Your health: Skin care group warns about 'sunburn art'

Be careful of ‘sunburn art'

A dangerous new behavior is trending on social media, warns the Skin Cancer Foundation.

“Sunburn art” is a type of body art created by exposing certain parts of the body to the sun without using proper sun protection. The result is a sunburn in the shape of a particular image, design or pattern.

In response to this growing trend, The Skin Cancer Foundation has released the following statement:

“The Skin Cancer Foundation strongly advises the public to avoid sunburns at all costs. A sunburn is not only painful — it's dangerous, and comes with consequences. Sunburns cause DNA damage to the skin, accelerate skin aging, and increase your lifetime skin cancer risk. In fact, sustaining five or more sunburns in youth increases lifetime melanoma risk by 80 percent. On average, a person's risk for melanoma doubles if he or she has had more than five sunburns.”

The Skin Cancer Foundation recommends adopting a complete sun protection regimen that includes seeking shade, covering up with clothing, including a broad-brimmed hat and UV blocking sunglasses, in addition to daily sunscreen use.

For more information, visit SkinCancer.org.

The real Paleo diet included plants

Archaeologists have used the remains of dental plaque to learn which foods were popular back in the Middle Pleistocene era.

And it turns out the paleo diet wasn't all meat: The plaque included nutritional plants, probably nuts and seeds, The Washington Post reports.

In a study published recently in the journal Quaternary International, researchers extracted samples of plaque from the teeth of three hominims that lived 300,000 to 400,000 years ago in Qesem Cave, in what is now Israel. Dental plaque stores remnants of ingested food, and an analysis of the stuff found substantial amounts of starch granules and other plant-related chemical compounds.

The research presents “a stark contrast to the notion that an early Paleolithic diet was based largely on meat,” according to a summary published by the University of York, which partnered with the University of Barcelona and Tel Aviv University on the research.

“Making deliberate use of local, nutritional plant resources ensured that their diet fulfilled their physiological requirements and suggests a detailed knowledge of the local ecology.” Ran Barkai, an archaeology professor at Tel Aviv University, said:

“Dental calculus from human teeth of this age has never been studied before, so we had very low expectations because of the age of the plaque. However, because the cave was sealed for 200,000 years, the teeth we analyzed were exceedingly well preserved. These findings are rare — there is no other similar discovery from this time period.”

Incidentally, our Paleo ancestors may not have brushed regularly, but they seem to have foreseen flossing: The university statement notes that “plant fibers and microwear patterns on the teeth point to chewing of raw materials and possibly oral hygiene activities such as tooth picking.”