13 ms·

Is Sunscreen the New Margarine?

329 points by cribbles 8y ago

projektfu 8y ago
This article breaks Betteridge's law. The answer is not "no", but it might not be "yes". In fact, the article promotes the viewpoint that sun exposure is actually good for you, whereas butter is probably not essential. If the sunscreen recommendations turn out to be too strong, this would be good news for me, as I have never liked having to apply sunscreen and dislike the scolds who push it on me when I don't feel I need it. But the article glosses over the fact that people who tend to burn rather than tan get more melanomas, and that melanoma can be a very insidious cancer. So, if I know I'm going to get a lot of exposure (beach, air show, whatever) I am going to use sunscreen to prevent burns.
- darkmighty 8y ago
  Yes I think it's good not to be carried away and burning yourself is definitely not good. What's certainly good for you is getting consistent, long term exposure that's compatible with your levels of tan.
  - paganel 8y ago
    That was my take on it, also. If you’re a very light-skin person living in Australia (probably because your ancestors have come there from gloomier places like Ireland and Scotland) then it’s probably a wise choice to not let go of using sunscreen. On the other hand, it seems that vitamin D supplements do nothing for the darker skin people who happen to work in places like Seattle or even Amsterdam (I have a former colleague who used to complain about the latter as always being cloudy).
    - democracy 8y ago
      We went to the Gold Coast a few years ago and I got terrible scars (that are still visible) after one hour of just walking around and looking for a bottle shop with no sunscreen on my skin. It definitely hurt my body as well as my holiday plans.
- mrfusion 8y ago
  I propose mrfusions law: in any discussion of an article with a headline ending in a question, someone will mention Betteridge’s law.
  - projektfu 8y ago
    I find it helpful to know if the answer is no. Betteridge's law suggests you can avoid reading the article because the headline writer is trumping up the findings.
  - pstuart 8y ago
    Nothing personal, but to keep the namespace clean it should probably be the Betteridge Effect.
- tom_ 8y ago
  The problem is that you aren't interpreting the title literally enough...
jonstewart 8y ago
There are obviously some biological processes that depend on sunlight, but it also seems likely that sun exposure is a signal for “is active outside.”
- adrianmonk 8y ago
  Or even more broadly, is active in general terms, not necessarily just outdoors and not necessarily just physically. I think it's likely that being active is positively correlated with good health. probably for two reasons. One is it is probably good for you to keep active. Too, if you have health issues, you probably are more likely to just stick around the house and not do as much.
angry_octet 8y ago
This is worse than pseudo science, it is complete mumbo jumbo, totally misrepesenting and misquoting sources. To think that the author has been selected as an MIT Science Journalism fellow is truly mind boggling. https://ksj.mit.edu/dispatches/2017/12/07/this-years-fellows-rowan-jacobsen/ https://ksj.mit.edu/dispatches/2017/12/07/this-years-fellows... I can truly say that I look forward to reading of the author's death from melanoma.
- shhehebehdh 8y ago
  While I appreciate the note of contradiction, it would be super helpful to those of us less familiar with the research if you would specify what parts are wrong or pseudoscience. I must admit the article seemed somewhat convincing to me, although my prior was strongly in favor of sunscreen so it hasn’t flipped me all the way to bathing in the noon sun for five hours without any protection.
- frereubu 8y ago
  You're living up to your user name, but I dislike reading someone wishing death on someone else, particularly on HN, from which I expect better. Like the other reply, I would also be interested in a more thoughtful rebuttal rather than this kind of vicious ad-hominem attack.
  - angry_octet 8y ago
    When you live in a culture that used to worship the sun and many friends and relatives have died and or been scarred by skin cancer, you lose tolerance for people pooh poohing UV exposure. Blatantly misrepresenting advice as he does (saying sun exposure is recommended) is absolutely ghastly. I rate him just a tad less awful than Andrew Wakefield, the anti-vaxxer.
- zeroname 8y ago
  What qualifies you to pass on such harsh judgement? What research on the topic have you done? I'd be very interested in having the article debunked, but I can't corroborate the accusation that sources have been "totally misrepresented" and "misquoted". Granted, I've merely given it a cursory glance.
martokus 8y ago
To;Dr: As with anything, balance is needed. Use your judgement wisely.
- zeroname 8y ago
  That's not the takeaway at all. The article basically insinuates that you shouldn't use sunscreen, that you should expose yourself to the sun for health reasons and that Vitamin D supplements are actually useless.
  - pstuart 8y ago
    I'd argue that sunscreen on the face might not be a bad thing if there's enough exposure on the rest of the body.
    - StavrosK 8y ago
      As someone who lives in a sunny Mediterranean country, there's nothing wrong with a few minutes' walk without sunscreen in the midday sun, but the hours of sunbathing (even with sunscreen) don't look very pleasant to me.
      - njarboe 8y ago
        People's own feeling on how the sun feels on their skin without sunscreen might be a great indicator of how good it is for you and an individual. Most people don't pay much attention to that, I would guess, but as a person with fairly light complexion (German, French, English, Irish, + minor unknown other) that grew up in sunny northern New Mexico, I find that the direct sun on a summer day feels good for just 5-15 minutes, while on a cold winter day I enjoy it much longer.
        StavrosK 8y ago
        I agree, that's what I go by as well. After a few minutes it becomes uncomfortable in the summer, and I look for shade. The only exception is when you're swimming in the sea, when you don't really feel the sun's rays.
paulsutter 8y ago
Interesting news almost completely buried in overpolarized nonsense: sunlight is beneficial beyond vitamin D. Of course, sun burns are still bad for you, and excessive tanning will make you look old at a young age. So yes do use sunscreen in moderation but don’t avoid the sun.
- zeroname 8y ago
  > sunlight is beneficial beyond vitamin D. Is it though? Do we actually have the data that says so, or do we have data that has tons of other factors mixed in, where sunlight exposure happens to be correlated with better health? > So yes do use sunscreen in moderation but don’t avoid the sun. Using sunscreen (according to the article) is equivalent to avoiding the sun, as it blocks production of Vitamin D.
  - PKop 8y ago
    > Is it though? Do we actually have the data that says so, or do we have data that has tons of other factors mixed in, where sunlight exposure happens to be correlated with better health? What other kind of data would you need, or expect to see? Shouldn't the onus be on people claiming that, given the reality of human evolution and existence, blocking sun exposure is the way to go? The article points out risks mitigated by sun exposure (and their corresponding mortality rates), and the main negative (Melanoma) and its lower incidence. On net I think the "minimize sun exposure" advocates have a weaker argument. As article points out this is eerily similar to low-fat, cholesterol fear mongering from decades ago. Funny a similar recommendation (blood pressure pills) is given by doctors here.
    - Gimpei 8y ago
      What I'd hope to see is randomized studies or studies that exploit some random variation for identification. The studies mentioned in the article all appear to rely on regressions controlling for observables. But of course there could be plenty of unobservable factors that are driving the result: the type of people that spend a lot of time in the sun are healthier for other reasons. I haven't read Weller's work though so maybe he has some RCTs too or maybe someone else does.
amelius 8y ago
I have a small blacklight installed in my home, and I turn it on a couple of hours a week when I watch TV. It definitely makes me feel more relaxed, though I'm unsure of the actual mechanism. Vitamin d is not the problem since I take plenty of it in the form of supplements and fatty fish. Recently I discovered that blue light can help break down bilirubin in the blood, and since I have Gilbert's syndrome, that might be one explanation.
- burlesona 8y ago
  According to this article, Vitamin D supplementation is showing not to “work,” and the theory is that the correlation with health is actually as a marker for UVB exposure. If your black light is putting out UVB then maybe that’s what’s helping you?
  - zenexer 8y ago
    Pretty sure they mostly (entirely?) put out UVA.
    - burlesona 8y ago
      Interesting. According to the article that’s the “bad” UV. I wonder if there’s a market for UVB lights?
      - groestl 8y ago
        Sure! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UV-B_lamps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UV-B_lamps Or do you mean market as in "consumer market"?
        crazygringo 8y ago
        Is there a consumer market? A quick search on Amazon reveals UVB lamps are mainly either expensive ($250) and for people with skin problems, or else cheap and low-powered ($30) for reptiles. There doesn't seem to be anything for a kind of full-body health use?
burlesona 8y ago
So TLDR; - a bunch of studies have shown Vitamin D strongly correlates with health - however more studies show supplementation of Vitamin D does not give the same outcomes - Thus probably Vitamin D is not the cause, rather just an indicator for sun exposure, and sun exposure is what’s good for you - lots of research showing sun exposure has many befits and avoiding it has high risks - as for melanoma, it’s less common than you think and the risk is mostly sunburn not sun exposure in general - this is more serious for people with darker skin whose bodies are better adapted to more sunlight and have much lower risk of skin cancer but need more sunlight to get the health benefits Conclusion: go outside a lot and get sun, just do it gradually and don’t shock your system with sunburn. If you’re not getting sunburn then your melanoma risk is very low while the other benefits are very high. That is interesting to read, and it also feels really common-sense to me. I definitely feel better when I’m getting good sun exposure, and I can feel it in the winter when I’m not. Most interesting to me is the studies showing Vitamin D supplementation is not effective for health benefits. That’s too bad because my D levels tend to be low and I have supplemented in the past, but not shocking because it’s never really felt different to me when supplementing.
- PKop 8y ago
  One other point to highlight: Many of the doctors quoted in the article couldn't dispute the data (reminiscent of nutrition conventional wisdom) but inexplicably advocated not to get benefits mentioned from sun, but instead take statins/blood pressure drugs. This is ridiculous, and if one looks into the criticisms of these drugs, mirrors the terrible advice peddled by same doctors as nutrition advice, to the detriment of millions. Why does this mentality persist, always and everywhere take blood pressure drugs? Madness.
  - burlesona 8y ago
    Well, I’ve come to see it that western primary care doctors main job is to try and match your symptoms to a pill that can help. I’m not trying to disparage all the doctors or say they do nothing else. But if you look at it like that, then a lot of the behavior makes sense. “I don’t know about sun exposure, but I’m confident this pill will help you, so avoid the sun and take the pill.”
pgcudahy 8y ago
This article is based on the work of Richard Weller who is trying to monetize them at Relaxsol[relaxsol.com]. I didn't find any disclosure of this in the article. The mainstream view is in a paragraph buried deep: "“I don’t argue with their data,” says David Fisher, chair of the dermatology department at Massachusetts General Hospital. “But I do disagree with the implications.” The risks of skin cancer, he believes, far outweigh the benefits of sun exposure. “Somebody might take these conclusions to mean that the skin-cancer risk is worth it to lower all-cause mortality or to get a benefit in blood pressure,” he says. “I strongly disagree with that." It is not worth it, he says, unless all other options for lowering blood pressure are exhausted. Instead he recommends vitamin D pills and hypertension drugs as safer approaches."
- PKop 8y ago
  Always they say take pills. People should seriously look into criticism of massive overprescribing of statins. It's crazy this advice always comes in place of natural substitutes (low carb keto diet, prudent sun exposure. No.. just take pills that's surely healthier). Here's a reference for alternative viewpoint on statins & cholesterol if anyone is interested: https://www.amazon.com/Cholesterol-Clarity-What-Wrong-Numbers-ebook/dp/B00ESMDGE8/ref=pd_sim_351_7?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=B00ESMDGE8&pd_rd_r=e33e5a6f-1680-11e9-a96d-590add2e911b&pd_rd_w=eOtTs&pd_rd_wg=kauv1&pf_rd_p=18bb0b78-4200-49b9-ac91-f141d61a1780&pf_rd_r=83M7XRA6SBD8S7VXCTQ3&psc=1&refRID=83M7XRA6SBD8S7VXCTQ3 https://www.amazon.com/Cholesterol-Clarity-What-Wrong-Number...
  - arkades 8y ago
    The first line recommendation is always diet and exercise. Pills are second line. Some docs burn out and just start giving pills first line because 99,999% of patients do not ever do the diet and exercise, even after repeated counseling rounds.
    - ip26 8y ago
      And the stipulation in this discussion is that maybe we're going to learn in the next decade that going outside should have been a first line recommendation, with pills second line. There's melanoma risk with sun exposure- but there's e-coli with produce, and a bevy of sports-related injuries.
alexandercrohde 8y ago
Summary: 1. Research shows the most popular vitamin supplements aren't useful. This turns out to include D supplements. 2. This is strange because "People with low levels of vitamin D in their blood have significantly higher rates of virtually every disease and disorder you can think of" 3. One theory to explain this is that Vitamin D was acting as simply a marker for sun-exposure. This is put forth by Richard Weller. 4. To add evidence, Weller found that exposing people to sunlight for 30 minutes reduced blood pressure and increased nitric oxide levels. 5. Article dispells concerns about sun exposure by pointing that the type of skin cancer one is likely to get from the sun is actually very safe (carcinomas) as compared to melanoma (1-3% of cases). 6. Cites a study 30,000 Swedish sunbathing women and found greater health and decreased odds of dying from a melanoma. 7. Observes the counter-intuitive nature of sun-exposure being harmful to a species that evolved outdoors. 8. Questions the validity of SPF recommendations when they don't factor in race / skin-tone. 9. Observes an example of "common knowledge" being wrong with margarine which was wrongly perceived to be healthier than butter for a long time. Suggests the very thing may be happening here.
- jcims 8y ago
  Thanks so much, I was interested in the content but something about the article rubbed me the wrong way and I couldn’t make it through.
- raverbashing 8y ago
  Nice summary It usually goes as "Vitamin D is not useful for healthy individuals" which is a nice example of circular reasoning (probably because they get enough sun exposure or have good levels of Vit. D from other sources) Oh yeah and tests checking Vitamin D's effects on things it was never claimed to help, like "found no impact on cancer, heart disease, or stroke." (Maybe cancer, but still) You will still get some Vit D through sun even with sunscreen on > Yes, but skin cancer kills surprisingly few people: less than 3 per 100,000 in the U.S. each year. Tell that to people in Australia or some other country directly below the Ozone layer hole But the news that production of NO is more important than Vit D is certainly interesting
  - deleted 8y ago
nemetroid 8y ago
I found the tabloid-style writing very difficult to read, and it did not inspire confidence in the content of the article.
nabla9 8y ago
Rebuking one point in the article. This article confuses treating vitamin D deficiency to taking high doses of vitamin D. 1) Studies show that excess amount of vitamin D provides no benefits against cancer, heart disease and stroke. 2) Studies also show that vitamin D deficiency is related to many illness. Taking supplement protects against them. You can determine if you have vitamin D deficiency with simple blood test.
- pakitan 8y ago
  > 2) Studies also show that vitamin D deficiency is related to many illness. Taking supplement protects against them. That's hardly a "rebuke". First, I'll note that you carefully used the word "related" instead of "causing" or "a major factor". Then again, you omitted "Studies show that..." from your second sentence, probably because there are no studies showing that people with Vitamin D deficiency, taking supplements, are doing any better than the ones that don't. In fact there is a meta-study, quoted by the article, that suggests they don't: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landia/article/PIIS2213-8587(13)70165-7/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landia/article/PIIS2213-8...
djohnston 8y ago
if this turns out to have weight im going to need to switch my routine, but i'll probably continue to use sunscreen on my face (but maybe not my arms anymore). the anti-aging effects are important to me, but particularly on the face, so there might be a nice middle ground here, as long as you're wearing a t-shirt.
- ip26 8y ago
  Protecting the face is rational, for many people it gets the most sun exposure of any part of your body. Heard from my dermatologist two of the most common skin cancer locations in our community are the lower lip and lower eyelid, which of course are two facets of your face that are most perpendicular to the sun at peak UV hours. I figure, and this is just me, that if you want to get sun exposure, it's probably best to expose more skin for less time. If the risk is LNT, it's all the same. If it's not, you lower the total risk.
  - djohnston 8y ago
    what does LNT mean?
rsync 8y ago
I wonder about the effects of breathing sunscreen. In affluent, white, suburban United States it is very common to see the religious application of sunblock to children in the specific form of aerosol spray delivery. Every day at the park stand still for a big cloud of aerosolized sunblock all over your face and arms, etc. Speaking more generally, my wife and I often discuss this or that terrible practice of health or habit or child-rearing from our own parents' generation and I am always inclined to extrapolate forward: "what are we doing right now that our kids are going to look back on with horror and amazement?" For a long time the sunblock regime has been near the top of the list ...
- jws 8y ago
  In the 90s we used to use purple sunscreen on the kids which then turned clear after exposure to air. It made it easy to get a complete, uniform coating. I never see that for sale anymore, just waiting for the news why.
  - copperx 8y ago
    That sounds terrific. I always anxious about not applying sunscreen completely.
- ryall 8y ago
  Had a long conversation with a skin cancer specialist about the harmful effects of sunscreen. While he agreed that there can be some nasty chemicals found in sunscreen he ended the discussion with the parting words "At the end of the day it's the people that _don't_ use sunscreen that we see here in the clinic, not the people that do"
  - pomber 8y ago
    Is it a skin cancer clinic? Maybe the people that _do_ use sunscreen go to another clinic (where they don't ask about sunscreen usage)
  - oska 8y ago
    > "At the end of the day it's the people that _don't_ use sunscreen that we see here in the clinic, not the people that do" I'm guessing you're quoting this somewhat ironically but that's really bad logic on the doctor's part.
guelo 8y ago
The human evolution argument is interesting to think about because humans are the only fur-less mammals so any advantages to sun exposure are unique to us.
- yesenadam 8y ago
  >humans are the only fur-less mammals Naked mole-rats beg to differ. Although yeah, I don't think they get much sun exposure. But apparently they never get cancer, maybe we could learn from them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_mole-rat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_mole-rat
manmal 8y ago
Long-term (3+ years) supplementation of vitamin D significantly decreases all-cause mortality [1]. So yeah, take the supps if you don't get enough sunlight. But personally I am convinced that sunlight exposure, and additional near-infrared "supplementation" are preferable. Nitric oxide release is a double whammy because it reduces stress within cells, and promotes endothelial health (as mentioned in the article). 1: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24349197 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24349197
- e40 8y ago
  That is refuted by this: http://sci-hub.tw/https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1809944 http://sci-hub.tw/https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM...
  - manmal 8y ago
    Great find (sibling comment posted the same btw). I was actually looking for papers like this but didn't find any.
- reinhardt1053 8y ago
  Recent long study results (5.3 years follow up) show no benefit on vitamin D supplement: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1811403 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1811403
  - solinent 8y ago
    Only 2000IU per day. I'd like to see one with 10000IU.
  - manmal 8y ago
    Thank you!
benj111 8y ago
So everything in moderation, including sun. Are there any sensible exceptions to that rule?
- jdminhbg 8y ago
  There are no exceptions because it’s a tautology. What’s moderation is defined by what’s good for you. Nobody recommends fentanyl in moderation.
  - benj111 8y ago
    Not necessarily. Its potentially true that consuming more of a veg increases health, without an upper bound, or at least an upper bound above 'moderation'. That doesn't fit in with your definition of moderation, but I would say moderation has both an upper and lower bound.
    - jdminhbg 8y ago
      That's exactly the tautology: "Moderation" is "the amount that is good for you." So there are no exceptions to "moderation is good for you." How else would you define "moderation" in this context without a reference to the amount of something that is beneficial? It's not as if "moderate" is an amount that exists out of context that can be applied to both donuts and broccoli without knowing which one of those is good for you.
      - benj111 8y ago
        Moderation: 1. the quality of being moderate; restraint; avoidance of extremes or excesses; temperance. [1] A 10kg portion of broccoli might be better for you than the usual recommended portion. I would not say that's a moderate amount of broccoli though. [1] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/moderation https://www.dictionary.com/browse/moderation Edit: Also there isn't really a healthy amount of doughnuts you can eat, so by your definition, a moderate amount would be zero. Which isn't really what the 'everything in moderation' rule means.
  - 8y ago
qwerty456127 8y ago
According to another research[1] vitamin D supplementation actually changes a lot of taken in adequate (by orders of magnitude higher than the official RDA) doses regularly (and it also affects mood). So I conclude that what we need is to also supplement nitric oxide, not just vitamin D alone. I had never feared sun and don't even use sunscreens but I neither live in a particularly sunny area nor have enough spare time for regular sunbathing so supplements still are the only way to get enough. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15867918 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15867918
brandonmenc 8y ago
> How did we get through the Neolithic Era without sunscreen? Actually, perfectly well. It's modern times. We optimize for long individual lives, not propagation of the species. As lifespans increase, so should efforts to avoid cumulative, damaging radiation. Similarly, heavy meat consumption gave early humans an advantage, but you shouldn't adopt that caveman behavior for a 100-year lifespan - it doesn't "work" at that scale.
- pakitan 8y ago
  The fact that humans evolved without access to sunscreen is just a starting point, when someone is considering whether to use sunscreen or not. You chose to take issue with that one sentence, while ignoring everything else in the article. And the article suggests that if you actually want to optimize for a 100-year lifespan, you certainly shouldn't douse yourself with sunblock, every time you go outside.
- darkpuma 8y ago
  Most of the average lifespan increases we've seen have come from reduced infant and childbirth mortality, not from making the elderly live to be even more elderly. There has certainly been some of that, but it's far less significant than the infant and childbirth mortality improvements. >Rowbotham and Clayton (JRSM 2008;101:454–62) make a very important point when they draw attention to the life expectancy at birth compared to life expectancy at 5+ years of age.1 They state ‘… life expectancy in the mid-Victorian period was not markedly different from what it is today. Once infant mortality is stripped out, life expectancy at 5 years was 75 for men and 73 for women.’ In 1995 Griffin2 produced a comparison of life expectancy of mature men (15+years of age) at different points in history over the last 3000 years >The change in life expectancy of mature men^ has not changed as dramatically over 3000 years as might be expected, although this data must of necessity refer to privileged members of society. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2625386/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2625386/ Note also that being economically or socially privileged would have given these men better access to nutrition, however it would have also given them better access to contemporary 'medicine' which may very well have been more hazardous to their health than no medical intervention at all. How many wealthy people in the past were poisoned by their well-meaning doctors? I'd wager more than were saved. ^ (The numbers for women are very different, because women used to frequently die during childbirth, but this is comparatively rare today.)
rb808 8y ago
There was a similar article in Australia a few months back https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/health-and-wellness/here-comes-the-sun-defending-our-summer-rays-20181120-p50h2j.html https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/health-and-wellness/here-co...
paavoova 8y ago
Related: many of the components of sunscreen break down into free radicals in the process of absorbing UV, which are in effect (but perhaps not in practice) more damaging than UV exposure itself. Quick source I dug up, but there's many more (and the industry appears to be aware of this issue and is doing R&D): "Sunscreens Inadequately Protect Against Ultraviolet-A-Induced Free Radicals in Skin: Implications for Skin Aging and Melanoma" [1] [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022202X15304437 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022202X1...
Eli_P 8y ago
Wanna share my experience, the TL;DR is that if you feel well you shouldn't expose yourself to the sun or use parasol or sunscreen, because only narrow UV spectrum is good, and sun doesn't care. I've had a severe form of psoriasis, majorly on scalp. Over 1/3 scalp looked like it had been rubbed with a sandpaper to near-bleeding sores. I tried to different docs, nobody told me what it is, I had no option but to do my own research. I found that it can be treated with ultraviolet, but not all of UVs are good for you, there are UVA, UVB and their sub-spectrums. The only good for health UV is UVB with a narrow peak at 310nm wavelength. Those tanning beds for bronze effect are wide band UVA+UVB and not good at all neither for vitamin D, nor for your health in general. So I had bought a UVB 310nm medical lamp, shaved my head, and started using UVB since june, it's been a half year experiment on myself. I started with long, over 10 minute sessions to figure out a limit where I do get burned (>10 minutes). Later I reduced down to 5 min, two times a week, and almost haven't used UVB recently. I don't have vitamin D blood meter, my criteria is a state of my skin, i.e. absence of pain on palpation, less itching, no bleeding sores, no reddening. Looks like UVB works for me, what I can tell from my experiment. In comparison with sun, UVB lamp with timer showed to be more safe, IMO. Three hours outdoors w/o sunscreen gives a sunburn very likely; but a 5 min/day UVB lamp exposure seems to be safe. I have a few tiny colored skin patches over body, didn't cover them or anything, just ignored them; they have become less distinguishable after UV. However, if you have patches like birthmarks, you must track their borders. When borders become blurred, that's a not good sign, you gotta them checked by your dermatologist. I think there could be some app to track colored skin patches, there is a bunch of open source libs for that[1]. [1] https://github.com/search?q=skin+cancer https://github.com/search?q=skin+cancer
msamwald 8y ago
The article they cite claims that people who were less exposed to sun had higher disease risk [1]. As far as I saw, the cited article does not include sunscreen use in the analysis. So it might very well be that sun exposure while wearing sunscreen might have the same benefit, minus the increased skin cancer risk and accelerated skin aging. EDIT: Besides that, there is very likely a huge confounding effect that was probably not properly corrected for. The persons in the "high sun exposure" group were much healthier than in the "avoiding sun exposure" group right from the start (Table 1)! [1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/joim.12496 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/joim.12496
DenisM 8y ago
It's remarkable how much attention is given to the quantity of the desirable Sun exposure, and how little thought is spent on the quality of the light. Absent sunscreen the UV-heavy mid-day Sun in the tropics gives me a sunburn in 15 minutes, while a morning exposure at the same locale remains perfectly safe for all the three hours that the morning lasts. The turning point is when the Sun crosses 45% boundary (when a match stuck in the sand becomes taller than its shadow), so my schedule is beach-time 6-9am and 3-6pm, while the rest of the time is spent sleeping, eating, working, and sightseeing. I wish I could sell you some dietary supplement with this fantastic advice, but none is needed. Well, maybe a branded box of matches is in order?..
- drited 8y ago
  Interesting stuff. What country is this? What skin complexion?
  - DenisM 8y ago
    Typical caucasian skin - not pale, not dark. The places were Hawaii and Costa Rica, but it should work the same anywhere in the tropics - just make use of the match-sand trick to adjust for the local timezone.
- argonaut 8y ago
  But the amount of vitamin D synthesized is proportional to the amount of UV radiation received.
- wyclif 8y ago
  I can attest to this because right now I'm about 13 degrees above the equator, in the Philippines. On top of that, I'm Anglo and my ancestors are uniformly from the region now known as the United Kingdom, so my complexion is quite fair. The midday sun is very bright and harsh here in SE Asia. I stay out in the middle of the day as much as possible, but get a lot of sunlight in the early morning and late in the afternoon.
jackfoxy 8y ago
How much are UVA and UVB blocked by the atmosphere in higher latitudes during winter months? UVB is blocked by the ozone layer, so I would expect in winter even less reaches the Earth's surface.
chiefalchemist 8y ago
The new margarine? Nah. No one was ever a fan of margarine. Feels more like the new sugar. Public was told to give up X (fat) in favor of Y (sugar) only to find said recommendation was paid for by Industry Y. The species has survived this long for a reason. What Mother Nature has to offer us is good for us. Why do we keep believing we can get it more better?
purplezooey 8y ago
Everything is the new smoking. Ambien. Deli meats. Roasted things. Now sunscreen. Are we supposed to live in a hobbit hole and eat boiled roots?
thisismyusernam 8y ago
I was really enjoying this article, which is intelligently written (even though it's obvious the author has made up their mind and is trying to convince me, I happen to agree with them). That is until this line: > From its inception in the mid-1800s, margarine had always been considered creepers, a freakish substitute for people who couldn’t afford real butter. When did "creepers" become a word journalists can use in a non-ironic way?
popinman322 8y ago
I find it odd that Examine.com[0] hasn't been mentioned yet. There have been studies of vitamin D supplementation; these have been specifically about supplementation and not just correlation with blood levels of vitamin D. I'm sure that sun exposure has additional effects past vitamin D production given how messy biology is, but it's not clear to me that unprotected sun exposure is the best way to get those additional effects. For example, if blocking UVA and letting in some amount of UVB gets the benefits of both sunscreen and sun exposure, then I'm all for it. However, it doesn't seem like we have enough information to make an informed decision yet. [0] https://examine.com/supplements/vitamin-d/ https://examine.com/supplements/vitamin-d/
chx 8y ago
Health wise , so much we are told turns out to be upside down. Say, chlosterol. In 1977 the Framingham Study told us higher HDL levels and lower LDL levels are associated with a reduced risk of coronary heart disease. Not to mention later studies showing statin lowers LDL not only coronaries but other cardiovascular diseases and even stroke (10.1002/14651858.CD004816.pub5). Well, turns out higher cholesterol only correlates with heart disease under 50 years old. Damning it all is a 2016 study showing above 60 actually higher LDL correlates with longer life... And then it turns out though niacin brings down your cholesterol but has no effects on cardiovascular events. And then Pfizer abandoned a drug which raised HDL -- but actually raised the risk of such events. Whopsie! https://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/03/health/03pfizer.html https://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/03/health/03pfizer.html The whole good/bad cholesterol thing is total, absolute bunk science proven wrong multiple times from multiple angles. (Hope I didn't get wrong the various lower/higher things.) Also, in general, evidence is mounting that all food related studies are useless simply because humans with different genomes (surprise!) react differently to food and we do not understand yet which genes correlate with which food causing what. I mean, this makes so much sense, imagine that someone asserted that seven billion beings with different genetic composition reacts the same to all foods. That's absolutely laughable and yet, you are getting these advices of what to eat and what not to eat in general. What is beginning to become clear is that we do not know anything at all about how humans react to the food they intake. First we started with trying to see how they react to "fats", "carbohydrates", "proteins" and so on. But turns out foods are not just those but also vitamins and then it turns out no matter how you put together fats, carbohydrates, proteins and vitamins it still won't resemble anything food like. We go to smaller and smaller components trying to find the composition of food -- but it just doesn't work. So you have an unknown on the food end and another unknown on the human end and yet we are told to follow certain diets. Which of course change every decade or so when it all falls apart.
jpiabrantes 8y ago
I always thought there should have been an enormous evolutionary pressure for humans to have different skin tones in different geographies. If sunlight is bad for skin than we should all be black or tanned all the time. However, if you don't live in a sunny area and you have a tan you might not getting enough Vitamin D. Vitamin D must be very important in order to make us evolve to have different skin tones and to tan according to the seasons.
- yesenadam 8y ago
  >Vitamin D must be very important in order to make us evolve to have different skin tones I'm no expert, but I believe it's thought that white skin must have evolved from sexual selection (i.e. lighter skin was thought more attractive), since it happened too quickly for any other explanation.
- gerbilly 8y ago
  The article mentions we store vitamin D for use in the winter. It also suggests pale skin may have evolved to allow us to produce way more vitamin D in the summer to compensate for cloudy winters. So, the advice would seem to be, go outside in the sun during the summer if you have pale skin.
anotherevan 8y ago
Whilst I understood the analogy, a part of my brain that dislikes poorly worded headlines thought to itself, "But sunscreen tastes terrible on toast."
crazygringo 8y ago
So for those of us in the winter (like right now in NYC), what are we supposed to do for health, to protect against the diseases whose rates are increased by lack of sufficient sunlight? If vitamin D supplements aren't the solution, are we supposed to get UV lamps for daily exposure at home after getting out of the shower? Totally serious question -- anyone got any ideas? I'm actually surprised the article didn't cover it.
- kovach 8y ago
  Vitamin D supplements do help your immune system, reducing respiratory tract infections, and seem to help with some autoimmune diseases. There have also been some positive findings regarding clinical depression, and improved bone health. Currently there is no evidence that they help with cancer or cardiovascular disease, but that doesn't mean that someone who is deficient should not try to solve that deficiency with supplements. Dosing the supplements is the difficult part, ingested Vitamin D absorption is different from person to person, and it's further complicated by variable sun exposure and skin production. 4000 IU per day should be a safe dose, but it's probably not enough with zero sun exposure during winter...
wolfv 8y ago
Dr. Greger has a different take on the data. From https://nutritionfacts.org/video/the-risks-and-benefits-of-sensible-sun-exposure/ https://nutritionfacts.org/video/the-risks-and-benefits-of-s... (transcript and sources cited are below the video) Concerning the Swedish study: Why would those that run around outside enough to get skin cancer live longer? Maybe it’s because they’re running around outside. More exercise may explain why they live longer. And here in the U.S., more UV exposure was associated with a shorter, not longer, lifespan. Estimates about vitamin D preventing internal cancers are from intervention studies involving giving people vitamin D supplements (not exposing people to UV rays).
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
pcvarmint 8y ago
I have osteomalacia, and I take Vitamin D, Calcium and Alendronate for it. I have suffered multiple spontaneous bone fractures. There is not enough sun where I live (Seattle), so unless I go to a tanning bed, I need to get my vitamin D through supplements. Survey of literature: [0] https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-rise-and-inevitable-fall-of-vitamin-d/ https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-rise-and-inevitable-fal... [1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11606-016-3645-y https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11606-016-3645-... [2] https://www.jabfm.org/content/22/6/698.long https://www.jabfm.org/content/22/6/698.long [3] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/290490087_Evaluation_of_knowledge_practices_of_vitamin_d_and_attitude_toward_sunlight_among_Indian_students https://www.researchgate.net/publication/290490087_Evaluatio... [4] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landia/article/PIIS2213-8587(18)30265-1/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landia/article/PIIS2213-8... [5] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5986441/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5986441/ [6] https://www.bmj.com/content/362/bmj.k3225 https://www.bmj.com/content/362/bmj.k3225 [7] https://www.bmj.com/content/355/bmj.i6201 https://www.bmj.com/content/355/bmj.i6201

329 points by cribbles 8y ago

This article breaks Betteridge's law. The answer is not "no", but it might not be "yes". In fact, the article promotes the viewpoint that sun exposure is actually good for you, whereas butter is probably not essential. If the sunscreen recommendations turn out to be too strong, this would be good news for me, as I have never liked having to apply sunscreen and dislike the scolds who push it on me when I don't feel I need it. But the article glosses over the fact that people who tend to burn rather than tan get more melanomas, and that melanoma can be a very insidious cancer. So, if I know I'm going to get a lot of exposure (beach, air show, whatever) I am going to use sunscreen to prevent burns.

darkmighty 8y ago
Yes I think it's good not to be carried away and burning yourself is definitely not good. What's certainly good for you is getting consistent, long term exposure that's compatible with your levels of tan.
- paganel 8y ago
  That was my take on it, also. If you’re a very light-skin person living in Australia (probably because your ancestors have come there from gloomier places like Ireland and Scotland) then it’s probably a wise choice to not let go of using sunscreen. On the other hand, it seems that vitamin D supplements do nothing for the darker skin people who happen to work in places like Seattle or even Amsterdam (I have a former colleague who used to complain about the latter as always being cloudy).
  - democracy 8y ago
    We went to the Gold Coast a few years ago and I got terrible scars (that are still visible) after one hour of just walking around and looking for a bottle shop with no sunscreen on my skin. It definitely hurt my body as well as my holiday plans.
mrfusion 8y ago
I propose mrfusions law: in any discussion of an article with a headline ending in a question, someone will mention Betteridge’s law.
- projektfu 8y ago
  I find it helpful to know if the answer is no. Betteridge's law suggests you can avoid reading the article because the headline writer is trumping up the findings.
- pstuart 8y ago
  Nothing personal, but to keep the namespace clean it should probably be the Betteridge Effect.
tom_ 8y ago
The problem is that you aren't interpreting the title literally enough...

jonstewart 8y ago

There are obviously some biological processes that depend on sunlight, but it also seems likely that sun exposure is a signal for “is active outside.”

adrianmonk 8y ago
Or even more broadly, is active in general terms, not necessarily just outdoors and not necessarily just physically. I think it's likely that being active is positively correlated with good health. probably for two reasons. One is it is probably good for you to keep active. Too, if you have health issues, you probably are more likely to just stick around the house and not do as much.

angry_octet 8y ago

This is worse than pseudo science, it is complete mumbo jumbo, totally misrepesenting and misquoting sources. To think that the author has been selected as an MIT Science Journalism fellow is truly mind boggling. https://ksj.mit.edu/dispatches/2017/12/07/this-years-fellows-rowan-jacobsen/ https://ksj.mit.edu/dispatches/2017/12/07/this-years-fellows... I can truly say that I look forward to reading of the author's death from melanoma.

shhehebehdh 8y ago
While I appreciate the note of contradiction, it would be super helpful to those of us less familiar with the research if you would specify what parts are wrong or pseudoscience. I must admit the article seemed somewhat convincing to me, although my prior was strongly in favor of sunscreen so it hasn’t flipped me all the way to bathing in the noon sun for five hours without any protection.
frereubu 8y ago
You're living up to your user name, but I dislike reading someone wishing death on someone else, particularly on HN, from which I expect better. Like the other reply, I would also be interested in a more thoughtful rebuttal rather than this kind of vicious ad-hominem attack.
- angry_octet 8y ago
  When you live in a culture that used to worship the sun and many friends and relatives have died and or been scarred by skin cancer, you lose tolerance for people pooh poohing UV exposure. Blatantly misrepresenting advice as he does (saying sun exposure is recommended) is absolutely ghastly. I rate him just a tad less awful than Andrew Wakefield, the anti-vaxxer.
zeroname 8y ago
What qualifies you to pass on such harsh judgement? What research on the topic have you done? I'd be very interested in having the article debunked, but I can't corroborate the accusation that sources have been "totally misrepresented" and "misquoted". Granted, I've merely given it a cursory glance.

martokus 8y ago

To;Dr: As with anything, balance is needed. Use your judgement wisely.

zeroname 8y ago
That's not the takeaway at all. The article basically insinuates that you shouldn't use sunscreen, that you should expose yourself to the sun for health reasons and that Vitamin D supplements are actually useless.
- pstuart 8y ago
  I'd argue that sunscreen on the face might not be a bad thing if there's enough exposure on the rest of the body.
  - StavrosK 8y ago
    As someone who lives in a sunny Mediterranean country, there's nothing wrong with a few minutes' walk without sunscreen in the midday sun, but the hours of sunbathing (even with sunscreen) don't look very pleasant to me.
    - njarboe 8y ago
      People's own feeling on how the sun feels on their skin without sunscreen might be a great indicator of how good it is for you and an individual. Most people don't pay much attention to that, I would guess, but as a person with fairly light complexion (German, French, English, Irish, + minor unknown other) that grew up in sunny northern New Mexico, I find that the direct sun on a summer day feels good for just 5-15 minutes, while on a cold winter day I enjoy it much longer.
      - StavrosK 8y ago
        I agree, that's what I go by as well. After a few minutes it becomes uncomfortable in the summer, and I look for shade. The only exception is when you're swimming in the sea, when you don't really feel the sun's rays.

paulsutter 8y ago

Interesting news almost completely buried in overpolarized nonsense: sunlight is beneficial beyond vitamin D. Of course, sun burns are still bad for you, and excessive tanning will make you look old at a young age. So yes do use sunscreen in moderation but don’t avoid the sun.

zeroname 8y ago
> sunlight is beneficial beyond vitamin D. Is it though? Do we actually have the data that says so, or do we have data that has tons of other factors mixed in, where sunlight exposure happens to be correlated with better health? > So yes do use sunscreen in moderation but don’t avoid the sun. Using sunscreen (according to the article) is equivalent to avoiding the sun, as it blocks production of Vitamin D.
- PKop 8y ago
  > Is it though? Do we actually have the data that says so, or do we have data that has tons of other factors mixed in, where sunlight exposure happens to be correlated with better health? What other kind of data would you need, or expect to see? Shouldn't the onus be on people claiming that, given the reality of human evolution and existence, blocking sun exposure is the way to go? The article points out risks mitigated by sun exposure (and their corresponding mortality rates), and the main negative (Melanoma) and its lower incidence. On net I think the "minimize sun exposure" advocates have a weaker argument. As article points out this is eerily similar to low-fat, cholesterol fear mongering from decades ago. Funny a similar recommendation (blood pressure pills) is given by doctors here.
  - Gimpei 8y ago
    What I'd hope to see is randomized studies or studies that exploit some random variation for identification. The studies mentioned in the article all appear to rely on regressions controlling for observables. But of course there could be plenty of unobservable factors that are driving the result: the type of people that spend a lot of time in the sun are healthier for other reasons. I haven't read Weller's work though so maybe he has some RCTs too or maybe someone else does.

amelius 8y ago

I have a small blacklight installed in my home, and I turn it on a couple of hours a week when I watch TV. It definitely makes me feel more relaxed, though I'm unsure of the actual mechanism. Vitamin d is not the problem since I take plenty of it in the form of supplements and fatty fish. Recently I discovered that blue light can help break down bilirubin in the blood, and since I have Gilbert's syndrome, that might be one explanation.

burlesona 8y ago
According to this article, Vitamin D supplementation is showing not to “work,” and the theory is that the correlation with health is actually as a marker for UVB exposure. If your black light is putting out UVB then maybe that’s what’s helping you?
- zenexer 8y ago
  Pretty sure they mostly (entirely?) put out UVA.
  - burlesona 8y ago
    Interesting. According to the article that’s the “bad” UV. I wonder if there’s a market for UVB lights?
    - groestl 8y ago
      Sure! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UV-B_lamps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UV-B_lamps Or do you mean market as in "consumer market"?
      - crazygringo 8y ago
        Is there a consumer market? A quick search on Amazon reveals UVB lamps are mainly either expensive ($250) and for people with skin problems, or else cheap and low-powered ($30) for reptiles. There doesn't seem to be anything for a kind of full-body health use?

burlesona 8y ago

So TLDR; - a bunch of studies have shown Vitamin D strongly correlates with health - however more studies show supplementation of Vitamin D does not give the same outcomes - Thus probably Vitamin D is not the cause, rather just an indicator for sun exposure, and sun exposure is what’s good for you - lots of research showing sun exposure has many befits and avoiding it has high risks - as for melanoma, it’s less common than you think and the risk is mostly sunburn not sun exposure in general - this is more serious for people with darker skin whose bodies are better adapted to more sunlight and have much lower risk of skin cancer but need more sunlight to get the health benefits Conclusion: go outside a lot and get sun, just do it gradually and don’t shock your system with sunburn. If you’re not getting sunburn then your melanoma risk is very low while the other benefits are very high. That is interesting to read, and it also feels really common-sense to me. I definitely feel better when I’m getting good sun exposure, and I can feel it in the winter when I’m not. Most interesting to me is the studies showing Vitamin D supplementation is not effective for health benefits. That’s too bad because my D levels tend to be low and I have supplemented in the past, but not shocking because it’s never really felt different to me when supplementing.

PKop 8y ago
One other point to highlight: Many of the doctors quoted in the article couldn't dispute the data (reminiscent of nutrition conventional wisdom) but inexplicably advocated not to get benefits mentioned from sun, but instead take statins/blood pressure drugs. This is ridiculous, and if one looks into the criticisms of these drugs, mirrors the terrible advice peddled by same doctors as nutrition advice, to the detriment of millions. Why does this mentality persist, always and everywhere take blood pressure drugs? Madness.
- burlesona 8y ago
  Well, I’ve come to see it that western primary care doctors main job is to try and match your symptoms to a pill that can help. I’m not trying to disparage all the doctors or say they do nothing else. But if you look at it like that, then a lot of the behavior makes sense. “I don’t know about sun exposure, but I’m confident this pill will help you, so avoid the sun and take the pill.”

pgcudahy 8y ago

This article is based on the work of Richard Weller who is trying to monetize them at Relaxsol[relaxsol.com]. I didn't find any disclosure of this in the article. The mainstream view is in a paragraph buried deep: "“I don’t argue with their data,” says David Fisher, chair of the dermatology department at Massachusetts General Hospital. “But I do disagree with the implications.” The risks of skin cancer, he believes, far outweigh the benefits of sun exposure. “Somebody might take these conclusions to mean that the skin-cancer risk is worth it to lower all-cause mortality or to get a benefit in blood pressure,” he says. “I strongly disagree with that." It is not worth it, he says, unless all other options for lowering blood pressure are exhausted. Instead he recommends vitamin D pills and hypertension drugs as safer approaches."

PKop 8y ago
Always they say take pills. People should seriously look into criticism of massive overprescribing of statins. It's crazy this advice always comes in place of natural substitutes (low carb keto diet, prudent sun exposure. No.. just take pills that's surely healthier). Here's a reference for alternative viewpoint on statins & cholesterol if anyone is interested: https://www.amazon.com/Cholesterol-Clarity-What-Wrong-Numbers-ebook/dp/B00ESMDGE8/ref=pd_sim_351_7?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=B00ESMDGE8&pd_rd_r=e33e5a6f-1680-11e9-a96d-590add2e911b&pd_rd_w=eOtTs&pd_rd_wg=kauv1&pf_rd_p=18bb0b78-4200-49b9-ac91-f141d61a1780&pf_rd_r=83M7XRA6SBD8S7VXCTQ3&psc=1&refRID=83M7XRA6SBD8S7VXCTQ3 https://www.amazon.com/Cholesterol-Clarity-What-Wrong-Number...
- arkades 8y ago
  The first line recommendation is always diet and exercise. Pills are second line. Some docs burn out and just start giving pills first line because 99,999% of patients do not ever do the diet and exercise, even after repeated counseling rounds.
  - ip26 8y ago
    And the stipulation in this discussion is that maybe we're going to learn in the next decade that going outside should have been a first line recommendation, with pills second line. There's melanoma risk with sun exposure- but there's e-coli with produce, and a bevy of sports-related injuries.

alexandercrohde 8y ago

Summary: 1. Research shows the most popular vitamin supplements aren't useful. This turns out to include D supplements. 2. This is strange because "People with low levels of vitamin D in their blood have significantly higher rates of virtually every disease and disorder you can think of" 3. One theory to explain this is that Vitamin D was acting as simply a marker for sun-exposure. This is put forth by Richard Weller. 4. To add evidence, Weller found that exposing people to sunlight for 30 minutes reduced blood pressure and increased nitric oxide levels. 5. Article dispells concerns about sun exposure by pointing that the type of skin cancer one is likely to get from the sun is actually very safe (carcinomas) as compared to melanoma (1-3% of cases). 6. Cites a study 30,000 Swedish sunbathing women and found greater health and decreased odds of dying from a melanoma. 7. Observes the counter-intuitive nature of sun-exposure being harmful to a species that evolved outdoors. 8. Questions the validity of SPF recommendations when they don't factor in race / skin-tone. 9. Observes an example of "common knowledge" being wrong with margarine which was wrongly perceived to be healthier than butter for a long time. Suggests the very thing may be happening here.

jcims 8y ago
Thanks so much, I was interested in the content but something about the article rubbed me the wrong way and I couldn’t make it through.
raverbashing 8y ago
Nice summary It usually goes as "Vitamin D is not useful for healthy individuals" which is a nice example of circular reasoning (probably because they get enough sun exposure or have good levels of Vit. D from other sources) Oh yeah and tests checking Vitamin D's effects on things it was never claimed to help, like "found no impact on cancer, heart disease, or stroke." (Maybe cancer, but still) You will still get some Vit D through sun even with sunscreen on > Yes, but skin cancer kills surprisingly few people: less than 3 per 100,000 in the U.S. each year. Tell that to people in Australia or some other country directly below the Ozone layer hole But the news that production of NO is more important than Vit D is certainly interesting
- deleted 8y ago

nemetroid 8y ago

I found the tabloid-style writing very difficult to read, and it did not inspire confidence in the content of the article.

nabla9 8y ago

Rebuking one point in the article. This article confuses treating vitamin D deficiency to taking high doses of vitamin D. 1) Studies show that excess amount of vitamin D provides no benefits against cancer, heart disease and stroke. 2) Studies also show that vitamin D deficiency is related to many illness. Taking supplement protects against them. You can determine if you have vitamin D deficiency with simple blood test.

pakitan 8y ago
> 2) Studies also show that vitamin D deficiency is related to many illness. Taking supplement protects against them. That's hardly a "rebuke". First, I'll note that you carefully used the word "related" instead of "causing" or "a major factor". Then again, you omitted "Studies show that..." from your second sentence, probably because there are no studies showing that people with Vitamin D deficiency, taking supplements, are doing any better than the ones that don't. In fact there is a meta-study, quoted by the article, that suggests they don't: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landia/article/PIIS2213-8587(13)70165-7/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landia/article/PIIS2213-8...

djohnston 8y ago

if this turns out to have weight im going to need to switch my routine, but i'll probably continue to use sunscreen on my face (but maybe not my arms anymore). the anti-aging effects are important to me, but particularly on the face, so there might be a nice middle ground here, as long as you're wearing a t-shirt.

ip26 8y ago
Protecting the face is rational, for many people it gets the most sun exposure of any part of your body. Heard from my dermatologist two of the most common skin cancer locations in our community are the lower lip and lower eyelid, which of course are two facets of your face that are most perpendicular to the sun at peak UV hours. I figure, and this is just me, that if you want to get sun exposure, it's probably best to expose more skin for less time. If the risk is LNT, it's all the same. If it's not, you lower the total risk.
- djohnston 8y ago
  what does LNT mean?

rsync 8y ago

I wonder about the effects of breathing sunscreen. In affluent, white, suburban United States it is very common to see the religious application of sunblock to children in the specific form of aerosol spray delivery. Every day at the park stand still for a big cloud of aerosolized sunblock all over your face and arms, etc. Speaking more generally, my wife and I often discuss this or that terrible practice of health or habit or child-rearing from our own parents' generation and I am always inclined to extrapolate forward: "what are we doing right now that our kids are going to look back on with horror and amazement?" For a long time the sunblock regime has been near the top of the list ...

jws 8y ago
In the 90s we used to use purple sunscreen on the kids which then turned clear after exposure to air. It made it easy to get a complete, uniform coating. I never see that for sale anymore, just waiting for the news why.
- copperx 8y ago
  That sounds terrific. I always anxious about not applying sunscreen completely.
ryall 8y ago
Had a long conversation with a skin cancer specialist about the harmful effects of sunscreen. While he agreed that there can be some nasty chemicals found in sunscreen he ended the discussion with the parting words "At the end of the day it's the people that _don't_ use sunscreen that we see here in the clinic, not the people that do"
- pomber 8y ago
  Is it a skin cancer clinic? Maybe the people that _do_ use sunscreen go to another clinic (where they don't ask about sunscreen usage)
- oska 8y ago
  > "At the end of the day it's the people that _don't_ use sunscreen that we see here in the clinic, not the people that do" I'm guessing you're quoting this somewhat ironically but that's really bad logic on the doctor's part.

guelo 8y ago

The human evolution argument is interesting to think about because humans are the only fur-less mammals so any advantages to sun exposure are unique to us.

yesenadam 8y ago
>humans are the only fur-less mammals Naked mole-rats beg to differ. Although yeah, I don't think they get much sun exposure. But apparently they never get cancer, maybe we could learn from them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_mole-rat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_mole-rat

manmal 8y ago

Long-term (3+ years) supplementation of vitamin D significantly decreases all-cause mortality [1]. So yeah, take the supps if you don't get enough sunlight. But personally I am convinced that sunlight exposure, and additional near-infrared "supplementation" are preferable. Nitric oxide release is a double whammy because it reduces stress within cells, and promotes endothelial health (as mentioned in the article). 1: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24349197 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24349197

e40 8y ago
That is refuted by this: http://sci-hub.tw/https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1809944 http://sci-hub.tw/https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM...
- manmal 8y ago
  Great find (sibling comment posted the same btw). I was actually looking for papers like this but didn't find any.
reinhardt1053 8y ago
Recent long study results (5.3 years follow up) show no benefit on vitamin D supplement: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1811403 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1811403
- solinent 8y ago
  Only 2000IU per day. I'd like to see one with 10000IU.
- manmal 8y ago
  Thank you!

benj111 8y ago

So everything in moderation, including sun. Are there any sensible exceptions to that rule?

jdminhbg 8y ago
There are no exceptions because it’s a tautology. What’s moderation is defined by what’s good for you. Nobody recommends fentanyl in moderation.
- benj111 8y ago
  Not necessarily. Its potentially true that consuming more of a veg increases health, without an upper bound, or at least an upper bound above 'moderation'. That doesn't fit in with your definition of moderation, but I would say moderation has both an upper and lower bound.
  - jdminhbg 8y ago
    That's exactly the tautology: "Moderation" is "the amount that is good for you." So there are no exceptions to "moderation is good for you." How else would you define "moderation" in this context without a reference to the amount of something that is beneficial? It's not as if "moderate" is an amount that exists out of context that can be applied to both donuts and broccoli without knowing which one of those is good for you.
    - benj111 8y ago
      Moderation: 1. the quality of being moderate; restraint; avoidance of extremes or excesses; temperance. [1] A 10kg portion of broccoli might be better for you than the usual recommended portion. I would not say that's a moderate amount of broccoli though. [1] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/moderation https://www.dictionary.com/browse/moderation Edit: Also there isn't really a healthy amount of doughnuts you can eat, so by your definition, a moderate amount would be zero. Which isn't really what the 'everything in moderation' rule means.
- 8y ago

qwerty456127 8y ago

According to another research[1] vitamin D supplementation actually changes a lot of taken in adequate (by orders of magnitude higher than the official RDA) doses regularly (and it also affects mood). So I conclude that what we need is to also supplement nitric oxide, not just vitamin D alone. I had never feared sun and don't even use sunscreens but I neither live in a particularly sunny area nor have enough spare time for regular sunbathing so supplements still are the only way to get enough. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15867918 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15867918

brandonmenc 8y ago

> How did we get through the Neolithic Era without sunscreen? Actually, perfectly well. It's modern times. We optimize for long individual lives, not propagation of the species. As lifespans increase, so should efforts to avoid cumulative, damaging radiation. Similarly, heavy meat consumption gave early humans an advantage, but you shouldn't adopt that caveman behavior for a 100-year lifespan - it doesn't "work" at that scale.

pakitan 8y ago
The fact that humans evolved without access to sunscreen is just a starting point, when someone is considering whether to use sunscreen or not. You chose to take issue with that one sentence, while ignoring everything else in the article. And the article suggests that if you actually want to optimize for a 100-year lifespan, you certainly shouldn't douse yourself with sunblock, every time you go outside.
darkpuma 8y ago
Most of the average lifespan increases we've seen have come from reduced infant and childbirth mortality, not from making the elderly live to be even more elderly. There has certainly been some of that, but it's far less significant than the infant and childbirth mortality improvements. >Rowbotham and Clayton (JRSM 2008;101:454–62) make a very important point when they draw attention to the life expectancy at birth compared to life expectancy at 5+ years of age.1 They state ‘… life expectancy in the mid-Victorian period was not markedly different from what it is today. Once infant mortality is stripped out, life expectancy at 5 years was 75 for men and 73 for women.’ In 1995 Griffin2 produced a comparison of life expectancy of mature men (15+years of age) at different points in history over the last 3000 years >The change in life expectancy of mature men^ has not changed as dramatically over 3000 years as might be expected, although this data must of necessity refer to privileged members of society. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2625386/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2625386/ Note also that being economically or socially privileged would have given these men better access to nutrition, however it would have also given them better access to contemporary 'medicine' which may very well have been more hazardous to their health than no medical intervention at all. How many wealthy people in the past were poisoned by their well-meaning doctors? I'd wager more than were saved. ^ (The numbers for women are very different, because women used to frequently die during childbirth, but this is comparatively rare today.)

rb808 8y ago

There was a similar article in Australia a few months back https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/health-and-wellness/here-comes-the-sun-defending-our-summer-rays-20181120-p50h2j.html https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/health-and-wellness/here-co...

paavoova 8y ago

Related: many of the components of sunscreen break down into free radicals in the process of absorbing UV, which are in effect (but perhaps not in practice) more damaging than UV exposure itself. Quick source I dug up, but there's many more (and the industry appears to be aware of this issue and is doing R&D): "Sunscreens Inadequately Protect Against Ultraviolet-A-Induced Free Radicals in Skin: Implications for Skin Aging and Melanoma" [1] [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022202X15304437 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022202X1...

Eli_P 8y ago

Wanna share my experience, the TL;DR is that if you feel well you shouldn't expose yourself to the sun or use parasol or sunscreen, because only narrow UV spectrum is good, and sun doesn't care. I've had a severe form of psoriasis, majorly on scalp. Over 1/3 scalp looked like it had been rubbed with a sandpaper to near-bleeding sores. I tried to different docs, nobody told me what it is, I had no option but to do my own research. I found that it can be treated with ultraviolet, but not all of UVs are good for you, there are UVA, UVB and their sub-spectrums. The only good for health UV is UVB with a narrow peak at 310nm wavelength. Those tanning beds for bronze effect are wide band UVA+UVB and not good at all neither for vitamin D, nor for your health in general. So I had bought a UVB 310nm medical lamp, shaved my head, and started using UVB since june, it's been a half year experiment on myself. I started with long, over 10 minute sessions to figure out a limit where I do get burned (>10 minutes). Later I reduced down to 5 min, two times a week, and almost haven't used UVB recently. I don't have vitamin D blood meter, my criteria is a state of my skin, i.e. absence of pain on palpation, less itching, no bleeding sores, no reddening. Looks like UVB works for me, what I can tell from my experiment. In comparison with sun, UVB lamp with timer showed to be more safe, IMO. Three hours outdoors w/o sunscreen gives a sunburn very likely; but a 5 min/day UVB lamp exposure seems to be safe. I have a few tiny colored skin patches over body, didn't cover them or anything, just ignored them; they have become less distinguishable after UV. However, if you have patches like birthmarks, you must track their borders. When borders become blurred, that's a not good sign, you gotta them checked by your dermatologist. I think there could be some app to track colored skin patches, there is a bunch of open source libs for that[1]. [1] https://github.com/search?q=skin+cancer https://github.com/search?q=skin+cancer

msamwald 8y ago

The article they cite claims that people who were less exposed to sun had higher disease risk [1]. As far as I saw, the cited article does not include sunscreen use in the analysis. So it might very well be that sun exposure while wearing sunscreen might have the same benefit, minus the increased skin cancer risk and accelerated skin aging. EDIT: Besides that, there is very likely a huge confounding effect that was probably not properly corrected for. The persons in the "high sun exposure" group were much healthier than in the "avoiding sun exposure" group right from the start (Table 1)! [1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/joim.12496 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/joim.12496

DenisM 8y ago

It's remarkable how much attention is given to the quantity of the desirable Sun exposure, and how little thought is spent on the quality of the light. Absent sunscreen the UV-heavy mid-day Sun in the tropics gives me a sunburn in 15 minutes, while a morning exposure at the same locale remains perfectly safe for all the three hours that the morning lasts. The turning point is when the Sun crosses 45% boundary (when a match stuck in the sand becomes taller than its shadow), so my schedule is beach-time 6-9am and 3-6pm, while the rest of the time is spent sleeping, eating, working, and sightseeing. I wish I could sell you some dietary supplement with this fantastic advice, but none is needed. Well, maybe a branded box of matches is in order?..

drited 8y ago
Interesting stuff. What country is this? What skin complexion?
- DenisM 8y ago
  Typical caucasian skin - not pale, not dark. The places were Hawaii and Costa Rica, but it should work the same anywhere in the tropics - just make use of the match-sand trick to adjust for the local timezone.
argonaut 8y ago
But the amount of vitamin D synthesized is proportional to the amount of UV radiation received.
wyclif 8y ago
I can attest to this because right now I'm about 13 degrees above the equator, in the Philippines. On top of that, I'm Anglo and my ancestors are uniformly from the region now known as the United Kingdom, so my complexion is quite fair. The midday sun is very bright and harsh here in SE Asia. I stay out in the middle of the day as much as possible, but get a lot of sunlight in the early morning and late in the afternoon.

jackfoxy 8y ago

How much are UVA and UVB blocked by the atmosphere in higher latitudes during winter months? UVB is blocked by the ozone layer, so I would expect in winter even less reaches the Earth's surface.

chiefalchemist 8y ago

The new margarine? Nah. No one was ever a fan of margarine. Feels more like the new sugar. Public was told to give up X (fat) in favor of Y (sugar) only to find said recommendation was paid for by Industry Y. The species has survived this long for a reason. What Mother Nature has to offer us is good for us. Why do we keep believing we can get it more better?

purplezooey 8y ago

Everything is the new smoking. Ambien. Deli meats. Roasted things. Now sunscreen. Are we supposed to live in a hobbit hole and eat boiled roots?

thisismyusernam 8y ago

I was really enjoying this article, which is intelligently written (even though it's obvious the author has made up their mind and is trying to convince me, I happen to agree with them). That is until this line: > From its inception in the mid-1800s, margarine had always been considered creepers, a freakish substitute for people who couldn’t afford real butter. When did "creepers" become a word journalists can use in a non-ironic way?

popinman322 8y ago

I find it odd that Examine.com[0] hasn't been mentioned yet. There have been studies of vitamin D supplementation; these have been specifically about supplementation and not just correlation with blood levels of vitamin D. I'm sure that sun exposure has additional effects past vitamin D production given how messy biology is, but it's not clear to me that unprotected sun exposure is the best way to get those additional effects. For example, if blocking UVA and letting in some amount of UVB gets the benefits of both sunscreen and sun exposure, then I'm all for it. However, it doesn't seem like we have enough information to make an informed decision yet. [0] https://examine.com/supplements/vitamin-d/ https://examine.com/supplements/vitamin-d/

chx 8y ago

Health wise , so much we are told turns out to be upside down. Say, chlosterol. In 1977 the Framingham Study told us higher HDL levels and lower LDL levels are associated with a reduced risk of coronary heart disease. Not to mention later studies showing statin lowers LDL not only coronaries but other cardiovascular diseases and even stroke (10.1002/14651858.CD004816.pub5). Well, turns out higher cholesterol only correlates with heart disease under 50 years old. Damning it all is a 2016 study showing above 60 actually higher LDL correlates with longer life... And then it turns out though niacin brings down your cholesterol but has no effects on cardiovascular events. And then Pfizer abandoned a drug which raised HDL -- but actually raised the risk of such events. Whopsie! https://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/03/health/03pfizer.html https://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/03/health/03pfizer.html The whole good/bad cholesterol thing is total, absolute bunk science proven wrong multiple times from multiple angles. (Hope I didn't get wrong the various lower/higher things.) Also, in general, evidence is mounting that all food related studies are useless simply because humans with different genomes (surprise!) react differently to food and we do not understand yet which genes correlate with which food causing what. I mean, this makes so much sense, imagine that someone asserted that seven billion beings with different genetic composition reacts the same to all foods. That's absolutely laughable and yet, you are getting these advices of what to eat and what not to eat in general. What is beginning to become clear is that we do not know anything at all about how humans react to the food they intake. First we started with trying to see how they react to "fats", "carbohydrates", "proteins" and so on. But turns out foods are not just those but also vitamins and then it turns out no matter how you put together fats, carbohydrates, proteins and vitamins it still won't resemble anything food like. We go to smaller and smaller components trying to find the composition of food -- but it just doesn't work. So you have an unknown on the food end and another unknown on the human end and yet we are told to follow certain diets. Which of course change every decade or so when it all falls apart.

jpiabrantes 8y ago

I always thought there should have been an enormous evolutionary pressure for humans to have different skin tones in different geographies. If sunlight is bad for skin than we should all be black or tanned all the time. However, if you don't live in a sunny area and you have a tan you might not getting enough Vitamin D. Vitamin D must be very important in order to make us evolve to have different skin tones and to tan according to the seasons.

yesenadam 8y ago
>Vitamin D must be very important in order to make us evolve to have different skin tones I'm no expert, but I believe it's thought that white skin must have evolved from sexual selection (i.e. lighter skin was thought more attractive), since it happened too quickly for any other explanation.
gerbilly 8y ago
The article mentions we store vitamin D for use in the winter. It also suggests pale skin may have evolved to allow us to produce way more vitamin D in the summer to compensate for cloudy winters. So, the advice would seem to be, go outside in the sun during the summer if you have pale skin.

anotherevan 8y ago

Whilst I understood the analogy, a part of my brain that dislikes poorly worded headlines thought to itself, "But sunscreen tastes terrible on toast."

crazygringo 8y ago

So for those of us in the winter (like right now in NYC), what are we supposed to do for health, to protect against the diseases whose rates are increased by lack of sufficient sunlight? If vitamin D supplements aren't the solution, are we supposed to get UV lamps for daily exposure at home after getting out of the shower? Totally serious question -- anyone got any ideas? I'm actually surprised the article didn't cover it.

kovach 8y ago
Vitamin D supplements do help your immune system, reducing respiratory tract infections, and seem to help with some autoimmune diseases. There have also been some positive findings regarding clinical depression, and improved bone health. Currently there is no evidence that they help with cancer or cardiovascular disease, but that doesn't mean that someone who is deficient should not try to solve that deficiency with supplements. Dosing the supplements is the difficult part, ingested Vitamin D absorption is different from person to person, and it's further complicated by variable sun exposure and skin production. 4000 IU per day should be a safe dose, but it's probably not enough with zero sun exposure during winter...

wolfv 8y ago

Dr. Greger has a different take on the data. From https://nutritionfacts.org/video/the-risks-and-benefits-of-sensible-sun-exposure/ https://nutritionfacts.org/video/the-risks-and-benefits-of-s... (transcript and sources cited are below the video) Concerning the Swedish study: Why would those that run around outside enough to get skin cancer live longer? Maybe it’s because they’re running around outside. More exercise may explain why they live longer. And here in the U.S., more UV exposure was associated with a shorter, not longer, lifespan. Estimates about vitamin D preventing internal cancers are from intervention studies involving giving people vitamin D supplements (not exposing people to UV rays).

deleted 8y ago

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pcvarmint 8y ago

I have osteomalacia, and I take Vitamin D, Calcium and Alendronate for it. I have suffered multiple spontaneous bone fractures. There is not enough sun where I live (Seattle), so unless I go to a tanning bed, I need to get my vitamin D through supplements. Survey of literature: [0] https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-rise-and-inevitable-fall-of-vitamin-d/ https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-rise-and-inevitable-fal... [1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11606-016-3645-y https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11606-016-3645-... [2] https://www.jabfm.org/content/22/6/698.long https://www.jabfm.org/content/22/6/698.long [3] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/290490087_Evaluation_of_knowledge_practices_of_vitamin_d_and_attitude_toward_sunlight_among_Indian_students https://www.researchgate.net/publication/290490087_Evaluatio... [4] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landia/article/PIIS2213-8587(18)30265-1/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landia/article/PIIS2213-8... [5] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5986441/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5986441/ [6] https://www.bmj.com/content/362/bmj.k3225 https://www.bmj.com/content/362/bmj.k3225 [7] https://www.bmj.com/content/355/bmj.i6201 https://www.bmj.com/content/355/bmj.i6201