A fashion industry blogger posted this week that sunscreen over-use has gone overboard and that avoiding the sun is riskier to your health than getting too much sun.

Marta Wohrle, a regular contributor to Truth In Aging, posted the essay on www.StyleBistro.com this week. The essay is entitled, “The Sunscreen Blues: Why You Should Soak Up The Sun – Safely.”

“According to a 2006 report by the World Health Organization, Ultraviolet Radiation (UVR) accounts for only 0.1% of the world’s burden of disease in disability-adjusted life years (DALYs), which ‘measure how much a person’s expectancy of healthy life is reduced by premature death or disability caused by disease.’ However, WHO noted that a much larger burden of 3.3 billion DALYs result from very low UVR exposure rates. This annual burden includes issues with the skeletal system (like rickets), autoimmune diseases and cancers,” Wohrle wrote.

She continued, “The latter is especially alarming; while skin cancer can be directly caused by too much sun exposure, a lack of sun (especially in high altitudes where sun exposure is limited) has been linked to an increased risk of death from cancers like Hodgkin lymphoma, breast, ovarian, colon, pancreatic and prostate. ‘As you head from north to south, you may find perhaps two or three extra deaths [per hundred thousand people] from skin cancer,’ says nutrition professor Reinhold Vieth. ‘At the same time, though, you’ll find thirty or forty fewer deaths for the other major cancers. So when you estimate the number of deaths likely to be attributable to UV light or vitamin D, it does is not appear to be the best policy to advise people to simply keep out of the sun just to prevent skin cancer.’”

To read the rest of Wohrle’s Style Bistro essay click here.