The Environmental Working Group recommends avoiding spray sunscreens entirely. With so little known about the effects of sunscreen chemicals on the body when rubbed into the skin, they say, we may never know how much worse the effects may be when they are inhaled. (ThinkStock)

Spray cans of sunscreen may no longer contain chlorofluorocarbons (also known as CFCs, which were phased out in the 1990s for causing holes in the stratospheric ozone layer), but many contain other chemicals that are no good for our health or the environment. Researchers have found that the chemicals and/or minerals in the vast majority of commercially available sunscreens—even the rub-in creamy or oily varieties—can cause health problems just from ordinary use; inhaling them only magnifies the risks.

And just what are the risks? According to the non-profit Environmental Working Group (EWG), there are two major types of sunscreens available in the U.S. “Chemical” sunscreens, the more common kind, penetrate the skin and may disrupt the body’s endocrine system, as their active ingredients (e.g., octylmethylcinnamate, oxybenzone, avobenzone, benzophone, mexoryl, PABA or PARSOL 1789) mimic the body’s natural hormones and as such can essentially confuse the body’s systems. Quite a risk to take, considering that the chemical varieties don’t even work for very long once applied.

Meanwhile, “mineral” sunscreens are considered somewhat safer, as their active ingredients are natural elements such as zinc or titanium. But “micronized” or “nano-scale” particles of these minerals can get below the skin surface and cause allergic reactions and other problems for some people. EWG recommends sticking with “mineral” sunscreens whenever possible but, more important, taking other precautions to avoid prolonged sun exposure altogether. “At EWG we use sunscreens, but we look for shade, wear protective clothing, and avoid the noontime sun before we smear on the cream,” the group reports.

As for spray varieties, EWG recommends avoiding them entirely: “These ingredients are not meant to be inhaled into the lungs.” With so little known about the effects of sunscreen chemicals on the body when rubbed into the skin, we may never know how much worse the effects may be when they are inhaled. But suffice it to say: When your neighbor at the beach is spraying down Junior, it’s in your best interest to turn away and cover your nose and mouth.

The root of the problem, according to EWG, is failure on the part of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), despite repeated requests from public health and consumer advocates, to implement sunscreen safety standards, some of which were proposed by government scientists more than three decades ago.

EWG only considers a small percentage of the sunscreens on the market—none of which come packaged in spray cans—safe for human use. Some of the top rated varieties come from manufacturers including All Terrain, Aubrey Organics, Badger, Blue Lizard, California Baby, La Roche-Posay, Purple Prairie Botanicals, thinksport, and UV Natural. None of the mainstream drug store variety brands appear on EWG’s recommended list. The full list is available on the sunscreens section of EWG’s Skin Deep website. With summer now upon us, stock up on good sunscreen before it’s too late.

CONTACT: Skin Deep, www.ewg.org/skindeep.

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Forget all you heard about Vitamin D from the sun’s rays — the sun is not your friend, folks.

Tanning is not good for you, and sunscreen is your very best friend.

OK, so you think we’re crazy, but doctors and decades of research don’t lie. The sun is your skin’s worst enemy. Ultra violet rays are extremely harmful to your health many ways. Doctors at the Academy of Dermatology Convention in Miami cannot emphasize this enough: there is no such thing as a safe or healthy tan.

"There are two types of rays that you are exposed to," says Dr. Dale Isaacson, "UVB rays that give you that instant burn, and UVA rays that generally lead to tanning and in the future, skin cancer."

Some skin cancer types are treatable and curable by removing the damaged cells, but some cancers are deadly. Melanoma is one of the deadliest types of skin cancer in the world, and millions die from it each year. It starts out looking like a bad mole, but extra sun exposure mutates it and turns it into cancer which can spread through your entire body.

"If you notice any of those symptoms, see a dermatologist immediately," said Dr. Isaacson.

The sun not only poses health risk, but it poses cosmetic ones too. Dr Marilyn Berzin treats people for sun exposure in as early as their late twenties.

"When you expose yourself to too much sun, it can seriously mutate your skin, but even worse, it can cause early wrinkling. I treat many young women who have premature wrinkles on their face, and they’re not even thirty."

Patients see Dr Berzin for laser resurfacing procedures and Botox injections to remove wrinkles. These procedures are often painful, but they are considered important in a youth driven society.

“If you want to stay young, stay out of the sun," says Dr. Berzin. "There is nothing wrong with being pale. And those of you who are naturally pale need to apply extra sunscreen protection."

The higher the SPF on your sunscreen, the greater protection. And make sure to re-apply it twice if you stay out in the sun too long.
Take it from a girl who is as pale as can be, your skin stays soft and smooth when you use a sunscreen moisturizer everyday. And don’t forget to put some on when its cloudy, you can get sun exposure then too. So think about all of this when you head out to tan on the beaches this season. Cover up.

Summer is a sexy time of year. Literally. We’re not just talking about the skimpy clothing and glistening tanned bodies, we’re talking SEX. According to psychologist Diana Kirschner, Ph.D., author of “Love in 90 Days,” we have more sex in the summer than during any other time of the year.

Why? Because we’ve been programmed to, thanks to–wait for it–school. “We were raised in the rhythm of a school calendar for…the first 20 years of our lives,” said Kirschner, who has appeared on top TV shows including “Oprah” and “Today.” “Summertime meant party time — which means we are conditioned to relax, let loose, and have more fun in the summer, (including) sex.”

The mindset induced by this calendar doesn’t evaporate after high school or college graduation; it translates into the adult world, too. Instead of spending most of the year fretting over lame stuff like class and homework, adults get suited up and head to the office. For us, summer means sipping cold margaritas, parties on the weekends, and taking much-needed vacations to the Cape.

“As summer approaches,” said Kirschner. “people begin to relax and (go to the) beach and pool parties. People are…more open. The sexy summer clothes come on. More flesh is exposed, and this is…seductive.”

For adults who are overworked and stressed out, summer vacations not only provide a much-needed escape, but more time for sex. And for parents who haven’t had time alone together since 1995, shipping the kids off to summer camp gives them the prime opportunity to do the wild thing and make up for lost time. (Ignore the fact that you spent six summers at camp; we’re sure your parents were outside gardening most of the time.)

And just as skimpy clothes and cocktails by the pool bring a smile to your face, warm weather and sunny skies can cheer you up. Longer days pump up the amount of serotonin and dopamine in your brain, leaving you glowing with happiness and desire. What’s more, seeing the sunshine is a godsend to those afflicted with winter Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) who spend the colder, darker months depressed, anxious, lethargic, withdrawn, and, predictably, with little to zero interest in sex. Symptoms of the less-common summer SAD include poor appetite, anxiety, insomnia, and — surprise! — an increased sex drive.

But don’t get too, um, excited. We’ve got some bad news. There’s something else that rises in the summer: the rate of infidelity. So should you be worried when you catch your guy staring at that skanky girl’s cleavage or when you notice your girl eying that jerk’s rock-hard abs? Maybe. Sometimes a glance is just a glance, but it’s easy for your “other brain” to do the thinking when the world becomes a tempting candy shop and everywhere you look you see girls dressed like cheap hookers who’ll do anything you ask for a hit of crack. But we digress.

Guys, listen up. According to infidelity expert Ruth Houston, author of “Is He Cheating on You? 829 Telltale Signs,” you are the ones doing the summer cheating. After all, it’s men who are known to cheat more often than women (or at least more men than women admit to cheating when taking part in research studies). Houston explains that the different reasons why men and women cheat have a lot to do with why men are the ones committing the summer affairs. Men tend to cheat for sexual satisfaction–and hello, summertime equals horniness-inducing visual stimulation overload. Women, on the other hand, tend to cheat for emotional satisfaction, and short-term hot and sweaty summer flings just don’t cut it. But there’s one exception: Women in their early 20s and below seem to stray for the sex, too, and they’re cheating nearly as often as men, according to researchers.

But eye candy isn’t just to blame, says Houston, who explains that this hot season provides numerous prime opportunities for taken men to cheat — and get away with it. Accordingly, there are three types of men who cheat in the summer:

1. The Recreational Cheater, who sees infidelity as a summer sport.
2. The Seasonal Cheater, who is faithful throughout the year but has a fling when his wife or girlfriend is away.
3. The Opportunistic Cheater, who will cheat if the opportunity presents itself and he doesn’t fear getting caught. For example he and the guys went on a camping and OMG, he couldn’t have predicted that a group of hot twenty-somethings would camp out next to him and enjoy skinnydipping in the lake! Jackpot!

Now we at Blast are well aware that there are exceptions to every rule; we know that many of you are genuinely good guys. But some of you — and you know who you are — are sneaky bastards jumping at the chance to “go fishing with the guys.” You know what we’re getting at here. Summertime makes it easy for cheaters to lie and leave their other halves completely clueless.

“Some men plan for their summer cheating, and it’s easy for them to do because it’s difficult to be detected, and the opportunities are there,” Houston elaborates. “If he has a business trip, he’ll say, ‘You don’t want to come; there will be lots of meetings and it’ll be boring for you,’ when really there often is a lot she could do while he’s in a meeting.”

And you should be wary of business trips. Very wary, said Houston. “Lots of workplace affairs start as emotional affairs and are consummated on business trips. Everything’s on the company’s expense: the hotel, the fancy meals, the drinks. Everything falls into place.”

Is your guy insisting on sending you on the trip of a lifetime (without him, of course)? If so, it could be a red alert. There may be a reason he doesn’t want to go with you: another woman.

“A man might send his wife on her dream vacation and say, ‘Oh honey, I’ll treat you to a spa trip this summer’ or ‘I know you’ve always wanted to go to Paris.’ What wife is going to say no?” Conversely, when young women have summer flings, Houston explained, they are usually spontaneous and are often when she’s on a trip with the girls. There isn’t the planning.

Houston shared a couple of stories from distressed clients who learned the hard way that their men were having summer affairs. Take “Slimeball,” who told his girlfriend he was going on a rafting trip with the guys. While he was away, his girlfriend bumped into one of his best buds, who knew nothing about the “trip.” Turns out her boyfriend was the only one of the guys who left town.

Or how about “Scumbag,” who said he was going fishing with his friends. But what happened when a neighbor asked to borrow something from the shed? The embarrassed wife discovered all of his fishing gear. The kicker? The loser had the nerve to bring back some fish when he returned.

In the fall, Houston is bombarded with clients who found out about their guys’ summer affairs. And the worst part? Some men get attached to the mistress and don’t want to let the affair go when summer is over. This, Houston said, is why you shouldn’t ignore that gut feeling. “You’re taking a chance when you look the other way.”

And Houston, who is no stranger to receiving angry comments from men who read her articles, would know. Before becoming an author and infidelity expert, she was cheated on by her first husband. Now happily remarried for nearly a decade to a man who went through the same thing, she hopes that her research will help mend marriages and relationships that have been scarred by infidelity.

So what should you do if you suspect or find out that your guy is cheating in the summer? “Never confront him unless you have proof,” warned Houston. “If all of a sudden he talks about going on separate vacations and he never has before, that’s a red flag. There are resorts and cruises where the husband can fish and the wife can go to the spa, and there are activities for the kids. You can all get away and do whatever you want. If he says, ‘I need to get away.’ Well you can all get away together. If he says he’s going to your vacation house and you suspect something, pop in and see how he reacts.

“If something is odd, just be alert,” she said. “Don’t go around peeking and sneaking, but be aware. You know your man’s behavior, and if he’s doing something out of character, then be alert, don’t just look the other way. Not every summer affair ends after summer. And if he gets away with it, he’ll try next year, or continue the affair throughout the year, and that’s a situation you don’t want to get yourself into.”

So the moral of the story? Make sure you shave your legs and buy your condoms because it’s summertime, which means it’s sex time. And please, don’t be a statistic: if you’re attached, keep it in your pants — unless you’re with your sweetie, then you can whip it out!

Dear EarthTalk: Is there really such a thing as “sun-protective clothing?” If so, does it mean I can dispense with oily sunscreens once and for all? — John Sugarman, San Diego, CA

While there will always be a place for high-quality sunscreen on body parts exposed to the sun, covering up elsewhere-ideally with clothing designed to absorb or shield the sun’s damaging ultraviolet (UV) radiation-can minimize a person’s skin cancer risk significantly.

With recent news about the inadequacy of many sunscreens-the nonprofit Environmental Working Group found that four out of five name brand sunscreens offer inadequate protection from the sun or contain potentially carcinogenic ingredients-covering up instead of smearing is looking better and better to many people. A handful of clothing manufacturers are responding to the increased demand for shirts, pants, dresses and hats bearing “SPF” (sun protection factor) ratings with stylish sun-protective duds.

The granddaddy of them all just might be Sun Precautions Inc., which was started 15 years ago by avid downhill ski racer and outdoors enthusiast Shaun Hughes after he was diagnosed with skin cancer at age 26. The company’s Solumbra line of sun-protective casual and outdoors clothing blocks upwards of 97 percent of all UVA and UVB radiation it encounters, and is recommended by thousands of dermatologists.

To test that its product line offers the kind of protection the company advertises, Sun Precautions subjects all of its Solumbra clothing to 500 laundry cycles, then snips out fabric samples which are exposed to the equivalent of 500 days of UV rays. If the samples pass muster, the line can be shipped.

Another leader in the fast growing field is Coolibar, which boasts a 50+ SPF rating for all of its garments. Its clothing, including wide-brimmed hats and long-sleeved bathing suits among many other items, is crafted from a proprietary tight-weave yet breezy fabric it calls Suntect. Another top purveyor is Sun Protective Clothing, which makes its casual and sporting clothes from a proprietary fabric blend called Solarweave, which fends off UVA and UVB rays yet maintains a light cottony “summerweight” feel.

Some hardcore environmentalists shun sun-protective clothing because it is usually made from polyester, Lycra or nylon-all which are petroleum-derived and are can contain some nasty chemicals. But Marta Phillips of SunGrubbies.com feels that it is better to wear the clothes than to smear chemicals directly onto your skin via sunscreen. That’s why her company sells a wide variety of sun-protective pants, jackets and hats, as well as specialty items such as cover-ups, sun gloves, sun sleeves and nose scarves.

If getting a whole new wardrobe of sun-protective clothing is out of the question, washing your existing clothes with Rit’s SunGuard, a product that treats fabric with a compound that imparts 96 percent UV protection through about 20 washings, might be the way to go. Also, sun lovers shouldn’t forget about protecting their eyes. A good pair of 100 percent UV protection sunglasses doesn’t cost an arm and a leg anymore; everyone in your family needs a pair.

CONTACTS: Environmental Working Group, www.ewg.org; Coolibar, www.coolibar.com; Sun Precautions, www.sunprecautions.com; Sun Protective Clothing, www.sunprotectiveclothing.com; SunGrubbies.com, www.sungrubbies.com; SunGuard, www.sunguardsunprotection.com.

Dear EarthTalk: Aren’t orangutans seriously threatened by the cutting down of forests?

– Nick Chermayeff, Greenwich, CT

Deforestation is indeed the primary threat to the orangutan, a species of great ape known for its keen intelligence and the fact that it’s the largest animal to live primarily in trees. A 2007 assessment by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) predicts that orangutans will be virtually eliminated in the wild within two decades if current deforestation trends continue. The great reddish-brown apes are native to the tropical rainforests of Indonesia and Malaysia, which are being cut down rapidly (and in many cases, illegally) to make way for agriculture and other development.

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) classifies the Bornean sub-species of orangutan as Endangered and the Sumatran sub-species as Critically Endangered. The non-profit Orangutan Conservancy estimates that 54,000 Bornean orangutans and only 6,600 Sumatran orangutans remain in the wild. Given that it’s rare for adult orangutans, supremely adapted to life in trees, to ever touch the ground; it’s no wonder that forest degradation, fragmentation and outright clearing-sometimes by intentionally set fires-are the main drivers of the species’ population decline. The result has been the loss of some 80 percent of the orangutans’ habitat in just the last two decades.

While small independent farmers are cutting down rainforest swaths to plant their crops, an even larger problem is the spread of large oil palm plantations-in some cases funded by supposedly forward-thinking international development banks-that stretch for hundreds of thousands of acres across formerly diverse rainforest. The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) reports that over the last four decades, the total land area planted with oil palm in Indonesia has grown some 30-fold to over three million hectares, while in Malaysia, oil palm agriculture has increased 12-fold to 3.5 million hectares.

Orangutans are also killed for the illegal wildlife trade. Poachers kill the mothers and then sell their babies as pets. According to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), there may be more (pet) orangutans per square-mile in Taipei, Taiwan than in the wild. Unfortunately for the often unwitting owners, orangutans quickly grow out of being cuddly and can, like any wild animal, become unmanageable and unruly when confined.

Poachers are also killing orangutans for food for the so-called bush meat trade. According to the Orangutan Conservancy, the fact that many Indonesian logging companies do not provide food for their workers exacerbates this problem. “Hundreds of loggers are employed to cut down a particular area of forest, and they have to find food for themselves,” says the Conservancy. “The loggers, along with settlers who establish communities in the forest, hunt orangs, birds, and small mammals the orangs eat.”

The group pins the blame on economic pressures along with human greed and ignorance. “The needs of so many people with little landmass are pressingly urgent, allowing little time for planning or care about the environment.” Readers can help by donating time or money to the group, or by contributing to its adopt-an-orangutan program whereby donated funds go toward caring for specific orphaned orangutans.

CONTACTS: UNEP, www.unep.org; IUCN, www.iucn.org; CSPI, www.cspinet.org; WWF, www.wwf.org; Orangutan Conservancy, www.orangutan.net.

SEND YOUR ENVIRONMENTAL QUESTIONS TO: EarthTalk, P.O. Box 5098, Westport, CT 06881; earthtalk@emagazine.com. Read past columns at: www.emagazine.com/earthtalk/archives.php. EarthTalk is now a book! Details and order information at: www.emagazine.com/earthtalkbook.