My son's summer job is life guarding. This is his fifth year working at the pool. Yesterday he made his first rescue of the season. A 5th grade girl went down the slide into deep water and couldn't swim.

When he came home from work I saw two red spots on his chest where he had missed rubbing sun screen. That introduces today's blog.

Last summer as I was first reading about the Blood Type Diet, I saw that while Os are less prone to most cancers than other blood types, we are more prone to melanoma. I don't need to nag my life guarding son about using plenty of sun screen - they talk about that subject at every training session. I did decide to increase my daily use of sunscreen. I bought a tinted moisturizer with sunscreen for my face, and a moisturizer with sunscreen for my neck and arms.

Toward the end of the summer there was a line in one of Heidi's columns about sunscreen causing cancer. WHAT!?! I went to the internet and read enough to stop using the sunscreen moisturizers. I put the subject on the back burner for the winter, but the approach of summer has forced me to reexamine the topic. I'm going to urge you to do your own internet research. It's very controversial, and I'm just going to scratch the surface in this blog.

It turns out that there are physical sun blocks and chemical sun screens. The sun blocks are zinc oxide (which all of the web sites consider safe) and Titanium oxide (only 1 website I read cast aspersions on titanium oxide).

The chemical sunscreens are: benzophenone-3 (Bp-3), homosalate (HMS), 4-methyl-benzylidene camphor (4-MBC), octyl-methoxycinnamate (OMC), octyl-dimethyl-PABA (OD-PABA), and butyl-methoxydibenzoylmethane (B-MDM)

There has been research in Europe that has linked 5 of the chemical sunscreens with cancer. The researchers observed that they "behaved like oestrogen in lab tests, making cancer cells grow more rapidly." I asked Dr. D'Adamo and he confirmed that some substances in sunscreens have "shown to act as xenobiotic estrogens."

It is the chemical sunscreens that have made the 30, 40 and 50 SPF sunscreens possible. It is the chemical sunscreens that are used in water proof and sports sunscreens. All of the grocery store brands are chemical sunscreens. I found one physical sun block at my health food store. There are several brands available on the internet.

Here is what I plan to do for the summer. For mid-day water activities, we will go ahead and use high SPF sunscreens. For hiking, biking and non water activities we will use only sun blocks. No more chemical sunscreen in makeup or moisturizer for me!