Open water swimmers use petroleum jelly, lanolin and lots and lots of sunscreen to help with their skin protection.
While petroleum jelly and lanolin help with the short-term effects of chaffing, the long-term effects of too much sun exposure are well known.Sunscreens of all types protect the skin from the harmful rays of sunlight, but they also impair the body’s ability to produce vitamin D.
Sunscreens, beauty products with SPF factors and lotions capitalize on our desire to protect the skin from the harmful rays that cause wrinkles and cancer, but they also lead to unintended consequences.
The medical and health care community now realize that the specific wavelengths of light used by the skin (295 to 315 nm) to produce vitamin D are also blocked out by sunscreen products as they purposefully screen the unwanted wavelengths associated with melanoma, photo-aging and wrinkling. So we get the good with the bad.
But we need Vitamin D which has become a hot topic and is gaining major consumer awareness in the United States. Vitamin D deficiency is a health problem in modern societies because the major and most effective source of vitamin D – exposure of our skin to sunlight – is blocked by buildings, glass, clothing and sunscreens. At the same time, the amount of vitamin D obtained from food and supplements is believed to be inadequate to prevent many diseases.
A California-based company, Exposure Scientific, has developed a revolutionary sunscreen formulation to resolve this issue. Their new sunscreen shields the skin from harmful UV rays while simultaneously permitting the skin to produce Vitamin D. Great news for health-conscious open water swimmers.
A panel of 13 medical experts at the National Cancer Institute described the vitamin D-promoting sunscreen as “a sunscreen that allows a percentage of Vitamin D stimulating rays to penetrate, while protecting against the more harmful UV rays is highly significant for cancer prevention.”
According to founder Professor Ernest Armstrong, “Sun exposure provides 10,000 to 25,000 IU of Vitamin D while our diet and supplements usually provide only hundreds of IU of Vitamin D.
To prevent disease, we need amounts of vitamin D counted in the thousands of IU, not hundreds of IU.”
As with marathon swimmers, more is usually better and Exposure Scientific is enabling this to happen.
Copyright © 2011 by World Open Water Swimming Association