What is important to know regarding sun for Vitamin D or no sun because of skin cancer? See detail.

Get your vitamin D tested and if you’re low take supplements, or your doctor might prescribe you D.

I feel strongly that we should be careful when we are young to get moderate sunshine, so we can continue to expose our skin to the sun as we age. Most of us baked ourselves in the sun as children, and so we have wrinkles and/or cancer scares that cause us to completely protect our skin now, and so what has resulted is that many adult Americans are extremely D deficient.

I’m not a doctor, that’s just my opinion.

Sunlight helps produce the Vitamin D your body needs. But here’s the catch with that…when it is produced, it initially sits on the surface of your skin. It takes some time to be absorbed. Many people jump in the pool or the ocean or take a shower long before the vitamin D is absorbed. So you have to take that into consideration as well. Supplements can be good, but they need to be taken regularly and given time to get into your system.
I personally don’t use sunscreen (and I live in a southern coastal area!). I did some research a while back and found that the sunscreen market is probably one of the biggest scams there is. We have all heard that if you go out you have to wear sunscreen. Advertisers tell us that, even doctors tell us that. But the problem is that the sunscreen itself may be adding to the skin cancer problem. No, not chemically attacking the skin…though there is some of that. But it blocks out the UV rays that cause sunburn, but not always the ones that actually cause the skin cancer. So we take away natures way of warning us we have been out too long and stay out even longer, soaking up more of the bad rays. Also, some sunscreens claim to block both UVA and UVB rays, but there is little guidance on how much of the chemicals they use to block these rays they have to put into their product to make that claim. As long as they are adding the chemical they can make the claim. So while you are slathering on their product with the belief you are being protected, you really aren’t.
I found at one point (can’t find them now…I’ll keep looking) that showed side by side graphs of sunscreen sales and incidents of skin cancer over a 20 or 30 year period. Both graphs looked identical. The more sunscreen that was sold, the more skin cancer we saw. If sunscreen really protected us from skin cancer, the graphs would be almost mirror images…the more sunscreen sold, the lower the skin cancer.
Another consideration is diet and lifestyle. Crappy food in and smoking and other unhealthy things we do to ourselves seems to mean more skin cancer is likely
And finally the Swedes did a study they released a few years back where they studied something like 30,000 Swedish women over a 20 year period. What they found was that of the women studied, those that avoided the sun were twice as likely to get skin cancer. The production of vitamin D helped block the harmful rays.
My plan (and it has worked now for many years) is to use no sunscreen, but not to stay in the sun too long. As soon as I start to feel or look like I am getting a slight burn, I cover up or go inside. I always have a nice loose shirt and hat handy if I go to the beach or am going to be outside for extended periods.

Very interesting. How about getting the Vitamin D from food? They say it’s not easy to get it from food you have to eat a lot of Vitamin D foods

@flo, the problem is that vitamin D doesn’t really come in most food in any appreciable amount. You would have to eat about 3 oz of salmon once a day to get the RDA. Even things like milk aren’t naturally high in vitamin D and if you were going to get your vitamin D from milk, you’d have to drink about half a gallon of whole milk per day.

I thoght Mayo clinic might list all the Vitamin D rich foods but it doesn’t. I suppose because it’s sickness focused.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/drugs-supplements-vitamin-d/art-20363792
https://health.gov/dietaryguidelines/2015/guidelines/appendix-12/
hard boiled eggs and mushrooms are also in the list. Good to know.

@seawulf575 I’ll let you see if the following article is what matches your post above.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/10/upshot/how-safe-is-sunscreen.html

…Or this:
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/study-shows-active-ingredients-sunscreen-absorbed-bloodstream-fda/story?id=62858765

@flo Those articles point out another problem with sunscreen…the chemical end of the product. My point was that they are used to block the sunburn which is nature’s way of telling us to get out of the sun. Because of that we stay out longer and absorb more of the cancer causing UV rays.

It sounds sound . I hope you’ll post link for your source. It makes it easier to remeber things.