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There's a study on rabbits that finds you can give them skin cancer quite easily if you feed them a diet high in polyunsaturated fats. If the same holds true i
by dilap 4y ago
There's a study on rabbits that finds you can give them skin cancer quite easily if you feed them a diet high in polyunsaturated fats.
If the same holds true in humans, it could explain our high skin cancer rates, since modern diets include a lot of polyunsaturated fats.
A corollary of that is that it might be a very bad idea, indeed, to stop using sunblock without also changing your diet, if you're eating a typical diet.
(Because maybe the diet is causal and the coincidentally-also-increasing-at-the-same-time sunblock use is actually a mitigating factor.)
Still, I do find the arguments in favor of sunlight's beneficial effects to be convincing. So my approach (/gamble) is to avoid modern sources of polyunsaturated fat (basically: seed oils and industrial ag chicken and pork) and mostly not wear sunblock.
(I'll let you know how it works out.)
- astrange 4y agoWhat do rabbits have to do with humans? Rabbits also die of GI stasis if they don’t eat grass 24/7. You gotta test with omnivores, and even then humans are more omnivorous than most other animals (like dogs are poisoned by grapes, chocolate, onions…).
- dilap 4y agoSure, it's not definitive, and rabbits are different from humans in many ways, but at the cellular level they are similar, & if skin cancer is a cellular phenomenon (say, perhaps, driven by fat composition of the cell membranes), it's likely the results would transfer. (Hard to do this kind of research in humans, so you have to use animal models and use good judgement/guess at the applicability.)