Cooked skin may cook kids' goose

News flash: Today's teenagers like to cook! Especially girls. They cook as often as once or twice a week, if not more. This is their favorite recipe:

1. Baste white meat in white or clear sauce.

2. Lay meat in oven and prepare to roast.

3. Close oven.

4. Cook till a deep golden Paula-Abdul brown.

5. Dress meat and prepare for friends.

6. Add more white sauce.

There you have it: One rotisserie-style, deep-roasted teenage girl.

If you know a teenager, then you probably know that tanning beds are the rage. Or did you think girls were getting those deep tans in the middle of December by taking regular Caribbean cruises?

This is creating a health hazard. Some Utah state legislators want to ban the use of the tanning salons for teens. So does the American Academy of Dermatologists and the World Health Organization. If cigarettes and alcohol are banned for minors, why not tanning salons, a $5 billion a year industry in the United States whose chief side effect, besides brown skin, is skin cancer.

In a perverse sort of way, tanning salons are the best thing that ever happened to dermatologists. They are for dermatologists what hard candy is for dentists and car wrecks are for lawyers: a gold mine.

"I guess I could open a chain of tanning salons," says dermatologist Doug Forsha, "and then they'd see me 15 years later for the skin damage. I could make money coming and going."

But then Forsha turns serious: "The thing is, now that we have Vitamin D supplementation in milk, there is no benefit to sun exposure. The best thing is for humans to live in caves, but of course that's not practical. So we do the other things: We wear hats, stay out of the sun from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., play golf in the late or early part of the day, and so forth."

And we don't go to tanning salons and nuke our skin.

Tanning beds are nothing but intensely concentrated doses of ultraviolet light in a short amount of time. Thirty minutes under a sun lamp is like one day at the beach. UV rays are what cause wrinkles, discoloration, redness of the skin and skin cancer.

What disturbs Forsha most is that he is seeing younger and younger patients for sun-damaged skin. Women in their 20s are turning up in his office with cancers.

"Which is extraordinary," says Forsha. "Usually the incubation (for sun damage) is 15 years (before it manifests itself). If they're having trouble at 24, you have to wonder what they'll be like in 15 years. Usually the people we see for those types of problems are in their 40s and 50s."

Paula Haacke, who manages the cosmetic side of Forsha's business, has noticed that she is giving "photo rejuvenation" treatments to increasing younger patients to correct skin damaged by exposure to sun lamps and sun.

"The treatment deals with discoloration, but it can't do anything about skin cancer," she says. "If they get cancer, then the doctor has to remove it, and that leaves a scar. Now they're not just getting ugly skin, they're getting cancer. The photo rejuv gets rid of some of the damage, but it's expensive and insurance doesn't cover it. And if they continue to tan, they'll have to keep doing the treatment."

Haacke has a favorite saying: The tan fades, the damage stays. She went on a cruise recently and was teased by other passengers for her white skin and her predilection for sunblock and hats.

"I told them, if you saw what I saw, you'd do it too," she says.

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Doug Robinson's column runs on Tuesdays. E-mail drob@desnews.com