2008 2ND PLACE

Charlotte Chester
c/o  Becketts Bank

Last summer, I returned from a sun-drenched fortnight in Italy sporting a rather more sanguine shade than I had on my departure. According to research by a team from Germany, had I eaten more tomatoes, I might not have returned from holiday looking like one.

Such natural alternatives to sun cream are particularly welcome as the massive benefits of sunlight to humans become increasingly apparent. One of these is the role it plays in maintaining our levels of vitamin D. Vitamin D is beneficial for many reasons, not least that it has recently been shown to inhibit the growth of abnormal cells. Thus the amount of sunlight we receive directly affects our body’s ability to avoid or recover from certain cancers. This is evident in recent research from Harvard, which revealed that cancer treatments taking place during the summer months have about a 40 per cent higher success rate than those taking place in winter. Vitamin D is also necessary for the absorption of calcium, which means that a sufficient level is vital in the prevention and treatment of bone diseases such as osteoporosis.

But there is no need to buy expensive supplements, because your body is capable of producing the exact amount of vitamin D it needs, requiring nothing more than adequate exposure to the sun. Thus the term “vitamin”, which means “an essential substance that our bodies cannot manufacture”, is inaccurate: “vitamin” D is actually a steroid hormone.

The active form of vitamin D begins its life as a substance called 7-dehydrocholesterol, a cholesterol precursor found in the upper layers of the skin. Left to its own devices, this will convert into cholesterol, but when the skin comes into contact with sunlight, the course of its journey changes. A reaction between the 7-dehydrocholesterol and ultraviolet light produces a different chemical, a precursor to vitamin D. This then travels to the liver and kidneys, which metabolise it further until it completes its transformation into the active form of vitamin D. Other organs also have the capacity to perform this final metabolism, so that each can have its own supply of the vitamin, each can subtly self-regulate how much it produces, maintaining the perfect concentration at all times.

However, as I learned last summer, the sun comes with dangers of its own. In excess, UV rays can cause sunburn, and in the longer term are connected with skin cancers. However, some scientists feel that this danger has been overplayed in the media, to the point where people have become afraid to go out in the sun altogether. Vitamin D could be a powerful anticancer agent – strikingly, 87 per cent of people are deficient in vitamin D, and we are still told to avoid sunlight.

Much research in this field is funded by a multi-million-pound suncare industry, which may have led to an unbalanced view becoming the general belief. In order for the body to synthesise vitamin D, sunlight has to come into contact with bare skin. Although sun creams protect against UV damage, they also prevent the body from keeping its vitamin D at the optimum level.

And this is where the tomatoes come in. Wilhelm Stahl and his team at Heinrich-Heine-Universität in Düsseldorf examined the effects of certain foods on the ability of the skin to withstand UV light. They discovered that organic pigments called carotenoids, particularly lycopene, were extremely effective in terms of furnishing the body with protection from free radicals, the molecules that can react with human DNA to cause cancers.

One experiment involved exposing 22 fair-skinned people to a beam of UV light, and timing how long the area took to redden. The group was then split in two, with one group taking a daily dose of tomato paste. Throughout the “feeding trial”, the two groups were exposed to 125 per cent of the UV level that had caused reddening in the initial test. While the control group experienced little alteration to the amount of reddening, by week 10 the tomato paste group were experiencing 35 less reddening than at the start of the experiment.

While this improvement in the skin’s ability to withstand sunlight without damage is only equivalent to wearing factor two or three sun cream, it does protect for short periods outdoors, negating the need for habitual application of sun cream and allowing for the short periods of unprotected exposure necessary for the maintenance of vitamin D.