I think about this often. I hear people talking about why we need sunscreen these days and in my mind it's simply due to the lack of foliage and natural shade in both modern urban and rural areas (which are largely farm land these days)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-01315-1/figures/2
Simple fact is, we’re much more exposed to uv than prior generations.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100316142529.h...
Which corresponds with the ozone layer being about 5% thinner:
https://www.clo.nl/en/indicators/en021819-ozone-layer-1980-2...
Not good (or good for us) but also not a huge huge change, since we stopped the thinning of the ozone layer mostly in time.
The leading causes of death in the UK[1] are heart disease, lung cancer, influenza, dementia, vascular disease (stroke?) and lower respiratory disease. Skin cancer is 1% of cancer deaths, and for melanoma the peak of diagnosis is people 85-89 years old[2]. Considering average life expectancy, people are generally diagnosed with skin cancer a few years after they die.
The partial claim "refrain from going outside which in turn .. is way worse than potential UV induced cancer risks" could be right. Avoiding exercise and increasing your heart disease risk, in the hope that you'll avoid one of the more treatable and less fatal cancers in very late life, is probably the wrong tradeoff. Not to do with Vitamin D or covering up or suncream though. Still, why not do both - cover up and go out, lower heart disease risk and lower your chances of skin cancer diagnosis in late life.
[0] https://www.bhf.org.uk/informationsupport/heart-matters-maga...
[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...
[2] https://cks.nice.org.uk/topics/melanoma/background-informati...
Melanoma causes 1.5 % of total cancers related deaths according to CDC so you are much more likely to die from all the other types of cancer. https://gis.cdc.gov/Cancer/USCS/#/Trends/
However many people only go outside in the context of walking from their car to the door of wherever they are going, and some who work from home can go for weeks without going outside at all. This is a bad thing, you need exercise (though it could be inside), but realistically many people are not getting enough.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2467926-most-europeans-...
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.01.29.635495v2....
"The peoples of Europe are fair-skinned and reddish, because they live in a cold climate and are not scorched by the sun."
Source: Hippocrates, On Airs, Waters, and Places, 5th century BC.
"The physical characteristics of the Germans are consistent: blue eyes, reddish hair, and large bodies."
(Tacitus, Germania, chapter 4)
Egyptian tomb paintings from the New Kingdom (c. 1550–1070 BC) visually represent foreign peoples with distinct skin tones - "Europeans", in the form of Sea Peoples or early Aegean peoples (e.g., Minoans or Mycenaeans), were sometimes shown with light red or pale skin tones.
I am open to this hypothesis (conjecture?), it just lacks supportive evidence. On the other hand, we have ample evidence that agricultural revolution did not "turn people white" in the other regions.
From a cursory study of Wikipedia my rough summary would be: Europe used to be roughly divided in the "Western Hunter Gatherers" (WHG) and "Eastern Hunter Gatherers" (EHG). The WHG typically had dark skin, dark hair and blue eyes, the EHG were typically light skinned with brown eyes. Blond hair may have originated from EHGs in North Eurasia and spread from there. Around 6000 BC farmers from Anatolia (~modern Turkey) started moving into Europe, the EEF (Early European Farmers). Those were typically smaller than European hunter-gatherers, light skinned and dark haired. They migrated North, partially replacing the EHG and WHG, partially mixing with them, and in some places the EHG and WHG simply took up farming. But Easter Europe is less amenable to farming, meaning the dark-skinned WHG diminished the most while the light-skinned EHG and EEF became the dominant groups in Europe's genetic diversity
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_European_Farmers#/media/...
That all started in the seventies when skin cancer was invented.
(remind me, what was the California "bus shelter" design that was basically an expensive stick and got widely ridiculed on here?)
And, it's even worse than just not working. It's a shelter to provide shade _for women_ that provided almost none. Because apparently shade is now part of the gender wars.
I'm not sure what your point about "gender wars" is. Is this pole too effeminate for a man to be shaded by?
They were referring to this: >Its purpose was to assist female bus riders by offering shade during the hottest hours of the day and providing sidewalk lighting at night.
No gender war, just serving your customers.
TFA address this: "Its purpose was to assist female bus riders by offering shade during the hottest hours of the day and providing sidewalk lighting at night."
heat and light are different factors, even though they mostly come hand in hand. outside, heat is definitely a bigger problem than it used to be, but also we don't spend as much time outside. if heat became a problem people used to take time off, rest during the hottest times of the day and work earlier/later.
It's not about foliage, it's because we like to look as young as possible - or put another way, as undamaged as possible. Sunscreen adds to that a lot, because it mitigates sun damage. At a given age, people used to look much older than we do now, and that is partly because of less sun exposure.