To paraphrase Spike Lee’s “Cause mo’ better makes it mo’ better”:

“Cause mo’ white folk makes mo’ money, and mo’ money gets mo’ health care, and mo’ health care makes mo’ diagnoses.”

Conversely: “mo’ melanin makes mo’ natural UVA/UVB protection.”

I’ve been a huge fan of the new breed of spray-on sunscreens– they are so much easier to apply and without all the mess. Are they as effective as their goopy rub-in counterparts?

My pediatrician suggested that I sit out in the sun with my newborn for 15 minutes a day since I’m nursing exclusively, is this something that you suggest?

What about vitamin D? We produce it in our skin, and many people now have low leverls. A recent study by Bruce Ames has linked Vitamin D with autism, in other words, autism may be higher because the lack of Vitamin D in some individuals, and vitamin D is important in bone strength, and many other diseases including cancer.

I am also concerned with the chemical factor of sunscreens. All day everyday on the largest organ in your body? I think not, especially if the FDA can’t get to european standards of what is safe.

Just like anything else, isn’t there a baseline genetic predisposition to skin cancer or melanoma?

I am a woman living in Marin county diagnosed with Melanoma in-situ. Currently the ingredient suggested by dermatologists is helioplex, what about that? I reiterrate the notion that sunscreen comes in small quantities and costs way too much if we are expected to use it as often as you suggest.

Environmental Working Group (www.ew. org)

There are excellent, cute swimwear products out there that cover. My son wears a long sleeve rash guard, my daughter a neck to ankle suit. Her suit is by Coolibar and has lasted 2 years with near daily use in summer. Chlorinated swimming once a week. Cheaper than sunscreen, and more effective. I have found Coolibar and Tuga to be tough and well made products.

There is a greater incidence of autism among Somalians who have moved to higher latitudes, where they do not make enough Vitamin D. Bruce Ames at the CHORI institute associated with Children’s Hospital in Oakland has recently published research that shows that vitamin D is involved with the production of serotonin and oxytocin in the brain. Serotonin has to do with social skills, and oxytocin has to do with socializing as well. You don’t need to be in the sun to get vitamin D, but can use supplements, but if people want to stay healthy in a lot of ways, they should have their vitamin D tested, especially if they are dark-skinned, obese, live in high latitudes, or avoid the sun.

wiki defines troll as “extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community (such as a newsgroup, forum, chat room, or blog) with the deliberate intent of provoking readers into an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.”

Sorry, but these are comments meant for airing if posted before the show is over as mine, not yours, was. I have no interest in provoking an emotional response out of KQED comment readers. Apparently you do with your name calling. As for off topic, my comment was not off topic from all previous comments. Yours is. It is not off topic as to the relevance of the dubious findings of a study conducted by an organization that gets more funding by apparently announcing alarming and inaccurate or at least unproven conclusions. The parts that were of possible value of thus topic could have been presented in a 5-10 minute discussion, max, not 1 hour. Presenting it as if the location was causing higher rates of cancer as opposed to higher rates of diagnosis was an off putting and sensationalistic disservice to cancer prevention.

I wanted to get a response from Krasny and the powers that be at KQED radio since my attempts to get any response in the past via email have not succeeded. Krasny’s decision to respond on air that my original comment was “rude” while dismissing it by lumping it with comments not even made during this show makes anything that proves the facts mentioned in it relevant. I guess donating $200 to one of KQEDs radio shows (with no perks offered) doesn’t even get me a boilerplate response to an email to KQED radio management.

Krasny has on several occasions neglected his full disclosure obligations when they are relevant to the topic and no I am not talking about being Jewish cause we can easily figure out that he is. I recently heard an NPR host feel it necessary to reveal he is gay just because he was doing a gay related story on radio. The first time Krasny got my attention for my not hearing a full disclosure about the relevant matter of living in Marin County was when he did the Restoring Mount Tamalpais piece and the KQED website had the following sensationalist propagandist intro designed to get the government to spend millions to destroy important historical archeology from the early cold war.

“In 1951 the military bulldozed Mount Tamalpais’s west peak to put in a radar station and barracks for 300 people. Six decades later, the military installation has long been abandoned, but remnants of the structures, power lines, pipes and construction debris remain on the 106-acre stretch of mountaintop. “The Invisible Peak,” a short documentary about the junk perched on Mount Tamalpais, has raised the call for cleanup.”

These people if they had lived in the Hawaiian Islands during WWII would have had the government spend millions to raise and scrap the Arizona because it is an eyesore to scuba divers. They illegally took it upon themselves to start demolishing the historic buildings without permission and not knowing they had asbestos. Expect multi-million dollar lawsuits when the first one gets some unrelated lung disease.