The Environmental Working Group (EWG) has come out with its 2012 Sunscreen Guide, which seeks to help consumers pick the best sunscreens. As Mother Jones reports here, people who use sunscreen are more vulnerable to cancer-inducing sun damage, among other reasons because using sunscreen gives them a false sense of invulnerability. According to EWG, one problem is FDA's regulatory failure:
The [2012 EWG] guide comes less than a week after the FDA pushed back the compliancy requirement for a news set of guidelines (33 years in the making) meant to urge manufacturers to more clearly label their products and toss out misleading terms like "sweatproof" and "sunblock." But even the now-delayed FDA guidelines, says EWG, fall short in some important ways. For starters, the FDA's new guidelines fail to address the risk of trusting a sunscreen with an SPF higher than 50. For sunscreens that boast SPF 100, for instance, "there's no evidence they provide additional health benefits," says David Andrews, a spokesperson for EWG. The higher value "lends to a sense of invincibility, so that people spend more time in the sun longer," Andrews argues.
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