I think people should be highly skeptical of articles like this, even without knowing anything about the subject in question. No byline/author. No citations/links to the studies in question. Confirmation of preconceived notions that people would like to be true (e.g. the sun as a wellness remedy instead of damaging to skin), including unfounded "just so" stories and claims about evolution, diabetes, and other unrelated topics. Named individuals seem to "specialize" in sunlight as a wellness remedy (seems like a big red flag to me). No actual physical theory as to how it could be true (more vitamin D reduces death by up to 50%? how? your body only needs so much vitamin D and it's not actually all that much).
And sure enough, if you look up any details on the studies in question, they are highly questionable. Vastly different populations studied with very weak controls. For example, sunscreen use -- both chemical and physical, i.e. hats -- was not controlled for. Seems like a big problem since that's the primary claim being made! And it seems like such an obvious thing. It makes one wonder why it was omitted.
The facts of the "status quo" of sun exposure dangers, on the other hand, have quite a lot more going for them, both in terms of study quality and in terms of physical explanation/interpretation. UV radiation physically damages DNA, even when you don't burn. Tanning is a response to skin cell damage, so any additional melanin production in your skin is indication that your DNA is being damaged. Damaged DNA means when your cells reproduce, they reproduce the damage and/or otherwise mutate. If that damage or mutation happens to be cancerous, then you have a big problem. Tanning, contrary to what people seem to think, doesn't inoculate you against skin cancer or damage. It merely helps absorb a higher percentage of UV radiation -- meaning your skin is still getting damaged, just at a slightly lower rate (a helpful, though marginal, evolutionary advantage).
Sure but you should also be highly skeptical of people telling you that sunscreen is always required to go outside. A lot of the studies are funded by sunscreen companies which stand to make a lot of money.
> Tanning is a response to skin cell damage
I don't think this is true in any meaningful sense. Damage is part of life. Your body repairs minor damage and it is usually a good thing to trigger the repair pathways once in a while. This is also the basis for exercise - your muscles and tendons are damaged when you work out, but they get rebuilt stronger. Your DNA is also repaired, and turning repair pathways on can sometimes improve tissue quality/collagen production or get rid of imperfections - this is the basis of microneedling and cosmetic techniques, some of which involve light exposure. UV therapy is also a treatment for psoriasis (skin inflammation).
If any amount of sunlight is bad, ask yourself why melanoma typically occurs on the trunk region (in men) or legs (women) rather than say the face or arms. Those are regions that are normally hidden, but are then suddenly exposed when you go shirtless/at the beach.
The most dangerous thing is to go straight from non-exposure to high exposure. But if you gradually increase exposure, the body has many ways of dealing with non-overwhelming amounts of damage. Damage can in fact trigger repair which is often beneficial, as this article alludes to.
Most importantly, the more beneficial UV rays (UVB) for vitamin D production are weaker than the more harmful ones (UVA), so any sunscreen or glass that "blocks UV" necessarily blocks all UVB before you get close to blocking all UVA. Nothing can actually block 100% of UVA. But let's say you slather sunscreen on every time you go out. Now imagine one day you forget it or run out of it or for whatever emergency reason can't apply it. Now your pale unready skin is exposed to a large dose which could actually do more damage than your body is ready to repair.
The best time to get UVB is actually around solar noon. So, depending on your skin type, the best thing to do is to expose yourself to sunlight for short amounts of time (start with 1 minute if you want) without sunscreen before applying sunscreen. Then gradually increase the non-sunscreen time as your skin turns up repair pathways (and you get tanner).
The byline is “The Economist”, and the lack of links is the house style, like a printed newspaper.
A relic from the times when the name and reputation of the institution alone was enough to earn your trust.
Personally I still find them a high-quality source, especially because they are a weekly publication based in the UK and distanced (but not entirely removed) from the bullshit of the US media cycle.
The Economist a few years back did an article on Steon (free energy engine) but it was essentially a PR piece soliciting investors… so take them with a grain of salt
Journalists fucked up massively when they allowed sponsored content to masquerade as editorial content. Now people don't trust media as much as they used to and are moving to other sources to get their information. What journalists around the world need to do is come together and build consensus in the industry on separating sponsored content from their own. A tiny, fine print at the bottom of a full page sponsor is grossly insufficient. It has to be more explicit. Perhaps reserve colors and styles exclusively for indigenous content or frame all sponsored content in a clearly identifiable manner. One way or another, they need to figure out how to reclaim their reputation.
Very simple, studies all confirm that people who spend more time outdoors have better eyesight at youth (avoids myopia) and health (exercise), use sunscreen (avoid skin cancer). No need to speculate more.
> A study published last year, for instance, examined medical data from 360,000 light-skinned Brits and found that greater exposure to UV radiation—either from living in Britain’s sunnier southern bits rather than the darker north, or from regularly using sunbeds—was correlated with either a 12% and 15% lower risk, respectively, of dying, even when the raised risk of skin cancer was taken into account.
Emphasis on “may” - this is hardly a gold standard study. Living in sunnier/warmer climates as a proxy for UV exposure as opposed to lifestyle differences afforded by such a climate, regional culture differences, etc. makes all of this very dubious to me.
I’m going to keep wearing my sunscreen most of the time when I need to be in direct sun, and continue regular screening for skin cancer.
Double-blind experiments on this are probably impossible, but it's not like large population studies are totally worthless. It's probably best to go where the evidence points, and the article mentions other studies with similar conclusions, as well as work on possible biological mechanisms.
My strategy is to get short sun exposures, use sunscreen only when I'm going to be out long enough to get burnt, and also do my dermatology appointments.
But also let’s not forget the things that tend to correlate with moderate sun exposure: Fresher air, exercise, social activity, daylight exposure on the eyes, stimulation of all the senses, etc.
The only time you will see anything stated as an absolute is when there is low or no scientific rigor.
Thinking you are somehow holding the authors into account is akin to doubting a paper's veracity because it has "too many authors" or some other meaningless if not ironic standard.
Agree - my original comment was trying to highlight the actual info from the study in contrast to the suggestive headline: That there’s no causal link being claimed by the study that UV exposure decreases all-cause mortality, or in other words, sunscreen isn’t killing us.
Bear in mind that this study is about the UK, and London is on the same latitude as Calgary, give or take.
The sun does get strong enough to burn here, but not for much of the year - especially considering the relatively high % cloud cover (not Seattle high maybe, but high). Skin cancer cases here are AFAIK most commonly related to overseas travel or people with outdoor lifestyles in the southwest of the country.
time of day and UV index is the most important thing, right? That is how you can accurately assess the “risk” of being exposed in direct sunlight.
Example: would you put on sunscreen when playing volleyball at the beach at 4:30pm, if the UV index at that time is 2 (UVI scale)? That seems completely unnecessary imo. And many people are vitamin d deficient anyway, so the minor sun exposure would certainly do more good.
If it’s around mid-day and/or the UV index is higher, say 4+, then i 100% agree with you that it’s prudent to apply sunscreen.
People don’t have a nuanced view of when to use sunscreen. You can see for yourself in the comments, there’s plenty of loud certainty and context is left behind. And I’d have expected this group to at least understand that the need for sunscreen is based on the position of the sun during the day.
How reliable are UV indexes? Genuine question. The iOS weather app is far from 100% reliable and I wonder the margin of error regarding the UV index number it provides.
great question! My understanding is the UV index shown online and in apps is “modeled” data, not realtime.
Basically it takes into account things like ozone measurements from satellites, latitude, forecasted cloud cover, and distance from sun (time of year).
I am in a unique position to confirm that they are a load of bunk. I have solar urticaria and develop hives in response to UV exposure, directly proportional to how much UV is getting through. I’ve developed hives in minutes while the UV index was supposedly only 4 and gone for relatively too long without erupting in hives the next day even when the UV index was supposedly 10.
i hate to be that person that quotes chatgpt, but this seems VERY relevant to your complaint:
“Solar urticaria is a rare condition where the skin reacts to specific wavelengths of light rather than the overall UV intensity. The UV index is a general measure of the total amount of erythema-causing UV radiation (mainly UVB) that can cause sunburn in the average person.
But in solar urticaria, the trigger might be UVA, visible light, or even a narrow band of wavelengths — and the UV index doesn’t capture that nuance.
So it’s not that the forecast is wrong — just that the UV index isn’t designed to reflect the sensitivity profile of solar urticaria.”
In other words, you’re (literally) a special case. :)
On cloudless days it it very accurate because on those days UV strength depends almost entirely on the solar altitude, which can be calculated very accurately from the location, the date and the time.
A sibling comment mentions the ozone layer, but I severely doubt it varies enough to be a source of inaccuracy.
How about looking at descendants of fair-skinned Britains in sunnier climes?
Australia has the highest rate of skin cancer in the world. This is due to a combination of factors: very high levels of ultraviolet (UV) radiation, outdoor lifestyles, and a largely fair-skinned population that is more vulnerable to sun damage. Rates of both melanoma (the deadliest form of skin cancer) and non-melanoma skin cancers are higher in Australia than anywhere else. New Zealand follows closely behind.
I think it’s difficult to study this sort of thing because people and behavior is so different. I lost someone dear to me to melanoma and one of the things we learned was that a single blistering sunburn as a child increases cancer risk significantly. So small variations have big impacts.
I’d love to see a study where people wear a meter to sample exposure. My mom was an avid gardener who never wore sunscreen - she dressed appropriately with a hat.
The helper verb 'may' should accompany any scientific result as the scientific method usually cannot prove causations but only negate the null hypothesis.
I still think “increased sun exposure correlates with decreased all cause mortality” makes a better headline, but then maybe that’s why I’m not an editor.
The word 'correlates' in a title is borderline click bait-y due to possible intended confusion with 'causes'. Also it has little value. Consider the equivalent "decreased all cause mortality correlates with increased sun exposure". The word play is crazy. 'May' captures the relation and is correct philosophically.
Science is good, but restraining all decisions behind FUTON biased double-blind longitudinal meta-analysis is not only unreasonably cognitiviely expensive, but not even the greatest idea.
When making decisions to personally guide your life, you can also base them on values, heuristics, paternal advice, common wisdom, etc...
It's obvious that the ideal amount of sunlight is somewhere between 0 and 100% of the time, I don't need to read a "The Economist" article with a clickbaity, possibly misrepresented title of a nuanced meta-analysis.
The proof is on this comment, it's never enough data, the conclusion is always that you need more funding:
>360,000 light-skinned Brits
>Emphasis on “may” - this is hardly a gold standard study
I didn't even need 1 subject, you need more than 360,000. You are out there running kubernetes for a blog and asking for more EC2 instances on top of a 3M$ bill, I'm out here running the whole company on 2 raspberry pis.
If wealth can be achieved by increasing resources or reducing necessities, I have achieved the nirvana of wisdom of the second kind while you still strive to amass more information to make a decision:
The study says sun good. But the studies being described in the UV are specifically comparing people who stay indoors vs people who get exposed to UV by being outdoors. The studies listed are not looking at application of sunscreen, or wearing clothes to block UV, etc.
This generally makes sense; stop being cooped up indoors and do things outside, but also wear UV protection.
Yeah, I agree. This always seemed pretty obvious to me but it was also obvious that it's nuanced and can be highly variable depending on skin type, medical history, locale, lifestyle and preferences.
But when it comes to things which are very probably "mostly beneficial for most people most of the time - but (obviously) not always beneficial for all the people all the time", there's a reluctance to say anything unless you've got study data to fully support everything you say into "the nines". But the world is full of things that are hard, expensive or impossible to study experimentally with that kind of rigor.
"The big picture is that the benefits of sunlight outweigh the risks—provided you don’t get sunburnt,” argues Richard Weller, a dermatologist at the University of Edinburg
Also, Dr. Roger Seheult has some strong opinions on this as well. Considers sun exposure one of the pillars of health and avoiding the sun to be as dangerous as smoking.
That does seem to be the case. The Lindqvist study specifically said that sun avoidance was as bad as smoking iirc. Sun exposure has been one of my main activities for over 10 years. The evidence is now overwhelming.
We're talking about a proscribed health practice that results in continuing discomfort and sickness. Even if the benefit manifests as predicted, I'm skeptical it can make up for the low quality of life.
edit: I'm far from alone in this. When I share my aversion to sunlight, I find many more folks who feel similarly, than I do people who are puzzled by it.
dunno man, just had melanoma removed from my ear and if it had moved to my lymph nodes I had a 50% chance of dying within 5 years. thankfully it didn't but it was caused by sun damage incurred in my youth. I'll be wearing sunscreen and mostly avoiding direct sunlight.
It has a lot to do with the individual's makeup. My mom came from a pale lineage and had the same story as the parent comment - except for the luck part. Melanoma was common in her family and was tightly tied to excessive time in the sun as children.
I am very white, but getting sun feels very healthy for my skin. Obviously I don't want to get burned bad, but good sun exposure helps my skin feel softer and less inflamed. My grandfather also spent most of his days out in the sun gardening, and my mom was just commenting a few months ago about how surprisingly smooth his skin is (and he's 92).
Grandfather was southern european but spent so much time in the garden he looked middle eastern. Never any sunscreen as he didn't burn. He wouldn't even feel bee stings. He did not visibly age from his 70s into his mid 90s when he passed, aside from getting quite skinny in those last years.
Many of those smoke or used to smoke, a lot (continues). I live in a country village in south EU and you can see immediately which of the farmers smoke and which don't. Most of them do, but the ones that don't have smooth skin and look younger than they are, the others look like leather bags indeed and older than they are. I guess you can get the same skin without smoking, I just don't see those here.
It's instructive to look at people who drive for a living. One arm will have significantly more sun exposure than the other and it's trivial to spot the difference as the sun does have a very noticeable aging effect.
I wonder, though, if they got full body sun exposure on a regular basis, if that would change things. It seems unlikely that we would have evolved to have a single part of our body exposed to the sun while the rest wasn’t.
What's interesting is that sun exposure through a car window removes almost all UVB rays and most UVA rays. So it's closer to comparing lower sun exposure vs sun exposure with sunscreen.
"The aim of this study is to evaluate the safety and effectiveness of riboflavin-ultraviolet type A (UV-A) light rays induced cross-linking of corneal collagen in improving visual acuity and in stabilizing the progression of keratoconic eyes.
...
The eyes were saturated with riboflavin solution and were subjected for 30 min under UV-A light
...
Cross-linking was safe and an effective therapeutical option for progressive keratoconus."
I think that this is probably one of the reasons why suntanned skin usually looks like it is in better condition mechanically-wise.
Another my favorite Sun exposure related correlation - vitamin D deficiency and autism, as couple studies on Somali immigrant population in Minnesota and Sweden - where such dark skinned population naturally gets very low on vitamin D - showed such correlation as autism rates in that population is higher than back there in Somali (and that would explain the correlation of low sunlight expo.
And my favorite pet theory is that Neanderthals with their large eyes adapted to the Northern latitudes were significantly impaired by spike of UV radiation - getting highly increased rate of early cataract and other eyesight damage - during that thousand years of magnetic field polar swap 40K years ago, and that caused them to lose to the Cro-Magnon who was coming out of Africa with more dark and smaller eyes more adapted to higher UV levels which are natural to Africa.
> couple studies on Somali immigrant population in Minnesota and Sweden - where such dark skinned population naturally gets very low on vitamin D - showed such correlation as autism rates in that population is higher than back there in Somali (and that would explain the correlation of low sunlight expo.
Or autism among Somalis causes them, or their parents, to want to immigrate to Minnesota and Sweden?
No. There the vitamin D deficiency during pregnancy is correlated with autism of the child. In another study child autism was correlated with regular Swedish woman pregnancy with the 3rd trimester in winter when the deficiency is the most frequent / most serious.
It seems that autism got politicized and thus such various correlations, which may or may not be real causations, don't seem to get enough of proper scientific attention/resources. I mean, for example folic acid deficiency causes spina bifida, and it wouldn't be out-of-this-world if vitamin D (which is steroid) deficiency (or some other deficiency) would have affected prenatal development and structure of the brain which is just another body organ. Instead we spend tremendous amount of attention and energy on alleged vaccine-autism connection which hasn't been established even as mere correlation.
> They did experiments by repairing cornea that way:
As a person w/ keratoconus I have read a fair bit about this treatment, corneal collagen crosslinking with riboflavin (C3R).
It does not repair the damage caused by keratoconus. It stabilizes the cornea and slows or halts progression. The collagen in the cornea naturally crosslinks (likely due to UV exposure) over our lives. My our late 30s our corneas are stable. For someone with keratoconus, where the cornea becomes progressively misshapen, stabilizing the tissue with UV (enhanced by riboflavin) slows or prevents further damage.
I was just a few years too early in my diagnosis to benefit from C3R. My eyes have been stable for the last 10 - 12 years. I wish I could have had C3R when my condition was first diagnosed back in my 20s.
Yes, i see what you're saying. I'm just a layman here, so i talking only based on my recollection of what i read somewhere somewhen. I think i also read another study where there were scratches or some other damage and they did it similar to pothole filling by applying solution/mix of collagen with vitamin B and curing with UV.
I don't think it's at all healthy to look directly at the sun.
But I have noticed that my eyes get weaker after spending a lot of time indoors, like if I'm sick. Getting enough time in sunlight seems to be heavily correlated with better eyesight, both in my personal experience fighting farsightedness as a man in his 50s and with studies done on children regarding nearsightedness.
So just to clarify - yes, I do think looking at the sun directly for very short periods is good (especially if it's lower on the horizon). But overall, what I as trying to get at is that being outside and getting the bright light of the sun on your eyes is helpful. The best way to do this is on the water. When you look at the sun reflecting off the water, you are getting the bright light, but because the water is reflecting it, and the waves are constantly changing the angles, the sun like gets spread evenly over your eyes.
For the naysayers, if looking at the sun is so bad, why is it not considered bad to look at the sun's reflection on the water? Additionally, when the sun is low, if you look at the brightness of the sunlight, it is less bright than some artificial light sources, and doesn't hurt to look at. How could this be bad?
Good point. It's all about balance though. People have been riding on boats on water for a long long time (most of it without the invention of sunglasses). And similar to the truck drivers who drive hours with one side exposed, or people who sunbathe a bunch - that is unbalanced. Staring at the sun at full brightness would be unbalanced. But I think never looking at it is also unbalanced. You can look at it, but keep your eyes moving - don't focus and stare at it for seconds (unless it's really low on the horizon, and then I think it is okay to stare at the sun).
IIRC, reflection of the sun off water is 5% when directly overhead to about 65% when at a glancing angle (low on the horizon). I prefer to close my eyes and aim my face at the sun for about 10 minutes a day if I'm working indoors all day plus whatever incidental sunlight I get. I have SAD during the winter months and use a full-spectrum lamp, then.
People who spend more time in the sun have a low-moderate risk of melanoma, but higher risk of other skin cancers, vs those who spend more time indoors having a lower risk of non-melanoma skin cancer and a moderate-higher risk of melanoma cancer.
Recently I've received an email from my eye specialist addressed to all her patients urging people not to look at the sun. At the same time I've also seen a similar public warning published in local media.
Apparently there has been an sharp rise in people coming in with retinal damage from staring at the sun. They didn't go into details why someone would do that, but reading this on HN I can start to guess.
Until I see some definite proof, I'm going to put this in the FUD box.
There's seems to be a concerted effort at making people afraid of the sun. My guess is because the sun fixes a lot of problems, and problems mean profit.
Seriously, take a step back. If spending time in / looking at the sun was dangerous we wouldn't be here.
Anyone thinking of doing this, don't. There's a reason we don't directly look at solar eclipse. Here's a excerpt from [1]
> Usually we close our eyes in reflex due to intense light from the Sun, but on day of an eclipse, the intensity of sunlight is decreased and we can view the Sun through naked eyes. While we watch a solar eclipse without any protection to our eyes, the ultraviolet rays penetrate our eyes and cause retinal burn, leading to loss of central vision.
In a Solar Eclipse you're getting a tiny fraction of the sun's energy and it is still enough to very quickly cause long-term physical damage to your eyes. Looking at the sun during not an eclipse is even worse.
So suddenly during an eclipse, your eyes have no idea what's painful/harmful anymore? Trust your experience, it's the closest you're ever going to get to truth.
I've found the same with direct sunlight exposure. My distance vision is much sharper if I've been outside a lot recently. It seems similar to how exercise works elsewhere in the body. You can definitely get a neuromuscular reaction if the incident angle of the sunlight is direct enough. The trick (as with all forms of exercise) is moderation.
Might it be that when outside you tend to look farther than when inside? So distance vision gets used more and body adapts. Similar to how kids that spend time outside are less shortsighted.
Also, bright light will help the eye to focus. It's the same principle as if you were using a camera with a small aperture (and larger DOF, keeping more things in focus).
I would guess it's dangerous nonsense, though there are plausible claims that shortsightedness is associated with not spending much time outside as a child so perhaps there's a slight link with something that isn't nonsense.
An obvious thing perhaps worth mentioning: if you're shortsighted (or longsighted) then you see better in bright sunlight because the iris closes, giving you greater depth of field, so that might make people think/feel that sunlight "cures" myopia.
(On the other hand, if you have excellent eyesight then you see better in less bright conditions because your vision is being limited by diffraction at the aperture.)
> Is this some kind of weird meta joke or are people actually arguing about staring into the sun in 2025?
Why not? People are still arguing in 2025 that the vast majority of the world's climate scientists are wrong about climate change, and there are even some who unironically argue that the Earth is flat. Science is dead. Long live "Whatever I want to believe is true and you're all wrong!"
It’s tempting to see things like this and think “well of course it does, because that’s how we evolved”. But I think that might just be post-rationalization? At the very least, I think the argument _doesn’t_ hold for periodic famine, extreme temperatures, most disease, etc even though we also evolved with those things. Is there any guiding principle that separates the things-we-evolved-with-that-are-good vs the -that-are-bad? Or is it really just a case-by-case examination?
The things you mention are sudden extremes: famine (extreme hunger), extreme temperature, being hit by a disease. The highest skin cancer group seems to be those that get sporadic extremes of sun (eg. the indoor office worker that burns on the weekend). That kind of rapid change in sunshine quantity was tough to ever do naturally. Even if you could hide from the sun in (rare) caves in the middle of summer it would be for hours not weeks. It wasn't something done normally in life.
I do think we also have observation on our side here, as it has been seen for a long time that people with outdoor occupations have lower skin cancer rates than indoor (eg "Occupational sunlight exposure and melanoma in the U.S. Navy", 1990). Why those stories never broke through to the mainstream is an interesting question.
(I know they're out of fashion now, but the paleo community was talking about doing ~10 minutes of direct sun a day almost two decades ago, with strict guidance to avoid burning, roughly based on the above reasons)
> Why those stories never broke through to the mainstream is an interesting question.
The mainstream media in the US has never been great at communicating any story with nuance or depth. In the 80s and 90s, foods that we've eaten forever were being demonized, like eggs. In 2020, people were being told they shouldn't go outside lest they come within 100 feet of another person.
To their credit, the general population has never had a shorter attention span and so easily hoodwinked into believing misleading claims.
Exactly - as if evolution cared enough about keeping us healthy after childbearing age. It's hard to state "yeah we've evolved to live like that, of course it's good for us" because clearly keeping us alive after the age of 40 really wasn't _that_ necessary for human survival. There's a lot of perfectly natural stuff that hurts us, including sunlight. Most cancers will only occur in the latter half of our lives, where usually a human historically had already had several children that are now old enough to survive on their own.
Selection pressure does not simply select on "did or did not reproduce" it selects on reproduction rate (compare 2 individuals, both having parented a first child, but one dies afterwards while the other continues to occasionally reproduce before dying. The latter displays higher fitness.
Its like any poisson process, a recent event does not inherently lower the probability density for the next event.
Achieving the minimum necessary for reproduction is not representative of the distribution of reproductive success scores.
> because clearly keeping us alive after the age of 40 really wasn't _that_ necessary for human survival.
That's a very common misconception. Being alive after 40 is quite necessary if you are a member of a gregarious species that (bar exceptions) always lives in community. And it's not only about the survival of your own genes, it's about the survival of the genes of the whole community.
Entirely case by case. It's further confounded by the fact that a bunch of things that are bad for us don't exert strong selective pressure in the first place.
> don't exert strong selective pressure in the first place
This assumes we understand how these things work in the first place. It’s very likely our understanding of evolution is incomplete.
I make this mistake a lot:
1. See thing that’s been done a long time a certain way
2. Modern recommendation is don’t do thing
3. Revised modern recommendation says “actually wait, do thing”
4. Revised modern recommendation is now ok because our incomplete model has been updated, whereas it should have always been ok because it’s been that way for a long time
Put another way: we should give more weight to a repeated pattern observed over thousands of years and heavily question any science that goes against it. Both sides are just estimations, but nowadays it’s almost assumed “old ways bad”. Way too many cases that end up being “way humans have operated for millennia is actually ok”.
Since I was a little kid I was always skeptical of slathering something all over my body just to go outside. Just thought…how did people survive before this stuff if we really need it so bad.
People didn't used to expose themselves to as much direct sun and covered themselves with a lot more clothes. Traditional clothing in arid sunny areas typically covers everything, look at people in the middle east today.
I live in a very sunny desert area and it's kind of funny when people assume people from here would be "more tanned". We stay in the shade, the sun will kill you! Anyone working outside is wearing wide brimmed hats and typically has all of their skin covered with clothing even in the heat, people typically have their faces covered with cloth as well.
Spending time outside with minimal clothing in direct midday sun is a modern weird behavior.
Yup, I grew up in a hot subtropical climate and the best counter to the summer was to stay indoors, hydrate. If you have to be outdoors, stay in the shade, if you have to be exposed to the sun, cover yourself. All of the benefits you get from being in direct sunlight can be gained with just being outdoors in shaded areas, maybe for a slightly longer time.
The way western culture glorifies direct exposure to the sun is always hilarious to me, everyone lining up to burn their skin for hours on end to "catch up" on sunlight exposure. Instead of just playing an outdoor sport under some trees or being outdoors in the morning/evening when sunlight is a lot less potent and weather is a lot more pleasant.
I'm find myself aghast when I travel to different environments and observe people laying in direct sun almost naked. Not that I think they shouldn't, it's just such a stark contrast to my norm. I'll end up with a painful sunburn if I venture outside uncovered for more than 10 minutes at home.
The ozone layer wasn't as weak as it is now. We receive more radiation from the sun at the surface than we did before CFCs.
In the past, people, in general, remained in the general vicinity of where they were born. Different skin types adapted to different amounts of sunlight.
We also didn't have the knowledge to link death and disease with their actual causes.
That said, in the past, people used variety of materials for sunscreen without the knowledge that "too much radiation bad". Mud/clay/etc seems to be something multiple cultures over time used. In cultures where working in the sun is common, wearing long clothes that blocks the sun is also a thing, and works like sunscreen.
Given that last point, I think baking in the sun while nearly naked to the point of developing disease is a relatively recent cultural thing, but that's just a guess.
If you ask „how did people survive“ the answer is more often than not: „with great difficulty“. Take for example simple hygiene measures like using soap or brushing your teeth or disinfecting wounds.
Or, the answer is simply “they didn't survive”, which is the case for countless babies who died because an activity as simple as hand-washing wasn't known to be a matter of life and death.
Global migration outpaced evolutionary adaption a long time ago. Many peoples have adapted to local UV conditions, but can now jump on an airplane and are instantly in a completely different environment.
Additionally, if you've ever seen a portrait of a human in the UV spectrum, you'll notice how shiny they look. I'm sure modern people have much less protective oils in their skin as a result of increased bathing required by societal and sanitation norms of modern urbanized habitation.
Many didn't. On top of that, evolution optimizes for reproduction, not long life. With few exceptions, cancer is a disease of the post child rearing aged folks.
White people - depending on your definition, I mean pale-skinned Northern Europeans - are adapted to live north of about 45 degrees.
Obviously they live lots of other places now, but evolution is slow to catch up.
If you drive through France for a day, you can literally see the change from north to south, "could be Dutch" in the far north to "could be Spanish" in the south. Of course lots of people move around but I'm talking about averages.
> skeptical of slathering something all over my body just to go outside
Missing nuance: Outside for how long? And how strong is the sun?
Even with my pasty Northern European complexion, I'm skipping the sunscreen for a 20 minute walk to lunch in November. But for a 10 hour hike above treeline in July? I'll be re-applying every two hours.
56th latitude person can be literally baked by northern mediterannean (~42 lat) March sun in a couple of days. But a couple months later.. no problems climbing mountains all day. We are very adaptable.
You can choose to bake, and your skin will harden up and deal with it, but it will also cause long term leathery skin, which many find unattractive, and increased skin cancer risk.
Tho I agree with economist article, sun exposure is very good for you, just not high UV exposure.
I'd say more like comments here: it's not high UV, it's high delta between actual UV flux and what one's skin was expecting. So pace it, like you would do when first starting lifting weights. The final tolerance is suprisingly high.
Slathering oneself in mud if you need to endure harsh sun exposure is the most common answer I’ve seen to this question.
Otherwise, I agree with your comment, the “best practice” of avoiding sun exposure is as unintuitive as the grain-heavy food pyramid.
Yeah, I've always found it a very weird and weak argument. There are plenty of things we've evolved with that would be considered pretty bad for us now. For example, we evolved as a polygamous species (like virtually all mammals), meaning harams, lots of sexless males and fighting etc.
Also important to remember evolution operates at a population level, not individual. We are descended from females that were able to survive at least pregnancy and carry the second to term, but it doesn't matter if they die in the second pregnancy. We're descended from males that were able to mate with said females, but they could have died very shortly after mating. So if you follow "what we evolved with" then that's all you're likely to get.
Where do you get the idea that we evolved as a polygamous species? The few remaining hunter-gatherer societies don't work like that. I think that kind of polygamy came with agriculture.
The existence of porn should be enough to show that we aren't monogamous. That and the fact that virtually no other mammal is including all the great apes. Monogamy is a thing in birds and they are literally dinosaurs.
I think possibly we are using different definitions of polygamy. If you mean one male monopolizes the females, I disagree. If you mean that individuals (both male and female) don't mate with just one person, then I agree.
I’m looking at the correlation between melanoma incidence and geographic latitude, and it doesn’t appear to be very strong. For instance, I observe a significantly higher incidence in countries like Norway compared to Italy.
I wish there was anything we could do about "x may y" "studies" where it's just a grad student finding 2 weakly correlated variables in an existing dataset and hitting publish. Maybe experimental studies can be called science and observational studies can be called schmience. Of course that is a terrible solution, but god I wish something could be done.
This article is a pop sci editorial. But it's drawing a "may cause" causation from correlations found in "observational studies" rather than "experimental studies". Junior researchers, pressured to publish or die, shovel them out because it's the easiest thing to publish. No experiments, no scientific method, no controls. Just manipulate old data and cherry pick something that looks like it might be related to another thing. Then a year later we get the opposite headline, from another grad student looking for an easy paper to publish. Then the general public confuses it for science.
This is not true in Australia or other places with high UV, and at least they sort of admit this: "at least for denizens of gloomy countries at high latitudes."
Yeah, I was laughing in Kiwi at this. When you live in a country where you can sunburn in less than 10 minutes in spring, skin cancer is a far higher risk.
For winter I got a standing tanning machine. Which I use 2-4x a week for 1 minute per use. I calculated this was equivalent to 5-15 minutes outside, depending on time, but engages the entirety of the bodies largest organ.
My (anecdotal, subjective) experience is that it helps. Both vitamin D and nitric oxide are good rationales for that.
This would be economically impossible at a tanning salon.
If you like to be tan, it turns out that a minute at a time, sporadically but regularly, is enough to train the skin to be somewhat tan all the time. Presumably with far less skin damage than longer more random sun exposures, or typical duration salon sessions.
I also have bright rope LEDs surrounding a few of my room ceilings, hidden behind coving. That light reflects smoothly off the entirety of the white ceilings. A great combination of very high intensity lighting, that is also gentle, diffuse and calming. Summer days, indoors, all year round.
There is nothing subjective about the mental benefits of the lights. I am far more alert during the day, and sleep better at night, even in summer. Rationale: We were meant to live outside.
I have worked at home my whole career, so I tune things.
> For winter I got a standing tanning machine. Which I use 2-4x a week for 1 minute per use. I calculated this was equivalent to 5-15 minutes outside, depending on time, but engages the entirety of the bodies largest organ.
Excellent idea. In my temperate climate, I use the outdoor method, with one further tweak: Cover the head and arms, which get too much inadvertent exposure anyway during daily activity.
> I also have bright rope LEDs surrounding a few of my room ceilings, hidden behind coving. That light reflects smoothly off the entirety of the white ceilings. A great combination of very high intensity lighting, that is also gentle, diffuse and calming. Summer days, indoors, all year round.
I am intrigued -- please can you share any publicly available image of this solution? I'm not sure what to google search, or what it would even look like. But I am interested in feeling better while stuck indoors all day.
> That light reflects smoothly off the entirety of the white ceilings. A great combination of very high intensity lighting, that is also gentle, diffuse and calming.
The description from GP, and the photos in the article you linked, seem like polar opposites of each other.
“Cove lighting” is the architectural lighting term used for this sort lighting installation. You build coves out of gypsum or wood and then install LED tape lighting into a plastic or metal channel and bounce the light off the cove to create indirect lighting. You can use cove lighting to illuminate a ceiling, or accent a wall, which is called perimeter cove lighting.
There are a number of other types of indirect light fixtures (and direct/indirect fixtures, most commonly as suspended linear fixtures with LEDs on both the top and bottom of the fixture).
Every winter since I was a kid, I get Keratosis pilaris [0] on my inner upper arms, which is a bit of a nuisance. After the first day of spring sun in a T-Shirt, it disappears completely within days.
Oh, I've always thought it's just a lack of sweating causing your dead skins to grow over the pores, didn't realize that it's actually a mysterious medical condition?
If you get melanoma, it can progress within weeks or months to stage >1. An annual checkup is not enough. And then you get 50% chance if you qualify for gene therapy or die.
That highly depends on the individual and their risk profile. But the best approach in general is to be aware of the signs that are up on these posters you see in every good dermatologist's office. Then you can spot abnormalities immediately and get them checked out professionally. Half of all melanomas are not found by screenings and are self-detected instead.
Perhaps by "An annual checkup is not enough", they do not mean you need screenings multiple times a year. Rather, one needs to regularly examine their own skin in addition to yearly checks by a professional.
An aside for my fellow wookies: moles can form under hair!
Between 2015 and 2021, Americans diagnosed with invasive[0] melanoma had a 94.7% net 5-year survival rate[1]. That means, if all other causes of death were impossible, an estimated 5.3% of those patients would have died of melanoma.
That's a pretty good net survival rate [3], but it's not perfect. And it's possible that less care in avoiding excessive sun exposure could lead to any cancers being more aggressive. However, I don't have a reference for that musing, so feel free to ignore it.
[0]: Invasive means the tumor has left the tissue it started in.
[2]: It would be higher if the official method for calculating net survival didn't, in my opinion, needlessly bias itself against cancer patient survival. The last time I reviewed the methodology notes, they compared daily hazards of death between cancer patients and everyone else. But, if the cancer patients had a lower hazard for a day, the difference was treated as zero instead of negative. This is a hill I'll die on, because their method pretends any confounding variables not in the model have no effect. Patients who catch melanoma early are probably less likely to die soon compared to those of similar age, race, sex, and location. An early diagnosis likely means they care enough about their health to visit doctors regularly and make good use of those visits.
I would like to know how regular sunlight compares to the combination of vitamin D supplementation and red light therapy. If you do both of those, is that equivalent or better since it doesn't have any damaging effects of the sun?
There are other benefits as well. For example, some eye exposure to violet or ultraviolet light have been shown to reduce myopia, which might be one reason why glasses usage has increased a lot. (Screen usage is a big myopia factor as well, but it’s not the whole story.)
There are also studies suggesting that low-level UV exposure lowers risk of death by more than what can be explained by serum vitamin D levels alone, suggesting other unknown mechanisms at play.
Make sure the studies control for people bed bound for long times in the hospital or in home care, they are magnitudes more likely to die early and don't get as much sun as people doing sports etc. but the sun isn't likely to be the primary factor.
If they claim causation in the paper it is usually controlled for, if they just claim a link it might not be.
As with everything, I guess do it in moderation and don't be stupid...?
Planning on being out a full day under the summer sun as a very pale north European? Slob on all the sunscreen that you can and hide in the shade when possible.
A day out in mid September / mid March when the sun is not looking to murder you? Revel in it. Soak it up. Be a plant.
Also it makes a lot of difference where you are. Scandinavians rarely wear sunscreen but their UV index is much lower than, say, California, let alone Australia.
Australia is exceptionally bad for the sun. It's crazy because the incidence of skin cancer is still so high even though sun protection is drilled into us since birth. I'll rant further that Australia is not even good from a UV/temperature tradeoff because the UV is always ridiculously high. Nice warm Mediterranean summer UV level is equivalent to a freezing cold winter day in Australia.
It's because you're the same latitude as Namibia, Botswana etc. Even Perth is on the same equivalent (south instead of north) as Cairo or Kuwait.
There's a reason the indigenous Australians stayed dark skinned after 40,000 years - a time frame more than long enough for the Irish to turn red-haired and pale; as a trait it's relatively fast evolving, Europe probably evolved most/all of its variation since the last ice age.
when your skin turns pale white your body is screaming for sunlight. it wants sunlight just like your body wants food and makes you hungry. if sunlight were so deadly then everyone would have skin that was pitch black and doesnt change. but we have this insane adaptive system to make sure we are always getting a trickle of UV. why else would we evolve this system if sunlight werent extremely important?
I don't think I'm going to take my health advice from an economics magazine that is published by libertarians in the UK (a famously NOT sunny place).
Economists have a habit of wandering off into other fields and misapplying statistical methods developed for economics. See their work in anti-parastic studies and all sorts of gross wannabe sociology research.
I'll wait until Chocrane steps in and says something before rejecting decades of scientific consensus.
I think this assessment is unfair. The paper [1] is not from economists. The first author is an endocrinologist. The third author is a dermatologist. As for where the authors are from, I don't see why it would matter, as long as their methodology is sound.
However, this doesn't mean one should forget about the current consensus. This is just one paper, and it takes more than that to offset the current knowledge.
> followed 30,000 Swedish women for 20 years. It likewise found that, even after correcting for things like age, wealth and health, sun-seeking behaviour was associated with a lower chance of death from all causes.
Is it because they got exposed to sun or is it because of the "sun-seeking behavior", which probably means more physical activity?
Either way, it's too soon to be throwing away our sunscreen.
I've had a malignant melanoma, my mother and extended relatives had it as well (including a great uncle I never met who died from it), 4 (of my 9) siblings have had multiple, mostly those of use who have red hair/fair skin. I don't think I've ever heard of a greater risk of skin cancer due to genetics/familial occurrence than I have.
After my mother got it and had a huge chunk taken out of her leg when I was very young, we have had it drilled into our heads that the sun was going to kill us and we needed to cover up and lather in sun screen for even the slightest possibility of sun exposure.
Obviously that didn't help much as many of us still got it anyway, hah!
But yea there are some folks who are terrified of the sun. I personally think 15-20 minutes unfiltered sunlight is good for me, but beyond that I'm looking for the nearest shade or trying to cover up.
There is also the evidence that it usually doesn't happen on the hands or face which are chronically exposed, but rather areas that are normally covered.
It is a big thing in Asia to avoid sunlight to avoid premature aging and tanning.
It's an interesting parallel you can observe in parks: in my country in Europe, people will prefer to sit on the benches exposed to the sun first, in China and Korea, people will sit in the shade instead.
Lived in SE Asia fora few years and my understanding is that tan skin = outdoor labor = lower caste.
My spouse is asian and I'm N Euro - I would kill to have skin that just tans no matter how much sun you get. I think I've seen her get burns twice in over a decade and we do a lot of beach time.
Quite a lot of people. People in Australia are educated about the risk of sun exposure in school for one. Another is cultures who view being pale as a beauty standard.
There is a lot of weird discussion on English-speaking forums that you should always always wear sunscreen, even if the day is grey, because skin cancer is a constant risk.
I do not get if it’s a massive and long-running marketing campaign that has brainwashed the entire population, if it’s because many living in US and UK have a very white skin tone thus burn easily, or what else. Skin cancer is a fact of life, but for a species that evolved in the sun, I do not believe one bit that sun exposure, which incidentally is linked to many benefits because it’s so bloody normal, is something that can only be dealt with modern technology and we should be deathly afraid of it. Sure, UV radiation can cause mutations, but our immune system has evolved over billions of years to deal with this exact problem.
By all means use sunscreen if you have to spend a lot of time in the sun and risk a very unpleasant sunburn, but I wish someone would explain the Anglo obsession with daily sunscreen routine.
> for a species that evolved in the sun, I do not believe one bit that sun exposure, which incidentally is linked to many benefits because it’s so bloody normal, is something that can only be dealt with modern technology and we should be deathly afraid of it. Sure, UV radiation can cause mutations, but our immune system has evolved over billions of years to deal with this exact problem.
Yeah, most of the time our immune system deals with it, but sometimes it misses one roge cell and you've got cancer. That's why you want to limit your exposure to mutations even if you're somewhat adapted to deal with them.
Then it's a matter of looking at studies and statistics and deciding for yourself. Personally, I'll keep putting on sunscreen, as I sunburn easily ;)
The important piece missing from both of these comments IMHO, is that sunburns are the problematic piece.
There's always going to be some risk from UV exposure, but as the parent comment points out we're evolved to deal with it and even to rely on it. There's research showing that low amounts of cellular damage is actually beneficial as it triggers cellular repair mechanisms or aptosis of senecent cells. Even here other commenters point out how exposure improved their skin or vision.
However that natural evolved state doesn't include sitting inside all week and then going outside on the weekend and getting completely toasted sunburnt!
Doing that and getting completely sunburnt overwhelms our normal cellular repair mechanism, the immune system response, etc. It's much more likely a rogue cell evades the immune system when it's swamped with such cells.
Personally I avoid sunscreen if possible for short excursions but will use it if going to the pool as I'm indoors more these years and paler.
> The important piece missing from both of these comments IMHO, is that sunburns are the problematic piece.
Then the problem is light skin tone, and the advice to wear sunscreen always, only applies to them, hence my doubts.
I do not get sunburnt if I go buy groceries or if I spend 1 hour outside, like most ethnicities on Earth; yet if I dare question the dogma of sunscreen, I get downvoted, which makes me wonder if it's at all rational. It boggles my mind how it has become a kind of innocent yet taboo argument on the (English-speaking) internet.
Just google it. I mean, there's plenty of articles that say you need to wear it even if you plan to stay indoors all day. WTF.
Where the medical establishment pushes it, it is largely about establishing habits for people who may get a lot of exposure that they didn't plan for.
Also, local climates differ dramatically. A couple of my worst sunburns in my life were on extremely gray days on the California coast. It is easy to fool yourself into thinking the sun isn't strong when you don't feel the heat of it. But on those kinds of days, it's just diffuse UV blasting from every direction.
I found it instructive when I got photochromatic eye glasses. Since they are UV-activated, it is like carrying a UV detection instrument around with a heads-up display. It really helped me get a better sense for what conditions and hours of the day have significant UV in my normal daily life.
It's a small factor, but humans evolved in the tropics. Ancestral humans has very dark skin because of the tropical UV exposure. Then when some moved into Europe and Asia, selection pressure means they rapidly lost their pigmentation because they weren't getting enough vitamin D.
Sunlight has a distinct ageing effect on skin and this is so well known that cosmetic companies can truthfully label their ointments/lotions as "anti-ageing" if they provide some sun protection effect (e.g. SPF level).
The way I see it: If you live where your ancestors lived for thousands of years and if you make sure your skin gets gradually attuned to the sun each year, you probably get more health benefits. But beware if you're of Northern European ancestry living in Southern USA or Australia or if you work an office job and only seek the summer sun with pale skin.
I have no reliable and in-depth data on how many of my ancestors died of skin cancer, or how many hours they exposed themselves to sunlight, and what kind of sunlight, or what clothes they wore over those thousands of years.
Using this line of thinking is at best an attempt at rationalizing what lifestyle you wanted to live anyway.
Melanin helps protect from DNA damage by absorbing much of the UV radiation. As you get more exposure to sunlight, your skin produces more melanin resulting in more protection.
A sunburn is what you want to avoid and it's easier to get when you stayed indoors the whole year and only go outside when the sun is out full blast. I personally think this modern lifestyle is one of the reasons people get more skin cancer despite being outside less. There are studies that show that chronic sun exposure isn't that bad.
Correlation versus causation and all that, but an increase in bowel cancers and a decrease in sun exposure are both well documented trends over the last few decades.
They've associated low vitamin D levels and bowel cancer, but I don't know which direction causation goes. Or if it's a third factor like more exercise.
Weren't there studies showing that 1) some health conditions correlate with low vitamin D level, 2) vitamin D supplements do nothing for these conditions?
Clearly, there's a third variable that causes both. Since we don't understand what the heck it is and I like being in the sun despite being pale (nearly never getting burned, although I did get burned a lot as a teen), I personally call it SUN MAGIC.
https://archive.md/ypb35
I think people should be highly skeptical of articles like this, even without knowing anything about the subject in question. No byline/author. No citations/links to the studies in question. Confirmation of preconceived notions that people would like to be true (e.g. the sun as a wellness remedy instead of damaging to skin), including unfounded "just so" stories and claims about evolution, diabetes, and other unrelated topics. Named individuals seem to "specialize" in sunlight as a wellness remedy (seems like a big red flag to me). No actual physical theory as to how it could be true (more vitamin D reduces death by up to 50%? how? your body only needs so much vitamin D and it's not actually all that much).
And sure enough, if you look up any details on the studies in question, they are highly questionable. Vastly different populations studied with very weak controls. For example, sunscreen use -- both chemical and physical, i.e. hats -- was not controlled for. Seems like a big problem since that's the primary claim being made! And it seems like such an obvious thing. It makes one wonder why it was omitted.
The facts of the "status quo" of sun exposure dangers, on the other hand, have quite a lot more going for them, both in terms of study quality and in terms of physical explanation/interpretation. UV radiation physically damages DNA, even when you don't burn. Tanning is a response to skin cell damage, so any additional melanin production in your skin is indication that your DNA is being damaged. Damaged DNA means when your cells reproduce, they reproduce the damage and/or otherwise mutate. If that damage or mutation happens to be cancerous, then you have a big problem. Tanning, contrary to what people seem to think, doesn't inoculate you against skin cancer or damage. It merely helps absorb a higher percentage of UV radiation -- meaning your skin is still getting damaged, just at a slightly lower rate (a helpful, though marginal, evolutionary advantage).
Sure but you should also be highly skeptical of people telling you that sunscreen is always required to go outside. A lot of the studies are funded by sunscreen companies which stand to make a lot of money.
> Tanning is a response to skin cell damage
I don't think this is true in any meaningful sense. Damage is part of life. Your body repairs minor damage and it is usually a good thing to trigger the repair pathways once in a while. This is also the basis for exercise - your muscles and tendons are damaged when you work out, but they get rebuilt stronger. Your DNA is also repaired, and turning repair pathways on can sometimes improve tissue quality/collagen production or get rid of imperfections - this is the basis of microneedling and cosmetic techniques, some of which involve light exposure. UV therapy is also a treatment for psoriasis (skin inflammation).
If any amount of sunlight is bad, ask yourself why melanoma typically occurs on the trunk region (in men) or legs (women) rather than say the face or arms. Those are regions that are normally hidden, but are then suddenly exposed when you go shirtless/at the beach.
The most dangerous thing is to go straight from non-exposure to high exposure. But if you gradually increase exposure, the body has many ways of dealing with non-overwhelming amounts of damage. Damage can in fact trigger repair which is often beneficial, as this article alludes to.
Most importantly, the more beneficial UV rays (UVB) for vitamin D production are weaker than the more harmful ones (UVA), so any sunscreen or glass that "blocks UV" necessarily blocks all UVB before you get close to blocking all UVA. Nothing can actually block 100% of UVA. But let's say you slather sunscreen on every time you go out. Now imagine one day you forget it or run out of it or for whatever emergency reason can't apply it. Now your pale unready skin is exposed to a large dose which could actually do more damage than your body is ready to repair.
The best time to get UVB is actually around solar noon. So, depending on your skin type, the best thing to do is to expose yourself to sunlight for short amounts of time (start with 1 minute if you want) without sunscreen before applying sunscreen. Then gradually increase the non-sunscreen time as your skin turns up repair pathways (and you get tanner).
Solar noon sunlight microdose is now on my todo list for tomorrow, thanks.
> No byline/author.
This is The Economist; they don't use bylines, and their articles are all anonymous.
+1
The byline is “The Economist”, and the lack of links is the house style, like a printed newspaper.
A relic from the times when the name and reputation of the institution alone was enough to earn your trust.
Personally I still find them a high-quality source, especially because they are a weekly publication based in the UK and distanced (but not entirely removed) from the bullshit of the US media cycle.
It's a foolish tradition of theirs not to provide hyperlinked citations in online articles. It would cost them little.
The Economist a few years back did an article on Steon (free energy engine) but it was essentially a PR piece soliciting investors… so take them with a grain of salt
Journalists fucked up massively when they allowed sponsored content to masquerade as editorial content. Now people don't trust media as much as they used to and are moving to other sources to get their information. What journalists around the world need to do is come together and build consensus in the industry on separating sponsored content from their own. A tiny, fine print at the bottom of a full page sponsor is grossly insufficient. It has to be more explicit. Perhaps reserve colors and styles exclusively for indigenous content or frame all sponsored content in a clearly identifiable manner. One way or another, they need to figure out how to reclaim their reputation.
How few average people care about any of this any more? Especially the incoming generation. There's not care about quality.
Or even better, allow people to pay to remove ads.
Very simple, studies all confirm that people who spend more time outdoors have better eyesight at youth (avoids myopia) and health (exercise), use sunscreen (avoid skin cancer). No need to speculate more.
No, it’s not very simple.
I’ve spent on average 15 hours outside as a kid, still -6. So take all those “studies” with a grain of salt, they might be not applicable to you.
This is the Lindqvist and Weller paper: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s43630-025-00743-6
So it’s a narrative review, the op ed of journals. Basically worthless.
> A study published last year, for instance, examined medical data from 360,000 light-skinned Brits and found that greater exposure to UV radiation—either from living in Britain’s sunnier southern bits rather than the darker north, or from regularly using sunbeds—was correlated with either a 12% and 15% lower risk, respectively, of dying, even when the raised risk of skin cancer was taken into account.
Emphasis on “may” - this is hardly a gold standard study. Living in sunnier/warmer climates as a proxy for UV exposure as opposed to lifestyle differences afforded by such a climate, regional culture differences, etc. makes all of this very dubious to me.
I’m going to keep wearing my sunscreen most of the time when I need to be in direct sun, and continue regular screening for skin cancer.
Double-blind experiments on this are probably impossible, but it's not like large population studies are totally worthless. It's probably best to go where the evidence points, and the article mentions other studies with similar conclusions, as well as work on possible biological mechanisms.
My strategy is to get short sun exposures, use sunscreen only when I'm going to be out long enough to get burnt, and also do my dermatology appointments.
Yep this about lines up with my current approach.
But also let’s not forget the things that tend to correlate with moderate sun exposure: Fresher air, exercise, social activity, daylight exposure on the eyes, stimulation of all the senses, etc.
The only time you will see anything stated as an absolute is when there is low or no scientific rigor.
Thinking you are somehow holding the authors into account is akin to doubting a paper's veracity because it has "too many authors" or some other meaningless if not ironic standard.
Agree - my original comment was trying to highlight the actual info from the study in contrast to the suggestive headline: That there’s no causal link being claimed by the study that UV exposure decreases all-cause mortality, or in other words, sunscreen isn’t killing us.
Bear in mind that this study is about the UK, and London is on the same latitude as Calgary, give or take.
The sun does get strong enough to burn here, but not for much of the year - especially considering the relatively high % cloud cover (not Seattle high maybe, but high). Skin cancer cases here are AFAIK most commonly related to overseas travel or people with outdoor lifestyles in the southwest of the country.
> but not for much of the year
Speak for yourself. Thanks to my Celtic genetics, I get sunburnt if I put my phone brightness too high. ;)
time of day and UV index is the most important thing, right? That is how you can accurately assess the “risk” of being exposed in direct sunlight.
Example: would you put on sunscreen when playing volleyball at the beach at 4:30pm, if the UV index at that time is 2 (UVI scale)? That seems completely unnecessary imo. And many people are vitamin d deficient anyway, so the minor sun exposure would certainly do more good.
If it’s around mid-day and/or the UV index is higher, say 4+, then i 100% agree with you that it’s prudent to apply sunscreen.
People don’t have a nuanced view of when to use sunscreen. You can see for yourself in the comments, there’s plenty of loud certainty and context is left behind. And I’d have expected this group to at least understand that the need for sunscreen is based on the position of the sun during the day.
How reliable are UV indexes? Genuine question. The iOS weather app is far from 100% reliable and I wonder the margin of error regarding the UV index number it provides.
great question! My understanding is the UV index shown online and in apps is “modeled” data, not realtime.
Basically it takes into account things like ozone measurements from satellites, latitude, forecasted cloud cover, and distance from sun (time of year).
See section “Calculating the UV index” here:
https://www.epa.gov/sunsafety/learn-about-uv-index
It’s not intended to be realtime. It’s more about understanding, generally, what the risk is.
I am in a unique position to confirm that they are a load of bunk. I have solar urticaria and develop hives in response to UV exposure, directly proportional to how much UV is getting through. I’ve developed hives in minutes while the UV index was supposedly only 4 and gone for relatively too long without erupting in hives the next day even when the UV index was supposedly 10.
i hate to be that person that quotes chatgpt, but this seems VERY relevant to your complaint:
“Solar urticaria is a rare condition where the skin reacts to specific wavelengths of light rather than the overall UV intensity. The UV index is a general measure of the total amount of erythema-causing UV radiation (mainly UVB) that can cause sunburn in the average person.
But in solar urticaria, the trigger might be UVA, visible light, or even a narrow band of wavelengths — and the UV index doesn’t capture that nuance.
So it’s not that the forecast is wrong — just that the UV index isn’t designed to reflect the sensitivity profile of solar urticaria.”
In other words, you’re (literally) a special case. :)
On cloudless days it it very accurate because on those days UV strength depends almost entirely on the solar altitude, which can be calculated very accurately from the location, the date and the time.
A sibling comment mentions the ozone layer, but I severely doubt it varies enough to be a source of inaccuracy.
> I’m going to keep wearing my sunscreen most of the time when I need to be in direct sun, and continue regular screening for skin cancer
Sunscreen reduces vitamin D production, but it doesn't stop it. Wearn sunscreen. Get screened. And don't stay indoors for fear of UV.
Also, getting sunburnt is not the only way to get vitamin D. Wear sunscreen and go out. Enjoy the sun. And eat healthy foods that contain vitamin D.
Yes, dubious indeed.
How about looking at descendants of fair-skinned Britains in sunnier climes?
Australia has the highest rate of skin cancer in the world. This is due to a combination of factors: very high levels of ultraviolet (UV) radiation, outdoor lifestyles, and a largely fair-skinned population that is more vulnerable to sun damage. Rates of both melanoma (the deadliest form of skin cancer) and non-melanoma skin cancers are higher in Australia than anywhere else. New Zealand follows closely behind.
> Australia has the highest rate of skin cancer in the world.
It also has excellent life expectancy.
The key question is: For all-cause mortality, do the benefits outweigh the risks?
I think it’s difficult to study this sort of thing because people and behavior is so different. I lost someone dear to me to melanoma and one of the things we learned was that a single blistering sunburn as a child increases cancer risk significantly. So small variations have big impacts.
I’d love to see a study where people wear a meter to sample exposure. My mom was an avid gardener who never wore sunscreen - she dressed appropriately with a hat.
The helper verb 'may' should accompany any scientific result as the scientific method usually cannot prove causations but only negate the null hypothesis.
I still think “increased sun exposure correlates with decreased all cause mortality” makes a better headline, but then maybe that’s why I’m not an editor.
The word 'correlates' in a title is borderline click bait-y due to possible intended confusion with 'causes'. Also it has little value. Consider the equivalent "decreased all cause mortality correlates with increased sun exposure". The word play is crazy. 'May' captures the relation and is correct philosophically.
Sun good
Science is good, but restraining all decisions behind FUTON biased double-blind longitudinal meta-analysis is not only unreasonably cognitiviely expensive, but not even the greatest idea.
When making decisions to personally guide your life, you can also base them on values, heuristics, paternal advice, common wisdom, etc...
It's obvious that the ideal amount of sunlight is somewhere between 0 and 100% of the time, I don't need to read a "The Economist" article with a clickbaity, possibly misrepresented title of a nuanced meta-analysis.
The proof is on this comment, it's never enough data, the conclusion is always that you need more funding:
>360,000 light-skinned Brits
>Emphasis on “may” - this is hardly a gold standard study
I didn't even need 1 subject, you need more than 360,000. You are out there running kubernetes for a blog and asking for more EC2 instances on top of a 3M$ bill, I'm out here running the whole company on 2 raspberry pis.
If wealth can be achieved by increasing resources or reducing necessities, I have achieved the nirvana of wisdom of the second kind while you still strive to amass more information to make a decision:
Sun good
Two things can be true.
The study says sun good. But the studies being described in the UV are specifically comparing people who stay indoors vs people who get exposed to UV by being outdoors. The studies listed are not looking at application of sunscreen, or wearing clothes to block UV, etc.
This generally makes sense; stop being cooped up indoors and do things outside, but also wear UV protection.
Thank you, this is a much better comment than my original one, but this was exactly my point. Go outside more. Sunscreen probably isn’t killing you.
Yeah, I agree. This always seemed pretty obvious to me but it was also obvious that it's nuanced and can be highly variable depending on skin type, medical history, locale, lifestyle and preferences.
But when it comes to things which are very probably "mostly beneficial for most people most of the time - but (obviously) not always beneficial for all the people all the time", there's a reluctance to say anything unless you've got study data to fully support everything you say into "the nines". But the world is full of things that are hard, expensive or impossible to study experimentally with that kind of rigor.
> I didn't even need 1 subject, you need more than 360,000
If you read my whole comment, my point was that I will continue to enjoy the sun, with sunscreen. Sun good. You say sunscreen bad? No. We agree.
"The big picture is that the benefits of sunlight outweigh the risks—provided you don’t get sunburnt,” argues Richard Weller, a dermatologist at the University of Edinburg
Also, Dr. Roger Seheult has some strong opinions on this as well. Considers sun exposure one of the pillars of health and avoiding the sun to be as dangerous as smoking.
That does seem to be the case. The Lindqvist study specifically said that sun avoidance was as bad as smoking iirc. Sun exposure has been one of my main activities for over 10 years. The evidence is now overwhelming.
I'm in the other camp. Sunlight never feels great and the best I've ever felt is working nights.
This isn't really about it feeling good or bad, rather it's about the effect of sunlight in significantly reducing mortality.
I agree that strong sunlight on a hot day doesn't feel good.
> This isn't really about it feeling good or bad,
I'm not sure that's true over the very long run.
We're talking about a proscribed health practice that results in continuing discomfort and sickness. Even if the benefit manifests as predicted, I'm skeptical it can make up for the low quality of life.
edit: I'm far from alone in this. When I share my aversion to sunlight, I find many more folks who feel similarly, than I do people who are puzzled by it.
dunno man, just had melanoma removed from my ear and if it had moved to my lymph nodes I had a 50% chance of dying within 5 years. thankfully it didn't but it was caused by sun damage incurred in my youth. I'll be wearing sunscreen and mostly avoiding direct sunlight.
That's the thing about population level trends: there's always going to be individuals with counterexamples.
It has a lot to do with the individual's makeup. My mom came from a pale lineage and had the same story as the parent comment - except for the luck part. Melanoma was common in her family and was tightly tied to excessive time in the sun as children.
There are studies that show that regular sun exposure is correlated with both lower incidence of and lower mortality from melanoma.
So as long as you're not getting sum burns, sun exposure is actually better for you.
In some decades we'll look at the whole sun avoidance policy as those doctors prescribing cigarettes a century ago.
They did say to avoid getting sunburn, which is the main cause of melanoma.
Make sure your sunscreen is free from things like benzene* or you may just be trading one cancer causer for another.
* https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/is-sunscreen-safe
A reality check on the sunscreen benzene panic: https://labmuffin.com/will-benzene-in-sunscreens-give-you-ca...
funny how some anecdotes are pounced on by redditors and others are taken at face value
I am very white, but getting sun feels very healthy for my skin. Obviously I don't want to get burned bad, but good sun exposure helps my skin feel softer and less inflamed. My grandfather also spent most of his days out in the sun gardening, and my mom was just commenting a few months ago about how surprisingly smooth his skin is (and he's 92).
Grandfather was southern european but spent so much time in the garden he looked middle eastern. Never any sunscreen as he didn't burn. He wouldn't even feel bee stings. He did not visibly age from his 70s into his mid 90s when he passed, aside from getting quite skinny in those last years.
And then another person (of North European ancestry looks) like a brown leatherbag at 50. Anecdotal evidence is sadly not worth a lot.
Many of those smoke or used to smoke, a lot (continues). I live in a country village in south EU and you can see immediately which of the farmers smoke and which don't. Most of them do, but the ones that don't have smooth skin and look younger than they are, the others look like leather bags indeed and older than they are. I guess you can get the same skin without smoking, I just don't see those here.
It's instructive to look at people who drive for a living. One arm will have significantly more sun exposure than the other and it's trivial to spot the difference as the sun does have a very noticeable aging effect.
I wonder, though, if they got full body sun exposure on a regular basis, if that would change things. It seems unlikely that we would have evolved to have a single part of our body exposed to the sun while the rest wasn’t.
What's interesting is that sun exposure through a car window removes almost all UVB rays and most UVA rays. So it's closer to comparing lower sun exposure vs sun exposure with sunscreen.
Dangerously incorrect, side car windows do not remove most UVA rays.
If I recall correctly, the side windows on cars let through more UVA, while the front windows block both efficiently.
My sister moved to a southern latitude and pretty much immediately aged 20 years. Never smoked.
Smoking or not smoking, things don't go 'immediately', so probably something else going on there.
Some pictures of truck drivers are also good counter examples. The side with more exposure tend to look older.
>good sun exposure helps my skin feel softer and less inflamed.
The UV light polymerizes collagen in presence of vitamin B. They did experiments by repairing cornea that way:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3018104/
"The aim of this study is to evaluate the safety and effectiveness of riboflavin-ultraviolet type A (UV-A) light rays induced cross-linking of corneal collagen in improving visual acuity and in stabilizing the progression of keratoconic eyes.
...
The eyes were saturated with riboflavin solution and were subjected for 30 min under UV-A light
...
Cross-linking was safe and an effective therapeutical option for progressive keratoconus."
I think that this is probably one of the reasons why suntanned skin usually looks like it is in better condition mechanically-wise.
Another my favorite Sun exposure related correlation - vitamin D deficiency and autism, as couple studies on Somali immigrant population in Minnesota and Sweden - where such dark skinned population naturally gets very low on vitamin D - showed such correlation as autism rates in that population is higher than back there in Somali (and that would explain the correlation of low sunlight expo.
And my favorite pet theory is that Neanderthals with their large eyes adapted to the Northern latitudes were significantly impaired by spike of UV radiation - getting highly increased rate of early cataract and other eyesight damage - during that thousand years of magnetic field polar swap 40K years ago, and that caused them to lose to the Cro-Magnon who was coming out of Africa with more dark and smaller eyes more adapted to higher UV levels which are natural to Africa.
> couple studies on Somali immigrant population in Minnesota and Sweden - where such dark skinned population naturally gets very low on vitamin D - showed such correlation as autism rates in that population is higher than back there in Somali (and that would explain the correlation of low sunlight expo.
Or autism among Somalis causes them, or their parents, to want to immigrate to Minnesota and Sweden?
No. There the vitamin D deficiency during pregnancy is correlated with autism of the child. In another study child autism was correlated with regular Swedish woman pregnancy with the 3rd trimester in winter when the deficiency is the most frequent / most serious.
It seems that autism got politicized and thus such various correlations, which may or may not be real causations, don't seem to get enough of proper scientific attention/resources. I mean, for example folic acid deficiency causes spina bifida, and it wouldn't be out-of-this-world if vitamin D (which is steroid) deficiency (or some other deficiency) would have affected prenatal development and structure of the brain which is just another body organ. Instead we spend tremendous amount of attention and energy on alleged vaccine-autism connection which hasn't been established even as mere correlation.
> They did experiments by repairing cornea that way:
As a person w/ keratoconus I have read a fair bit about this treatment, corneal collagen crosslinking with riboflavin (C3R).
It does not repair the damage caused by keratoconus. It stabilizes the cornea and slows or halts progression. The collagen in the cornea naturally crosslinks (likely due to UV exposure) over our lives. My our late 30s our corneas are stable. For someone with keratoconus, where the cornea becomes progressively misshapen, stabilizing the tissue with UV (enhanced by riboflavin) slows or prevents further damage.
I was just a few years too early in my diagnosis to benefit from C3R. My eyes have been stable for the last 10 - 12 years. I wish I could have had C3R when my condition was first diagnosed back in my 20s.
Yes, i see what you're saying. I'm just a layman here, so i talking only based on my recollection of what i read somewhere somewhen. I think i also read another study where there were scratches or some other damage and they did it similar to pothole filling by applying solution/mix of collagen with vitamin B and curing with UV.
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I don't think it's at all healthy to look directly at the sun.
But I have noticed that my eyes get weaker after spending a lot of time indoors, like if I'm sick. Getting enough time in sunlight seems to be heavily correlated with better eyesight, both in my personal experience fighting farsightedness as a man in his 50s and with studies done on children regarding nearsightedness.
So just to clarify - yes, I do think looking at the sun directly for very short periods is good (especially if it's lower on the horizon). But overall, what I as trying to get at is that being outside and getting the bright light of the sun on your eyes is helpful. The best way to do this is on the water. When you look at the sun reflecting off the water, you are getting the bright light, but because the water is reflecting it, and the waves are constantly changing the angles, the sun like gets spread evenly over your eyes.
For the naysayers, if looking at the sun is so bad, why is it not considered bad to look at the sun's reflection on the water? Additionally, when the sun is low, if you look at the brightness of the sunlight, it is less bright than some artificial light sources, and doesn't hurt to look at. How could this be bad?
>why is it not considered bad to look at the sun's reflection on the water?
Who said it's not? It may hurt you as fast but it's still bad for you.
https://www.aao.org/eye-health/diseases/photokeratitis-snow-...
Good point. It's all about balance though. People have been riding on boats on water for a long long time (most of it without the invention of sunglasses). And similar to the truck drivers who drive hours with one side exposed, or people who sunbathe a bunch - that is unbalanced. Staring at the sun at full brightness would be unbalanced. But I think never looking at it is also unbalanced. You can look at it, but keep your eyes moving - don't focus and stare at it for seconds (unless it's really low on the horizon, and then I think it is okay to stare at the sun).
IIRC, reflection of the sun off water is 5% when directly overhead to about 65% when at a glancing angle (low on the horizon). I prefer to close my eyes and aim my face at the sun for about 10 minutes a day if I'm working indoors all day plus whatever incidental sunlight I get. I have SAD during the winter months and use a full-spectrum lamp, then.
People who spend more time in the sun have a low-moderate risk of melanoma, but higher risk of other skin cancers, vs those who spend more time indoors having a lower risk of non-melanoma skin cancer and a moderate-higher risk of melanoma cancer.
Recently I've received an email from my eye specialist addressed to all her patients urging people not to look at the sun. At the same time I've also seen a similar public warning published in local media.
Apparently there has been an sharp rise in people coming in with retinal damage from staring at the sun. They didn't go into details why someone would do that, but reading this on HN I can start to guess.
Until I see some definite proof, I'm going to put this in the FUD box.
There's seems to be a concerted effort at making people afraid of the sun. My guess is because the sun fixes a lot of problems, and problems mean profit.
Seriously, take a step back. If spending time in / looking at the sun was dangerous we wouldn't be here.
My guess is because the sun fixes a lot of problems, and problems mean profit.
And there ya go, the rallying cry of every conspiracy theorist: "They don't want you to know, because money!"
Seriously, take a step back.
Yeah, seriously.
Anyone thinking of doing this, don't. There's a reason we don't directly look at solar eclipse. Here's a excerpt from [1]
> Usually we close our eyes in reflex due to intense light from the Sun, but on day of an eclipse, the intensity of sunlight is decreased and we can view the Sun through naked eyes. While we watch a solar eclipse without any protection to our eyes, the ultraviolet rays penetrate our eyes and cause retinal burn, leading to loss of central vision.
[1]: https://www.indiatoday.in/science/story/partial-solar-eclips...
The comment above you said nothing about a solar eclipse
In a Solar Eclipse you're getting a tiny fraction of the sun's energy and it is still enough to very quickly cause long-term physical damage to your eyes. Looking at the sun during not an eclipse is even worse.
Where the fuck are these people coming from???
We are truly in the dumbest timeline.
So suddenly during an eclipse, your eyes have no idea what's painful/harmful anymore? Trust your experience, it's the closest you're ever going to get to truth.
I've found the same with direct sunlight exposure. My distance vision is much sharper if I've been outside a lot recently. It seems similar to how exercise works elsewhere in the body. You can definitely get a neuromuscular reaction if the incident angle of the sunlight is direct enough. The trick (as with all forms of exercise) is moderation.
Might it be that when outside you tend to look farther than when inside? So distance vision gets used more and body adapts. Similar to how kids that spend time outside are less shortsighted.
I'm fairly certain I saw an article recently on HN that claimed it was not the distance focusing which helped but just the exposure to brighter light.
Edit: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31722876/
Also, bright light will help the eye to focus. It's the same principle as if you were using a camera with a small aperture (and larger DOF, keeping more things in focus).
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bates_method#Sunning
Aldous Huxley was taken in, unfortunately: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Seeing
I would guess it's dangerous nonsense, though there are plausible claims that shortsightedness is associated with not spending much time outside as a child so perhaps there's a slight link with something that isn't nonsense.
> there are plausible claims that shortsightedness is associated with not spending much time outside as a child
AFAIK that has nothing to do with the sun but rather with looking at things at a larger distance than at home.
That seems likely.
An obvious thing perhaps worth mentioning: if you're shortsighted (or longsighted) then you see better in bright sunlight because the iris closes, giving you greater depth of field, so that might make people think/feel that sunlight "cures" myopia.
(On the other hand, if you have excellent eyesight then you see better in less bright conditions because your vision is being limited by diffraction at the aperture.)
Maybe not: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31722876/
Is this some kind of weird meta joke or are people actually arguing about staring into the sun in 2025?
An age of unenlightenment!
> Is this some kind of weird meta joke or are people actually arguing about staring into the sun in 2025?
Why not? People are still arguing in 2025 that the vast majority of the world's climate scientists are wrong about climate change, and there are even some who unironically argue that the Earth is flat. Science is dead. Long live "Whatever I want to believe is true and you're all wrong!"
Insufficient sun (light) exposure also increases risk of myopia (sort-sightedness) by an insane amount, by messing with eye growth.
It’s tempting to see things like this and think “well of course it does, because that’s how we evolved”. But I think that might just be post-rationalization? At the very least, I think the argument _doesn’t_ hold for periodic famine, extreme temperatures, most disease, etc even though we also evolved with those things. Is there any guiding principle that separates the things-we-evolved-with-that-are-good vs the -that-are-bad? Or is it really just a case-by-case examination?
The things you mention are sudden extremes: famine (extreme hunger), extreme temperature, being hit by a disease. The highest skin cancer group seems to be those that get sporadic extremes of sun (eg. the indoor office worker that burns on the weekend). That kind of rapid change in sunshine quantity was tough to ever do naturally. Even if you could hide from the sun in (rare) caves in the middle of summer it would be for hours not weeks. It wasn't something done normally in life.
I do think we also have observation on our side here, as it has been seen for a long time that people with outdoor occupations have lower skin cancer rates than indoor (eg "Occupational sunlight exposure and melanoma in the U.S. Navy", 1990). Why those stories never broke through to the mainstream is an interesting question.
(I know they're out of fashion now, but the paleo community was talking about doing ~10 minutes of direct sun a day almost two decades ago, with strict guidance to avoid burning, roughly based on the above reasons)
> Why those stories never broke through to the mainstream is an interesting question.
The mainstream media in the US has never been great at communicating any story with nuance or depth. In the 80s and 90s, foods that we've eaten forever were being demonized, like eggs. In 2020, people were being told they shouldn't go outside lest they come within 100 feet of another person.
To their credit, the general population has never had a shorter attention span and so easily hoodwinked into believing misleading claims.
Australia's sun recommendations for people of differing skin types is not bad: https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/tailored-protection-aust...
Exactly - as if evolution cared enough about keeping us healthy after childbearing age. It's hard to state "yeah we've evolved to live like that, of course it's good for us" because clearly keeping us alive after the age of 40 really wasn't _that_ necessary for human survival. There's a lot of perfectly natural stuff that hurts us, including sunlight. Most cancers will only occur in the latter half of our lives, where usually a human historically had already had several children that are now old enough to survive on their own.
Selection pressure does not simply select on "did or did not reproduce" it selects on reproduction rate (compare 2 individuals, both having parented a first child, but one dies afterwards while the other continues to occasionally reproduce before dying. The latter displays higher fitness.
Its like any poisson process, a recent event does not inherently lower the probability density for the next event.
Achieving the minimum necessary for reproduction is not representative of the distribution of reproductive success scores.
> because clearly keeping us alive after the age of 40 really wasn't _that_ necessary for human survival.
That's a very common misconception. Being alive after 40 is quite necessary if you are a member of a gregarious species that (bar exceptions) always lives in community. And it's not only about the survival of your own genes, it's about the survival of the genes of the whole community.
Entirely case by case. It's further confounded by the fact that a bunch of things that are bad for us don't exert strong selective pressure in the first place.
> don't exert strong selective pressure in the first place
This assumes we understand how these things work in the first place. It’s very likely our understanding of evolution is incomplete.
I make this mistake a lot:
1. See thing that’s been done a long time a certain way
2. Modern recommendation is don’t do thing
3. Revised modern recommendation says “actually wait, do thing”
4. Revised modern recommendation is now ok because our incomplete model has been updated, whereas it should have always been ok because it’s been that way for a long time
Put another way: we should give more weight to a repeated pattern observed over thousands of years and heavily question any science that goes against it. Both sides are just estimations, but nowadays it’s almost assumed “old ways bad”. Way too many cases that end up being “way humans have operated for millennia is actually ok”.
Since I was a little kid I was always skeptical of slathering something all over my body just to go outside. Just thought…how did people survive before this stuff if we really need it so bad.
People didn't used to expose themselves to as much direct sun and covered themselves with a lot more clothes. Traditional clothing in arid sunny areas typically covers everything, look at people in the middle east today.
I live in a very sunny desert area and it's kind of funny when people assume people from here would be "more tanned". We stay in the shade, the sun will kill you! Anyone working outside is wearing wide brimmed hats and typically has all of their skin covered with clothing even in the heat, people typically have their faces covered with cloth as well.
Spending time outside with minimal clothing in direct midday sun is a modern weird behavior.
Yup, I grew up in a hot subtropical climate and the best counter to the summer was to stay indoors, hydrate. If you have to be outdoors, stay in the shade, if you have to be exposed to the sun, cover yourself. All of the benefits you get from being in direct sunlight can be gained with just being outdoors in shaded areas, maybe for a slightly longer time.
The way western culture glorifies direct exposure to the sun is always hilarious to me, everyone lining up to burn their skin for hours on end to "catch up" on sunlight exposure. Instead of just playing an outdoor sport under some trees or being outdoors in the morning/evening when sunlight is a lot less potent and weather is a lot more pleasant.
Absolutely agree.
I'm find myself aghast when I travel to different environments and observe people laying in direct sun almost naked. Not that I think they shouldn't, it's just such a stark contrast to my norm. I'll end up with a painful sunburn if I venture outside uncovered for more than 10 minutes at home.
People in greece/israel/italy/etc don't cover themselves much and they have very long lives.
The ozone layer wasn't as weak as it is now. We receive more radiation from the sun at the surface than we did before CFCs.
In the past, people, in general, remained in the general vicinity of where they were born. Different skin types adapted to different amounts of sunlight.
We also didn't have the knowledge to link death and disease with their actual causes.
That said, in the past, people used variety of materials for sunscreen without the knowledge that "too much radiation bad". Mud/clay/etc seems to be something multiple cultures over time used. In cultures where working in the sun is common, wearing long clothes that blocks the sun is also a thing, and works like sunscreen.
Given that last point, I think baking in the sun while nearly naked to the point of developing disease is a relatively recent cultural thing, but that's just a guess.
If you ask „how did people survive“ the answer is more often than not: „with great difficulty“. Take for example simple hygiene measures like using soap or brushing your teeth or disinfecting wounds.
Or, the answer is simply “they didn't survive”, which is the case for countless babies who died because an activity as simple as hand-washing wasn't known to be a matter of life and death.
Teeth brushing is not as important if you're not eating modern food. Processed sugars really are terrible (but delicious)
If by modern you mean anything since agriculture was invented, then perhaps.
Global migration outpaced evolutionary adaption a long time ago. Many peoples have adapted to local UV conditions, but can now jump on an airplane and are instantly in a completely different environment.
Additionally, if you've ever seen a portrait of a human in the UV spectrum, you'll notice how shiny they look. I'm sure modern people have much less protective oils in their skin as a result of increased bathing required by societal and sanitation norms of modern urbanized habitation.
Many didn't. On top of that, evolution optimizes for reproduction, not long life. With few exceptions, cancer is a disease of the post child rearing aged folks.
White people - depending on your definition, I mean pale-skinned Northern Europeans - are adapted to live north of about 45 degrees.
Obviously they live lots of other places now, but evolution is slow to catch up.
If you drive through France for a day, you can literally see the change from north to south, "could be Dutch" in the far north to "could be Spanish" in the south. Of course lots of people move around but I'm talking about averages.
> skeptical of slathering something all over my body just to go outside
Missing nuance: Outside for how long? And how strong is the sun?
Even with my pasty Northern European complexion, I'm skipping the sunscreen for a 20 minute walk to lunch in November. But for a 10 hour hike above treeline in July? I'll be re-applying every two hours.
I live at a much lower latitude (about the same as Morocco) than my Celtic ancestors did.
Often living in a different climate zone, US is well south of Europe.
56th latitude person can be literally baked by northern mediterannean (~42 lat) March sun in a couple of days. But a couple months later.. no problems climbing mountains all day. We are very adaptable.
You can choose to bake, and your skin will harden up and deal with it, but it will also cause long term leathery skin, which many find unattractive, and increased skin cancer risk.
Tho I agree with economist article, sun exposure is very good for you, just not high UV exposure.
I'd say more like comments here: it's not high UV, it's high delta between actual UV flux and what one's skin was expecting. So pace it, like you would do when first starting lifting weights. The final tolerance is suprisingly high.
SPF 4: https://www.health.harvard.edu/skin-and-hair/are-there-benef...
They survived but for a much shorter time?
Slathering oneself in mud if you need to endure harsh sun exposure is the most common answer I’ve seen to this question. Otherwise, I agree with your comment, the “best practice” of avoiding sun exposure is as unintuitive as the grain-heavy food pyramid.
That food pyramid hasn't been recommended in 20 years.
That’s my point.
Long sleeves and wide brim hats.
Yeah, I've always found it a very weird and weak argument. There are plenty of things we've evolved with that would be considered pretty bad for us now. For example, we evolved as a polygamous species (like virtually all mammals), meaning harams, lots of sexless males and fighting etc.
Also important to remember evolution operates at a population level, not individual. We are descended from females that were able to survive at least pregnancy and carry the second to term, but it doesn't matter if they die in the second pregnancy. We're descended from males that were able to mate with said females, but they could have died very shortly after mating. So if you follow "what we evolved with" then that's all you're likely to get.
Where do you get the idea that we evolved as a polygamous species? The few remaining hunter-gatherer societies don't work like that. I think that kind of polygamy came with agriculture.
The existence of porn should be enough to show that we aren't monogamous. That and the fact that virtually no other mammal is including all the great apes. Monogamy is a thing in birds and they are literally dinosaurs.
I think possibly we are using different definitions of polygamy. If you mean one male monopolizes the females, I disagree. If you mean that individuals (both male and female) don't mate with just one person, then I agree.
I’m looking at the correlation between melanoma incidence and geographic latitude, and it doesn’t appear to be very strong. For instance, I observe a significantly higher incidence in countries like Norway compared to Italy.
Shouldn’t we expect a much stronger correlation?
I wish there was anything we could do about "x may y" "studies" where it's just a grad student finding 2 weakly correlated variables in an existing dataset and hitting publish. Maybe experimental studies can be called science and observational studies can be called schmience. Of course that is a terrible solution, but god I wish something could be done.
> where it's just a grad student
This study was "just a grad student"?
This article is a pop sci editorial. But it's drawing a "may cause" causation from correlations found in "observational studies" rather than "experimental studies". Junior researchers, pressured to publish or die, shovel them out because it's the easiest thing to publish. No experiments, no scientific method, no controls. Just manipulate old data and cherry pick something that looks like it might be related to another thing. Then a year later we get the opposite headline, from another grad student looking for an easy paper to publish. Then the general public confuses it for science.
So…you’re spouting crap not relevant to this paper?
This is not true in Australia or other places with high UV, and at least they sort of admit this: "at least for denizens of gloomy countries at high latitudes."
Yeah, I was laughing in Kiwi at this. When you live in a country where you can sunburn in less than 10 minutes in spring, skin cancer is a far higher risk.
For winter I got a standing tanning machine. Which I use 2-4x a week for 1 minute per use. I calculated this was equivalent to 5-15 minutes outside, depending on time, but engages the entirety of the bodies largest organ.
My (anecdotal, subjective) experience is that it helps. Both vitamin D and nitric oxide are good rationales for that.
This would be economically impossible at a tanning salon.
If you like to be tan, it turns out that a minute at a time, sporadically but regularly, is enough to train the skin to be somewhat tan all the time. Presumably with far less skin damage than longer more random sun exposures, or typical duration salon sessions.
I also have bright rope LEDs surrounding a few of my room ceilings, hidden behind coving. That light reflects smoothly off the entirety of the white ceilings. A great combination of very high intensity lighting, that is also gentle, diffuse and calming. Summer days, indoors, all year round.
There is nothing subjective about the mental benefits of the lights. I am far more alert during the day, and sleep better at night, even in summer. Rationale: We were meant to live outside.
I have worked at home my whole career, so I tune things.
I also enjoy the real sun!
> For winter I got a standing tanning machine. Which I use 2-4x a week for 1 minute per use. I calculated this was equivalent to 5-15 minutes outside, depending on time, but engages the entirety of the bodies largest organ.
Excellent idea. In my temperate climate, I use the outdoor method, with one further tweak: Cover the head and arms, which get too much inadvertent exposure anyway during daily activity.
Sounds good, I'll schedule my time to wander the neighborhood nude, except for towels around my head and arms.
> I also have bright rope LEDs surrounding a few of my room ceilings, hidden behind coving. That light reflects smoothly off the entirety of the white ceilings. A great combination of very high intensity lighting, that is also gentle, diffuse and calming. Summer days, indoors, all year round.
I am intrigued -- please can you share any publicly available image of this solution? I'm not sure what to google search, or what it would even look like. But I am interested in feeling better while stuck indoors all day.
Here you go!
The camera dramatically auto-reduced the brightness in all the pictures. So imagine the room summer sun bright. But not harsh, very soft shadowing.
https://imgur.com/a/0OBnR9j
Where the ceiling shows shadow in the middle of each border, it is really just a tiny bit less bright than at the edge of the borders.
And those LED strips are blinding, even though they look off!
In the evening I turn off the ceiling lights, and the room is lit warmly by the low-lumen crystal lights from below.
The sleep cycle isn't something that comes natural to me, so I work all the angles.
David Chapman has a great writeup on this:
https://meaningness.com/sad-light-lumens
His other writing is great too, but much more philosophical which may or may not be your cup of tea.
> That light reflects smoothly off the entirety of the white ceilings. A great combination of very high intensity lighting, that is also gentle, diffuse and calming.
The description from GP, and the photos in the article you linked, seem like polar opposites of each other.
“Cove lighting” is the architectural lighting term used for this sort lighting installation. You build coves out of gypsum or wood and then install LED tape lighting into a plastic or metal channel and bounce the light off the cove to create indirect lighting. You can use cove lighting to illuminate a ceiling, or accent a wall, which is called perimeter cove lighting.
There are a number of other types of indirect light fixtures (and direct/indirect fixtures, most commonly as suspended linear fixtures with LEDs on both the top and bottom of the fixture).
The first picture in the article linked below has an architectural elevation diagram (basically a side profile) of cove lighting: https://www.architectmagazine.com/technology/lighting/cove-l...
Every winter since I was a kid, I get Keratosis pilaris [0] on my inner upper arms, which is a bit of a nuisance. After the first day of spring sun in a T-Shirt, it disappears completely within days.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keratosis_pilaris
Oh, I've always thought it's just a lack of sweating causing your dead skins to grow over the pores, didn't realize that it's actually a mysterious medical condition?
Have you tried irradiating with near infrared light in the winter? Eg with a cheap CCTV IR light off aliexpress.
Personally, I associate sunlight with less health because of how it makes me feel - uncomfortable on a good day but often like having the flu.
Some of that is tied to our daily 85° dew points but once the sun goes down the dp feels livable.
But even without high heat and humidity, sunlight feels relentlessly, painfully bright. The best I can hope for is to ignore it.
Conversely, cool cloudy days feel like the relief after a long, bad headache. And fog is the finest weather there is.
Isn't skin cancer 100% survivable if caught on time*, with the removal procedure begin a single 1-2 hour specialist visit?
Where "on time" means during the trivial yearly screening that everyone should be getting.
If you get melanoma, it can progress within weeks or months to stage >1. An annual checkup is not enough. And then you get 50% chance if you qualify for gene therapy or die.
What is the recommended screening frequency ?
That highly depends on the individual and their risk profile. But the best approach in general is to be aware of the signs that are up on these posters you see in every good dermatologist's office. Then you can spot abnormalities immediately and get them checked out professionally. Half of all melanomas are not found by screenings and are self-detected instead.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/cancer/screening-advice-thats...
Perhaps by "An annual checkup is not enough", they do not mean you need screenings multiple times a year. Rather, one needs to regularly examine their own skin in addition to yearly checks by a professional.
An aside for my fellow wookies: moles can form under hair!
Between 2015 and 2021, Americans diagnosed with invasive[0] melanoma had a 94.7% net 5-year survival rate[1]. That means, if all other causes of death were impossible, an estimated 5.3% of those patients would have died of melanoma.
That's a pretty good net survival rate [3], but it's not perfect. And it's possible that less care in avoiding excessive sun exposure could lead to any cancers being more aggressive. However, I don't have a reference for that musing, so feel free to ignore it.
[0]: Invasive means the tumor has left the tissue it started in.
[1]: https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/melan.html
[2]: It would be higher if the official method for calculating net survival didn't, in my opinion, needlessly bias itself against cancer patient survival. The last time I reviewed the methodology notes, they compared daily hazards of death between cancer patients and everyone else. But, if the cancer patients had a lower hazard for a day, the difference was treated as zero instead of negative. This is a hill I'll die on, because their method pretends any confounding variables not in the model have no effect. Patients who catch melanoma early are probably less likely to die soon compared to those of similar age, race, sex, and location. An early diagnosis likely means they care enough about their health to visit doctors regularly and make good use of those visits.
https://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/sunshine
I would like to know how regular sunlight compares to the combination of vitamin D supplementation and red light therapy. If you do both of those, is that equivalent or better since it doesn't have any damaging effects of the sun?
There are other benefits as well. For example, some eye exposure to violet or ultraviolet light have been shown to reduce myopia, which might be one reason why glasses usage has increased a lot. (Screen usage is a big myopia factor as well, but it’s not the whole story.)
There are also studies suggesting that low-level UV exposure lowers risk of death by more than what can be explained by serum vitamin D levels alone, suggesting other unknown mechanisms at play.
Make sure the studies control for people bed bound for long times in the hospital or in home care, they are magnitudes more likely to die early and don't get as much sun as people doing sports etc. but the sun isn't likely to be the primary factor.
If they claim causation in the paper it is usually controlled for, if they just claim a link it might not be.
something to think about here: Your body synthesizes vitamin D. That chemical reaction may have side-products which are not found in the supplements.
Biology is complex.
until you get melanoma
> during which the nights will be longer the days.
Error in the first sentence. At first I thought that's a bad thing, but then also, probably more likely not written/assisted by an AI. Haha.
As with everything, I guess do it in moderation and don't be stupid...?
Planning on being out a full day under the summer sun as a very pale north European? Slob on all the sunscreen that you can and hide in the shade when possible.
A day out in mid September / mid March when the sun is not looking to murder you? Revel in it. Soak it up. Be a plant.
Also it makes a lot of difference where you are. Scandinavians rarely wear sunscreen but their UV index is much lower than, say, California, let alone Australia.
Also, critically, get regular sun exposure so that your skin adapts. Ideally do this before it gets intense.
Yeah not as a pasty white guy in Australia
Australia is exceptionally bad for the sun. It's crazy because the incidence of skin cancer is still so high even though sun protection is drilled into us since birth. I'll rant further that Australia is not even good from a UV/temperature tradeoff because the UV is always ridiculously high. Nice warm Mediterranean summer UV level is equivalent to a freezing cold winter day in Australia.
It's because you're the same latitude as Namibia, Botswana etc. Even Perth is on the same equivalent (south instead of north) as Cairo or Kuwait.
There's a reason the indigenous Australians stayed dark skinned after 40,000 years - a time frame more than long enough for the Irish to turn red-haired and pale; as a trait it's relatively fast evolving, Europe probably evolved most/all of its variation since the last ice age.
Well yes, given this has been the message since the problems with short sightedness in the east everyone still seems obsessed with "too much sun bad".
How about not making any public messaging so black and white. B&W messaging leads to polarised ideas on healthcare and everything else...
</rant>
when your skin turns pale white your body is screaming for sunlight. it wants sunlight just like your body wants food and makes you hungry. if sunlight were so deadly then everyone would have skin that was pitch black and doesnt change. but we have this insane adaptive system to make sure we are always getting a trickle of UV. why else would we evolve this system if sunlight werent extremely important?
> when your skin turns pale white your body is screaming for sunlight.
Complete bullshit.
I never realized how much solar radiation can be dangerous until I read Andy Weir's Hail Mary.
unexpected andy weir reference (luv him)
I don't think I'm going to take my health advice from an economics magazine that is published by libertarians in the UK (a famously NOT sunny place).
Economists have a habit of wandering off into other fields and misapplying statistical methods developed for economics. See their work in anti-parastic studies and all sorts of gross wannabe sociology research.
I'll wait until Chocrane steps in and says something before rejecting decades of scientific consensus.
I think this assessment is unfair. The paper [1] is not from economists. The first author is an endocrinologist. The third author is a dermatologist. As for where the authors are from, I don't see why it would matter, as long as their methodology is sound.
However, this doesn't mean one should forget about the current consensus. This is just one paper, and it takes more than that to offset the current knowledge.
[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s43630-025-00743-6
Is this the eggs/butter but for sun?
> followed 30,000 Swedish women for 20 years. It likewise found that, even after correcting for things like age, wealth and health, sun-seeking behaviour was associated with a lower chance of death from all causes.
Is it because they got exposed to sun or is it because of the "sun-seeking behavior", which probably means more physical activity?
Either way, it's too soon to be throwing away our sunscreen.
Who actually thought that getting sunlight was bad ?
Anyone who didn’t live under a rock for the last 30 years.
I've had a malignant melanoma, my mother and extended relatives had it as well (including a great uncle I never met who died from it), 4 (of my 9) siblings have had multiple, mostly those of use who have red hair/fair skin. I don't think I've ever heard of a greater risk of skin cancer due to genetics/familial occurrence than I have.
After my mother got it and had a huge chunk taken out of her leg when I was very young, we have had it drilled into our heads that the sun was going to kill us and we needed to cover up and lather in sun screen for even the slightest possibility of sun exposure.
Obviously that didn't help much as many of us still got it anyway, hah!
But yea there are some folks who are terrified of the sun. I personally think 15-20 minutes unfiltered sunlight is good for me, but beyond that I'm looking for the nearest shade or trying to cover up.
What I've heard is people who don't get sun frequently, are at higher risk of melanoma. Like no sun then sunburn = bad bad
There is also the evidence that it usually doesn't happen on the hands or face which are chronically exposed, but rather areas that are normally covered.
It is a big thing in Asia to avoid sunlight to avoid premature aging and tanning. It's an interesting parallel you can observe in parks: in my country in Europe, people will prefer to sit on the benches exposed to the sun first, in China and Korea, people will sit in the shade instead.
Lived in SE Asia fora few years and my understanding is that tan skin = outdoor labor = lower caste.
My spouse is asian and I'm N Euro - I would kill to have skin that just tans no matter how much sun you get. I think I've seen her get burns twice in over a decade and we do a lot of beach time.
The West used to have the same association. Now it's reversed, only people with lots of leisure time get to have a tan.
Quite a lot of people. People in Australia are educated about the risk of sun exposure in school for one. Another is cultures who view being pale as a beauty standard.
Slip, Slop, Slap.
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There is a lot of weird discussion on English-speaking forums that you should always always wear sunscreen, even if the day is grey, because skin cancer is a constant risk.
I do not get if it’s a massive and long-running marketing campaign that has brainwashed the entire population, if it’s because many living in US and UK have a very white skin tone thus burn easily, or what else. Skin cancer is a fact of life, but for a species that evolved in the sun, I do not believe one bit that sun exposure, which incidentally is linked to many benefits because it’s so bloody normal, is something that can only be dealt with modern technology and we should be deathly afraid of it. Sure, UV radiation can cause mutations, but our immune system has evolved over billions of years to deal with this exact problem.
By all means use sunscreen if you have to spend a lot of time in the sun and risk a very unpleasant sunburn, but I wish someone would explain the Anglo obsession with daily sunscreen routine.
> for a species that evolved in the sun, I do not believe one bit that sun exposure, which incidentally is linked to many benefits because it’s so bloody normal, is something that can only be dealt with modern technology and we should be deathly afraid of it. Sure, UV radiation can cause mutations, but our immune system has evolved over billions of years to deal with this exact problem.
Yeah, most of the time our immune system deals with it, but sometimes it misses one roge cell and you've got cancer. That's why you want to limit your exposure to mutations even if you're somewhat adapted to deal with them.
Then it's a matter of looking at studies and statistics and deciding for yourself. Personally, I'll keep putting on sunscreen, as I sunburn easily ;)
The important piece missing from both of these comments IMHO, is that sunburns are the problematic piece.
There's always going to be some risk from UV exposure, but as the parent comment points out we're evolved to deal with it and even to rely on it. There's research showing that low amounts of cellular damage is actually beneficial as it triggers cellular repair mechanisms or aptosis of senecent cells. Even here other commenters point out how exposure improved their skin or vision.
However that natural evolved state doesn't include sitting inside all week and then going outside on the weekend and getting completely toasted sunburnt!
Doing that and getting completely sunburnt overwhelms our normal cellular repair mechanism, the immune system response, etc. It's much more likely a rogue cell evades the immune system when it's swamped with such cells.
Personally I avoid sunscreen if possible for short excursions but will use it if going to the pool as I'm indoors more these years and paler.
> The important piece missing from both of these comments IMHO, is that sunburns are the problematic piece.
Then the problem is light skin tone, and the advice to wear sunscreen always, only applies to them, hence my doubts.
I do not get sunburnt if I go buy groceries or if I spend 1 hour outside, like most ethnicities on Earth; yet if I dare question the dogma of sunscreen, I get downvoted, which makes me wonder if it's at all rational. It boggles my mind how it has become a kind of innocent yet taboo argument on the (English-speaking) internet.
Just google it. I mean, there's plenty of articles that say you need to wear it even if you plan to stay indoors all day. WTF.
While we may be one species, there are very obvious differences between some ethnic groups and ancestral clusters.
Cancer is a parasite, the sun kills parasites.
Also bleach to cure corona.
Soap also kills parasites. And antibiotics!
> I wish someone would explain the Anglo obsession with daily sunscreen routine.
Because it's more about skincare for physical attraction and less about the cancer. Sun ages your skin with wrinkles, sagging, hyperpigmentation, etc.
This isn't specific to Anglo nations too. Any country where being "fair skinned" is more desirable will have lots of demand for sunscreen.
Where the medical establishment pushes it, it is largely about establishing habits for people who may get a lot of exposure that they didn't plan for.
Also, local climates differ dramatically. A couple of my worst sunburns in my life were on extremely gray days on the California coast. It is easy to fool yourself into thinking the sun isn't strong when you don't feel the heat of it. But on those kinds of days, it's just diffuse UV blasting from every direction.
I found it instructive when I got photochromatic eye glasses. Since they are UV-activated, it is like carrying a UV detection instrument around with a heads-up display. It really helped me get a better sense for what conditions and hours of the day have significant UV in my normal daily life.
It's context collapse, the curse of a shared language.
If you live in Australia or Florida and have Anglo skin, you'd best believe that's good advice.
In the natural range of the Anglo skin type, Edinburgh or Dublin, not so much.
Maybe we're getting more UV now than we evolved with?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_depletion
It's a small factor, but humans evolved in the tropics. Ancestral humans has very dark skin because of the tropical UV exposure. Then when some moved into Europe and Asia, selection pressure means they rapidly lost their pigmentation because they weren't getting enough vitamin D.
Skin aging, skin cancer, cataract.
Most East Asians: Chinese, Japanese and Koreans for a start.
Sunlight has a distinct ageing effect on skin and this is so well known that cosmetic companies can truthfully label their ointments/lotions as "anti-ageing" if they provide some sun protection effect (e.g. SPF level).
Dermatologists and doctors
The way I see it: If you live where your ancestors lived for thousands of years and if you make sure your skin gets gradually attuned to the sun each year, you probably get more health benefits. But beware if you're of Northern European ancestry living in Southern USA or Australia or if you work an office job and only seek the summer sun with pale skin.
I have no reliable and in-depth data on how many of my ancestors died of skin cancer, or how many hours they exposed themselves to sunlight, and what kind of sunlight, or what clothes they wore over those thousands of years.
Using this line of thinking is at best an attempt at rationalizing what lifestyle you wanted to live anyway.
> make sure your skin gets gradually attuned
Is this a thing? Surely DNA damage from UV is dose-dependent, in which case any greater amount of UV results in a greater chance of skin cancer.
Melanin helps protect from DNA damage by absorbing much of the UV radiation. As you get more exposure to sunlight, your skin produces more melanin resulting in more protection.
A sunburn is what you want to avoid and it's easier to get when you stayed indoors the whole year and only go outside when the sun is out full blast. I personally think this modern lifestyle is one of the reasons people get more skin cancer despite being outside less. There are studies that show that chronic sun exposure isn't that bad.
Is this a joke? Yes, it's called 'tanning'.
Having more melanin decreases the effective dose because any photon that melanin absorbs isn't going to be absorbed by your DNA.
Are you joking? I'm legitimately asking.
Primary institute of skin cancer in Australia: https://www.cancer.org.au/cancer-information/causes-and-prev...
See number 2.
I'm hypothesising you may live in a place where skin cancer is not a big issue?
Correlation versus causation and all that, but an increase in bowel cancers and a decrease in sun exposure are both well documented trends over the last few decades.
They've associated low vitamin D levels and bowel cancer, but I don't know which direction causation goes. Or if it's a third factor like more exercise.
Weren't there studies showing that 1) some health conditions correlate with low vitamin D level, 2) vitamin D supplements do nothing for these conditions?
Clearly, there's a third variable that causes both. Since we don't understand what the heck it is and I like being in the sun despite being pale (nearly never getting burned, although I did get burned a lot as a teen), I personally call it SUN MAGIC.
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