Keep Thou My Feet

Here is a rant. It might offend somebody. Oh, well. It's my blog.

Recently I came across a tutorial for making homemade sunscreen with coconut oil. Here are the first couple of sentences: "Most commercial sunscreens contain toxic ingredients and endocrine disrupting chemicals. In fact, in the years since sunscreen use began skin cancer rates have actually risen. In many cases commercial sunscreen use may actually promote skin cancer growth and free radical production." (emphasis mine)

And that is when I had to resist the urge to bang my head against the table. This is why I am very hesitant to get more involved in healthy living stuff--because so often I come across claims like this. Hmmm, skin cancer rates have been going up ever since people started using sunscreen, so it looks like sunscreen causes skin cancer. By that logic, you could probably also say that sunscreen causes tanning beds. Correlation does not equal causation, people. You have to look at who got skin cancer. Is skin cancer more common among people who use sunscreen than among those who don't? My guess is that skin cancer is more common among people who frequently use tanning beds or lay out in the sun to get a tan than among those who use sunscreen. The more you expose your skin to ultraviolet light, the more likely your DNA is to be damaged or altered by it.

As for the effectiveness of the homemade sunscreen, I suppose it's possible that it would work because of the zinc oxide. I find it interesting that several people commented below saying that they use plain coconut oil as a sunscreen, claiming it has an SPF of 4 (which is not much at all). I think one person even said she tried it and got burned everywhere that isn't normally exposed to the sun, so her arms and face were okay, but everything else was sunburned. Instead of realizing the coconut oil isn't very effective, she decided to keep using it every day until her skin builds up a sun tolerance. That sounds to me like her arms and face were already fairly tolerant of the sun and the rest of her skin wasn't, and the coconut oil does nothing to prevent sunburn. In fact, other commenters said that they used to use plain coconut oil to get tan faster.

I realize that toxins and nasty chemicals (Oh, I am so tired of that phrase!) and carcinogens and all that stuff are a concern. But whenever I stray to a health blog I always seem to see things like this and I rarely see good quality research. I am happy to cook most of our food from scratch (it tastes better that way anyway) and to strive to eat plenty of fresh and healthy foods, but I'm not going to let wild and unsupported claims get me worried, and I'm not going to spend money we don't have on magic foods just because some blog says I will get cancer if I don't eat them. It's like Abe Lincoln said: Don't believe everything you read on the internet.

Oh, and while I'm at it, here's another claim that makes me go bug-eyed: You should eat organic potatoes, because most of the potatoes that are eaten in the United States are in the form of deep-fried french fries, which are obviously really bad for you and are also usually not made from organic potatoes. So since french fries are not organic, you should eat organic potatoes.Yes, I have really seen this on the internet.