Why do jersey people tan so much

Vaughn-Flam says MTV declined to add warning messages to the show at a meeting with foundation representatives in September.

In one study, published this month, college women who regularly watched reality beauty shows were at least twice as likely to use tanning beds or tan outside as those who did not watch. The study did not specifically include Jersey Shore , and there's no way to know whether viewers tanned more because of the shows they watched, says researcher Joshua Fogel, a health policy researcher at Brooklyn College in New York.

But, he says, reality show tanning fans are an obvious audience for prevention messages. Facebook Twitter Email. Share your feedback to help improve our site! And a survey found the same has been true for almost 40 percent of college students. For 59 percent of those who indoor tan, they say it's because "everything causes cancer these days.

What's with the defeatist, something's-gonna-get-me attitude? In other words: They're weighing the risks and benefits of a potentially health-damaging behavior, and the benefits win. Unfortunately, that perception is pretty accurate. If you're tan, compliments like "You look so healthy! Americans have been climbing into tanning beds since the devices were first introduced in this country in , and the growing pile of evidence that they can cause cancer hasn't seemed to slow people down.

That's because we live in a culture in which being tan is the ideal, says Elizabeth Tanzi, M. Whether you GTL like the cast of Jersey Shore that's gym, tan, laundry for nonfans or think Snooki looks too Oompa Loompa, it's hard to escape the fact that the skin tone of white women in media images is usually some shade of tan. And then there's what every dermatologist doesn't want to admit when it comes to golden-brown skin: It makes you look thinner.

Those little cellulite bumps on your thighs? They're so much less noticeable when you're tan. The tank-top arm muscles you've been going to Pilates three times a week to see?

They're more defined when you have a golden glow. And despite a ton of information on the dangers of indoor tanning—including a startling new study just published in the British Medical Journal estimating that indoor tanning accounts for more than , cases of nonmelanoma skin cancers in the U. According to the American Academy of Dermatology, 24 percent of young adults reported that they were either unaware or unsure that tanning beds aren't safer than the sun, and only 35 percent of them knew that a "base tan" is not a healthy way to protect skin from sun damage.

A recent U. House of Representatives report found that this kind of misinformation is in part due to tanning salons not providing accurate facts about skin cancer and other risks to their clients. In fact, this report found that the vast majority of tanning salons are making claims about the health benefits of indoor tanning. Luckily, her melanoma was removed at an early stage, before it spread, and she hasn't had a recurrence. But she says when she looks at her four-inch scar, which took a full year to heal, she's grateful it's on the back of her leg and not on her face.

When I was 18 years old and going to the tanning salon, I didn't think about the possibility of getting cancer," she adds. Lasting Scars What worries dermatologists almost as much as the skyrocketing rates of melanoma is young women's misinformation about how treatable the disease is.

While most cases of skin cancer are curable—even melanoma, if it's caught early—too many women seem to think it's no big deal, says Sarnoff. But I'd invite those people to watch a skin-cancer surgery, when you see layer by layer of, say, someone's nose disappearing. Just look at Tricia, now 35, who was only recently given the green light to have another reconstructive surgery on her ear.

Her doctors wanted to wait three months to do this so the plastic surgery wouldn't hide the melanoma that had a chance of returning again, but she waited a year. Once the skin has grown over the cartilage, they'll unpin my ear and do a skin graft.

And it's not just melanoma patients who have to deal with the potentially disfiguring side effects of skin cancer. Tanzi says she removes a lot of basal cell and squamous cell carcinomas from women's faces, and those scars can take years to heal. That's only if they're lucky and a spot is caught early. While squamous and basal cell carcinomas—the two nonmelanoma skin cancers—don't typically spread to other parts of the body, melanoma is a totally different beast. Kafka is aware of the skin cancer risks associated with her tanning bed habit, but she says the risk is worth it.

Campaigns by health organizations like the American Academy of Dermatology to warn the public about the skin cancer risks of tanning with have had limited success. About 28 million Americans still frequent tanning booths each year and tanning-bed use among teens has only been growing. It was the same thing with smoking. Especially younger people have a hard time seeing themselves as getting older and having to deal with these risks," says Dr.

In the last century, tanned skin has done a in public perception. A tan used to connote a working class person who had to do manual labor outdoors, but the Industrial Revolution started to change all that, says Mark Leary, professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University.

It was the rich who could afford vacations to places like Florida. That's where the shift started," he says. Until recently, many doctors also felt that the sun conferred many health benefits, Leary says -- so much so that mothers in the s and s were sometimes told to leave their babies out in the sun for a certain amount each day. While sun exposure does help the body produce necessary vitamin D, supplements and natural sources of the vitamin in one's diet, such as cheese and eggs, do the job just as well, says Kunin, so there isn't really a medical basis for tanner people looking healthier.

Even a few minutes of sun exposure -- from walking the dog or sitting in one's car on a daily commute -- provides the average individual with enough UV exposure to make ample vitamin D, she says. The advent of indoor tanning salons gave Americans a fast and relatively inexpensive way to get tan year-round, no trip to the tropics necessary. Numerous studies have linked overexposure to UV light with skin cancer, especially through the use of tanning beds, but controlling Americans' desire to bronze has proved difficult, dermatologists say.