So the darker your skin, the more you are protected against skin cancer, specifically

the melanoma type cancer, which is responsible for the majority of skin cancer. Now, in this video,

I'm going to get into the why, but also some additional information I want to introduce

you to, which is quite fascinating and beneficial to your long-term health. Now, what is it about

the skin color that protects you against skin cancer? It has to do with a pigment called

melanin, and melanin is a pigment in your skin that protects you against radiation from the sun,

a very specific type of radiation called ultraviolet radiation, specifically ultraviolet B type radiation,

and it also protects you against oxidative stress, as well as free radical damage. So if we compare

dark skin to light skin, we're looking at an average between 43% melanin down to 1.3% melanin,

and there are various races that have virtually no melanin. So what happens when they go into the

sun and they expose themselves to UV radiation, which has a tendency to stimulate more melanin,

they can't do it, so they can't get a tan, so they just burn, and they're at a very high risk of

getting melanomas. Now, if we take a look at an albino, there are a thousand times more risk

of getting melanomas. So someone that has darker skin has more melanin, and you can look at melanin

as kind of a sunscreen. It's equivalent to the SPF-13 sunscreen. One thing that's interesting about

the UV radiation is that it degrades folate, which is a B vitamin, and folate is necessary

to protect you against DNA damage. It does a lot of other things, but folate, which by the way,

isn't leafy green vegetables, is degraded by UV radiation. So the more melanin you have in your

skin, the less you're going to be able to break down folate if you're exposed to UV radiation.

Now, let's take a look at the rate of getting melanomas for different skin colors. So this is

the rate of developing melanomas per 100,000 people for males. The data for females is quite similar,

it's not exact, and this is just in the U.S., but people that have white skin have a 31.4%

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