5 ms·

I find the advice 'all sun exposure is bad' pretty unhelpful. It is on the same level as teaching abstinence as sex education. Our bodies deal with some form o

I find the advice 'all sun exposure is bad' pretty unhelpful. It is on the same level as teaching abstinence as sex education. Our bodies deal with some form of damage all the time. Is there really evidence that someone that slowly builds up a tan during spring has a higher risk of skin cancer than someone who doesn't? I can't really imagine how you could study that in a controlled way.

ip26 4y ago
“all sun exposure is bad” suggests we should spend our lives in the basement, but we also know human eyes do not shape properly without the bright light of the sun.
mistrial9 4y ago
in my lifetime western medicine "discovered" a casual link between sun burn during your mid-teens, and real serious skin cancers decades later. Other random factoids - skin varies a lot with genetics.. a lot, a lot.. and your resistance to aggressive cancer has to do with overall health and nutrition at any time in your life. .. no simple "this or that" cause and effect, even with good nutrition, skin care and moderation.
ryandrake 4y ago
> I find the advice 'all sun exposure is bad' pretty unhelpful. It is on the same level as teaching abstinence as sex education. > Our bodies deal with some form of damage all the time. Yet in the frequent “leaded gasoline” threads here, the “no amount of lead exposure is acceptable” meme gets trotted out every time. No spectrum, no trade offs, no caveats. As if the minute you eat a paint chip as a toddler, you’re hopelessly contaminated! When dealing with hazards to health, it’s important to frame things in terms of higher/lower probability and higher/lower risk rather than these zero tolerance simplifications. I’m not saying we should go out and drink a pint of airplane gasoline but entire generations grew up with lead paint and regular gasoline and are still here—just statistically worse off health wise than the generation that grew up without them.
- thelopa 4y ago
  I think it’s a bit extreme to go from “our bodies likely have some amount of tolerance for a hazard that has existed and been a fundamental and inescapable part of life since before there even was life” to “the body must surely have a way to deal with this toxic element that isn’t common in the environments where our species evolved”. I’d go so far as to say you might be ignoring some important differences between the two!
- raverbashing 4y ago
  Yes, but they're different things Everybody is exposed to the sun in a greater or lesser degree and in fact we have evolved to depend on it. The necessary consumption of lead by your average kid or adult is zero. And to be honest the lack of spectrum and caveats in science communication is much more common than it should be. Like "food X is bad for the heart" or "Y causes cancer" and then you see the studies and you give rats 10x the dose per weight for an adult for a long time and they get cancer, well, no crap sherlock!
- IshKebab 4y ago
  People say anything before a "... but" doesn't count. I'd say it's similar for "there's no safe level of". It's maybe technically true, but 99% of the time it is used to scare people into unreasonable levels of compliance. Some doctor actually managed to make it into the news in the UK recently highlighting how dumb it is - in that case for drinking during pregnancy. There's no safe level of alcohol during pregnancy, but somehow that has distorted into you can't drink at all whereas in reality a glass of wine occasionally is going to have absolutely no effect.
- mikkergp 4y ago
  There are some written guidelines. The CDC "uses a blood lead reference value (BLRV) of 3.5 micrograms per deciliter to identify children with blood lead levels that are higher than most children’s levels." (https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/lead/prevention/blood-lead-levels.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/lead/prevention/blood-lead-levels.h...). The difference between lead and sunlight as described is that there is likely some lower bound with sunlight as well, too little sunlight is unhealthy, which makes the advice "all sun exposure is bad" not only unhelpful but possibly unhealthy.

ip26 4y ago

“all sun exposure is bad” suggests we should spend our lives in the basement, but we also know human eyes do not shape properly without the bright light of the sun.

mistrial9 4y ago

in my lifetime western medicine "discovered" a casual link between sun burn during your mid-teens, and real serious skin cancers decades later. Other random factoids - skin varies a lot with genetics.. a lot, a lot.. and your resistance to aggressive cancer has to do with overall health and nutrition at any time in your life. .. no simple "this or that" cause and effect, even with good nutrition, skin care and moderation.

ryandrake 4y ago

> I find the advice 'all sun exposure is bad' pretty unhelpful. It is on the same level as teaching abstinence as sex education. > Our bodies deal with some form of damage all the time. Yet in the frequent “leaded gasoline” threads here, the “no amount of lead exposure is acceptable” meme gets trotted out every time. No spectrum, no trade offs, no caveats. As if the minute you eat a paint chip as a toddler, you’re hopelessly contaminated! When dealing with hazards to health, it’s important to frame things in terms of higher/lower probability and higher/lower risk rather than these zero tolerance simplifications. I’m not saying we should go out and drink a pint of airplane gasoline but entire generations grew up with lead paint and regular gasoline and are still here—just statistically worse off health wise than the generation that grew up without them.

thelopa 4y ago
I think it’s a bit extreme to go from “our bodies likely have some amount of tolerance for a hazard that has existed and been a fundamental and inescapable part of life since before there even was life” to “the body must surely have a way to deal with this toxic element that isn’t common in the environments where our species evolved”. I’d go so far as to say you might be ignoring some important differences between the two!
raverbashing 4y ago
Yes, but they're different things Everybody is exposed to the sun in a greater or lesser degree and in fact we have evolved to depend on it. The necessary consumption of lead by your average kid or adult is zero. And to be honest the lack of spectrum and caveats in science communication is much more common than it should be. Like "food X is bad for the heart" or "Y causes cancer" and then you see the studies and you give rats 10x the dose per weight for an adult for a long time and they get cancer, well, no crap sherlock!
IshKebab 4y ago
People say anything before a "... but" doesn't count. I'd say it's similar for "there's no safe level of". It's maybe technically true, but 99% of the time it is used to scare people into unreasonable levels of compliance. Some doctor actually managed to make it into the news in the UK recently highlighting how dumb it is - in that case for drinking during pregnancy. There's no safe level of alcohol during pregnancy, but somehow that has distorted into you can't drink at all whereas in reality a glass of wine occasionally is going to have absolutely no effect.
mikkergp 4y ago
There are some written guidelines. The CDC "uses a blood lead reference value (BLRV) of 3.5 micrograms per deciliter to identify children with blood lead levels that are higher than most children’s levels." (https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/lead/prevention/blood-lead-levels.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/lead/prevention/blood-lead-levels.h...). The difference between lead and sunlight as described is that there is likely some lower bound with sunlight as well, too little sunlight is unhealthy, which makes the advice "all sun exposure is bad" not only unhelpful but possibly unhealthy.