Is Sunscreen the New Margarine? (2019) | Hacker News Reader

Is Sunscreen the New Margarine? (2019)

outsideonline.com

74 pointsplessthanpt0582 comments

> How did we get through the Neolithic Era without sunscreen? Actually, perfectly well.

I have to suspect that this logic won't apply if you're a light skinned person in a place where the natives are all fairly dark skinned.

I live in Sweden, I have traveled with Swedish people to the Philippines. Many of them never get tanned, they just get red.

The article criticizes the generalization of using sunscreen advice, and proceeds to go full-generalization itself.

The study that the article is based on may be very interesting, the article is just misleading. If there is parts of the population that avoid too much to be under sunlight, it is worth studying. Asking the general public to stop using sunscreen is just bad advice.

Yep, I’m fair skinned (Scots-Irish heritage) and live in the US south (North Carolina). If I’m very careful to build up my sun exposure all spring I can tolerate moderate amounts of sun without burning... but if I went out tomorrow for even an hour in direct sun anywhere near mid-day, I’d have a major sunburn. I’ve been more careful to use sunscreen for the last decade or so after seeing my dad’s experience with skin cancers. His aren’t the “serious” kind but basically every time I see him he has fresh scars from having cancerous spots cut or burned off. No thanks.

If you get all the way to the call to action, it doesn't actually say to stop using sunscreen altogether. It basically says you should make sure you get some sun, but not too much. Which I don't think is anything new.

Actually, the point of this article is that it is something new... for the last few decades the medical establishment and of course the sun-screen industry have been absurdly dogmatic and absolutists, telling people to avoid all sun, and anyone who dared to say that it was OK or even desirable to get a bit of sun was vilified (in one case lost his position as department chair of dermatology at Boston U).

I think this article is spot on. And like you say it doesn't say to avoid sunscreen altogether... it says: "Each person’s needs vary so much with season, latitude, skin color, personal history, philosophy, and so much else that it’s impossible to provide a one-size-fits-all recommendation."

Well I've had my doctor tell me I needed more sunlight.

I live in Australia. I always wondered if a change in attitude/behavior has resulted in the increasing skin cancer rates.

When I talk to my grandparents. The idea of doing anything during the hottest part of the day is crazy to them. They would go for a swim at the beach in the morning or afternoon. Not at midday.

I guess they also had people that rubbed themselves in butter to get a nice tan too, but I'm interested if there has been that sort of change.

A sunny place where a lot of people coming from a cloudy place have arrived in the last few centuries. Not a fair comparison with "we survived neolithic".

> Australia

There was a guy on the radio (in the UK) discussing skin cancer rates in Australia. He summed up with a few words "we're white men in a black man's country".

Isn't it culturally normalized in AUS to wear full skin covering when under the sun? I seem to remember being told that most Australians wore more long-sleeve shirts and jeans than t-shirts and shorts.

I think that such a level of skin covering, despite the high temperatures, speaks to an acute cultural awareness of skin cancer that you don't see in most places.

The hole in the ozone layer probably doesn't help. UV exposure in Australia is much higher than many other countries.

My parents always told me not to go outside between the hours of 10 AM and 2 PM.

Not to mention that it’s not hard to suppose that they lived to be old enough to reproduce before they all died from skin cancer...

That's a really good point.

No evolutionary pressure once someone has reproduced, and skin cancer and skin cancer is both rare under 30[1] and take some years to kill.

[1] https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/health-professional/cancer-...

Offspring with living parents and grandparents have incredibly better odds at surviving.

That's not strictly true. If we assume that a person provides little/no value to the group until the age of 10-11. Then someone who lives to 50 as opposed to 40 spends 10 more years working productively for the betterment of the group. This of course assumes that they produce more benefit than detriment to the group during those 10 years.

Thus if there are group selective pressures at play. Those with adults who live longer may outcompete those who do not.

Fair point.

And it may explain why darker skin (which has less incidents of skin cancer) was selected for at lower latitudes, while white skin (more effective as absorbing vitamin D) was selected for at higher latitudes.

The paper doesn’t specify why these genes might have been under such strong selection. But the likely explanation for the pigmentation genes is to maximize vitamin D synthesis, said paleoanthropologist Nina Jablonski of Pennsylvania State University (Penn State), University Park, as she looked at the poster’s results at the meeting. People living in northern latitudes often don’t get enough UV to synthesize vitamin D in their skin so natural selection has favored two genetic solutions to that problem—evolving pale skin that absorbs UV more efficiently or favoring lactose tolerance to be able to digest the sugars and vitamin D naturally found in milk.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/04/how-europeans-evolve...

Simpler than that: just being sunburnt is a disadvantage, no need to get cancer.

Life expectancies were longer than people think back then. A lot of times we see stats that are dominated by high infant mortality. If you lived to 10 you were gonna make it a while.

That's also not necessarily true either. Even accounting for infant mortality, people died much younger than we do today.

Sure, people did occasionally live to old ages, but only the ones who lived easier lives.

Today, the top 5 places where people live the longest are three islands, one peninsula, and a place filled with vegetarians who don't smoke and don't drink alcohol. https://www.aplaceformom.com/blog/2013-03-29-where-people-li...

Nevertheless, the underlying logic stands: the whole point of evolving light skin was to get the necessary beneficial effects of sunlight (including vitamin D) in climates with drastically less sun.

The fact that sun was so important evolutionarily that whole populations literally turned white to get more of it really says something.

Of course the point of the article is that it's not just vitamin D, but a whole host of other effects.

And when some of these people went back to tropical regions (e.g., across the Bering Strait and down to Central America) they re-developed darker skins. So, not getting too much sunlight was apparently equally important.

> the whole point of evolving light skin was to get the necessary beneficial effects of sunlight (including vitamin D)

I’m not sure that we actually know that this is true. It could be that there is some other beneficial mutation which causes light skin which is only a net positive at higher latitudes where light skin is not penalized as much. And there’s some disconfirming evidence for the vitamin D hypothesis: people of African ancestry seem to do okay when they live at higher latitudes and most of us spend most of our time indoors, anyway, and also seem to do okay.

We weren’t able to screen for skin cancer in the Neolithic era, and that was one of many mysterious ways that people died.

Even if you're a light skinned person in the North, we don't have as much forest cover as we had back in the Neolithic era.

If you only have 10% of sun exposure at a time due to trees, that's quite an effective sunblock.

People didn’t live up to 70–80 years old routinely. They’d die of “club to head” or “fauna dinner” causes waaaay before they’d get skin cancer.

It certainly doesn't apply to me. I have albinism and even 15 minutes outside without sunscreen can result in the start of a nasty burn.

On the other hand, massive sun exposure also ages your skin vastly faster. Remember this famous photo of the truck driver who got sun on one side of his face? [1]

I've been aware for a very long time that when I don't get enough sun, I have less energy, I get sick more often, and my mood suffers. But at the same time, I don't want my skin to look like leather.

So it's a pretty easy compromise: I make sure to get a couple hours' of sunbathing without sunscreen every couple weeks, whether at a park, beach, or tanning salon (for a few minutes) in the winter. (Basically cured my seasonal affective disorder in the winter.) The goal is to stay healthily moderately tanned (absolutely not over-tanned) year-round. (And if I spend the whole day at the beach, I put on moderate-strength sunblock after an hour or so.)

But I put sunscreen moisturizer on my face and the back of my neck any day I know I'll be outside in the sun for more than a few minutes -- if I'll be taking a walk or eating lunch outside.

It seems to be a good middle ground -- and the possibility of a middle ground seems to be what is ignored in most conversations on this topic. You don't need to choose between being a sun "worshipper" versus never letting a drop of sun touch your skin.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/shortcuts/2012/jun/05/fa...

Glass windows filter out UV wavelengths that stimulate vitamin D production. Ironically, they pass wavelengths that cause skin cancer.

Nothing I can find about William McElligott says whether he worked south of his home. He drove throughout the workday, and the explanation seems to be that his left side was exposed to the window. But surely the commuting direction would have been a factor too, even if it wasn't the main reason.

I once got tanned on just half of my face, skiing.

Apparently I took much longer going up the lift with the sun on my right than I did coming down :)

I had done a small bit of research online some time back to know what was best for sun exposure and vitamin D. And had concluded that sunscreen on your face, ear and neck which are more likely to burn and also cause wrinkles, with about 20 to 30 minute of direct sunlight exposure on your body per day was the current recommendation.

I think one issue is it's not very socially accepted for me to take a walk shirtless in the middle of the day. So I had found it quite hard to take in the sun.

The other thing I had read was that clothes accentuate skin cancer, because it means that we expose the same parts over and over to sun, yet we get way less amount of vitamin D and other benefits for the amount of time we are out.

Like 5 minutes out in the sun naked, you get a lot of surface sun, but no part of the skin is exposed for too long. While if you go out for 1 hour in the sun with clothes, you might have sunburn in the exposed areas yet didn't even get as much vitamin D from it.

Best sunscreen is zinc oxide btw.

There are two classes of sunscreen, chemical and mineral/physical.

The mineral/physical ones are group by two mineral zinc oxide and titanium dioxide.

You get a ghost cast using mineral but you can offset it by using a tan/colored version.

Mineral sunscreen are better because it stop UVB and UVA. It also doesn't require a waiting period after applying. Zinc provide wider spectrum of protection than titanium.

A sunscreen that blocks UVB, harm marine life [1] and can cause allergic airways inflammation [2] when breathed (inevitable when it dries on your skin) is hardly the best sunscreen in my option.

My personal choice for to vitamin D synthesis is Avobenzone stabilized with ubiquinone.

[1] https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/news/sunscreen-corals.html [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0041008X1...

Non-nano zinc oxide, the traditional kind that is white, like OP is talking about, is fine as far as I know(https://www.vogue.com/article/reef-safe-sunscreens-oxybenzon...).

The nano mineral sunscreens are bad, but they can be coated, which sounds like it makes them less harmful.

The issues I enumerated affects both nano and non-nano sunscreen with different degrees.

The most commons concerns specific of the nano version are the skin absorption and free radical creation when expose to UV radiation -- not exclusive of the mineral sunscreen though, azobenzene is also highly unstable.

We often hear about studies done with the nano crystal because are worst. Experiments done with them are more likely to produce a negative result. But this doesn't mean the "macro" version isn't affected as well.

The aspiration concern is very serious one. Some countries bans spray and power mineral sunscreen of any kind.

Just to be clear. I'm not advocating against using them. Every sunscreen has its place, saying one option is better than other is reductive.

For instance, think an Avobenzone + antiox only chemical sunscreen is a good option to minimize the UVA damage and enable the body to produce vitamin D minimizing the damage created by UVA radiation. But they wouldn't be my choice when going to the beach.

Similarly, Mineral sunscreens don't degrade in the sun and block a wide range of UV radiation. But they are bad for marine wild life. They are a good choice for daily facial sunscreen, specially for skin sensitized by "anti aging" treatments.

Again. There is no such thing as the best sunscreen. Each is best in different use cases.

This article makes an interesting point. It is more than a year old, which means there has been ample time for the research to be replicated, expanded, challenged, or even debunked. Has there been any new development in this regard?

I dislike sunscreen and I dislike having to use it all the time, but the reality is that if I'm under the full sun here in California for more than 10 minutes I'll get a sunburn and after a few more we're talking bubbles and water, i.e. a serious large burn. Long term disease risk is really a secondary concern for me, I can't have half my body covered in burns all the time. I'm not some crazy outlier, but more like your regular guy from Scandinavia or what people in central Europe might call "northern type" informally.

UV damage accounts for 80+% of visible signs of aging. The difference between daily protection with sunscreen and not compounds over years and you can find plenty of pictures illustrating the sharp divergence in end result.

You should use sunscreen with a minimum SPF of 30 every day on your face and neck. Reapply with every 2 hours of direct sun exposure, accounting for things like being in the shade or behind windows (most windows filter out a significant proportion of incoming UV). This is easily the smallest change you can make to get the greatest return on anti-aging and, reiterating the above, the difference produced can be astounding.

For purposes of vitamin D 'intake', leave the other exposed parts of your body unslathered, as long as you're not deliberately increasing exposure (e.g. hitting the beach). Easy fix.

>anti-aging

Since when did "anti-aging" come to mean "anti-visible signs of aging"? Why should I care about looking old when I am old? Shouldn't I care more about being healthy when I am old?

The choice to try and look younger is partly a function of inherent vanity and partly a function of pragmatic value.

Appearing more youthful improves outcomes in romance, socialization, and at work in both overt and subtle ways. The reason for this is quite simple: humans are wired to subconsciously respond positively to things (and especially people) that are visually appealing.

This latter motivation is what drives my thinking on the subject and the implications are perhaps even more consequential for people in the tech industry. Tech is a realm that preferences youth and (sadly) will likely continue to do so.

I had an epiphany some time ago when I encountered a 40 year old who looked about 25. What was striking was that people interacted with him AS IF he was 25. That demonstrated how surprisingly easy it is to short circuit the neural programming for assessing age (i.e. it seems predominantly visual).

I should also note that sunscreen isn't some fountain of youth. There are various factors that contribute to the presentation of visual age and the use of sunscreen. For example: loss of skin elasticity due to a slowdown in collagen production with increasing age.

And to address your last question: using sunscreen and maintaining a healthy lifestyle are not in any way mutually exclusive.

Whether or not you care about your appearance, your skin is still a very important organ.

For skin it just happens that “aging” and “visible signs of aging” are synonymous.

If it's a direct tradeoff then yes, health wins. But you can care about both.

So that optimizes looks. Does it optimize health? The article says not.

If my head and neck are covered in sunscreen, that is a lot of my vitamin D for the year.

> You should use sunscreen with a minimum SPF of 30 every day on your face and neck.

Even in the winter when the UV index is 0 or 1? Or was "in spring/summer" implied?

> UV damage accounts for 80+% of visible signs of aging

Source?

Seems accurate for white people anyway

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4344124/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3790843/

The first article does not claim that it quotes another article as a source instead.

The second article is a clusterfuck, it is not even wrong. Long story short: they asked 300 caucasian women if they were "sun-loving" or "sun-phobic", assessed their "apparent age" by a panel of people (how objective) and then calculated a vague correlation.

> The first article does not claim that it quotes another article as a source instead.

It summarises the evidence from a number of papers. That exact quote comes from one, but the "Age" section alone includes 5 references to skin damage (not including those for melanoma).

> The second article is a clusterfuck, it is not even wrong.

Asking "apparent age" seems a reasonable first step in assessing something as vague as "visible signs of aging"

Not when you claim percentages with 4 significant figures.

Look, you asked for a source.

I'm not going to defend every single thing out of a couple of random papers I googled for you.

The claim is reasonable and has evidence supporting it, and if the exact number is 60% or 90% or 40% it seems pretty reasonable to believe the point of the original comment.

Anecdotal, but a close relative was associate director of P&G R&D (Beauty division) for three decades and that figure has come up quite a bit in conversations I've had with him -- he's said all the research they did always just backed up that SPF was the only thing that had serious practical value, that nothing else really matters in comparison (I can't remember ever asking how much skin tone changes this figure though, I should really ask home about it next time I see him).

Using sunscreen daily? Being that vain seems like a hassle.

It also begins to sound like "Always wear a helmet -- you never know when you might fall!"

Nothing wrong with looking your age because you didn't put on sunscreen for your office job. I feel like following their advice just trains you to have a self-image crisis.

Vain?

I'm of the gender whom society expects to keep the entire body shaved.

Putting cream on my face takes 10 seconds.

Vain = any person who does something in service of their appearance that I don't do

Wear a wide-brimmed hat and a light long-sleeved jacket when you're out. Daily sunscreen will get expensive real fast.

To help control my sun exposure, I use UV widgets on my dashboard.

They help me know when I can expose as much skin as possible to get gentle exposure everywhere, and when I'll burn in 5 minutes.

It's interesting, the heat of the sun and the actual risk of burning don't seem to be 100% correlated.

I find it really helpful to have actual knowledge of what the sun is doing at any one time, instead of having to guess and under or over exposing myself.

I've listed the widgets I use below for Australia, I'm sure you can find them for your location too.

https://www.arpansa.gov.au/our-services/monitoring/ultraviol...

https://www.cancer.org.au/preventing-cancer/sun-protection/u...

I'm one of those weird people who gets a rash when using sunscreen, and am also one of those folks who has dental fluorosis.

I simply stay out of the sun, wear long sleeves and a hat if I can't avoid it, and ... Well I have ugly teeth.

Not wearing sunscreen isn't a pass for exposure; there are still precautions that can be taken.

The the most commonly used sunscreen chemical have hormone like activity [1].

https://www.ewg.org/sunscreen/report/the-trouble-with-sunscr...

Sunscreen sensitivity is definitely a real thing, too:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/sunscreen-sensitivity-1.42009...

I have an OCD-like tendency where I absolutely cannot stand being greasy. I’ve yet to find a sunscreen that I can handle being on, especially in my face.

As a wedding photographer that’s a bit of a problem - some days I’m out in the blazing sun for 12 hours. I take supplements that largely prevent sunburn, but I doubt they help with UV damage much. This article has made me feel better about that.

I am a Norwegian German mix and fairly white. Living in Wisconsin for the winters was difficult. The overcast weather and low sun on the horizon tended to make me feel pretty low.

Having moved to Florida, I get as much sun as I can take and haven’t experienced some of the lows I had in previous Wisconsin winters. I wear a straw hat, breathable long sleeve shirts and long pants to moderate my sun exposure. I have spent more time outdoors and away from cities. All together, I feel less stressed at 38 than I have in years. I attribute it to being out in the elements, WFH and pushing outside my comfort zone. It just feels better to be out here, anchored next to Cape Canaveral.

This glosses over the far more important question: Is Margarine the New Sunscreen?

I find that when I am outside a lot starting early spring, and of course not go out during noon hours (11am-4pm) in high summer, I have almost no need for sunscreen.

If however I spend the spring mostly indoors with few opportunities to go outside, then no matter what I do later I can not habituate and will get 'sun allergy' for the season.

You’ll have to pry the Sun Bum spf 70 from my pink sunburned hands. I’m not giving that stuff up and if they go out of business my family is going to be hurting.

I just tried it on toast, and I'm going to have to agree that it's as bad as margarine.

Soft, creamy mouthfeel. Earthy, metallic notes - like a brisk bite of aluminum foil. Strong aftertaste of own puke.

Hacker News usually isn't a great place for jokes, but I admit that I laughed heartily at this.

The optimal application frequency and SPF of Sunscreen is going to differ drastically from person to person, place to place, all within a given year.

A fresh-faced Irish tourist will be burnt to a crisp after a 20 min stroll on the beach in QLD, Australia in January. Yet slathering on SPF 50 in rainy Dublin upon their return would be all but detrimental.

God, can’t I just get vitamin D from other sources? I drink 24oz of milk a day and that’s about 75% of the RDI.

RDI for vitamin D is too low, and probably resulted from a calculation error. Should probably aim for 5-10x the RDI. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/03/150317122458.h... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28768407

The article cites a study where large doses of vitamin D had no benefit.

I guess I’m screwed by these standards.

Eating vitamin D is not beneficial. Clinical studies have proven it, as the article says. Get some sun instead.

Which studies? Can you point me to the one you are talking about?

Have the clinical studies been confirmed by multiple independent studies?

This is terrible advice that will kill people.

Here in Australia skin cancer (directly caused by exposure to UV) is the most common cancer[1] and kills an increasing proportion of people every year.

Sure, vitamin D deficiency is bad. But don't tell people who are spending all day in the sun not to wear sunscreen! Tell people who never go outside to get 20 minutes of sun a day instead!

As pointed out elsewhere, the primary argument ("how did we get through the neolithic age") is bunk - there is no evolutionary pressure once someone has reproduced, and almost always skin cancer kills people over 30.

[1] https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/cancer/skin-cancer-in-austra...

Both are addressed in the article. The floated theory is that a lack of uv is responsible for more death then skin cancer.

I'm a fair skinned Aussie, who doesn't really like sunscreen.

I can 100% understand nl's position - skin cancer is really prevalent here, and the sun can be incredibly harsh. The skies here are usually completely cloudless, and we're affected by the ozone hole too. Skin cancer is a big deal here. The aboriginal people are very dark, which should be a big hint as to the amount of UV we get, and that will have been selected for from before the ozone hole.

I keep track of UV levels on my personal dashboard, so I know when it's dangerous or not. Previously I was overly cautious, but now I can enjoy time outdoors with skin exposed without the worry of burning, and get gentle UV exposure over my whole body for the vit D.

Personally I prefer to cover up rather than use sunscreen. I don't like the feel of sunscreen, and when covered up there is no risk of the sunscreen slowly washing away. I do use sunscreen on exposed areas, such as hands, face, and feet.

Here are the UV widgets I use.

https://www.arpansa.gov.au/our-services/monitoring/ultraviol...

https://www.cancer.org.au/preventing-cancer/sun-protection/u...

It claims a link between sunlight exposure and lower death rates (which I can buy), and claims vitamin D is "just a marker [of exposure]".

It also discusses studies that show vitamin D supplements don't change life expectancy.

But it jumps from this to "don't use sunscreen" which is a dangerous jump, completely unsupported by anything discussed in the article.

They have a correlation between low levels of sunlight exposure and higher death rate. They know it isn't shortage of vitamin D that causes that. But they don't know if sunscreen stops whatever it is that reduced the death rate.

As a random hypothesis: we know sunlight reduces depression[1], and that depressed people have lower life expectancy. The mechanism there is serotonin production, which isn't blocked by sunscreen.

I'm not claiming that's the answer - I'm just pointing out that there are many alternative explanations and the evidence for the dangerous advice he is giving ("don't use sunscreen") is missing.

[1] https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/news/20021205/unraveling...

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