She writes frequently on health and wellness for Home, New Age Journal and other magazines. Later, cancer rates skyrocketed. Natives who had once paddled their dugout canoes up and down the rivers wearing nothing more than a loin cloth, had started wearing sunglasses. Indeed Dr. Schweitzer's daughter remembers that sunglasses were such a status symbol in Lambarene that they had a higher bartering value than beads and trinkets.
Anecdotes abound that correlate the use of sunglasses with cancer.
Yet the mass media has whipped people into such a frenzy of fear about the dangers of sunlight that many Americans are afraid of going out in the daytime at all. The sun has been blamed for everything from premature wrinkling to skin cancer. Those who examine the evidence, however, will find it less than convincing. Certainly, Dr. Weston Price never spied healthy natives wearing dark sunglasses, fashion shades or tinted contact lenses. Nor did he see them riding around in cars with tinted windows, slaving under artificial lights or slathered with sunscreen.