Avoidance of sun exposure as a risk factor for major causes of death (2016)
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Or: people who live a long time, often go outside.
Or: non-sedentary lifestyles predict long-life.
Or: to quote the paper 2/3rds in,
"We acknowledge several major limitations of this study.
First, it is not possible to differentiate between active sun exposure habits and a healthy lifestyle".
And take vitamin D supplements to compensate.
I hate these types of headlines. They're akin to "Coffee is a carcinogen", "Chocolate makes you live longer", "Making your child listen to Mozart 30 minutes a day boosts his IQ", etc. I.e. the results are probably either outright wrong, non-reproducible, or statistically insignificant.
Avoiding the outdoors won't shorten your lifespan if you take care of your health in general. Just live your life the way you want to and all will be well.
However I'm sceptical that vitamin D deficiency explains the entire effect given it is quite large. If sunlight itself isn't relevant I expect other confounders to be stacking on top of vitamin D deficiency.
It might not be true for everybody (sounds like you're fine sitting inside, popping vitamins, and grinding on the Peloton or whatever -- good for you) but don't make the mistake of thinking your experiences are others'.
Clearly there are things about "the outdoors" that can't be replicated indoors. Smells, the sheer size and variety of environs, O2/CO2 levels, etc. Unless you are living in some kind of enormous, elaborate bio-dome.
You write this as if you somehow know this for sure. It’s well known that indoor air is significantly more polluted in most cases than outdoor air, at least in the west. Fresh exposure to outdoor air is also important not just exposure to the sun. I would definitely not want to spend most of my life breathing indoor air, and opening windows only gets you so far.
Source on that? It probably vastly depends on the "outdoor", because i highly doubt next to an American highway the air is cleaner than the average housing away from that highway, like i don't doubt a house next to the highway has worse air than a forest in the middle of nowhere.
> Americans, on average, spend approximately 90 percent of their time indoors,1 where the concentrations of some pollutants are often 2 to 5 times higher than typical outdoor concentrations
There’s been so much research on this by so many different organizations around the world, as far as I’ve known almost everybody was aware of this as fact.
There is an extraordinary amount of data online about this, should be easy to find. On average, outdoor air is healthier than indoor air, often by a wide margin. The above is from the EPA site: https://www.epa.gov/report-environment/indoor-air-quality
Also https://www.cnbc.com/2016/04/22/indoor-air-can-be-deadlier-t...
> indoors [...] concentrations of SOME pollutants are OFTEN [...] higher
Those two statements don't seem to be the same to me?
> World Health Organization has said that household cooking with coal or biomass-burning stoves led to 4.3 million deaths in 2012, compared with 3.7 million deaths from outdoor air pollution.
And that’s just talking about one of many different sources of pollution. There are so many sources of pollution indoors, sources that are very close to you physically, that you should carefully consider these factors and the statistics surrounding them.
the future is an exciting place.
in the meantime, “study finds…”
The same data could be used to conclude that low income and lack of education are risk factors for death similar to smoking...
But they're acknowledging the limitations of the study. As it is, it's a jumping off-point to do more research on the subject. They even mention confounding factors in the abstract.
I'm curious what alternative you'd propose, other than more funding on larger and more complex studies.
A somewhat sophisticated person says something like the above.
People who change the world will wonder there’s something there. especially given the sober and candid examination of possible confounding factors and mechanisms of action.
Who cares what these development delayed children think, we have another 15 years of hegemony
It does my head in why would you choose to cast aspersions on the science method. It's literally an example of science done by the book, published in a peer reviewed magazine. It's not amateur work, it's not fake news. It's ground breaking science: "We found this interesting thing and here we present it to you, with caveats, after some other people in the field did a quick sanity check on it".
I'm sorry for the tone, but I'm quite exasperated by people doing this kind of low key, subtle, disparaging of science under the guise of scepticism. It always happens when studies are posted on HN (or reddit), people seem to find a perverse joy in finding weird gotchas that the study already mentions and then saying: see, science is such a mess.
The study spends 2/3rds of the time ignoring the obvious analysis which is already established -- this is common in journalism. The title is "what if?", the article spends most of the time imagining what-if, and then at the end says "probably not".
why i chose to comment is that people do not weight parts of articles evenly, the read what they want to read into things. It is the responsibility of honest communication to make the most plausible conclusion the easiest to infer, and the least plausible, the hardest. If you want to think this study shows that more sunlight = more life, you should have to do a lot of cognitive work to get to that mumbojumbo.
This paper does the opposite. It toes the line of dishonesty, making deeply implausible pseudo-science an easy conclusion to infer.
During the summer months, I now get 20 min full body exposure daily and I supplement D3 on the days I can't (and months I can't - I live in a colder climate). As my body has built up tolerance, I've even developed a light tan and I've found my skin no longer burns as easily. Best of all, I just look healthier and my mood is better.
Usually people are allowed to be naked inside .. and unless you are presenting yourself, no one will notice, if you are a bit inside.
But way better is of course, a garden with surrounding bushes, or living close to wilderness, where no one bothers your privacy.
Interestingly, this instance stems from a court ruling several decades ago that a government requirement to wear any particular article of clothing in public spaces was a violation of First Amendment rights. While the original case was about the right to be topless in public spaces, the generalized implication was that the government couldn't require you to wear anything at all.
This is the rub. We don't know sun-exposure is merely a signal of some healthy lifestyle; but evidence from the later questionnaire suggests that normalizing for exercise still leads to a reduction in risk.
I also have to say that I bought into the HN idea of “you can fix life indoors” because it’s an attractive idea. Air quality is far lower indoors? Just buy multiple high quality HEPA air filters and a humidifier and perhaps a dehumidifier if needed, and oh you’ll want a high quality CO2 monitor because those levels are likely high as well. Vitamin D? Just take a supplement! Except oh wait, if you’re deficient you’ll need a large amount, so take a bunch… but vitamin D is fat soluble, so now you have hypervitaminosis D which is terrible, so really you should just get your vitamin D levels checked regularly, which is not cheap. Eyesight issues? Eh, sunlight exposure can help prevent that better than anything else we know, but let’s not talk about that, let’s just let everyone ruin their vision by staying in dim rooms and focusing on close objects and then you can get LASIK, but oh wait, that often isn’t permanent and sometimes it gives people dry eyes so bad they kill themselves. Sleep issues, because you don’t get enough sun exposure to regulate your circadian rhythm? Just take an Ambien or similarly powerful drug, if you get side effects you can medicate those away. And so on, and so on, and so on… Everything can be solved through technology and medication, air sensors and supplements and the like.
Although the article seems like common sense science, it does bring up the question of why there's such an opposition regarding moderate sun exposure. I think the question that makes me really curious is whether natural sun exposure is more beneficial than supplementation or vice-versa.
My mother also has multiple cases of confirmed carcinomas. She obtained disability due to those.
So yeah, even though you may be all shock and awe about why some of us would avoid it, its definitely genetic. And I don't need the risk of having my skin burn and eventually cancer.
But if you want Vitamin-D - the morning and evening sun won't help you, as they are too filtered out. And basically the whole winter sun in the northern hemisphere is too weak, even at noon.
But the beauty of the morning and evening sun helps, too.
Despite having a lineage that hates itself, it also means that I don't tan; I stroke. My mother was actually allergic to the sun. She had to be hospitalized, a few times, because of it.
I live in an area with tons of folks of Mediterranean descent. Every summer, they end up looking like alligator purses, come May.
I get really sick of them insisting that I "just need to do it in stages. Just go out for fifteen minutes at a time. You'll tan; I promise!"
For me, it's:
15 Min. -> Nothing
15 Min. -> Nothing
15 Min. -> Nothing
15 Min. -> Bright red, peeling and screaming
It isn’t, and I’m not gonna bother.
That said, I do like to get out and about, just with a hat on.
I think that the mental health aspects of sunlight may come into play. Very difficult to control for.
When I consistently eat carrots daily my skin darkens a bit, but I also tan easily. It's been reported before that carrot eaters score better in hot-or-not style surveys, attributed to healthier looking skin. At least overdosing on carrots doesn't cause melanoma ;)
It gives the skin a noticeable orange color.
I seem to recall seeing something like that, recently, but it escapes me, just now…
Nevermind. I’m sure it will come to me…
TL;DW - It's not just Vitamin-D generated from UV exposure but nitric oxide release in the skin, that may have a positive effect on health.
And yes, while correlation isn't causality, it's very difficult to separate sunlight exposure from a healthy lifestyle. Since we don't know exact causality, the takeaway should be this: Get regular exercise and sun exposure if you want to live a longer, healthier life. The benefits far outweigh the risk of skin cancer.
In birds and fur-bearing mammals, fur or feathers block UV rays from reaching the skin. Instead, vitamin D is created from oily secretions of the skin deposited onto the feathers or fur, and is obtained orally during grooming.
So they take vitamin D orally, producing it on their bodies.
Although that provides additional sourced guidance for public health officials, for sure.
2. Ensure vitamin D levels are right (In Swedish latitude vitamin D deficiency is common in the winter)
3. Control for confounding variables.