Current guidelines for sun exposure are unhealthy and unscientific – research (2019)
outsideonline.com
outsideonline.com
As far as I can tell, the "340 000" person study was finally published in 2020[1]. The study was an observational analysis of 342,000 dialysis patients. There was no attempt to measure personal exposure to UV (FTA: "it was not feasible to determine personal exposures to UV radiation and temperature"). Rather, these exposures were approximated by dialysis center zip code.
I can understand why David Fisher would say that he doesn't question the data, but doesn't agree with the implications.
1 = https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/JAHA.119.013837
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24697969/#:~:text=We%20found....
But agree with OP that in a world that is becoming less and less trusting of authority (to a dangerous extreme) that it would be nice for those in authority to have enough humility to accept when their work is questioned.
This is the same as the teeth flossing skeptics: observational studies suggesting a paradox are interesting, but they actually need to unearth convincing alternative models with at least as much support as the dominant one for why they're right.
I agree that just dropping a seemingly safe belief should take effort. I have no problem challenging them on a regular basis, though. Especially with more than just arguments and thought experiments. More observational studies can almost certainly only be a good thing.
Also, that UV damages DNA and causes cancer isn't simply a "proposed" mechanism, it's been tested many times.
I would say pure "observation" per se has little value -- for it to be scientifically valid it needs to seek explanations.
The mechanism isn't really at question. But just as sun exposure can kill grass, so to can lack of sun. We know that humans don't do photosynthesis, but it seems reasonable to ask if we do get other benefits.
Note. Is reasonable to ask and study. Is not reasonable to just assume the conclusion.
That said, I'm not sure why this would be better
than just taking nitric oxide
The digestive system involves a pit of acid and a diverse, poorly-understood, and variable biome. It is an extremely fraught and indirect way to introduce substances into the body. Obviously many things can be introduced this way, but the list of those that can't is probably longer than the list of things that can.
It's ironic that the author didn't consider that getting sunlight may similarly be the side effect of the true cause of the stated benefits (being active?).
It's true there may be some important difference between sunlight-induced NO generation and whatever other supplement/injection/lotion/etc, but my point here is that the right approach is to focus on the mechanism, and avoid the naturalistic fallacy.
Wait, has there been a study suggesting this? This implies that there's a narrow optimal range and exceeding it causes problems. Seems you would see this in the supplement trials. Vitamin D toxicity doesn't occur until you take many times the RDA for months, and presumably none of the supplementation trials went anywhere near that high. https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-h...
As mentioned in article, but also some general knowledge in physics is that interaction of radiation with the matter is probabilistic. It is not like every quantum of UV radiation will always damage DNA, which always result in cancer. There's some "conversion funnel" that depends on a number of parameters, and the actual probability of cancer in the end could indeed be lower than probability of the negative consequences of low sun exposure. Even if physical mechanism of diseases is established, it does not mean we should always avoid the risk by disabling it by some expensive means. Sometimes it is low enough to accept it or mitigate (e.g. by efficient cancer treatment).
The reporters goal is eyeballs. Job well done. By the time someone looks at it closely, nobody is talking about the article anymore.
Sadly no current consumer devices exist on market that can track these two numbers. The Microsoft Band used to have both needed sensors, but AFAIK no one else has tried to widely release a consumer product with a UV exposure sensor on it.
FWIW that sensor was a major hassle, took up a lot of space, and finding a plastic cover for it that didn't also block UV was super hard.
Unlike a film badge, a calibrated dye could be visually interpreted against a colour scale by the user. Neat idea if it works!
And if there were consumer devices, the next problem would be accuracy. Based on a bunch of reading I did several years ago (so maybe out of date), consumer excercise trackers were very innaccurate in many ways. Exercise misinformation devices.
Having worked on Microsoft Band, I can tell you that accuracy is a problem with UV exposure for a number of reasons, none of which involve the sensor itself.
Mostly it is around how people wear it, and was the sensor always facing the sun, people going in and out of the shade, long sleeves, and so forth. We settled on # of minutes of high exposure, I forget what index we considered "high" but basically it if it was above a certain threshold we considered you "in the sun".
The goal was sunscreen application reminders, no way would we have trusted it to tell people they had "enough" sun!
But in fairness, the sensor doesn't work with how people use it. We could make a sensor that straps to user foreheads and requires them to always face the sun. When integration fails, we can point the finger either way, or just say it wasn't a good fit.
https://www.wearshade.com/articles/comparison-of-wearable-uv... https://www.amazon.com/SunSprite-Wearable-Light-Tracker/dp/B...
I have the SunSprite and the June. The June is unreliable, I believe they stopped selling them years ago. The SunSprite worked well and once I'd worn it for a full year I had a good idea of my exposure at various times of year and stopped wearing it. The magnetic clasp on it sucked though, I would often find the sensor had slipped off and stuck to my car door (or anything else made of steel). Not sure if any of the sensors listed in the article are still for sale, but you can probably still find used ones on eBay.
You can also get simple wearable wristbands or tokens or cards that change color under UV exposure:
https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B004XMH95K https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B08HV91P77 https://smile.amazon.com/Fischuel-Photochromic-Indicator%EF%...
The cards are somewhat calibrated, but any of these technologies require taking into account your personal skin sensitivity.
The technology is out there, you could probably build your own sensor using an Arduino and UVA and UVB sensors. The SunSprite is cool in that it never needs charging since it charges from the Sun.
> The technology is out there, you could probably build your own sensor using an Arduino and UVA and UVB sensors.
Back in 2016 or so, we were able to order UV sensors, but since there was so little knowledge about how to use them on wearable, getting them to work was a challenge.
It was months just to find a lens material that didn't block UV at all, but was also affordable, could be put on a production line, and fit all our consumer use cases (durable, chemical resistant, etc).
The cards are cool, I forgot about them.
It is unfortunate none of the main wearable players, by which I really just mean Apple, have bothered, but the UV sensor on Microsoft Band 2 was responsible for Band 2's not so friendly looking clasp, so I can't say I blame anyone for not wanting to go down that route again.
Edit: FWIW our sensor gave us something, I forget what, but I remember it wasn't what we wanted, and we had to map it to UVI. From what I vaguely recall it was one of those things where we ordered a sensor, it says it did one thing, but the thing it actually did was related but not quite the same, so we had to create a mapping curve of some type.
I came up with the user story and user flow for what we shipped, sun exposure reminders. We were really smart about it, we had logic in there to tell when you briefly went out of the sun, such as going to the bathroom, vs when you spent extended time inside, and we also worked to separate out walks to and from your car VS actually spending time outside.
To take "breaks", I believe we had an accumulator and if you went out of the sun we started a timer and if the timer went off we reset the accumulator but if you went back into the sun the timer was cancelled.
Actually starting the accumulator worked the same way, get out of car, exposure starts, if you didn't have so many minutes of continuous exposure, we never started the accumulator, an example is walking between buildings.
Lots of use case design around what ended up being a couple of dialog boxes for a reminder to put on sun screen!
Parents loved it though. :) Lots of positive feedback from parents who used it to track their family's sunscreen applications.
Edit: From shade
> 5 days of battery on a single charge
Pretty sure if we just ran the UV sensor on band our battery life would've been forever and ever. :-D
If that is a sales page, they need to list power draw of their sensor for various sampling rates, that is the only thing anyone cares about when it comes to integration.
One interesting paragraph was:
"When you spend much of your day treating patients with terrible melanomas, it’s natural to focus on preventing them, but you need to keep the big picture in mind. Orthopedic surgeons, after all, don’t advise their patients to avoid exercise in order to reduce the risk of knee injuries."
We need to avoid tunnel vision when making health decisions. And this coming from someone (me) who had skin cancer in the past (not that it makes me a specialist).
> it is good intuition that we survived for thousands of years stark naked without sunscreen and vitamin suplements
That, as an argument, is completely worthless. You don't know how those people lived, how they died, what diseases they had, all you can deduce is that some of them managed to reproduce before keeling over.
... without sunscreen.
Life expectancy is an average. If you have two children, and one dies before their first birthday but the other lives to the age of 70, their average life expectancy is 35.
That’s mathematically correct – and it certainly tells us something about the circumstances in which the children were raised. But it doesn’t give us the full picture. It also becomes especially problematic when looking at eras, or in regions, where there are high levels of infant mortality. Most of human history has been blighted by poor survival rates among children, and that continues in various countries today.”
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181002-how-long-did-anc...
Adjust for infant mortality, war, etc., humans are still humans.
In NZ we get about 4000 in-situ melanoma diagnosis a year. I was one of them a couple of years ago (at 37).
Wear sunscreen!
Also NZ wasn’t really affected by ozone depletion, but the effects are definitely in our neighbourhood and we were worried. “While the ozone hole does not directly affect ozone concentrations over New Zealand, when it breaks up in spring it can send ‘plumes’ of ozone-depleted air towards us. This briefly decreases column ozone levels by around 5 percent, about the same amount as normal daily variation.”. Also see graph at https://niwa.co.nz/our-services/online-services/uv-ozone and notice ozone is lowest in NZ summer. Also measuring a column of ozone is most relevant in the tropics when the sun can be directly above one at noon, and less relevant when the sun doesn’t get so high above the horizon (location further towards poles, and winter versus summer). https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9671831/
I am reminded that, in addition to not going about stark naked, mesolithic humans in the British isles were dark skinned.
We can also deduce from many sources that humanity did not just "managed to reproduce before keeling over".
Well, all those people in the past are dead, so no, they did not survive.
We also completely changed our way of life. We don't live outside anymore so we have less pigment that protects us from UV.
it is good intuition that we survived for thousands of years
If your goal is merely to survive until the age at which you can make a baby and rear it there are a lot of risks that can be disregarded. Skin cancer is one. So are all other cancers. No need to worry about long-term dental health either. So many fears and worries melt away. Embrace that hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
Alternatively, if you are hoping to live past your 30s (most of us would like to live at least 2.5x longer!) the lifestyles of ancient civilizations and our hunter-gatherer ancestors may not be your ticket to success.
stark naked
Having surviving parents and grandparents confers
evolutionary advantage to offspring
Anyway, UV sucks, nobody is hurt by minimizing it and supplementing via diet. Hell, in the north the sun doesn’t even rise high enough to be a source of vit D for months on end. You have to get it from diet or not at all.
https://smarttan.com/news/index.php/how-to-safely-effectivel...
We also ate differently in the Stone Age, so our vitamin intake might have been different.
Finally, life expectancy in the Stone Age was much shorter. Even excluding infant deaths, few people lived long enough to get cancer. Cancer is a typical disease of old age.
If you're looking for sunblock that won't give you cancer or ruin the environment, check out EWG:
What you describe clearly is a problem with data collection, where crucial unobservable variables had to be replaced with questionable assumptions. We should be wary because we can't fully trust those assumptions, and hence not the data, not because of what the implications would be.
There are tools that can make this better (eg, finding an instrumental variable), but this wasn’t done here.
I think this is yet another case of us collectively ignoring common sense. We know that UV radiation is damaging to the skin and can cause skin cancer. Instead of rubbing chemicals on our skin to negate these effects, it is better to avoid being out in direct sunlight when the UV index is high, especially if you're super pale. If you have to go out at mid day for a decent length of time, wear a big hat and clothes that cover you up.
I'm on the pale end of the spectrum and if I go out at say 2pm when the UV index is at 10 it'll be physically painful within a few minutes.
However, when I go for my daily walks earlier in the day or later in the afternoon when the UV index is say 3-4, I go without sunscreen and feel great. And even though I supplement vitamin D, the effects of sunlight is clearly better.
Also I think it is safe to imagine that most of our ancient ancestors weren't going out in the most intense sunlight and stripping close to naked for hours to develop a nice tan.
Modern context: UV light therapy for newborns.
If the mechanism is:
unfiltered sunlight -> Vitamin D production -> increased calcium absorption -> decreased risk of osteoporosis;
then in many Asian cultures, the desire for women to have fair skin, cover up as much as possible, use sunscreen judiciously, and even use umbrellas when going outside; would certainly cause a Vitamin D deficiency and increased risk of osteoporosis by old age.
Has anyone measured if this is possible?
Sunscreen recommendations as I commonly encounter them are to stay out of the sun when it is strongest. It is to stay in shade when possible. It is that sunshine is healthy for producing vitamin D and for your general psychological well-being.
But it is to also wear sunscreen and that you should protect yourself from UV even when outside in shade.
If most of your ancestors are from Nigeria and you stay in Sweden, you should catch as much sun as you can, and still take vitamin D supplements.
If you stay in a location where the bulk of your ancestors came from, you should probably be able to stay outside most of the time, as long as it is relativey constant from month to month. (Ie, anyone who stays inside all day for 11 months would have a risk of sunburn if they suddenly start spending all day on the beach in July without sunscreen.)
The answer is: it depends on your family history, your lifestyle, and a bunch of other things.
I know that organizations like American Dermatology or Outdoor magazine have to water down their message so it’s digestible, but it annoys me when people expect “The Answer”. Science is constantly updating.
I don't think it's unreasonable that people expect clear public health guidelines. I don't want to trudge through a thousand pages of research, I want the department of health to say "well we had some experts read the papers, and if you do X and Y and Z you'll probably be fine." I'd appreciate more details beyond that, of course, especially if it's an area of particular interest to me. But I can't be that interested in everything, and sometimes it's good just to put out a guideline.
The reality of the advice for sun is probably similar to most things -- You need some sun, but not too much. And no one probably knows the answer, and it will probably change as a result of climate change and other factors. My wife is a high risk pregnancy because she’s over 35, but after probing the doctors what we realize is that for some women at some point between the ages of 30 and 45 the risks to your pregnancy may increase some variable amount but you know what is funny, that because these women are more closely monitored, high risk pregnancies may actually have better outcomes than low risk pregnancies! And so there’s this epically long laundry list of things that you’re not supposed to do, with very little specific guidance on the risks you might take on.
But if you really want experts. The Skin Cancer Foundation at Skincancer.org suggests a shotglass full of sunscreen over your entire body every day 30 minutes before you go out, even when it's cloudy. Also, that's not enough! For a full sun protection strategy seek the shade whenever possible, wear sun-safe clothing, a wide-brimmed hat and UV-blocking sunglasses:
https://www.skincancer.org/skin-cancer-prevention/sun-protec...
Smoking cigarettes to reduce throat irritation is fine. Oops.
Take thalidomide to ward off the effects of morning sickness. Oops.
Then there’s the whole communications fiasco around masks for COVID. A different kind of oops.
I mean whoever thought inhaling the output of small bonfire is no biggie should try it with a big one first.
Our bodies deal with some form of damage all the time.
Is there really evidence that someone that slowly builds up a tan during spring has a higher risk of skin cancer than someone who doesn't?
I can't really imagine how you could study that in a controlled way.
> Our bodies deal with some form of damage all the time.
Yet in the frequent “leaded gasoline” threads here, the “no amount of lead exposure is acceptable” meme gets trotted out every time. No spectrum, no trade offs, no caveats. As if the minute you eat a paint chip as a toddler, you’re hopelessly contaminated! When dealing with hazards to health, it’s important to frame things in terms of higher/lower probability and higher/lower risk rather than these zero tolerance simplifications.
I’m not saying we should go out and drink a pint of airplane gasoline but entire generations grew up with lead paint and regular gasoline and are still here—just statistically worse off health wise than the generation that grew up without them.
Everybody is exposed to the sun in a greater or lesser degree and in fact we have evolved to depend on it.
The necessary consumption of lead by your average kid or adult is zero.
And to be honest the lack of spectrum and caveats in science communication is much more common than it should be. Like "food X is bad for the heart" or "Y causes cancer" and then you see the studies and you give rats 10x the dose per weight for an adult for a long time and they get cancer, well, no crap sherlock!
It's maybe technically true, but 99% of the time it is used to scare people into unreasonable levels of compliance.
Some doctor actually managed to make it into the news in the UK recently highlighting how dumb it is - in that case for drinking during pregnancy. There's no safe level of alcohol during pregnancy, but somehow that has distorted into you can't drink at all whereas in reality a glass of wine occasionally is going to have absolutely no effect.
As does my firefox installation. Trade offs, indeed.
https://lorienpsych.com/2020/12/19/light-therapy/#:~:text=El....
I spent a few years in a tropical country and never once got a sunburn. I paid no mind to sun and spent a ton of time outside. Moving back to the states, within 3 months I had gotten a bad sunburn. I don't know what is going on with this sunburn thing but I'm convinced it has more to do with just sun exposure. Maybe ozone, maybe an environmental factor that increases damage upon exposure, I don't know, but there's something there.
As far as sun exposure now, I'll put sunscreen on when I'm going to spend more than an hour in direct sunlight at a time. I spend a lot of time outside and I don't really get burned anymore.
> “I don’t argue with their data,” says David Fisher, chair of the dermatology department at Massachusetts General Hospital. “But I do disagree with the implications.” The risks of skin cancer, he believes, far outweigh the benefits of sun exposure. “Somebody might take these conclusions to mean that the skin-cancer risk is worth it to lower all-cause mortality or to get a benefit in blood pressure,” he says. “I strongly disagree with that.” It is not worth it, he says, unless all other options for lowering blood pressure are exhausted. Instead he recommends vitamin D pills and hypertension drugs as safer approaches.
To paraphrase "the data isn't wrong, but it contradicts dogmatically held beliefs, and so a strict regime of pills and treatments are required first before indulging in this heresy".
It takes a lot to break persistent medical dogmas, and these platitudes of "avoid sun exposure at all costs because skin cancer" are starting to become generational sayings that are ingrained in prevalent thinking.
Also just want to point out what is touched on in the article - melanoma (skin cancer caused by UV) in the USA kills about 7000-8000, with that trend line decreasing. Heart disease kills around 700,000 people a year in the USA alone.
Food for thought.
> And perplexingly, outdoor workers have half the melanoma rate of indoor workers. Tanned people have lower rates in general. “The risk factor for melanoma appears to be intermittent sunshine and sunburn, especially when you’re young,” says Weller. “But there’s evidence that long-term sun exposure associates with less melanoma.”
That rephrasing in itself can be describe as a dogmatic belief that supplements are bad/conspiracy. It’s a dogmatism pile.
Eat sun exposed mushrooms if vitamin d pills aren’t ones cup of tea, but in northern climes relying on sun for vitamin d is not realistic much of the year.
It's a bit much claiming those suspicious of pill pushing are part of the actual cult. If someone thinks taking vitamin D pills is necessary they're the one who has to provide the evidence, not the other way around.
Even my cat had an episode of acne.
Have to disagree with this one, everyone who can't escape sunlight and likes to go outside at all is affected. People in the American southwest from all walks of life age shockingly faster (in appearance) than their northern state counterparts. I'd meet women who were 25 and looked 35 (by northern expectations), and it only accelerates from there (35 looking like 50, 50 looking like 70).
https://www.techtimes.com/articles/67285/20150711/not-everyo...
>They found that the "biological age" of the participants in 2011, when they were 38 — as exhibited by the state of their organs, their immune systems, their heart health and their chromosomes — ranged from as young as 30 to as old as 60.
He's tasked with fighting a battle, not winning a war.
As an anecdotal aside, I always read about people who treat cancers as being more militant in their beliefs, but they're also dealt with tough hands.
If the supposed benefits of UV light exposure can be achieved through an alternative treatment that poses a lower risk of skin cancer, then why wouldn't that be the superior treatment?
Okay, well that's your choice; but don't latch on to some argument about it being healthy, unless you're willing to endure scrutiny.
However, subsequently a meta-analysis (including that same paper) was published that found:
"Vitamin D [supplementation] was associated with significant reduction of cancer-related mortality compared with placebo [...]. Compared with placebo, Vitamin D was not associated with significant reduction of cancer incidence [...]".
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/20009666.2019.17...
I am now a stage 4 melanoma patient. They have taken my lymph nodes on one side, a chunk of my brain, and half of my right lung. Immunotherapy has so far saved my life, but there are no guarantees this will last.
Careful. I sincerely hope it plays out better for you..
It’s reasonable to question the current dogma (no sun ever) and determine if there’s a better balance (~30 minutes without sunscreen, but use sunscreen beyond that, or some other mix). Dermatologists are focused on skin health and more likely to overlook or ignore those other benefits.
Go tell your doctor You smoke two packs a day they’ll say stop smoking. If smoking two packs means you won’t kill yourself then they will weigh that. Then there are bad doctors too of course
How many need treatment? Can skin cancer be cured better than heart diseases?
And heart disease is a pretty broad term, if you say heart diseases you should say cancer not just skin cancer. And cancer killes 600,000 a year.
I suspect anybody who recommends medication over natural resources has a bridge to sell.
This is actually borderline nonsensical in the context:
> People with low levels of vitamin D in their blood have significantly higher rates of virtually every disease and disorder you can think of: cancer, diabetes, obesity, osteoporosis, heart attack, stroke, depression, cognitive impairment, autoimmune conditions, and more.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/high-blood-ch...
"It’s entirely intuitive,” he responded. “Homo sapiens have been around for 200,000 years. Until the industrial revolution, we lived outside. How did we get through the Neolithic Era without sunscreen?"
By boning each other at the earliest possible age and procreating before we could die of cancer. DUH. The guy's a scientist but can't logically filter out causes of mortality that don't typically transpire until after child-bearing age?
What I've always done is build up my tolerance by getting tan during the spring so I can walk around without sunscreen in summer. Of course I don't go crazy with it, and I try to avoid direct sunlight in high-UV situations (e.g. walking on the shaded side of the street) but I take it when there is no option. It works fine for me, I rarely get sunburn and when I do it's minor, just a little red glow and sensitivity. Even though I have very pale skin I tan and burn very slowly, luckily. I lived in Australia a while in the early '00s while the ozone hole was still around and the same approach worked even there
I live in a country (Spain) that has lots of sun so I don't want to go out with cream every day. The only times I use it is when I'm outside for a long time and I feel I'm getting close to burning.
I get that it's totally bad what I see many Northern European tourists do: They stay indoors most of the summer and then take a 2-week holiday to the costa's where they lay in the sun for 12 hours a day. Obviously this is totally bad, even with suncreen you will get totally burned to a crisp.
In any case, I'll see. Maybe I'm wrong but in that case the damage is done already. But I don't think sun exposure can be as bad as they say.
I get mine mostly from walking in the woods/mountains too and I usually wear long trousers even on hot days too. But it's really for a different reason. I just don't like shorts and I get cut a lot.
"Your tan isn’t doing anything." you say, despite clear evidence that melanin is associated with ancestral UV exposure and how your body develops a tan in response to UV exposure. Now you're suggesting a separate unnamed method of resilience associated with darker skinned people.
I guess go ahead and fear the sun, you do you.
Our bodies can deal with damaged DNA.
Proving that low rates of DNA damage increase cancer risk proportionaly to the risk asociated with high rates of damage seems nearly impossible.
So I don't understand the absolute certanty with which it gets proclaimed as fact.
So instead of baking my body for hours on a sandy beach somewhere, I prefer to expose my body intermittently to the sun through the foliage.
https://ozonewatch.gsfc.nasa.gov/ https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/sbuv2to/...
Everyone has heard that melanin is the body's defense against too much UV exposure. Once during a visit with my dermatologist I asked if there was a connect between having vitiligo and increased skin cancer, expecting her to say yes. Instead she reacted as if I had asked a complete non sequitur. I had to make explicit my chain of reasoning (vitiligo means areas with no melanin production, meaning more UV damage, meaning more chance of skin cancer) and she half-heartedly told me no, she had never heard of such a thing.
It seems like there should be an obvious connection, but apparently not. It made me question whether she was just incurious or if there really is that loose of a connection between UV and skin cancer. BTW I've had two patches of skin cancer removed by this doctor, both on my neck/shoulder area, which is not affected by my vitiligo.
It's worth making friends with the ones who keep up with stuff. Doctors like to party but they're so fucking overworked that they hit you up at like 11pm most of the time.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6164767/
Although the SIRs of melanoma, cancers of oral cavity, hepatoma and lymphoma were also increased in vitiligo patients, the significance was lost after correction for multiple testing. No specific cancer occurred less frequently in vitiligo patients than in the general population.
https://sci-hub.se/10.1111/joim.12496
> First, it is not possible to differentiate between active sun exposure habits and a healthy lifestyle.
People who are healthy get outside more. People who engage in physical activity tend to do quite a bit of it outside.
Despite the term "sun avoidance" this is not about people who intentionally avoid the sun. It is about people who for whatever reason do not have much sun exposure.
I would post links but when I search for the studies I get a barrage of summaries without actually linking to the original study.
I think this study is part of it:
doi:10.1001/archderm.139.4.451
I think this summarizes another part of the study:
https://www.cancer.org.au/blog/world-leading-research-confir...
I don’t get the fundamental premise of the article: Dermatologists warn about skin cancer from sun exposure, and the author takes issue with vitamin D not curing cancer and heart diseases.
What is “wrong” ? These two facts look disjointed to me, with no specific opposition.
Vitamin D not directly linked to curing cancer and heart diseases is also nothing new, there is very few scientifically proven effects of vitamin D[0] and it’s usually offered as “just in case” supplement.
Dermatologists arguing skin cancer can happen doesn’t seem wrong or unproven either, and all the “sun benefits us” part doesn’t seem to contradict that part either.
Am I missing some important cultural background of the author that makes it all a bigger point ?
[0] https://www.webmd.com/vitamins/ai/ingredientmono-929/vitamin...
PS: is the author just arguing that extreme advice should be taken with a grain of salt ?
The CTA of the article seems to focused around that we may have been overdoing it with the sunscreen advice and that there is a healthy amount of sun exposure we should be getting.
On sunscreen, my personal impression was that people were sloppy enough that the impact would be mild at most (seems the subject has also been looked into [1]), and people going for really high blocking values usually do so for beauty preferences way more than health preoccupations.
"Outdoor activities" is a terrible way to differentiate between sun exposure and large environments
For fair-skinned people like me, I would recommend generously applying sunscreen to face and hands and leaving the other areas uncovered if you are out in the sun for less than an hour or so with moderate UV index, or less than 20 minutes or so with high UV index. Longer than that, consider applying sunscreen to the rest of your body as well. Of course, ymmv.
There's a link around "put it in perspective." Following it through to the source leads to the 2016 study, which notes:
> 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 secondly, the results are of an observational nature; therefore, a causal link cannot be proven. A further limitation is that we did not have access to exercise data from study initiation; however, similar sHR values were obtained when including exercise for those women who answered the second questionnaire in 2000. With the introduction of whole-genome scanning, a new method of getting closer to causality using observational data is Mendelian random analysis. A potential causal link between BMI and vitamin D levels has been demonstrated with this method 8. In addition, individuals with high BMI do not obtain the same increase in vitamin D levels by UV radiation as lean subjects 9. As a consequence, as BMI seems to be involved in the causal pathway of vitamin D, it should not be included as a confounder in analyses as has been performed in many studies.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/joim.12496
This adds nuance missing from the original article. Also, AFAICT, the study doesn't mention anything about sunscreen use by the women. Based on the discussion in the original article, this study looks like a smoking gun. But going a little deeper, not so much.
It'd put the study into the category "needs follow-up."
When i shave and look younger I always kind of feel like OK I might have a few more years of not falling apart
I get the sentiment of course, but I think there’s value in seeing past it too.
Balance is necessary but man, I started balding at 17, looking old is no big deal compared to feeling good.
Most sun exposure is on the nose, ears, arms. If some sun exposure is healthy, then the best way to do it is to be completely naked and only be in the sun for 10 minutes. By exposing more surface area, you can get as much sun in 10 minutes as you would by just exposing you face for 2 hours. No burns. In engineering terms, it's like load balancing the sun across several body parts.
There was just an article I saw last year about a sunscreen recall because it contained ingredients that caused leukemia or something. Not to mention some of the mental health benefits of sun.
If you want to reduce sun exposure, probably better to shade yourself with clothes or umbrellas than put chemicals on your skin, or use something natural like zinc on sensitive areas like nose and ears.
Also, there is more red light around sunrise/sunset. That's healthier light. You want to avoid blue light (UV), which is magnified (like a magnifying glass on the atmosphere) in the middle of the day.
The same general idea that you could light a room with a single LED die overdriven to thermal death in minutes, or many adequately-cooled underdriven ones virtually indefinitely.
Or maybe more similarly, cooking with a 10kW cutting laser rather than an electric stovetop would make a huge mess of your cookware.
This speculation on the author's part, at least, makes no sense.
People have been getting sunburns for a long time[1]. The word "sunburn" in English dates to 1650, but treatments for sunburn are at least as old as the ancient Egyptians, who wrote down numerous treatments for it, including breast milk.
I'm picturing all those Bedouin office workers wearing their keffiyehs and robes in the desert. Looks cool, sure, but might it also serve another purpose?
Also, cannot discount innate bias: love sunshine to the degree I had these solar lamps for winter.
But the fact that melanomas are less likely to be fatal overall amongst us outdoor weather-beaten folk is quite gratifying. I wonder if there are genetic markers.
I can sort of imagine what that might be enough to think that Wikipedia's 'lamp with solar panels' article with that name is definitely not what you mean, but I can't see anything else on it, do you have a link or model number or something?
If obesity and age explains the low sun exposure (less likely to be sunbathing on beaches, etc.), the assumed causality is at least oversimplified if not outright mistaken.
The evidence for a sunlight-triggered mechanism for the production of sunlight is interesting, though. I wish the article worked more to connect that finding to everything else.
Yes, randomized, controlled trials are better, and the gold standard. No, they aren't always available and sometimes--even often--science can draw conclusions with evidence that came from other sources.
And that's odd. Because that's the HUGE idea here. Yes, there are concerns about the harms associated with the UV end of the spectrum. But there are also the massive benefits from the Near Infrared (NIR) end.
Certain NIR wavelengths, around 810nm to 850nm, penetrate up to 5cm into the body and have a dramatically positive effect on mitochondria, creating the most powerful sub-cellular antioxidant (melatonin) to manage Oxidative Stress. This is well-established science now. Indeed, the exact mechanism is known (cytochrome c oxidase, etc).
It turns out that for good health it helps to be exposed to the Sun (and specifically NIR). We're more plant than we realise (a different mechanism obviously).
And, if you think about it, how on earth could we have not evolved to take advantage of the “free” energy provided by the Sun, particularly the NIR part of the spectrum which actually delivers about half of the energy.
Here's an explanation from MedCram: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YV_iKnzDRg&t=2878s
Sure, don't avoid the sun completely, but don't play with it
It's true that sunlight increases Vit D and Nitric Oxide, other claims are much feeble and holy mother of selection bias to claim all that is due to the sun!
30 minutes? I did that today for two hours. My arms, legs, face, and neck were all exposed without sunscreen, and I didn't burn at all. It all depends on your skin type.
I do this daily for up to 6 hrs on the weekend. I have never had a sunburn.
You seem to have assumed all humans are light-skinned, which is something the article warns about right at the top.
I stand by my comment and if you do have darker skin you can adjust that time for your case
I don't know what you think "assuming" means. I'm not assuming it. You said anyone should spend 30 min in the sun and see how badly it hurts them.
I can spend an entire day in the sun without being sunburned.
> if you do have darker skin you can adjust that time for your case
This further proves that light skin was a vital premise of your claim (which is false).
Your generalization necessarily can't apply to all skin types
For today's lucky 10,000:
The rapper Logic is African American, but he probably needs more sunblock than Akon. I imagine Italians can tolerate more sunlight than Norwegians
Like with most medical advice what works for Billy might not work for Andy. But we have a massive medical industrial complex which needs to sell as much crap as possible.
Wouldn't surprise me if the sunblock manufacturers are behind some of this
Hm. So, having read the article I know how many times less likely are "sun worshippers" to die from melanoma but I don't know how higher is its incidence among them.
Why quantify one thing and not the other? That's one of the things that make this article read very fishy.
> Wouldn’t all those rays also raise rates of skin cancer? Yes, but skin cancer kills surprisingly few people: less than 3 per 100,000 in the U.S. each year
This is like saying "Don't people who slather themselves in honey and walk bare naked to the woods get eaten by bears more? Sure, but bears kill surprisingly few people, just 59 out of 1,000,000 yearly"
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trucker-accumulates-skin-damage...
- blue fish are the protein of the sea, eat many! Few years later blue fish are the pollutant-eaters of the sea, avoid them!
- cigarettes are good for health! They kill seasonal germs! Smoke! Few years later cigarettes should be banned they are absolutely unhealthy!
- artificial tanning is safe for skin than Sun exposure! Than artificial tanning provoke skin cancer!
- radioactivity at small doses are good for health, help fetus to develop stronger, help against baldness! Radioactivity is dangerous and lethal!
....
The REAL issue is that to avoid such phenomenon we need a PUBLIC-only really developed and religiously separate from the private sector public research for the society, with public bodies who publish their results for any cohort of citizens (witch means from real papers to abstracts for the large public) and of course the little we have had, when real innovation have happened, was destroyed quickly cannibalizing their results for private profits. Just see the outcome for IT or from big pharma. Oh BTW such move it's the key for the win of China and Russia, since both still have public research while we haven't anymore.
[1] YES, my dears fellow HNers we do have hyper-fast and hyper-big search engines BUT we have nothing public really good at finding really past events we do not know by some keywords, just try to generate let's say a map of how many floods per area we have experienced in recent years: IF someone have published that we can profit from such results, if not building out of the web it's far from easier. When someone do something similar for very specific aspects likely end up here on HN like the recent Reddit Map or some Babarasi network analyses etc because there is no public generic tool for such research
I do believe much of these problems exist because of the literal interpretation of the science. More people are thinking in absolutes rather than how one can moderate these things in our lives.
Even just last year, many “influencers” on social media were misinforming younger people about the dangers of the sun. Speaking in the sense of never going outside without proper products. Debating if those products will give you the same benefits without them on ridding the risk. But none the less, selling a product at the end of the day.
America is one big shopping mall with everyone holding their credit card out.
Would explain why vitamin D supplements don’t seem to work in the studies mentioned in the article.
Does anyone here know?
Everything seems to be racist these days. Sunscreen, math...
Great piece. Makes sense. Sun is pretty good with everything it shines on. And you can definitely feel it has a positive effect on your mood and your skin.
Anyone else noticing that a whole lot of lifestyle recommendations are slowly moving back toward "just do whatever they did like 2500 years ago"?
I understand that our pupils adapt a lot and give us an illusion of constant luminance when in fact there is actually a huge light difference between indoors and outdoors in the shade. But I never found any info linking this with vitamin D production?
Previously, I relied on unhealthy doses of steroids/corticoids and layers of vaseline covered by cotton medical apparel. Eczema got better during Summer (sunlight exposure).
Sainsbury's multi-vitamins have cured me. I don't need a study to tell me this is true
"Although they are a $30-plus billion market in the United States alone, vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin E, selenium, beta-carotene, glucosamine, chondroitin, and fish oil have now flopped in study after study."
What? Fish oil flopped? They did every study combination they could on Fish Oil and Omega 3? They even filtered out for genetics? They are just starting, it is no where near finished!
FADS1 and FADS2 Gene Polymorphisms Modulate the Relationship of Omega-3 and Omega-6 Fatty Acid Plasma Concentrations in Gestational Weight Gain: A NISAMI Cohort Study https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8912382/
Give vitamin B6 to someone who is deficient and guess what, it will not flop. But I would bet none of you have had a B6 test, correct?
The studies did not flop. They are still showing casualty but more work needs to be down on who they might help. Yet he talks about vitamin D like it has somehow escaped these problems? Because on guy said something?
That guy suffered from "my supplement is the best supplement and only supplement that effects health" disorder.
All my dry skin issues etc. went away…
What should I do?
[0]: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2004RG00...
[1]: https://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/ozone-aus.html
Those vit d supplements will only skew the one thing that actually tells you how much deficiencient you are in getting enough sunlight as it correlates quite directly with it (most other things look more long term).
> and quite possibly even racist
And I'm out.
Does racism exist? Of course.
Is everything everywhere always racism? Of course not.
I came here to read an article about sunscreen, not be implicitly lectured with distilled identity politics.
But from where I sit I do not see any diversity quotas that choose race/gender over skill. There might be exceptions somewhere, I won't lie. I only know about my corner which is big tech hiring.
What I see is an acknowledgement that much selection in our society (to universities, for jobs, etc) are subjective decisions that incorporate objective and subjective factors. Every student trying to get into Yale has perfect GPA, SATs, and a list of extra-curricular activities as long as my arm. So if they are equal on these measures, why not bring in slightly more folks from races that have been historically disadvantaged to offset past injustices? Is that fair to white students? No. But there is no "fair" way to make a choice like this.
Big tech hiring focus on diversity is much the same - the bar is NOT lowered for women or anyone from a minority race. The last step of hiring before an offer is an objective test of programming ability. And nobody gets through those except on merit. But the FIRST step of hiring for multi-billion dollar companies is to sift through thousands of interview applicants, or contact thousands of applicants on LinkedIn with identical sounding resumes. These steps are HIGHLY subjective and unscientific - they're based on keywords, feel of recruiters, overindexing on past signals (other big tech companies, big universities, etc). The first "screen out" phase of hiring has NEVER been a meritocracy. It's always been a gut feel of who "feels" like they would be a successful candidate.
This is where the diversity initiatives are focused - to try to shift the variables in a subjective non-meritocratic process to - again - offset past racial discriminations to try to even the playing field slightly.
I ask you to have patience with "being lectured about identity politics". I ask you to wonder why you find virtue signals "accusatory" if they're not talking to you or about you. Don't discount those talking about this subject as "woke", or "virtue signalers" or "social justice warriors".
Some of them are overly angry and vitriolic, yes. Some are tired of explaining concepts that are clear and for granted to them, thinking that at this point anyone that disagrees is simply an agitator. Not all show good faith. Some are in it for themselves, and the glory of being holier-than-thou. I'm not going to pretend that doesn't exist.
But most of the concepts being discussed are sound. And there is a lot of fire behind the smoke. There is a lot of past, present, and future "racism" that still needs to be understood, and addressed.
>Big tech hiring focus on diversity is much the same - the bar is NOT lowered for women or anyone from a minority race.
When employers industry wide are tripping over themselves to hire minorities, then yes, the bar is absolutely lower and pay higher. Its a classic perverse incentive.
>The last step of hiring before an offer is an objective test of programming ability.
Having been on both ends, there is absolutely nothing objective about interviews, and its perfectly possible to even pass a hard leetcode interview while lacking hard/soft skills. This is the basis for the diversity overcorrection: the allegation was that the system was implicitly biased against minorities, and the solution was to apply bias in the other direction.
Except the fundamental premise, all of the "proof" upon which the justification for racist/sexist hiring is a giant conflation; inequality of outcome is not strong evidence of discrimination. Especially when you have a glaring and obvious pipeline problem.
You can't snap your fingers and decide that you're going to hire up a bunch of minorities to senior positions tomorrow when they don't even exist in college today without sacrificing merit. Statistics and the normal distribution guarantee that a smaller pool of candidates will have a disproportionately smaller pool of high achievers and once those are vacuumed by corps virtually signalling for ESG Goodboy points you are forced to either abandon quotas or draw from closer to the mean. It is a statistical inevitability that minority hiring quotas lead to reduced average competence.
Something about the road to hell and pavement.
You can, if OP's premise is sound - that you can get more diveristy hires simply by expanding the pool of candidates being considered.
I am deeply involved in hiring at Amazon, (and am a bar raiser) and we work super hard to make sure diversity candidates want to apply, are being considered fairly, don't fall through the cracks, but when it comes to the final on-site, it might as well be a blind audition. We teach interviewers to refer to candidates impartially and focus purely on the questions, and answers. The analysis and conclusions is reviewed in a group. There is no way to make a hire decision without supportive data from their performance on the coding test, or in their behavioural experience.
I can't speak for the entire tech industry, but I know at Amazon the bar has absolutely not lowered.
Introversion is still taken poorly, as if it is a sin. Despite introversion having almost no relation to job performance without further context.
People who work better on different schedules are still funneled primarily into a 9-6 rhythm, being told to suck it up.
"White students" from poor backgrounds now struggle to move up even more, as they are selected against for "not being diverse enough".
Really, most companies with diversity quotas might not hire Joe, but they'll hire Juan who's basically the same as Joe except he's Mexican and loves Taco Tuesday more than Pizza Friday. It's diversity in the most superficial sense, looking for the same car with a different paint job. They're not in this to combat "racial injustices", they're in this to appease some crowd with too much money in an attempt to get more money out of them.
Remote work should help with this. I have no idea how tall my coworkers are.
> Introversion
In my corner of the world - the tech industry - it's taken to be a baseline, so there is no discrimination.
There IS insufficient accordances made for neuroatypical (ADHD, Autistic) people with interviews, but there is active discussion happening about it.
> "White students" from poor backgrounds now struggle to move up even more
So long as any part of our society remains not a pure meritocracy, of course some people will struggle against others. Money is still the best way to get ahead. So poor people will struggle, and there is not enough opportunities for everyone. White people still get selected to "move up" by the forces that be, they just aren't the ONLY ones that do so. Instead of 99% of the scholarships going to white students, maybe 50%% are. But if that reflects the demographics of the part of society that is making that choice, where is the problem?
> diversity in the most superficial sense
It's a correction for discrimination in the most superficial sense. It's a start. It's a stepping stone towards not having any discrimination, and not needing corrective action like diversity initiatives.
It’s saying they’re pushing sun screen for people who don’t really need it.
This is 2 paragraphs after the one I quoted and it says it even more clearly: “And yet they are being told a very different story, misled into believing that sunscreen can prevent their melanomas, which Weller finds exasperating. “The cosmetic industry is now trying to push sunscreen at dark-skinned people,” he says. “At dermatology meetings, you get people standing up and saying, ‘We have to adapt products for this market.’ Well, no we don’t. This is a marketing ploy.””
> “I think that sun-protection advice,” [David Leffel, Yale] told me, “has always been directed at those most at risk”—people with fair skin or a family history of skin cancer. “While it is true that people with olive skin are at less risk, we do see an increasing number of people with that type of skin getting skin cancer. But skin cancer… is very rare in African Americans… and although they represent a spectrum of pigmentation, [they] are not at as much risk.”
Your original comment was effectively ‘why does everything have to be about race?’ and it matters in this context.
You say “systemic racism”, I say “the article cites one guy and gives his voice more weight than an entire industry body in order to contort this into a story about (maybe) racism”.
Science is messy. Doctors are very cautious by training and experience. So yes, they encourage everyone to use sunscreen until the preponderance of scientific evidence suggests otherwise. This is not racism in any form. To suggest otherwise is a slap in the face to people who have been subjected to real racism.
> No real science is performed to test their validity.
This is a ludicrous argument. Which scientific experiment do you want me to perform, exactly, to discover the definition of racism? It's a word, not a physical law.
> To suggest otherwise is a slap in the face to people who have been subjected to real racism.
And a true scottsman would never put sugar in his porridge, yes, yes.
It's generally a damned good principle to live by. We know for certain that higher UV exposure = higher risk of melanoma. It may be a lower risk for people with darker skin, but where do you draw the line for how dark is dark enough to not need to bother with sunscreen? The article states that it's rare in African Americans, but not nonexistent. In the absence of other evidence, why not avoid UV exposure?
This article presents emerging studies that suggest that UV exposure does have some direct benefits and that avoiding it may be especially harmful to people with darker skin. If there's enough evidence to support the findings, the AAD should absolutely change its advice. That's the scientific process. The article uses the example of margarine to illustrate the point; we've gotten it wrong before.
Given the above, are you certain that the term "racism" is accurate here? What can we attribute to bias that can't be explained by a lack of scientific evidence?
Maybe the world needs a variant of Hanlon’s razor: never attribute to racism that which is adequate explained by stupidity (or incompetence or the desire to promote one’s product or profession, etc.).
The US tried /extremely/ hard to take 'color-blindness' as the solution to centuries of explicit racism. And it failed rather completely. There's two effects at play: a) the 'true' racists learned how to keep being horrible without ever explicitly talking about race, and b) we wound up with lots of 'data gaps' around race by ignoring real differences. This data gap is arguably at the root of what's called structural racism.
(Incidentally, an incredibly similar dynamic has played out with the rights of women. I'm currently reading Caroline Criado-Perez's 'Invisible Women' which is about a huge range of areas where the 'default' is male, and the resulting gaps in data about women lead to poor outcomes.)
So I'd say the article points to a particular kind of structural racism: That the medical advice for white people is assumed to also be good for people of color.
Maybe? The article is trying pretty hard to say that the medical advice is wrong for white people too. Of course, it’s plausible that the article is wrong, white people should use sunscreen, and black people (at least in Northern climates?) should not.
Here’s a more clear-cut example of structural racism in medicine:
https://sph.umich.edu/pursuit/2021posts/black-people-are-thr...
That is racism.
And doctors don't want to differentiate because it's safer to just say "sure, wear sunscreen all day and wear a helmet too, in case you get hit by a meteor". Nobody will blame a doctor for repeating the currently-accepted dogma. Maybe they'll blame sunscreen companies in ten years, but not the doctor.
Could possibly be racially motivated, but greed seems likelier.
The can want to sell more suncreen, and the way they are achieving that might be racist. These two are not mutually-exclusive.
Particularly here, where the alternative action (not recommending sunscreen for dark-skinned people) could also be seen as racist, it seems unfair to claim one way or the other.
To disregard legitimate concerns about racism because you've grown frustrated with false positives is evidence of a weak morality. It's prioritizing our selfish frustrations over significant harms that other people (the victims of racism) are experiencing.
Intelligent, moral people aren't obligated or forced to jump into action when someone makes an accusation of racism. We can take a moment to consider the available facts, the context, and decide whether the charge of racism seems credible.
It does take effort, so there's a limit to how much attention we can give to these things... But we can also respond to the false accusations, and push back on them for being distractions and wasting the patience of people.
We get the society that is as good as we choose to put in effort to make it.
If anyone lacks the time or patience to parse my comments, I would welcome them to skip reading my comments... Why should any of us feel obliged to read everything on HN? I sure as hell don't.
Personally, I find your comments to be far too simplistic and reductive, to the point that you lack the ability to do more than snipe and quip at a single idea at a time... But some ideas are complex enough to benefit from longer, more thorough treatment, in order to avoid miscommunication.
Or maybe some people just have more patience, or better reading comprehension skills? Ya know, so we don't mind reading a longer comment that does a better job making the point than a half-baked, single-sentence hot take?
BTW, if you made it this far... Why ARE you compelled to keep reading my comments, anyway? Just ignore me, and be happy with the existence you choose
Has there been an overreaction? Are too many things being blamed on racism now? Possibly. But the motivation is good and clear about attempting to get to the root of how people treat one another in the world, and what structures we've created to reinforce tribal or instinctual prejudices and how they're not even obvious to most people going through their lives in the world today.
This all has meaning. I urge you to not give up on the concept, to not discount those talking about it as "woke", or "virtue signalers" or "social justice warriors".
Some of them are overly angry and vitriolic, yes. Some are tired of explaining concepts that are clear and for granted to them, thinking that at this point anyone that disagrees is simply an agitator. Not all show good faith. Some are in it for themselves, and the glory of being holier-than-thou. I'm not going to pretend that doesn't exist.
But most of the concepts being discussed are sound. And there is a lot of fire behind the smoke. There is a lot of past, present, and future "racism" that still needs to be understood, and addressed.
There's nothing about race in there anyway. Don't get tricked into these identity discussions. Both ignoring anything that has race in it as well as getting angry when they bait you with it ultimately means they have control over you, because you're easily manipulated with a single word.
As an example, if you give 100 children a math test -- no word problems, just algebra -- and find that there is any correlation between skin color and test performance, then the test itself must be racist, and perhaps even math itself. Similarly here, if there is a difference in how cancer affects people... what must be the cause? That's right! Racism™!
This is a patently absurd understanding of racism, but I've found it extremely helpful to start discussions like these by pointing out that if we don't have a common definition of what it means for something to be racist, then we can't have a discussion about it.
PS: The classical definition of racism is the idea that skin color is indicative of performance. To look at the students before or after the test takes place, and make the assumption that skin color will effect performance. The extremely fine point here is that *the skin color itself* is what will cause (or caused) the difference.
> Over the 20 years of the study, sun avoiders were twice as likely to die as sun worshippers.
> Avoidance of sun exposure is a risk factor of a similar magnitude as smoking, in terms of life expectancy.
> Vitamin D now looks like the tip of the solar iceberg. Sunlight triggers the release of a number of other important compounds in the body, not only nitric oxide but also serotonin and endorphins. It reduces the risk of prostate, breast, colorectal, and pancreatic cancers. It improves circadian rhythms. It reduces inflammation and dampens autoimmune responses. It improves virtually every mental condition you can think of. And it’s free.
> the current U.S. sun-exposure guidelines were written for the whitest people on earth
> People of color rarely get melanoma. The rate is 26 per 100,000 in Caucasians, 5 per 100,000 in Hispanics, and 1 per 100,000 in African Americans.
> Leffell, the Yale dermatologist, recommends what he calls a “sensible” approach. “I have always advised my patients that they don’t need to crawl under a rock but should use common sense and be conscious of cumulative sun exposure and sunburns in particular,”
This was the alarm bell for me. They completely leave out that people who get sun exposure are typically doing something more active than sitting at a desk or watching TV. Maybe the physical activity explains a lot of the benefits (think there are studies supporting that).
I might get a lot of hate for this, but I'm kind of tired about these articles. They claim things they can't possibly know about a topic that is largely irrelevant. It's like trying to argue about algorithmic time efficiencies without knowing the details of their use (in this case we're trying to biohack for lower mortality without knowing all the factors).
> They completely leave out that people who get sun exposure are typically doing something more active than sitting at a desk or watching TV.
Did the research (not the article) leave that out? Researchers aren't idiots and spent 10,000x as long thinking about the issue as we did about these HN posts.
>Meanwhile, that big picture just keeps getting more interesting. Vitamin D now looks like the tip of the solar iceberg. Sunlight triggers the release of a number of other important compounds in the body, not only nitric oxide but also serotonin and endorphins. It reduces the risk of prostate, breast, colorectal, and pancreatic cancers. It improves circadian rhythms. It reduces inflammation and dampens autoimmune responses. It improves virtually every mental condition you can think of. And it’s free.
The article didn't include links to the research, so who knows.
On top of that, I'd imagine that it would be hard to control for the physiological and psychological benefits of being outside (nature, activity, etc; or detriments of being indoors like air quality) unless the subjects were in a controlled environment. It would be interesting to see how the research controlled for these, if they did at all. Many studies following large cohorts in real life are not looking at proving causation, but showing correlation because they can't fully control all the variables.
But how much of it? The amount that gives you skin cancer? The article mentions "30 minutes of summer sunlight", but not a study, let alone a replicated one. And it doesn't simply mention "30 minutes of summer sunlight", but "the equivalent of 30 minutes of summer sunlight". The other studies mentioned in the first part of the article (office workers, tanned Swedes, etc.) might be accidental correlations. And mentioning the neolithicum is utterly ridiculous.
> It improves virtually every mental condition you can think of.
It still does that with sun screen. But it improves mental health only a bit. I've never read that exposing patients to a bit of sun light solved their depression, ADHD or schizophrenia.
Since the byline brings up race, its kind an aside but I'm almost convinced that a lot of our large scale nutritional/alternative medical studies give mixed results (and are not reproducable) because researchers are unwilling to sufficiently control for genes. High level categories like "black, white, hispanic, asian" are not enough.
Dietary genes aren’t correlated to race of course, except for rare ones like Inuits adapting to eating more fat.
For a large scale study I would check if they correlated for geography, blood markers and diet outside the supplements.
Hell, look at the distribution of lactose intolerance. Is drinking milk racist?
Actually, the most lactose intolerant people I know are totally white and I think actually have worse undiagnosed medical problems but just think they’re lactose intolerant. And Asians I know aren’t lactose intolerant because even though they “are Asian” culturally and would look Asian to you they’re actually 2/3 genetically Scottish.
Testing milk as a supplement would be interesting I guess; I know in the 90s we were all taught it was needed for bones but more recently this is said to not be true because 1. bones need vitamin K which we don’t get enough of and 2. cows milk contains galactose which is bad for bones and may cause osteoporosis.
When there are so many places where systemic racism shows up in clear and demonstrable ways, why complicate your thesis with a completely unfounded assertion?
In any case, like “code smell” this article has a “journalism smell.” Hand-waving, breezy style; over-identification with certain groups of researchers. And of course, cursory treatment of the evidence. He points out the lack of improvement in certain end-points among subjects supplemented with vitamin D. Who were the subjects? Randomized? Matched controls? Matched how? We’re any outcomes positive? In other words are we seeing evidence cherry picking of evidence? In fact so little is mentioned in the article that he may as well have given a list of PubMed links and just directed the readers to figure it out for themselves. I don’t know what the right answer is, but the only TL;DR from this piece is “There’s some controversy here.”
If the same holds true in humans, it could explain our high skin cancer rates, since modern diets include a lot of polyunsaturated fats.
A corollary of that is that it might be a very bad idea, indeed, to stop using sunblock without also changing your diet, if you're eating a typical diet.
(Because maybe the diet is causal and the coincidentally-also-increasing-at-the-same-time sunblock use is actually a mitigating factor.)
Still, I do find the arguments in favor of sunlight's beneficial effects to be convincing. So my approach (/gamble) is to avoid modern sources of polyunsaturated fat (basically: seed oils and industrial ag chicken and pork) and mostly not wear sunblock.
(I'll let you know how it works out.)
You gotta test with omnivores, and even then humans are more omnivorous than most other animals (like dogs are poisoned by grapes, chocolate, onions…).
(Hard to do this kind of research in humans, so you have to use animal models and use good judgement/guess at the applicability.)