Why Tanning beds are actually robing you of your vitamin D!

Many indoor tanning companies advertise their beds to be beneficial for providing“natural” vitamin D. This is a marketing angle that these companies have comeup with in an attempt to offset the bad reputation that indoor tanning hasgathered in the more recent years in regards to skin cancer and other healthand cosmetic problems.

Surprisingly, this tactic hasworked quite well in attracting people who are interested in this new, and socalled “healthy” way to get their vitamin D.

While we obviously need healthy levels of vitamin D, this is definitely not theideal way to get it and I will tell you why…

As most of us know there are 3 main rays that are dispersed from the sun. UVA, UVB and UVC rays:

1. UVA rays are the rays that causetanning, skin cancer and are responsible for breaking down collagen and elastinfibers deep in the skin which is why they’re also responsible for causing themajority of premature aging.
2. UVB rays are the rays that damagethe skin more superficially (on the surface), cause burns and enable the skinto make vitamin D.
3. Thankfully UVC rays are filtered outby the earth’s atmosphere, so we don’t have to worry too much about those ones!

A tanning bed will contain about 95% UVA rays, since these are the raysthat cause tanning, and only 5% UVB rays.

Clearly the concentration of UVB is very low, however this isn’t the mainproblem when talking about why a tanning bed would actually diminish our levelsof vitamin D.

The real problem is a sneaky one and probably something you’ve never heardabout before…and that is, UVA raysdenature and destroy vitamin D.

That’s right! You see normally, in cases of long term sun exposure outsidethe balance of UVB allowing us to create the vitamin, along with UVA denaturingit would keep us from essentially over dosing on vitamin D.

But, since tanning beds are about12x the concentration of UVA/UVB light outside, this throws any natural balanceway off whack. This means that any vitamin Dwe’re creating from the low levels of UVB rays in a tanning bed, is beingdestroyed just as fast by the UVA rays.
In addition, any vitamin D we walked in with is also being destroyed straightfrom the skin as well as the blood stream since UVA rays can penetrate deepdown into the dermis which is home to many blood vessels. It’s because of this that we’re actually leaving the tanning salon with less vitamin D than when we entered it!