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Comment by JamesLefrere | Hacker News Reader

Wellbeing is one thing (I know I would enjoy this a lot more than an office) but long term UV exposure is not forgiving for longevity. I could find sources, but it’s not my area; my partner is a dermatologist and I take her advice on this. It’s worth wearing sunscreen every day (even in the winter), though I believe you have to be careful about choosing products in some places like the US, where sunscreens can be zinc-based.

It’s basically something easy you can do in your morning routine every day that will lower your risk of developing skin cancer and some other problems.

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For what it’s worth it also depends on the skin color of the person involved. If you’re on the more brownish side of things (like my mother and brother are) then you will not be as affected as the people who are more light-skinned (like the guy from the submitted post). There’s also the fact that our grandparents managed just fine to work all day long in broad sunlight without developing skin diseases, but it’s also true that they would almost never wear short-sleeved stuff and they would always keep their head covered under intense sunlight. Nowadays it’s almost a matter of pride among some people (think Nordic or British tourists) to show off how red-skinned they have become after just a couple of days spent in Greece or Southern Spain, it’s nuts.

Later edit: I’m talking about something like this [1], you can see how no person in that photo wears anything short-sleeved and you can also see that almost everyone has their head covered, with the exception of those two guys who probably took their hats off in order to enjoy the tzuica or palinka.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Harvest_time_in_Romania...

I think it depends on tropical location more than anything else. The sun is much more potent. My grandfather in northern Australia had many cancers removed from his face, ears, neck, shoulders, arms and legs. Today skin cancer occurs in roughly 2 out of 3 people in Australia.

Sorry but I think this does not really sound convincing regarding longevity, since there is no consideration of the net effect in light of the well-known positive health benefits of being outdoors. At risk of stretching my bed analogy, there are probably things you could do to mitigate risk of falling over in your home if you do get out of bed, such as wearing a helmet...

See eg this article:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26992108 "Avoidance of sun exposure as a risk factor for major causes of death: a competing risk analysis of the Melanoma in Southern Sweden cohort"

"CONCLUSION:

The longer life expectancy amongst women with active sun exposure habits was related to a decrease in CVD and noncancer/non-CVD mortality, causing the relative contribution of death due to cancer to increase."

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