Your health: Surf safety

Surf’s up?

It’s hard to imagine summer without a trip to a beach. But while a shoreline vacation should be fun and relaxing, it comes with its share of hazards.

You might have heard of “riptides” or “the undertow,” but the proper term is “rip currents,” says Tom Gill, the Virginia Beach-based spokesman for the U.S. Lifesaving Association.

The website for the association, which represents beaches that hosted 309 million visitors last year, reported 50 rip-current-related deaths on unguarded beaches and 22 on guarded beaches in 2010, according to The Washington Post.

Rip currents, Gill says, are channels of water moving away from the shore. They pop up in areas where there’s an obstacle such as a jetty or pier. But they also occur when there’s a breach in a sandbar; that gap becomes the path of least resistance for water.

Some rip currents are so light you don’t notice them, Gill says, but others are strong enough to pull you off your feet and carry you faster than anyone can run. But rip currents won’t pull you under, so if you can manage to float, “you’re good to go,” he says. If you’re a good swimmer, start swimming parallel to the shore. “Once you’re not being pulled away anymore, you can go ahead and swim in,” he says.

If you’re not so strong a swimmer, Gill says, try to float and scream for help. Lifeguards “like loud swimmers in distress,” he says.

Lean = healthy

Men with lean physiques at age 18 have a lower chance of dying from cancer later in life than those who are obese at that age, a study of Harvard alumni suggests.

Men with the lowest body mass index at age 18 were 35 percent less likely to die from cancer than those with the highest BMIs, according to the study by British and American researchers. The findings, published in the Annals of Oncology, also showed that smoking and physical activity as a young adult didn’t affect results.

Obesity at 18 portends a greater risk for cancer than obesity at middle age, according to the study, one of the largest to look at the effect of weight in young adulthood on risk of cancer death later in life. Early adulthood obesity was associated with dying from cancers of the lung, skin, esophagus and kidneys, the study showed.

“Keeping your weight healthy as a young adult reduces your chances of developing cancer later in life,” said Linsay Gray, a study author and researcher at the Medical Research Council and the Chief Scientist Office’s Social and Public Health Sciences in Glasgow.