Dr. Chheda – There’s a lot of talk about sunscreens going on right now. EWG, Environmental Working Group, has said that there are several ingredients in sunscreen that can be absorbed into the bloodstream and become hormone disruptors. That can happen. And so if you’re really concerned about toxins and chemicals in your child’s skin, you want to look for sunscreens that have zinc oxide or titanium oxide – more of a mineral component rather than a chemical component that can protect your child from sunburns. Now why is sunscreen so important? It is the amount of sun that a child’s skin sees that can turn into skin cancer later on in life. As children, you want to protect your skin from sunburns, from intermittent sun exposure, because every sunburn that a child gets can then cause melanoma or basal cell cancer as an adult. So we want to try to prevent it as a child.

So you do want to use some sort of barrier on the skin to prevent all that intermittent sun exposure and to prevent sunburns. Plus, sunburns are really, really painful. You just don’t want to go through that, and your child is gonna really scream. So you do want to use some sort of barrier – whether it’s gonna be clothing, whether it’s going to be sitting in the shade, whether it’s a mineral sunscreen like zinc oxide or titanium oxide. You do want to use sunscreen.

Now what about vitamin D? Because vitamin D does come from the sun – natural vitamin D. That’s about the only place you can get it. Any other foods, it’s fortified with vitamin D. But it only takes 10 minutes of sun exposure to get the vitamin D that you need for the day.

So you go outside, you put on your sunscreen, and it takes 10 minutes for the sunscreens to start working. So during that 10-minute time frame, you’re also absorbing the vitamin D that you need. Now you’ve got your vitamin D and you’re preventing sunburns and skin cancer later on in life. The best of both worlds.