Sun - does it cause cancer?
Are you old enough to remember a time when going out in the sun was associated with skin cancer? News headlines would tell us how risky it was to spend time in the sun.
But before we talk about the sun and skin cancer, let us first discuss how you feel about getting tanned. Getting tanned in India, where I live, is almost taboo. It is fair skin that is coveted, at any price.
In Victorian times, a tan was associated with the labour class. People who spent time toiling in the sun. Obviously, not something for the well-to-do.
It took French designer Coco Chanel to make it fashionable.
Having spent time on the Riviera, she came back with a tan. His followers thought it looked cool, and people started spending a lot more time trying to acquire a tan.
If you live in Europe, you know people who go to the beach or park or even tanning saloons trying to get a tan. That is how much a fashion icon can affect our lives.
But we are discussing the link between spending time in the sun and cancer. So I looked up statistics. In 2022, approximately 58,000 people succumbed to skin cancer.
While even one person is too much, approximately 2,000 of these were Indians, a low number given how many Indians there are.
If you know anything about India, you know millions of people spend their entire lives working in bright sunlight as farmers, construction workers, or similar.
So, unless there is underreporting, clearly the statistics do not seem to indicate a great risk of skin cancer for Indians.
You might argue that Indians have darker skin that protects them. That is probably true. But China had approximately 5,385 people. As we know, the Chinese do not have the same skin tone as Indians.
So why do I make the case for a low incidence of skin cancer? Because for most of us, spending time in the sun is a wonderful thing to do.
As for the tan that will come, hasn't Coco Chanel already told us what is fashionable?
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