There is something disturbing about Sydney when you see it, as it were, in the flesh. Australia's premier city sits astride a sparkling harbour under an azure sky.
There is the famed opera house and the magisterial Harbour Bridge linking the northern and southern shores. You see why estate agents promote Sydney as the city with the matchless lifestyle.
Now take a look at the people. They are pasty-faced. The clothes are grey and beige, the skin a pimply shade of pale. To anyone who has holidayed on the shores of the Mediterranean, with its smooth, olive-skinned peoples, this comes as a shock. Here, in one of the most sun-kissed cities of the world, the people look as though they live underground.
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In a sense, many of them do. A generation of Australians has been raised to fear the sun, never venturing out without a hat, long-sleeved shirt and factor 30 sunblock. These people avoid the beach, keep their children covered head-to-toe in summer and go for regular check-ups in the ubiquitous skin cancer clinics.
In sun-kissed Sydney, people look as though they live underground This could be about to change. The Cancer Council Australia has issued new advice on the sun, which, some claim, amounts to a seismic shift in its thinking. After more than two decades of warning people to stay out of the sun, the new advice, to be published in The Medical Journal of Australia (MJA) this month, says that a little of it is essential for good health.
The reason for this change of heart is that a new problem has emerged in Australia: vitamin D deficiency. Vitamin D is made by the action of the sun on the skin and is essential for good bones, a healthy immune system and possibly also for protection against some forms of cancer.
Spelling out exactly what this means, the advice in the MJA says that, in Sydney and southern parts of Australia, people should expose their unprotected face, hands and arms to the sun for five to 10 minutes before 10am or after 3pm on most days of the week in summer to get adequate doses of vitamin D.
Announcement has provoked a fevered debate among the specialists
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