depth/heart-disease-prevention/art-20046502