Putting together all the messaging I've gotten recently: Regular sunscreen is bad, zinc oxide sunscreen is bad, getting sun is bad, not getting sun is bad (Vitamin D).
"getting sun is bad" should be strictly "too much UV exposure over a long period of time is bad" which is currently unambiguously what the evidence demonstrates.
I have also started to avoid sunscreens and wear synthetic fabrics instead which aggressively filter out UV light, or I schedule fewer outdoors-in-direct-sun activities during peak UV hours when I have that option.
* Of course exhausting antioxidant capacity will greatly increase damage at a certain point. I am not exactly sure if UV light can cause single strand breakage by itself, or via ROS, but antioxidants are no "shield" in any case - more like a minefield.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cytochrome_c_oxidase (no mention of red light therapy in this article).
UV light from the sun comes with plenty of red light. UV light from the tanning bed does not have any red light. In the winter I used to go tanning, then would spend 12 minutes in the bright-light room [1].
[1] at Planet Fitness. The company website doesn't have any information, but I found this page: https://thelifevirtue.com/total-body-enhancement-pros-and-co...
Being pale and then going for 4 hours at noon to the beach is trouble, build up to it or wear clothing to shade you. If you are naturally pasty and live in the tropics.. mmm . You are in trouble.
It is so insanely hard to filter the truth from the lies when it comes to this stuff.
Of course there is. There are people that think eating only red meat is the best diet.
I also don't believe that eating "mostly plants" is the best way of eating healthy.
- Most plants are a little dangerous to consume raw in significant quantities, especially over any extended period of time, especially if you're one of the 15% of the US with kidney issues, especially if you're one of the 1% of the US with IBD, etc. If your diet is mostly plants, the processing you do should at a minimum include cooking most of them for a few minutes. Some vitamins will be destroyed, but that's a preferable outcome.
- If you have any kind of nutrient deficiency (e.g., calcium is a common issue) and want to solve the issue with your diet, you'll typically want to choose foods that have been processed to be easier to digest and/or to be fortified with such a nutrient. For calcium in particular a diet consisting mostly of unprocessed plants is insufficient.
- Some foods (tomatoes are a classic example) have higher nutritional value when bought cooked and canned than when bought "fresh" because the canned product was produced with much fresher ingredients.
- The majority of the US lives paycheck to paycheck. There's an economic argument to be made that heavily processed foods can be preferable to the alternatives if they allow you to get your vegetables and other nutrition more cheaply (both in direct cost savings and also in the ability to buy in bulk without spoilage).
- Not everyone has the same health goals or personal chemistry, and a linearizable ordering doesn't exist for many diet choices that would apply to every individual across time. For a few choice examples, (1) roughly 1% of the population are underweight and benefit from diet choices enabling weight gain (i.e., on average probably not the proposed diet), and (2) a mostly different 1% subset with IBD benefits from the immunosuppressive effects of low to moderate alcohol consumption even despite its other negative effects (that point is still being studied/debated -- alcohol affects some individuals in that group more negatively than others, talk to your doctor).
With the Sun... you're already exposing yourself to a giant irradiating ball of fire, but also our bodies are evolved to require some exposure to produce vitD. How much exposure should you get? Nobody really knows. Should you wear sunscreen, or just moderate exposure? Which sunscreen? What good choices are there? It's all a mess.