This is a very interesting theory, but also low-quality evidence. It merits further study, but hard to say that it merits any change in behavior just yet.
As far as I can tell, the "340 000" person study was finally published in 2020[1]. The study was an observational analysis of 342,000 dialysis patients. There was no attempt to measure personal exposure to UV (FTA: "it was not feasible to determine personal exposures to UV radiation and temperature"). Rather, these exposures were approximated by dialysis center zip code.
I can understand why David Fisher would say that he doesn't question the data, but doesn't agree with the implications.
This is why journalists need to learn some basic stats. The credulity with which he takes the pro-sun researchers claims, the ignorance he displays about the shortcomings of observational studies are as depressing as they are common. Not saying, by the way, that I don’t believe the sun hypothesis, I just think this article displays false confidence. Science is hard; when you present the latest theory as The Truth, all you do is undermine long term faith in science. Sometimes these new discoveries bear out, but most of the time, they don’t. See this pattern enough and it becomes reasonable to conclude that scientists are full of shit.
Well said in many ways; however, it isn't clear that having more statistics savvy journalists would address the problems associated with media economics and incentives.
Agree. How well-trained would a journalist need to be in order to effectively analyze something that has probably taken several years of effort. Lots of numbers != good interpretations and little data != bad conclusion.
But agree with OP that in a world that is becoming less and less trusting of authority (to a dangerous extreme) that it would be nice for those in authority to have enough humility to accept when their work is questioned.
No, because they have a demonstrable mechanism from pre-established science: UV radiation damages DNA, which causes cancer. Their product absorbs or scatters UV radiation.
This is the same as the teeth flossing skeptics: observational studies suggesting a paradox are interesting, but they actually need to unearth convincing alternative models with at least as much support as the dominant one for why they're right.
> No, because they have a demonstrable mechanism from pre-established science: UV radiation damages DNA, which causes cancer. Their product absorbs or scatters UV radiation.
As mentioned in article, but also some general knowledge in physics is that interaction of radiation with the matter is probabilistic. It is not like every quantum of UV radiation will always damage DNA, which always result in cancer. There's some "conversion funnel" that depends on a number of parameters, and the actual probability of cancer in the end could indeed be lower than probability of the negative consequences of low sun exposure. Even if physical mechanism of diseases is established, it does not mean we should always avoid the risk by disabling it by some expensive means. Sometimes it is low enough to accept it or mitigate (e.g. by efficient cancer treatment).
The article did describe some mechanisms, for instance the skin uses UV to make nitric oxide, which is known to lower blood pressure. That said, I'm not sure why this would be better than just taking nitric oxide. The same question comes up for vitamin D, and it's noted that supplements don't seem to help there -- with no explanation for that. So I would agree that the explanations for the pro-sunlight case are weaker.
That said, I'm not sure why this would be better
than just taking nitric oxide
One might do well to start with the assumption that "taking XYZ orally" is not as effective as producing it naturally.
The digestive system involves a pit of acid and a diverse, poorly-understood, and variable biome. It is an extremely fraught and indirect way to introduce substances into the body. Obviously many things can be introduced this way, but the list of those that can't is probably longer than the list of things that can.
Well, I never said "orally." If it's beneficial to get NO via sunlight on your skin, it doesn't seem crazy that it might work via some lotion. Even considering oral supplements, one might also take a precursor if the molecule itself isn't stable in the stomach.
It's true there may be some important difference between sunlight-induced NO generation and whatever other supplement/injection/lotion/etc, but my point here is that the right approach is to focus on the mechanism, and avoid the naturalistic fallacy.
The conclusion that vitamin D levels are an effect not a cause came from exploring the mechanisms. And yes, it may turn out that NO similarly is a marker.
It's ironic that the author didn't consider that getting sunlight may similarly be the side effect of the true cause of the stated benefits (being active?).
One reason getting these from the evolved route may be better is because feedback mechanisms stop making the beneficial substance when the body has enough, which may not happen via intake by other methods. This is the case for vitamin D from sun vs oral D supplements. Serum levels stop going up when they reach a natural adequate evolutionary range if it's coming from sun. I don't know if that's true of NO or not. Or of melatonin from the near-infra-red wavelengths, but I wouldn't be surprised.
> This is the case for vitamin D from sun vs oral D supplements.
Wait, has there been a study suggesting this? This implies that there's a narrow optimal range and exceeding it causes problems. Seems you would see this in the supplement trials. Vitamin D toxicity doesn't occur until you take many times the RDA for months, and presumably none of the supplementation trials went anywhere near that high. https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-h...
This feels wrong, too. You are presenting one option as a settled thing because it has a proposed mechanism.
I agree that just dropping a seemingly safe belief should take effort. I have no problem challenging them on a regular basis, though. Especially with more than just arguments and thought experiments. More observational studies can almost certainly only be a good thing.
Observational studies are certainly science. Any claim against that is going to be hard to defend.
The mechanism isn't really at question. But just as sun exposure can kill grass, so to can lack of sun. We know that humans don't do photosynthesis, but it seems reasonable to ask if we do get other benefits.
Note. Is reasonable to ask and study. Is not reasonable to just assume the conclusion.
By "observational" studies I realize you probably just meant studies where they don't manipulate a variable (which, while less than ideal, it is indeed science), whereas I was making a more philosophical point, a la Popper https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/778918-the-belief-that-scie...
Ah, makes sense. You are correct in what I was referencing. To your point, I would expect most observational studies to be done with the expection of validating understood mechanisms.
There are other studies with interesting results in the article and it is good intuition that we survived for thousands of years stark naked without sunscreen and vitamin suplements.
One interesting paragraph was:
"When you spend much of your day treating patients with terrible melanomas, it’s natural to focus on preventing them, but you need to keep the big picture in mind. Orthopedic surgeons, after all, don’t advise their patients to avoid exercise in order to reduce the risk of knee injuries."
We need to avoid tunnel vision when making health decisions. And this coming from someone (me) who had skin cancer in the past (not that it makes me a specialist).
> it is good intuition that we survived for thousands of years stark naked without sunscreen and vitamin suplements
That, as an argument, is completely worthless. You don't know how those people lived, how they died, what diseases they had, all you can deduce is that some of them managed to reproduce before keeling over.
And if you are in the equivalent Southern latitude to Canada (e.g. New Zealand), you still sometimes need sunscreen to avoid the extra UV due to the ozone hole. Perhaps not as bad as it was, but cannot be ignored, although it is variable: https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/ourchangingworld/a...
The NZ sun is terrible. You feel the sun burning you as soon as you get outside.
Burn time can be about 10 minutes on a sunny day, and maybe 20 on a cloudy day in summer.
In NZ we get about 4000 in-situ melanoma diagnosis a year. I was one of them a couple of years ago (at 37).
Yeah, good point. NZ has similar latitudes down here as the USA has up there. Weather is very different since we don’t get continental effects.
Also NZ wasn’t really affected by ozone depletion, but the effects are definitely in our neighbourhood and we were worried. “While the ozone hole does not directly affect ozone concentrations over New Zealand, when it breaks up in spring it can send ‘plumes’ of ozone-depleted air towards us. This briefly decreases column ozone levels by around 5 percent, about the same amount as normal daily variation.”. Also see graph at https://niwa.co.nz/our-services/online-services/uv-ozone and notice ozone is lowest in NZ summer. Also measuring a column of ozone is most relevant in the tropics when the sun can be directly above one at noon, and less relevant when the sun doesn’t get so high above the horizon (location further towards poles, and winter versus summer). https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9671831/
For that matter, that complexion also likely evolved with clothes, and people in a sufficiently distant past may have looked quite different. The idea of people looking just like us living without clothes or shelter, presumably like some depiction of Eden, is fanciful.
I am reminded that, in addition to not going about stark naked, mesolithic humans in the British isles were dark skinned.
Also cancer takes a fair while to develop and kill you - well after age of reproduction, at which point evolutions opinion on guiding behaviour becomes much weaker.
Within living memory, Americans wore hats pretty much whenever they were outside. If we decide to give up sunblock, we might want to reconsider the change in fashions that got rid of them.
“There is a basic distinction between life expectancy and life span,” says Stanford University historian Walter Scheidel, a leading scholar of ancient Roman demography. “The life span of humans – opposed to life expectancy, which is a statistical construct – hasn’t really changed much at all, as far as I can tell.
Life expectancy is an average. If you have two children, and one dies before their first birthday but the other lives to the age of 70, their average life expectancy is 35.
That’s mathematically correct – and it certainly tells us something about the circumstances in which the children were raised. But it doesn’t give us the full picture. It also becomes especially problematic when looking at eras, or in regions, where there are high levels of infant mortality. Most of human history has been blighted by poor survival rates among children, and that continues in various countries today.”
Because it's obvious to anybody. It's also obvious that modern humans are far less exposed to UV than our ancestors, who pretty much lived like current days hobos spending most of their time on fresh air.
I am actually a fan of the sun myself. I feel way better, physically and mentally, when getting decent amounts of sunlight. I would accept some risk in exchange for the benefits. But...
it is good intuition that we survived for thousands of years
Humans survived to the age of reproductive viability for many thousands of years.
If your goal is merely to survive until the age at which you can make a baby and rear it there are a lot of risks that can be disregarded. Skin cancer is one. So are all other cancers. No need to worry about long-term dental health either. So many fears and worries melt away. Embrace that hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
Alternatively, if you are hoping to live past your 30s (most of us would like to live at least 2.5x longer!) the lifestyles of ancient civilizations and our hunter-gatherer ancestors may not be your ticket to success.
I don’t know about stark naked - in the northern climes where the fairer complexioned folk roam(ed), furs and wool were a matter of survival.
Anyway, UV sucks, nobody is hurt by minimizing it and supplementing via diet. Hell, in the north the sun doesn’t even rise high enough to be a source of vit D for months on end. You have to get it from diet or not at all.
Look at pretty much any elder in today's tribal societies, they look like raisins at age 50. Most people would rather maintain some youthful looks which means protecting yourself from the sun.
"we survived for thousands of years stark naked without sunscreen and vitamin suplements"
We also ate differently in the Stone Age, so our vitamin intake might have been different.
Finally, life expectancy in the Stone Age was much shorter. Even excluding infant deaths, few people lived long enough to get cancer. Cancer is a typical disease of old age.
> FTA: "it was not feasible to determine personal exposures to UV radiation and temperature"
Sadly no current consumer devices exist on market that can track these two numbers. The Microsoft Band used to have both needed sensors, but AFAIK no one else has tried to widely release a consumer product with a UV exposure sensor on it.
FWIW that sensor was a major hassle, took up a lot of space, and finding a plastic cover for it that didn't also block UV was super hard.
Couldn't you use the bleaching effect of UV to estimate exposure? It doesn't have to be an electronic UV sensor, just a spot of calibrated UV-sensitive dye.
I have the SunSprite and the June. The June is unreliable, I believe they stopped selling them years ago. The SunSprite worked well and once I'd worn it for a full year I had a good idea of my exposure at various times of year and stopped wearing it. The magnetic clasp on it sucked though, I would often find the sensor had slipped off and stuck to my car door (or anything else made of steel). Not sure if any of the sensors listed in the article are still for sale, but you can probably still find used ones on eBay.
You can also get simple wearable wristbands or tokens or cards that change color under UV exposure:
The cards are somewhat calibrated, but any of these technologies require taking into account your personal skin sensitivity.
The technology is out there, you could probably build your own sensor using an Arduino and UVA and UVB sensors. The SunSprite is cool in that it never needs charging since it charges from the Sun.
Cool, I didn't realize anyone else had productized UV sensors. I wish the tech would hit mass market devices.
> The technology is out there, you could probably build your own sensor using an Arduino and UVA and UVB sensors.
Back in 2016 or so, we were able to order UV sensors, but since there was so little knowledge about how to use them on wearable, getting them to work was a challenge.
It was months just to find a lens material that didn't block UV at all, but was also affordable, could be put on a production line, and fit all our consumer use cases (durable, chemical resistant, etc).
The cards are cool, I forgot about them.
It is unfortunate none of the main wearable players, by which I really just mean Apple, have bothered, but the UV sensor on Microsoft Band 2 was responsible for Band 2's not so friendly looking clasp, so I can't say I blame anyone for not wanting to go down that route again.
Edit: FWIW our sensor gave us something, I forget what, but I remember it wasn't what we wanted, and we had to map it to UVI. From what I vaguely recall it was one of those things where we ordered a sensor, it says it did one thing, but the thing it actually did was related but not quite the same, so we had to create a mapping curve of some type.
I came up with the user story and user flow for what we shipped, sun exposure reminders. We were really smart about it, we had logic in there to tell when you briefly went out of the sun, such as going to the bathroom, vs when you spent extended time inside, and we also worked to separate out walks to and from your car VS actually spending time outside.
To take "breaks", I believe we had an accumulator and if you went out of the sun we started a timer and if the timer went off we reset the accumulator but if you went back into the sun the timer was cancelled.
Actually starting the accumulator worked the same way, get out of car, exposure starts, if you didn't have so many minutes of continuous exposure, we never started the accumulator, an example is walking between buildings.
Lots of use case design around what ended up being a couple of dialog boxes for a reminder to put on sun screen!
Parents loved it though. :) Lots of positive feedback from parents who used it to track their family's sunscreen applications.
Edit: From shade
> 5 days of battery on a single charge
Pretty sure if we just ran the UV sensor on band our battery life would've been forever and ever. :-D
If that is a sales page, they need to list power draw of their sensor for various sampling rates, that is the only thing anyone cares about when it comes to integration.
> no current consumer devices exist on market that can track these two numbers
And if there were consumer devices, the next problem would be accuracy. Based on a bunch of reading I did several years ago (so maybe out of date), consumer excercise trackers were very innaccurate in many ways. Exercise misinformation devices.
> And if there were consumer devices, the next problem would be accuracy.
Having worked on Microsoft Band, I can tell you that accuracy is a problem with UV exposure for a number of reasons, none of which involve the sensor itself.
Mostly it is around how people wear it, and was the sensor always facing the sun, people going in and out of the shade, long sleeves, and so forth. We settled on # of minutes of high exposure, I forget what index we considered "high" but basically it if it was above a certain threshold we considered you "in the sun".
The goal was sunscreen application reminders, no way would we have trusted it to tell people they had "enough" sun!
Thanks; I am not surprised. It's hard to imagine how a sensor could be made to work cost-effectively - something that detects whatever ambient solar radiation slips through clothing? Whatever, consumers aren't going to pay for that.
But in fairness, the sensor doesn't work with how people use it. We could make a sensor that straps to user foreheads and requires them to always face the sun. When integration fails, we can point the finger either way, or just say it wasn't a good fit.
I would upvote if it wasn't for the stance of disagreeing with the implications of data that you don't have any reason not to trust.
What you describe clearly is a problem with data collection, where crucial unobservable variables had to be replaced with questionable assumptions. We should be wary because we can't fully trust those assumptions, and hence not the data, not because of what the implications would be.
Observational data is so profoundly affected by the decisions and assumptions of those who chose to select them and analyze them in a specific way that I cannot agree with this premise that the implications should be “trusted”. Those implications are a function of the choices made by the people making those decisions. The data have no opportunity to tell an independent story.
There are tools that can make this better (eg, finding an instrumental variable), but this wasn’t done here.
To be expected from a lifestyle magazine. OO is an OK place to find your next camping destination, but it's a terrible place to look for science. This nonsense made it to HN a year or so ago.
If you're looking for sunblock that won't give you cancer or ruin the environment, check out EWG:
I read this article a couple years ago and it definitely influenced my thoughts on the matter.
I think this is yet another case of us collectively ignoring common sense. We know that UV radiation is damaging to the skin and can cause skin cancer. Instead of rubbing chemicals on our skin to negate these effects, it is better to avoid being out in direct sunlight when the UV index is high, especially if you're super pale. If you have to go out at mid day for a decent length of time, wear a big hat and clothes that cover you up.
I'm on the pale end of the spectrum and if I go out at say 2pm when the UV index is at 10 it'll be physically painful within a few minutes.
However, when I go for my daily walks earlier in the day or later in the afternoon when the UV index is say 3-4, I go without sunscreen and feel great. And even though I supplement vitamin D, the effects of sunlight is clearly better.
Also I think it is safe to imagine that most of our ancient ancestors weren't going out in the most intense sunlight and stripping close to naked for hours to develop a nice tan.
This article set off a lightbulb as a possible explanation for the prevalence of osteoporosis in older Asian women.
If the mechanism is:
unfiltered sunlight -> Vitamin D production -> increased calcium absorption -> decreased risk of osteoporosis;
then in many Asian cultures, the desire for women to have fair skin, cover up as much as possible, use sunscreen judiciously, and even use umbrellas when going outside; would certainly cause a Vitamin D deficiency and increased risk of osteoporosis by old age.
Our ancient ancestors such as those in Egypt would use the sun to fight off bilirubin with newborns by rotating them next to a sun-lit window. So yeah, common sense.
If most of your ancesters are from Sweden, and you go to Nigeria, you should probably avoid the sun most of the time, and use sunscreen whenever you have to spend time in the sun.
If most of your ancestors are from Nigeria and you stay in Sweden, you should catch as much sun as you can, and still take vitamin D supplements.
If you stay in a location where the bulk of your ancestors came from, you should probably be able to stay outside most of the time, as long as it is relativey constant from month to month. (Ie, anyone who stays inside all day for 11 months would have a risk of sunburn if they suddenly start spending all day on the beach in July without sunscreen.)
Indeed, at least up to some temperature threshold. Personally, I start to struggle around 30-35 degrees C if the humidity is "tropical", and prefer an air conditioned room (or a pool/beach).
Unless there exists some weird guideline that says “use sunscreen and go out in the strongest sunlight doing noon” I find your comment completely baffling.
Sunscreen recommendations as I commonly encounter them are to stay out of the sun when it is strongest. It is to stay in shade when possible. It is that sunshine is healthy for producing vitamin D and for your general psychological well-being.
But it is to also wear sunscreen and that you should protect yourself from UV even when outside in shade.
People have such a hard time with the concept of a trade-off. Life is not a video game where there is an optimal single answer for everyone every time. It’s complicated,
especially with something like biology. So place your bets: do you want possibly better blood pressure, higher incidence of melanoma, and faster aging of skin? Or do you want benefits of more sun exposure and greater risk of cancer?
The answer is: it depends on your family history, your lifestyle, and a bunch of other things.
I know that organizations like American Dermatology or Outdoor magazine have to water down their message so it’s digestible, but it annoys me when people expect “The Answer”. Science is constantly updating.
> 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.
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!
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!
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.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.
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.
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.
“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.
People are trained to expect the Answer during their education which focuses for a very long time on presenting things as Truth with uncertainty coming in far too late.
I don't think it's unreasonable that people expect clear public health guidelines. I don't want to trudge through a thousand pages of research, I want the department of health to say "well we had some experts read the papers, and if you do X and Y and Z you'll probably be fine." I'd appreciate more details beyond that, of course, especially if it's an area of particular interest to me. But I can't be that interested in everything, and sometimes it's good just to put out a guideline.
I understand why you think this isn't unreasonable -- I just don't think it's _possible_ for most things (that aren't overt poisons, i.e. smoking, lead, etc). If you get skin cancer, you'll always wish you'd done more. There's just too many variables, and the department of health will likely always be too conservative(see below) for some people's take, so then which "experts" do you listen to?
The reality of the advice for sun is probably similar to most things -- You need some sun, but not too much. And no one probably knows the answer, and it will probably change as a result of climate change and other factors. My wife is a high risk pregnancy because she’s over 35, but after probing the doctors what we realize is that for some women at some point between the ages of 30 and 45 the risks to your pregnancy may increase some variable amount but you know what is funny, that because these women are more closely monitored, high risk pregnancies may actually have better outcomes than low risk pregnancies! And so there’s this epically long laundry list of things that you’re not supposed to do, with very little specific guidance on the risks you might take on.
But if you really want experts. The Skin Cancer Foundation at Skincancer.org suggests a shotglass full of sunscreen over your entire body every day 30 minutes before you go out, even when it's cloudy. Also, that's not enough! For a full sun protection strategy seek the shade whenever possible, wear sun-safe clothing, a wide-brimmed hat and UV-blocking sunglasses:
There is simple and then there is insistence on everything to be either "you need to maximize exposure" or "any small amount of it is super bad" with no middle ground allowed. There is simple and then there is "so overly simplistic, that it is almost guaranteed to harm those who take it seriously".
I had some pretty crappy skin issues (Dermatitis and occasionally psoriasis) starting in childhood, but as an adult I moved to a tropical country - boom no more problems. I don't even think I have allergic reactions to cats and dogs anymore. Wild how much your health and mood improves when you can get daily sunlight year round. There's the rainy season for sure, but there's usually a window in the morning of a few hours or so to go for a nice walk in.
The last two winters I’ve had some really bad mental problems. Two winters ago I spent savings and that night booked a morning flight to Florida, which helped a lot. The second time I didn’t have money to blow so I told my wife I was leaving and going to Florida, got in the car and turned off my phone (it was more traumatic and not a good time, she was very upset about me effectively abandoning her and our children. And I was effectively insane for the next two hours, which is good because if I had been thinking clearly I could have booked a flight and ended up 1500 miles away with no plan). About an hour of driving later I snapped out of it, but I’m pretty sure the lack of sunlight where I live in the winter is making me go crazy.
I'm not a doctor but it's likely you have something more going on mentally than just lack of sunlight. For the sake of yourself and your family, please see a psychiatrist.
The latter skin condition runs in my family (thankfully I have never really dealt with it except a couple of bouts when I was a child) and all those in my family that deal with it say the same thing. They go to the tropics and it's gone in a week.
I spent a few years in a tropical country and never once got a sunburn. I paid no mind to sun and spent a ton of time outside. Moving back to the states, within 3 months I had gotten a bad sunburn. I don't know what is going on with this sunburn thing but I'm convinced it has more to do with just sun exposure. Maybe ozone, maybe an environmental factor that increases damage upon exposure, I don't know, but there's something there.
As far as sun exposure now, I'll put sunscreen on when I'm going to spend more than an hour in direct sunlight at a time. I spend a lot of time outside and I don't really get burned anymore.
> “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.
To paraphrase "the data isn't wrong, but it contradicts dogmatically held beliefs, and so a strict regime of pills and treatments are required first before indulging in this heresy".
It takes a lot to break persistent medical dogmas, and these platitudes of "avoid sun exposure at all costs because skin cancer" are starting to become generational sayings that are ingrained in prevalent thinking.
Also just want to point out what is touched on in the article - melanoma (skin cancer caused by UV) in the USA kills about 7000-8000, with that trend line decreasing. Heart disease kills around 700,000 people a year in the USA alone.
Well he's a dermatologist. His bias is towards fighting skin cancer. He looks at it through the lens of somebody who regularly deals with people who are dying from melanoma.
He's tasked with fighting a battle, not winning a war.
As an anecdotal aside, I always read about people who treat cancers as being more militant in their beliefs, but they're also dealt with tough hands.
Right. The road to hell is paved with the good intentions
(and myopia) of narrow specialists who want others to prioritize the thing they worry about. Technicians of all kinds need to realize their most helpful role is to provide inputs so people can make their own decisions, not to actually recommend (or recently mandate) what people decide to do.
If you think of UV light exposure as a therapy of sorts, then it's fair to weigh its benefits and risks against alternative treatments.
If the supposed benefits of UV light exposure can be achieved through an alternative treatment that poses a lower risk of skin cancer, then why wouldn't that be the superior treatment?
Because real people like to go to the beach or go running or a million other outdoor activities. And some people even like the look of a tan, or want to show off their bodies. Or people don't want to spend their time thinking about that stuff and have other priorities. That is my point about the narrow advice. People have diverse goals, and there is a lot more to going out in the sun than optimizing your vitamin d levels. Treating people like we're all farm animals that need some standard, dictated care formula works for nobody
It sounds like your argument is now: "I like the look of being tanned and don't want to be burdened by the need to regularly apply lotion while living my outdoor lifestyle".
Okay, well that's your choice; but don't latch on to some argument about it being healthy, unless you're willing to endure scrutiny.
I laughed when the Dr in the article recommended sunscreen plus blood pressure pills. The confidence in narrow pharmaceutical interventions is absurd when we keep realizing that we don't understand how all the systems in the body are interconnected.
Sure, the article does say that and it even provides a paper to backup its claim.
However, subsequently a meta-analysis (including that same paper) was published that found:
"Vitamin D [supplementation] was associated with significant reduction of cancer-related mortality compared with placebo [...]. Compared with placebo, Vitamin D was not associated with significant reduction of cancer incidence [...]".
I tried this approach. I love being outside, love the beach, love to run and when I was younger I loved having a nice bronze tan.
I am now a stage 4 melanoma patient. They have taken my lymph nodes on one side, a chunk of my brain, and half of my right lung. Immunotherapy has so far saved my life, but there are no guarantees this will last.
Careful. I sincerely hope it plays out better for you..
Those alternatives either work poorly (vitamin D supplementation) or have other side-effects (hypertension drugs). And, as noted in the article, sun exposure is a complex reaction with several benefits - it would take many drugs to reproduce that effect.
It’s reasonable to question the current dogma (no sun ever) and determine if there’s a better balance (~30 minutes without sunscreen, but use sunscreen beyond that, or some other mix). Dermatologists are focused on skin health and more likely to overlook or ignore those other benefits.
That is an entirely pointless hypothetical. The medical reality is that alternative treatments can only deliver a subset of the benefits of UV light exposure.
According to the article the alternative treatment is ineffective (vitamin D supplements) and increases risk factors for higher mortality rate diseases. I'd say that's pretty far from the superior treatment.
Recently mandating not coughing on others to stop a (initially scary) pandemic is not the same as recommending less sun exposure. The road to slippery slopes is itself a slippery slope.
Go tell your doctor You smoke two packs a day they’ll say stop smoking. If smoking two packs means you won’t kill yourself then they will weigh that. Then there are bad doctors too of course
It upsets me that no one mentions the link between sun exposure and aging. The people who seem to not age are commonly those who use sunscreen or protect their face/neck from the sun. Without sun exposure, the skin naturally heals and replaces scarring. This is why people with post-acne hyperpigmentation will often need to wear sunscreen for a long time while using a topical retinoid-- to both increase the rate of skin cell turnover and to make sure the new skin is adequately healed.
Is your hypothesis that avoiding sun exposure slows aging generally, or just that it makes the skin look younger? I’m worried about many of the effects of aging, but don’t care a whole lot about how my skin looks.
It's just aesthetic. Heavy sun exposure throughout life leads to wrinkles and sun spots/splotchy skin later in life. White collar workers likely needn't worry, though. That advice is more for people who spend their working hours in the sun.
> White collar workers likely needn't worry, though.
Have to disagree with this one, everyone who can't escape sunlight and likes to go outside at all is affected. People in the American southwest from all walks of life age shockingly faster (in appearance) than their northern state counterparts. I'd meet women who were 25 and looked 35 (by northern expectations), and it only accelerates from there (35 looking like 50, 50 looking like 70).
I totally agree, broadly speaking, that people in SW age out quickly. But I live in New Mexico and have observed that white collar/software eng. people are not nearly as affected. I'm kind of a night owl who gets out after 6pm and I can say my wrinkles are age-appropriate compared to my farmer friends who look 10+ years older than their age.
Skin is the largest organ of the body. It is an indicator of the inner health as well even though the main function of the skin is to protect the tissue/fat and other layers. so you should care about how your skin looks. You can protect your skin from excessive sun exposure, but if your diet isnt adequate or healthy, it will show through your skin.
Everybody ages at the same rate. I'd argue that society should care less about the superficial dermatological implications of sun exposure, if sun exposure is actually as good as this article claims.
>They found that the "biological age" of the participants in 2011, when they were 38 — as exhibited by the state of their organs, their immune systems, their heart health and their chromosomes — ranged from as young as 30 to as old as 60.
It might feel that way because acne is just much less noticable on darker skin. Acne effects skin of all colors. The one year I was tan was also my year I had my bad bacne episode.
>” To paraphrase "the data isn't wrong, but it contradicts dogmatically held beliefs, and so a strict regime of pills and treatments are required first before indulging in this heresy".”
That rephrasing in itself can be describe as a dogmatic belief that supplements are bad/conspiracy. It’s a dogmatism pile.
Eat sun exposed mushrooms if vitamin d pills aren’t ones cup of tea, but in northern climes relying on sun for vitamin d is not realistic much of the year.
The issue described in the article seems to be that sunlight does a lot more than produce Vitamin D - thinking a natural process is the same as taking exactly one chemical by mouth is the kind of modernist nutrition science that gets overturned later.
There is no empirical evidence the pills do anything. Did you read the article? It's likely one of those spurious correlation type of situations. Being outdoors or having sun exposure, maybe living healthier lifestyles... whatever it is it corresponds with higher vitamin D levels, that's all.
It's a bit much claiming those suspicious of pill pushing are part of the actual cult. If someone thinks taking vitamin D pills is necessary they're the one who has to provide the evidence, not the other way around.
I'd say you're probably right, but then things like the hole in, or the thickness of, the ozone layer would make a difference between pre- and post-industrial sun exposure.
I found this quote particularly undermining of his credibility:
"It’s entirely intuitive,” he responded. “Homo sapiens have been around for 200,000 years. Until the industrial revolution, we lived outside. How did we get through the Neolithic Era without sunscreen?"
By boning each other at the earliest possible age and procreating before we could die of cancer. DUH. The guy's a scientist but can't logically filter out causes of mortality that don't typically transpire until after child-bearing age?
Makes me wonder about melanoma rates within outdoor working populations, like construction workers. Do we see more or less the same ratios in their population?
> And perplexingly, outdoor workers have half the melanoma rate of indoor workers. Tanned people have lower rates in general. “The risk factor for melanoma appears to be intermittent sunshine and sunburn, especially when you’re young,” says Weller. “But there’s evidence that long-term sun exposure associates with less melanoma.”
> Also just want to point out what is touched on in the article - melanoma (skin cancer caused by UV) in the USA kills about 7000-8000, with that trend line decreasing. Heart disease kills around 700,000 people a year in the USA alone.
This is actually borderline nonsensical in the context:
> People with low levels of vitamin D in their blood have significantly higher rates of virtually every disease and disorder you can think of: cancer, diabetes, obesity, osteoporosis, heart attack, stroke, depression, cognitive impairment, autoimmune conditions, and more.
This is why we need the phrase "evidence-based medicine": the prevalence of the alternative. Doctors aren't automatically scientists or critical thinkers.
I think you're reading too much into that quote. I think they just meant that they acknowledge that there are benefits to sun exposure but in his opinion it's not worth the risk of getting skin cancer. Even if turns out to be misguided, that's not dogma.
If skin cancer deaths caused by UV are low in the US and the doctor is still concerned, I can side with the concern our doctors have in Australia. Where we lead the world on rates of skin cancer.
The most common hypertension drugs are statins. While those can be necessary for some patients, they come with a long list of negative side effects. Recommending them as a first line therapy before moderate UV light exposure is medical malpractice.
This makes sense. I recently saw an article in the local news that said the same as the dermatology academy mentioned in the article: Any sun exposure is supposedly bad and has to be avoided. And the concept of building up tolerance was said to be nonsense, apparently any exposure is bad even when you don't burn.
What I've always done is build up my tolerance by getting tan during the spring so I can walk around without sunscreen in summer. Of course I don't go crazy with it, and I try to avoid direct sunlight in high-UV situations (e.g. walking on the shaded side of the street) but I take it when there is no option. It works fine for me, I rarely get sunburn and when I do it's minor, just a little red glow and sensitivity. Even though I have very pale skin I tan and burn very slowly, luckily. I lived in Australia a while in the early '00s while the ozone hole was still around and the same approach worked even there
I live in a country (Spain) that has lots of sun so I don't want to go out with cream every day. The only times I use it is when I'm outside for a long time and I feel I'm getting close to burning.
I get that it's totally bad what I see many Northern European tourists do: They stay indoors most of the summer and then take a 2-week holiday to the costa's where they lay in the sun for 12 hours a day. Obviously this is totally bad, even with suncreen you will get totally burned to a crisp.
In any case, I'll see. Maybe I'm wrong but in that case the damage is done already. But I don't think sun exposure can be as bad as they say.
I mostly go into the woods to get my sun exposure. My pet theory is that sunlight exposure isn't a problem, it's the persistent exposing of the same tissue that's causing problems.
So instead of baking my body for hours on a sandy beach somewhere, I prefer to expose my body intermittently to the sun through the foliage.
IMHO, the sun does not cause skin cancer. Oxidative stress causes skin cancer. If you have a functioning oxidative stress pathway you will not get skin cancer.
I do yes! I don't have much hair left so I kinda need to. For some reason my head burns quicker than the rest.
I get mine mostly from walking in the woods/mountains too and I usually wear long trousers even on hot days too. But it's really for a different reason. I just don't like shorts and I get cut a lot.
Skin exposure is quite different there because unlike the head they get a change in angle way more often. Sure you can get sunburn there too, but it’s harder to do.
For the arms at least, they make UV protective shirts, they are essentially just a lightweight loose breathable fabric. Worth considering if you aren't familiar with them.
No, it’s my point. We see skin tones mapped because all the lighter skin people died out faster than they could reproduce due to UV radiation killing them off sooner in life. Melanin rich individuals are more resilient, but that is not purely because of their skin and tanning won’t give you their power.
"Your tan isn’t doing anything." you say, despite clear evidence that melanin is associated with ancestral UV exposure and how your body develops a tan in response to UV exposure. Now you're suggesting a separate unnamed method of resilience associated with darker skinned people.
I have vitiligo. Being a pale person it doesn't show up except in the summer when my skin tans a bit.
Everyone has heard that melanin is the body's defense against too much UV exposure. Once during a visit with my dermatologist I asked if there was a connect between having vitiligo and increased skin cancer, expecting her to say yes. Instead she reacted as if I had asked a complete non sequitur. I had to make explicit my chain of reasoning (vitiligo means areas with no melanin production, meaning more UV damage, meaning more chance of skin cancer) and she half-heartedly told me no, she had never heard of such a thing.
It seems like there should be an obvious connection, but apparently not. It made me question whether she was just incurious or if there really is that loose of a connection between UV and skin cancer. BTW I've had two patches of skin cancer removed by this doctor, both on my neck/shoulder area, which is not affected by my vitiligo.
It depends on the doctor. I know some who keep up with stuff, and some who don't and just rake in the cash.
It's worth making friends with the ones who keep up with stuff. Doctors like to party but they're so fucking overworked that they hit you up at like 11pm most of the time.
I also have vitiligo. Vitiligo sufferers have overall significantly lower rates of skin cancer. While the reason is unknown, in my mind the connection between "immune system aggressively attacks skin cells" and "less skin cancer" makes sense.
Although the SIRs of melanoma, cancers of oral cavity, hepatoma and lymphoma were also increased in vitiligo patients, the significance was lost after correction for multiple testing. No specific cancer occurred less frequently in vitiligo patients than in the general population.
> First, it is not possible to differentiate between active sun exposure habits and a healthy lifestyle.
People who are healthy get outside more. People who engage in physical activity tend to do quite a bit of it outside.
Despite the term "sun avoidance" this is not about people who intentionally avoid the sun. It is about people who for whatever reason do not have much sun exposure.
There were some randomized controlled trials in Australia where they instructed people to use sunscreen vs not and then followed them up over 10-15 years or so. They couldn't rigorously control use over the period of the study but found that people differed by condition, and the group instructed to use sunscreen had lower rates of melanoma and markers of skin aging.
I would post links but when I search for the studies I get a barrage of summaries without actually linking to the original study.
I think this study is part of it:
doi:10.1001/archderm.139.4.451
I think this summarizes another part of the study:
I'm surprised that they didn't mention that sunscreen blocks about 99% of vitamin D production. It doesn't seem wise for people who spend most of their time indoors to slather on sunscreen every time they go outside, even for 5 minutes, given their sun exposure is much lower than what is likely healthy. There was also a HN article a few years ago about a dev who said one thing they wish they had known about earlier in their career was was to get more sun exposure, because they were facing osteoporosis later in life.
> we’ve been taught to protect ourselves from dangerous UV rays, which can cause skin cancer.
[…]
> 25,871 participants received high doses for five years—found no impact on cancer, heart disease, or stroke.
> How did we get it so wrong?
I don’t get the fundamental premise of the article: Dermatologists warn about skin cancer from sun exposure, and the author takes issue with vitamin D not curing cancer and heart diseases.
What is “wrong” ? These two facts look disjointed to me, with no specific opposition.
Vitamin D not directly linked to curing cancer and heart diseases is also nothing new, there is very few scientifically proven effects of vitamin D[0] and it’s usually offered as “just in case” supplement.
Dermatologists arguing skin cancer can happen doesn’t seem wrong or unproven either, and all the “sun benefits us” part doesn’t seem to contradict that part either.
Am I missing some important cultural background of the author that makes it all a bigger point ?
I think they were just making a point that this relationship between Vitamin D and good health is correlative rather than causal, i.e people who had higher levels of Vitamin D were healthy because natural production of Vitamin D is common in people who are more active, rather than Vitamin D itself made them healthy.
The CTA of the article seems to focused around that we may have been overdoing it with the sunscreen advice and that there is a healthy amount of sun exposure we should be getting.
On sunscreen, my personal impression was that people were sloppy enough that the impact would be mild at most (seems the subject has also been looked into [1]), and people going for really high blocking values usually do so for beauty preferences way more than health preoccupations.
Wouldn’t this be very obvious in certain Asian countries (Japan, South Korea, and China)? Being pale skin is extremely culturally coveted since it’s seen as beauty (also pale skins means you don’t work on the farms so historically speaking, pale skin is like being fat in the medieval times). However, anecdotally I have not noticed any of the stated benefits of “sun exposure” in those countries.
Lack of sun exposure or lack of “large environments” where your eye can focus further distances? While they’re extremely hard to separate in real life, it’s different from what the article is suggesting.
I have sensitive skin that turns red easily in the sun, especially at the locations where I have scars from acne and other injuries. With my atrophic scars, we know that UV can reduce collagen levels which would reduce the healing potential at those sites. For these reasons, I avoid UV exposure to my face as much as possible.
For fair-skinned people like me, I would recommend generously applying sunscreen to face and hands and leaving the other areas uncovered if you are out in the sun for less than an hour or so with moderate UV index, or less than 20 minutes or so with high UV index. Longer than that, consider applying sunscreen to the rest of your body as well. Of course, ymmv.
There are other benefits to this approach too. You'll visibly age slower. I've yet to hear anyone say that your skin has to absorb vitamin D from your face or hands for it to be effective.
> There are not many daily lifestyle choices that double your risk of dying. In a 2016 study published in the Journal of Internal Medicine, Lindqvist’s team put it in perspective: “Avoidance of sun exposure is a risk factor of a similar magnitude as smoking, in terms of life expectancy.”
There's a link around "put it in perspective." Following it through to the source leads to the 2016 study, which notes:
> We acknowledge several major limitations of this study. First, it is not possible to differentiate between active sun exposure habits and a healthy lifestyle, and secondly, the results are of an observational nature; therefore, a causal link cannot be proven. A further limitation is that we did not have access to exercise data from study initiation; however, similar sHR values were obtained when including exercise for those women who answered the second questionnaire in 2000. With the introduction of whole-genome scanning, a new method of getting closer to causality using observational data is Mendelian random analysis. A potential causal link between BMI and vitamin D levels has been demonstrated with this method 8. In addition, individuals with high BMI do not obtain the same increase in vitamin D levels by UV radiation as lean subjects 9. As a consequence, as BMI seems to be involved in the causal pathway of vitamin D, it should not be included as a confounder in analyses as has been performed in many studies.
This adds nuance missing from the original article. Also, AFAICT, the study doesn't mention anything about sunscreen use by the women. Based on the discussion in the original article, this study looks like a smoking gun. But going a little deeper, not so much.
It'd put the study into the category "needs follow-up."
Something to keep in mind that's strongly in sunscreen's favor: Sun exposure has a dramatic (over spans of years) effect on how your skin looks. People who have low sun exposure, or high sunscreen look look noticibly younger. I can't think of a reproducible way to look younger than preventing UV exposure.
Positive. I feel worse over our long grey winters even with the outdoors and exercise. They help a ton too, but plain old sunlight does wonders for me. If we get a nice bright week in winter, I feel like a mental weight has been lifted off.
Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "Wow! What a Ride!
Among my ancient relatives those that look darker from the sun look better in old age anyway than those who stay indoors and pasty. Healthier looking for sure.
I've internalized the view of "your skin is your largest organ", so I treat as one. I don't generally put things on my skin I wouldn't put in my mouth.
Most sun exposure is on the nose, ears, arms. If some sun exposure is healthy, then the best way to do it is to be completely naked and only be in the sun for 10 minutes. By exposing more surface area, you can get as much sun in 10 minutes as you would by just exposing you face for 2 hours. No burns. In engineering terms, it's like load balancing the sun across several body parts.
There was just an article I saw last year about a sunscreen recall because it contained ingredients that caused leukemia or something. Not to mention some of the mental health benefits of sun.
If you want to reduce sun exposure, probably better to shade yourself with clothes or umbrellas than put chemicals on your skin, or use something natural like zinc on sensitive areas like nose and ears.
Also, there is more red light around sunrise/sunset. That's healthier light. You want to avoid blue light (UV), which is magnified (like a magnifying glass on the atmosphere) in the middle of the day.
I've never heard of this 'load balancing' being a thing. You can get totally sunburned on an exposed spot. Or do you mean in terms of vitamin D generation?
I think the point is that you can get the same vitamin D dose from a gentle exposure of a lot of skin, or a massive and damaging over-exposure of a small part of your skin, or a spectrum in between.
The same general idea that you could light a room with a single LED die overdriven to thermal death in minutes, or many adequately-cooled underdriven ones virtually indefinitely.
Or maybe more similarly, cooking with a 10kW cutting laser rather than an electric stovetop would make a huge mess of your cookware.
This article is from 3 years ago, and talks about how there are upcoming studies that will give us more information. Is there a good summary of what we currently know?
> Sunburn was probably a rarity until modern times, when we began spending most of our time indoors. Suddenly, pasty office workers were hitting the beach in summer and getting zapped. That’s a recipe for melanoma.
This speculation on the author's part, at least, makes no sense.
People have been getting sunburns for a long time[1]. The word "sunburn" in English dates to 1650, but treatments for sunburn are at least as old as the ancient Egyptians, who wrote down numerous treatments for it, including breast milk.
I'm picturing all those Bedouin office workers wearing their keffiyehs and robes in the desert. Looks cool, sure, but might it also serve another purpose?
It seems that there is even some level of doubt that we even _know_ that sun exposure causes melanoma, and what that means, I think we can assume very few people are following a zero tolerance policy of unprotected sun exposure. Reading through a few abstracts, it seems like the connection between sun exposure and melanoma isn’t even all that clear. They make connections between childhood sunburns and melanoma in old age. I kinda get the methodology but it feels too tenuous to make a zero tolerance recommendation, and this seems reflected in the commentary or the papers.
Based on my experience, most "sun damage" worry comes from aesthetic concerns. Personally, as someone who has already encountered much of that, I also find the whole explorer look neat, but I don't think the health effects are the prime movers here.
Also, cannot discount innate bias: love sunshine to the degree I had these solar lamps for winter.
But the fact that melanomas are less likely to be fatal overall amongst us outdoor weather-beaten folk is quite gratifying. I wonder if there are genetic markers.
> love sunshine to the degree I had these solar lamps for winter.
I can sort of imagine what that might be enough to think that Wikipedia's 'lamp with solar panels' article with that name is definitely not what you mean, but I can't see anything else on it, do you have a link or model number or something?
Sorry. Meant Seasonal Affective Disorder lamps. I've moved to California since and have a lot of sunshine but I'm told they have nice lamps now that collimate the beam so it looks like a bright window.
Sadly the article talks about sun exposure being a confounder to vitamin D and positive health outcomes, but not about further confounders. If you are already sick you will go out less into the sun.
I'd worry more about the studies covering every possible confounding factor than the article itself. The conceivable confounding factors are practically without limit. The same can be said for data backing the "sun bad" schools of thought.
I'm surprised age and obesity aren't mentioned more in this article. It seems like both lead to less sun exposure and are also comorbid with heart disease, low vitamin D levels, etc.
If obesity and age explains the low sun exposure (less likely to be sunbathing on beaches, etc.), the assumed causality is at least oversimplified if not outright mistaken.
The evidence for a sunlight-triggered mechanism for the production of sunlight is interesting, though. I wish the article worked more to connect that finding to everything else.
Those arguing that we can't conclude anything without a randomized, controlled trial need to reread [1].
Yes, randomized, controlled trials are better, and the gold standard. No, they aren't always available and sometimes--even often--science can draw conclusions with evidence that came from other sources.
The article makes no mention of Photobiomodulation (and there’s no mention in these comments at the time of writing).
And that's odd. Because that's the HUGE idea here. Yes, there are concerns about the harms associated with the UV end of the spectrum. But there are also the massive benefits from the Near Infrared (NIR) end.
Certain NIR wavelengths, around 810nm to 850nm, penetrate up to 5cm into the body and have a dramatically positive effect on mitochondria, creating the most powerful sub-cellular antioxidant (melatonin) to manage Oxidative Stress. This is well-established science now. Indeed, the exact mechanism is known (cytochrome c oxidase, etc).
It turns out that for good health it helps to be exposed to the Sun (and specifically NIR). We're more plant than we realise (a different mechanism obviously).
And, if you think about it, how on earth could we have not evolved to take advantage of the “free” energy provided by the Sun, particularly the NIR part of the spectrum which actually delivers about half of the energy.
I'll go with "the sun is a deadly laser". I'll suggest anyone that disbelieves that to spend some 30min into a moderate/high UV intensity day outside without sunscreen. Especially around midday.
Sure, don't avoid the sun completely, but don't play with it
It's true that sunlight increases Vit D and Nitric Oxide, other claims are much feeble and holy mother of selection bias to claim all that is due to the sun!
> I'll suggest anyone that disbelieves that to spend some 30min into a moderate/high UV intensity day outside without sunscreen. Especially around midday.
30 minutes? I did that today for two hours. My arms, legs, face, and neck were all exposed without sunscreen, and I didn't burn at all. It all depends on your skin type.
I'm black, from the Caribbean and now I live in Canada. I've never been sunburnt, despite spending all day in the sun, sleeping in plain sunlight without sunscreen etc. I only ever started wearing sunscreen (30 spf) on my face during University in Canada a few years ago, in my early twenties.
Your generalization necessarily can't apply to all skin types
To be fair, having different recommendations per race is problematic.
The rapper Logic is African American, but he probably needs more sunblock than Akon. I imagine Italians can tolerate more sunlight than Norwegians
Like with most medical advice what works for Billy might not work for Andy. But we have a massive medical industrial complex which needs to sell as much crap as possible.
Wouldn't surprise me if the sunblock manufacturers are behind some of this
>> Melanoma? True, the sun worshippers had a higher incidence of it—but they were eight times less likely to die from it.
Hm. So, having read the article I know how many times less likely are "sun worshippers" to die from melanoma but I don't know how higher is its incidence among them.
Why quantify one thing and not the other? That's one of the things that make this article read very fishy.
> Wouldn’t all those rays also raise rates of skin cancer? Yes, but skin cancer kills surprisingly few people: less than 3 per 100,000 in the U.S. each year
This is like saying "Don't people who slather themselves in honey and walk bare naked to the woods get eaten by bears more? Sure, but bears kill surprisingly few people, just 59 out of 1,000,000 yearly"
Most wide-public guidelines are unhealthy and unscientific simply because they are the results of some lobbyist pushing some product. If we go through recent history a thing that's really difficult these days [1] we'll see many examples, let's say for foods:
- blue fish are the protein of the sea, eat many! Few years later blue fish are the pollutant-eaters of the sea, avoid them!
- cigarettes are good for health! They kill seasonal germs! Smoke! Few years later cigarettes should be banned they are absolutely unhealthy!
- artificial tanning is safe for skin than Sun exposure! Than artificial tanning provoke skin cancer!
- radioactivity at small doses are good for health, help fetus to develop stronger, help against baldness! Radioactivity is dangerous and lethal!
....
The REAL issue is that to avoid such phenomenon we need a PUBLIC-only really developed and religiously separate from the private sector public research for the society, with public bodies who publish their results for any cohort of citizens (witch means from real papers to abstracts for the large public) and of course the little we have had, when real innovation have happened, was destroyed quickly cannibalizing their results for private profits. Just see the outcome for IT or from big pharma. Oh BTW such move it's the key for the win of China and Russia, since both still have public research while we haven't anymore.
[1] YES, my dears fellow HNers we do have hyper-fast and hyper-big search engines BUT we have nothing public really good at finding really past events we do not know by some keywords, just try to generate let's say a map of how many floods per area we have experienced in recent years: IF someone have published that we can profit from such results, if not building out of the web it's far from easier. When someone do something similar for very specific aspects likely end up here on HN like the recent Reddit Map or some Babarasi network analyses etc because there is no public generic tool for such research
It’s a great article. There definitely has been some back and forth on this topic for many years. It probably will always be like that, especially given it’s in the same realm of artificial light, eggs, and sugar.
I do believe much of these problems exist because of the literal interpretation of the science. More people are thinking in absolutes rather than how one can moderate these things in our lives.
Even just last year, many “influencers” on social media were misinforming younger people about the dangers of the sun. Speaking in the sense of never going outside without proper products. Debating if those products will give you the same benefits without them on ridding the risk. But none the less, selling a product at the end of the day.
America is one big shopping mall with everyone holding their credit card out.
What I didn’t see discussed was the possibility of the reverse causation. People that have more diseases spend less time outside and therefore have lower levels of vitamin D.
Would explain why vitamin D supplements don’t seem to work in the studies mentioned in the article.
>Current guidelines for sun exposure are unhealthy and unscientific, controversial new research suggests—and quite possibly even racist. How did we get it so wrong?
Everything seems to be racist these days. Sunscreen, math...
I read this while listening to "Here comes the Rain again".
Great piece. Makes sense. Sun is pretty good with everything it shines on. And you can definitely feel it has a positive effect on your mood and your skin.
in my last job, I reviewed hundreds of medical records, many of whom had basal cell or squamous cell carcinomas (BCC & SCC)...i never saw a case where BCC or SCC caused a real problem...I never saw one where it spread elsewhere on the body other than the skin...this theory that the more skin cancers you have means you have better general health is one that has been finding more support recently..and I agree with this theory...the sun has definite benefits, and almost certainly benefits that we do not yet even understand...
Causation could be (partially) the other way round, very sick people do not get to go out. So if you screen all sick people for sun exposure you will find a lower exposure than non sick people.
I've been living this way consciously for years. It's not shocking that the sun, which we evolved alongside for millions of years, is probably good to see once in a while. It's not shocking that putting chemical creams on your skin every day is probably not great for your health.
Anyone else noticing that a whole lot of lifestyle recommendations are slowly moving back toward "just do whatever they did like 2500 years ago"?
Is there any data on vitamin D production that compares being outside exposed directly to the sun versus being outside but under a shade or with clothes on?
I understand that our pupils adapt a lot and give us an illusion of constant luminance when in fact there is actually a huge light difference between indoors and outdoors in the shade. But I never found any info linking this with vitamin D production?
My own observation is not scientific. Still - I saw a big impact after taking Vitamin D. Note that I do not take any supplement or medicine, almost never, even when I am really sick. I had various unspecific problems (random infections, inflammations etc.) - all of these disappeared after deiciding to take Vitamin D daily half a year ago. I do not have an explanation other than it works.
I struggled with eczema for years. At some point I wished I could cut off limbs and be done with the pain.
Previously, I relied on unhealthy doses of steroids/corticoids and layers of vaseline covered by cotton medical apparel. Eczema got better during Summer (sunlight exposure).
Sainsbury's multi-vitamins have cured me. I don't need a study to tell me this is true
"Although they are a $30-plus billion market in the United States alone, vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin E, selenium, beta-carotene, glucosamine, chondroitin, and fish oil have now flopped in study after study."
What? Fish oil flopped? They did every study combination they could on Fish Oil and Omega 3? They even filtered out for genetics? They are just starting, it is no where near finished!
FADS1 and FADS2 Gene Polymorphisms Modulate the Relationship of Omega-3 and Omega-6 Fatty Acid Plasma Concentrations in Gestational Weight Gain: A NISAMI Cohort Study
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8912382/
Give vitamin B6 to someone who is deficient and guess what, it will not flop. But I would bet none of you have had a B6 test, correct?
The studies did not flop. They are still showing casualty but more work needs to be down on who they might help. Yet he talks about vitamin D like it has somehow escaped these problems? Because on guy said something?
That guy suffered from "my supplement is the best supplement and only supplement that effects health" disorder.
"...and quite possibly even racist."
No need to read further, what an absolutely stupid thing to say.
Maybe the author should open a dictionary and look up the word "racist". (I hope he did in the years after he wrote that.)
During the pandemic I took hour long walks in the afternoon pretty consistently six days a week or so, I got a tan for the first time in over a decade and ended up feeling much healthier in turn.
Hm.. one one hand I can believe this.
On the other hand, I believe it is well known that sun-screen is necessary in order to prevent one's skin from aging.
Clouds reduce UV, but it still penetrates (also, apparently, it can actually enhance UV at times [0]). In my country (New Zealand), in summer you can get sunburned in about 10 - 20 minutes on a cloudy day, compared to 5 - 10 minutes on a clear day. But then, we tend to have much thinner ozone above us in our summer than countries in the Northern Hemisphere.[1]
One thing i learned from this article is if you have low vitamin D it's better to not eat any d supplements - as that is equal to putting little chips of ice on a thermometer to get it down to 98.4 when you are trying to measure your fever.
Those vit d supplements will only skew the one thing that actually tells you how much deficiencient you are in getting enough sunlight as it correlates quite directly with it (most other things look more long term).
“People of color rarely get melanoma. The rate is 26 per 100,000 in Caucasians, 5 per 100,000 in Hispanics, and 1 per 100,000 in African Americans. On the rare occasion when African Americans do get melanoma, it’s particularly lethal—but it’s mostly a kind that occurs on the palms, soles, or under the nails and is not caused by sun exposure.”
It’s saying they’re pushing sun screen for people who don’t really need it.
If we read all the sentences around those you quoted, it presents a nuanced view. It takes some motivated reasoning to flatten both the relevant context here and the background that science, particularly the science of human health, is highly uncertain. And yet the author manages just that, flattening all the context and nuance into: sunscreen is racist.
This is 2 paragraphs after the one I quoted and it says it even more clearly:
“And yet they are being told a very different story, misled into believing that sunscreen can prevent their melanomas, which Weller finds exasperating. “The cosmetic industry is now trying to push sunscreen at dark-skinned people,” he says. “At dermatology meetings, you get people standing up and saying, ‘We have to adapt products for this market.’ Well, no we don’t. This is a marketing ploy.””
> The American Academy of Dermatology recommends that all people, regardless of skin color, protect themselves from the sun’s harmful ultraviolet rays by seeking shade, wearing protective clothing, and using a broad-spectrum, water-resistant sunscreen with an SPF of 30 or higher
> “I think that sun-protection advice,” [David Leffel, Yale] told me, “has always been directed at those most at risk”—people with fair skin or a family history of skin cancer. “While it is true that people with olive skin are at less risk, we do see an increasing number of people with that type of skin getting skin cancer. But skin cancer… is very rare in African Americans… and although they represent a spectrum of pigmentation, [they] are not at as much risk.”
Right, it’s saying that race matters in this context because sun exposure skin cancer is rare in African Americans. The article is trying to make an argument that the American Academy of Dermatology needs to reconsider the opinion in your first quote.
Your original comment was effectively ‘why does everything have to be about race?’ and it matters in this context.
Discussing differences by race and implying racism are two quite different things. This article engaged in the latter, when only the former appears relevant in light of the facts.
The article is making the case that black people are being given sun exposure advice catered to white people. That's a pretty basic example of systemic racism. It's not vile bigotry, but it doesn't need to be—it's just a bias grounded in race. Still racism. Let's not be afraid of using accurate language just because that language is politicized.
Radiation safety, including UV safety, operates on the As Low As Reasonably Achievable (ALARA) principle - "This principle means that even if it is a small dose, if receiving that dose has no direct benefit, you should try to avoid it." [1] I'd imagine that this is the principle that the American Academy of Dermatologists bases their guidance on. Skin colour has nothing to do with it; radiation = bad.
It's generally a damned good principle to live by. We know for certain that higher UV exposure = higher risk of melanoma. It may be a lower risk for people with darker skin, but where do you draw the line for how dark is dark enough to not need to bother with sunscreen? The article states that it's rare in African Americans, but not nonexistent. In the absence of other evidence, why not avoid UV exposure?
This article presents emerging studies that suggest that UV exposure does have some direct benefits and that avoiding it may be especially harmful to people with darker skin. If there's enough evidence to support the findings, the AAD should absolutely change its advice. That's the scientific process. The article uses the example of margarine to illustrate the point; we've gotten it wrong before.
Given the above, are you certain that the term "racism" is accurate here? What can we attribute to bias that can't be explained by a lack of scientific evidence?
Changing the definitions of words (it’s “systemic racism” not “vile bigotry”) is no different than changing the premises of a debate in order better favor your beliefs. It is the rhetorical equivalent of gerrymandering. Even worse is the insistence that these new words are as true and constant as natural laws like gravity, when in reality, these ideas are just made up by non-scientist academics and activists. No real science is performed to test their validity.
You say “systemic racism”, I say “the article cites one guy and gives his voice more weight than an entire industry body in order to contort this into a story about (maybe) racism”.
Science is messy. Doctors are very cautious by training and experience. So yes, they encourage everyone to use sunscreen until the preponderance of scientific evidence suggests otherwise. This is not racism in any form. To suggest otherwise is a slap in the face to people who have been subjected to real racism.
I didn't change the definition of anything. Racism is bias based upon race, plain and simple.
> No real science is performed to test their validity.
This is a ludicrous argument. Which scientific experiment do you want me to perform, exactly, to discover the definition of racism? It's a word, not a physical law.
> To suggest otherwise is a slap in the face to people who have been subjected to real racism.
And a true scottsman would never put sugar in his porridge, yes, yes.
This right is here is someone on HN being the paragon of objectivity. How about taking the opposing argument in good faith? He didn’t even say anything about racism in the article and just gave evidence. The second someone mentions racism on HN this comment can be seen everywhere “wow and now X is racist?? So dumb!!” Relax it’s just the internet and try to learn something.
The article seems to be saying that excessive sunscreen usage and sun avoidance is bad for everyone and especially for people with darker skin. The leap of logic from that to racism seems like a bit of a stretch.
Maybe the world needs a variant of Hanlon’s razor: never attribute to racism that which is adequate explained by stupidity (or incompetence or the desire to promote one’s product or profession, etc.).
The US tried /extremely/ hard to take 'color-blindness' as the solution to centuries of explicit racism. And it failed rather completely. There's two effects at play: a) the 'true' racists learned how to keep being horrible without ever explicitly talking about race, and b) we wound up with lots of 'data gaps' around race by ignoring real differences. This data gap is arguably at the root of what's called structural racism.
(Incidentally, an incredibly similar dynamic has played out with the rights of women. I'm currently reading Caroline Criado-Perez's 'Invisible Women' which is about a huge range of areas where the 'default' is male, and the resulting gaps in data about women lead to poor outcomes.)
So I'd say the article points to a particular kind of structural racism: That the medical advice for white people is assumed to also be good for people of color.
> So I'd say the article points to a particular kind of structural racism: That the medical advice for white people is assumed to also be good for people of color.
Maybe? The article is trying pretty hard to say that the medical advice is wrong for white people too. Of course, it’s plausible that the article is wrong, white people should use sunscreen, and black people (at least in Northern climates?) should not.
Here’s a more clear-cut example of structural racism in medicine:
Asterisk: They probably are using the "new" definition of racism, not the classical definition. The foundation of the "anti-racist" definition is that in any situation, a difference in outcomes has a single attribution: racism.
As an example, if you give 100 children a math test -- no word problems, just algebra -- and find that there is any correlation between skin color and test performance, then the test itself must be racist, and perhaps even math itself. Similarly here, if there is a difference in how cancer affects people... what must be the cause? That's right! Racism™!
This is a patently absurd understanding of racism, but I've found it extremely helpful to start discussions like these by pointing out that if we don't have a common definition of what it means for something to be racist, then we can't have a discussion about it.
PS: The classical definition of racism is the idea that skin color is indicative of performance. To look at the students before or after the test takes place, and make the assumption that skin color will effect performance. The extremely fine point here is that *the skin color itself* is what will cause (or caused) the difference.
Not the test but the society that allows some groups to continue to be undereducated in mathematics. The fact that many people don't understand this and loudly proclaim their lack of understanding, typically of certain backgrounds who are not affected, is also not due to their race making their brains incapable of understanding but due to society allowing them to continue to be undereducated on this topic.
I felt the same way. I don't like the disingenuous way the article starts, because it really does dilute the serious nature of racism. It shouldn't be something off-handedly used to get a few more clicks on an article or to signal to your in-group that you're virtuous.
You should read the entire article. The author discusses how pushing products meant for white skin towards dark skinned people despite negative detriment is common.
It sounds more like they just want to sell more sunscreen. They don't really care what color your skin is as long as money is changing hands. Nothing racist about that.
And doctors don't want to differentiate because it's safer to just say "sure, wear sunscreen all day and wear a helmet too, in case you get hit by a meteor". Nobody will blame a doctor for repeating the currently-accepted dogma. Maybe they'll blame sunscreen companies in ten years, but not the doctor.
But in the absence of evidence that corroborates the claim of racism, it's mere speculation.
Particularly here, where the alternative action (not recommending sunscreen for dark-skinned people) could also be seen as racist, it seems unfair to claim one way or the other.
And it's very possible the author didn't write it but an editor did. I'm not sure where one gets "racist" from the content of the article. Maybe insofar as the medical community makes blanket recommendations that arguably don't apply to/don't help black people. But it's a stretch to go from there to racism.
Clickbait headlines have abounded over past decades from editors with SEO concerns dancing in their eyes. One would think those who are easily triggered by social justice invocations would be more attuned to it by now- they should view it as no different from any other form of attention grabbing, and no more indictment against the articles these titles disservice compared to headlines who incite other passions. How discriminating of these who see one subheading blurb and then refuse to read further.
Agreed... I didn't notice the mention of racism in the title. I only realized after reading the article and seeing people ignore the substance in lieu of attacking a perceived slighting.
There's nothing about race in there anyway. Don't get tricked into these identity discussions. Both ignoring anything that has race in it as well as getting angry when they bait you with it ultimately means they have control over you, because you're easily manipulated with a single word.
Because in the last couple of years was the first time there has been an open and widespread discussion of various forms of race-based discrimination that we've just been ignoring for our entire history - or worse - thought that we left in the past, but are still relevant to people not of the dominant race in our societies.
Has there been an overreaction? Are too many things being blamed on racism now? Possibly. But the motivation is good and clear about attempting to get to the root of how people treat one another in the world, and what structures we've created to reinforce tribal or instinctual prejudices and how they're not even obvious to most people going through their lives in the world today.
This all has meaning. I urge you to not give up on the concept, to not discount those talking about it as "woke", or "virtue signalers" or "social justice warriors".
Some of them are overly angry and vitriolic, yes. Some are tired of explaining concepts that are clear and for granted to them, thinking that at this point anyone that disagrees is simply an agitator. Not all show good faith. Some are in it for themselves, and the glory of being holier-than-thou. I'm not going to pretend that doesn't exist.
But most of the concepts being discussed are sound. And there is a lot of fire behind the smoke. There is a lot of past, present, and future "racism" that still needs to be understood, and addressed.
By you. Some things are called "racism" unnecessarily, and that causes some harms... But there is still plenty of actual, bona fide Racism that causes bigger harms.
To disregard legitimate concerns about racism because you've grown frustrated with false positives is evidence of a weak morality. It's prioritizing our selfish frustrations over significant harms that other people (the victims of racism) are experiencing.
The boy who cries wolf is definitely in the wrong, that much is true... But that doesn't remove blame from the townspeople who ignored his cries. It's not a binary absolute, where one person being wrong absolves the other of any wrongdoing.
Intelligent, moral people aren't obligated or forced to jump into action when someone makes an accusation of racism. We can take a moment to consider the available facts, the context, and decide whether the charge of racism seems credible.
It does take effort, so there's a limit to how much attention we can give to these things... But we can also respond to the false accusations, and push back on them for being distractions and wasting the patience of people.
We get the society that is as good as we choose to put in effort to make it.
But brevity at the expense of clarity is not widely considered a good thing.
If anyone lacks the time or patience to parse my comments, I would welcome them to skip reading my comments... Why should any of us feel obliged to read everything on HN? I sure as hell don't.
Personally, I find your comments to be far too simplistic and reductive, to the point that you lack the ability to do more than snipe and quip at a single idea at a time... But some ideas are complex enough to benefit from longer, more thorough treatment, in order to avoid miscommunication.
Or maybe some people just have more patience, or better reading comprehension skills? Ya know, so we don't mind reading a longer comment that does a better job making the point than a half-baked, single-sentence hot take?
BTW, if you made it this far... Why ARE you compelled to keep reading my comments, anyway? Just ignore me, and be happy with the existence you choose
I felt the same way when I read it, but decided to keep reading anyway. The only remotely racist thing referenced is the fact that marketing companies are trying to get black people to wear sunscreen even though they don't need it. I wouldn't call it racist per se, but it is a case of someone targeting a demographic for profit, regardless of the fact that they can't benefit from the product, with no concern whatsoever for any negative effects they could experience. Definitely shady and scummy.
The article isn't claiming that everything everywhere is always racism. It's claiming that there is the possibility of the recommendation being racist. Perhaps you should read the article to decide for yourself how fair that characterization is.
I strongly disagree. These accusatory virtue signals are everywhere, deliberate, and most importantly antithetical to reason. Ignoring this stuff is how we ended up with diversity quotas. We should all be pushing back at this point, meritocracy is literally at stake when people are hired for race/gender, and the dysfunction is already visible across many of our institutions.
I came here to read an article about sunscreen, not be implicitly lectured with distilled identity politics.
Filter out the chatter and follow the actual information. The article is on some online magazine site, who cares what they write. The original study says nothing about race whatsoever.
I'm with you, but I take a different approach: mercilessly mock the chatter and noise, discuss the information. Encourage information, discourage senseless garbage.
Diversity quotas irrespective of skill, and those that denigrate meritocracy are antithetical to reason.
But from where I sit I do not see any diversity quotas that choose race/gender over skill.
There might be exceptions somewhere, I won't lie. I only know about my corner which is big tech hiring.
What I see is an acknowledgement that much selection in our society (to universities, for jobs, etc) are subjective decisions that incorporate objective and subjective factors. Every student trying to get into Yale has perfect GPA, SATs, and a list of extra-curricular activities as long as my arm. So if they are equal on these measures, why not bring in slightly more folks from races that have been historically disadvantaged to offset past injustices? Is that fair to white students? No. But there is no "fair" way to make a choice like this.
Big tech hiring focus on diversity is much the same - the bar is NOT lowered for women or anyone from a minority race. The last step of hiring before an offer is an objective test of programming ability. And nobody gets through those except on merit. But the FIRST step of hiring for multi-billion dollar companies is to sift through thousands of interview applicants, or contact thousands of applicants on LinkedIn with identical sounding resumes. These steps are HIGHLY subjective and unscientific - they're based on keywords, feel of recruiters, overindexing on past signals (other big tech companies, big universities, etc). The first "screen out" phase of hiring has NEVER been a meritocracy. It's always been a gut feel of who "feels" like they would be a successful candidate.
This is where the diversity initiatives are focused - to try to shift the variables in a subjective non-meritocratic process to - again - offset past racial discriminations to try to even the playing field slightly.
I ask you to have patience with "being lectured about identity politics". I ask you to wonder why you find virtue signals "accusatory" if they're not talking to you or about you. Don't discount those talking about this subject as "woke", or "virtue signalers" or "social justice warriors".
Some of them are overly angry and vitriolic, yes. Some are tired of explaining concepts that are clear and for granted to them, thinking that at this point anyone that disagrees is simply an agitator. Not all show good faith. Some are in it for themselves, and the glory of being holier-than-thou. I'm not going to pretend that doesn't exist.
But most of the concepts being discussed are sound. And there is a lot of fire behind the smoke. There is a lot of past, present, and future "racism" that still needs to be understood, and addressed.
Shorter people (relative to their gender) systematically earn less. Yet we aren't in uproar about this, and they are still allowed to be the butt of many jokes.
Introversion is still taken poorly, as if it is a sin. Despite introversion having almost no relation to job performance without further context.
People who work better on different schedules are still funneled primarily into a 9-6 rhythm, being told to suck it up.
"White students" from poor backgrounds now struggle to move up even more, as they are selected against for "not being diverse enough".
Really, most companies with diversity quotas might not hire Joe, but they'll hire Juan who's basically the same as Joe except he's Mexican and loves Taco Tuesday more than Pizza Friday. It's diversity in the most superficial sense, looking for the same car with a different paint job. They're not in this to combat "racial injustices", they're in this to appease some crowd with too much money in an attempt to get more money out of them.
Remote work should help with this. I have no idea how tall my coworkers are.
> Introversion
In my corner of the world - the tech industry - it's taken to be a baseline, so there is no discrimination.
There IS insufficient accordances made for neuroatypical (ADHD, Autistic) people with interviews, but there is active discussion happening about it.
> "White students" from poor backgrounds now struggle to move up even more
So long as any part of our society remains not a pure meritocracy, of course some people will struggle against others. Money is still the best way to get ahead. So poor people will struggle, and there is not enough opportunities for everyone. White people still get selected to "move up" by the forces that be, they just aren't the ONLY ones that do so. Instead of 99% of the scholarships going to white students, maybe 50%% are. But if that reflects the demographics of the part of society that is making that choice, where is the problem?
> diversity in the most superficial sense
It's a correction for discrimination in the most superficial sense. It's a start. It's a stepping stone towards not having any discrimination, and not needing corrective action like diversity initiatives.
I don't have space to respond to your whole commend but upon skimming these two points stood out:
>Big tech hiring focus on diversity is much the same - the bar is NOT lowered for women or anyone from a minority race.
When employers industry wide are tripping over themselves to hire minorities, then yes, the bar is absolutely lower and pay higher. Its a classic perverse incentive.
>The last step of hiring before an offer is an objective test of programming ability.
Having been on both ends, there is absolutely nothing objective about interviews, and its perfectly possible to even pass a hard leetcode interview while lacking hard/soft skills. This is the basis for the diversity overcorrection: the allegation was that the system was implicitly biased against minorities, and the solution was to apply bias in the other direction.
Except the fundamental premise, all of the "proof" upon which the justification for racist/sexist hiring is a giant conflation; inequality of outcome is not strong evidence of discrimination. Especially when you have a glaring and obvious pipeline problem.
You can't snap your fingers and decide that you're going to hire up a bunch of minorities to senior positions tomorrow when they don't even exist in college today without sacrificing merit. Statistics and the normal distribution guarantee that a smaller pool of candidates will have a disproportionately smaller pool of high achievers and once those are vacuumed by corps virtually signalling for ESG Goodboy points you are forced to either abandon quotas or draw from closer to the mean. It is a statistical inevitability that minority hiring quotas lead to reduced average competence.
> You can't snap your fingers and decide that you're going to hire up a bunch of minorities to senior positions tomorrow when they don't even exist in college today without sacrificing merit.
You can, if OP's premise is sound - that you can get more diveristy hires simply by expanding the pool of candidates being considered.
I am deeply involved in hiring at Amazon, (and am a bar raiser) and we work super hard to make sure diversity candidates want to apply, are being considered fairly, don't fall through the cracks, but when it comes to the final on-site, it might as well be a blind audition. We teach interviewers to refer to candidates impartially and focus purely on the questions, and answers. The analysis and conclusions is reviewed in a group. There is no way to make a hire decision without supportive data from their performance on the coding test, or in their behavioural experience.
I can't speak for the entire tech industry, but I know at Amazon the bar has absolutely not lowered.
> Melanoma? True, the sun worshippers had a higher incidence of it—but they were eight times less likely to die from it.
> Over the 20 years of the study, sun avoiders were twice as likely to die as sun worshippers.
> Avoidance of sun exposure is a risk factor of a similar magnitude as smoking, in terms of life expectancy.
> Vitamin D now looks like the tip of the solar iceberg. Sunlight triggers the release of a number of other important compounds in the body, not only nitric oxide but also serotonin and endorphins. It reduces the risk of prostate, breast, colorectal, and pancreatic cancers. It improves circadian rhythms. It reduces inflammation and dampens autoimmune responses. It improves virtually every mental condition you can think of. And it’s free.
> the current U.S. sun-exposure guidelines were written for the whitest people on earth
> People of color rarely get melanoma. The rate is 26 per 100,000 in Caucasians, 5 per 100,000 in Hispanics, and 1 per 100,000 in African Americans.
> Leffell, the Yale dermatologist, recommends what he calls a “sensible” approach. “I have always advised my patients that they don’t need to crawl under a rock but should use common sense and be conscious of cumulative sun exposure and sunburns in particular,”
"the thing that was really responsible for their good health—that big orange ball shining down from above."
This was the alarm bell for me. They completely leave out that people who get sun exposure are typically doing something more active than sitting at a desk or watching TV. Maybe the physical activity explains a lot of the benefits (think there are studies supporting that).
I might get a lot of hate for this, but I'm kind of tired about these articles. They claim things they can't possibly know about a topic that is largely irrelevant. It's like trying to argue about algorithmic time efficiencies without knowing the details of their use (in this case we're trying to biohack for lower mortality without knowing all the factors).
While I find the article questionable, though interesting ...
> They completely leave out that people who get sun exposure are typically doing something more active than sitting at a desk or watching TV.
Did the research (not the article) leave that out? Researchers aren't idiots and spent 10,000x as long thinking about the issue as we did about these HN posts.
Hard to tell, since the article doesn't bother to cite any sources for most of its claims. Including this paragraph without a single source is just incredible to me
>Meanwhile, that big picture just keeps getting more interesting. Vitamin D now looks like the tip of the solar iceberg. Sunlight triggers the release of a number of other important compounds in the body, not only nitric oxide but also serotonin and endorphins. It reduces the risk of prostate, breast, colorectal, and pancreatic cancers. It improves circadian rhythms. It reduces inflammation and dampens autoimmune responses. It improves virtually every mental condition you can think of. And it’s free.
"Did the research (not the article) leave that out?"
The article didn't include links to the research, so who knows.
On top of that, I'd imagine that it would be hard to control for the physiological and psychological benefits of being outside (nature, activity, etc; or detriments of being indoors like air quality) unless the subjects were in a controlled environment. It would be interesting to see how the research controlled for these, if they did at all. Many studies following large cohorts in real life are not looking at proving causation, but showing correlation because they can't fully control all the variables.
But how much of it? The amount that gives you skin cancer? The article mentions "30 minutes of summer sunlight", but not a study, let alone a replicated one. And it doesn't simply mention "30 minutes of summer sunlight", but "the equivalent of 30 minutes of summer sunlight". The other studies mentioned in the first part of the article (office workers, tanned Swedes, etc.) might be accidental correlations. And mentioning the neolithicum is utterly ridiculous.
> It improves virtually every mental condition you can think of.
It still does that with sun screen. But it improves mental health only a bit. I've never read that exposing patients to a bit of sun light solved their depression, ADHD or schizophrenia.
Anecdata: I have one severely depressed person in my family, and it is blatantly obvious that sun exposure has a positive effect on that person's depression. Does it cure the depression? No. But it makes living with it much better and removes blockages to working on the depression long-term.
>These are dark days for supplements. Although they are a $30-plus billion market in the United States alone, vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin E, selenium, beta-carotene, glucosamine, chondroitin, and fish oil have now flopped in study after study
Since the byline brings up race, its kind an aside but I'm almost convinced that a lot of our large scale nutritional/alternative medical studies give mixed results (and are not reproducable) because researchers are unwilling to sufficiently control for genes. High level categories like "black, white, hispanic, asian" are not enough.
I think its absolutely certain that thousands of generations of specialization for local geographies post africa lead to disparate dietary needs. Yeah, humans can pretty much eat anything, but regularly consuming the same diet may may be ideal for one ethnic group and unhealthy for another.
Hell, look at the distribution of lactose intolerance. Is drinking milk racist?
Lactose intolerant cultures don’t all avoid milk. They develop cultural ways of processing it like kefir that eliminate lactose, or they’re Japanese and just drink it anyway because they’re masochists and think it builds character.
Actually, the most lactose intolerant people I know are totally white and I think actually have worse undiagnosed medical problems but just think they’re lactose intolerant. And Asians I know aren’t lactose intolerant because even though they “are Asian” culturally and would look Asian to you they’re actually 2/3 genetically Scottish.
Testing milk as a supplement would be interesting I guess; I know in the 90s we were all taught it was needed for bones but more recently this is said to not be true because 1. bones need vitamin K which we don’t get enough of and 2. cows milk contains galactose which is bad for bones and may cause osteoporosis.
The published subtitle of the article seems deliberately click-baity/inflammatory. “quite possibly even racist”
When there are so many places where systemic racism shows up in clear and demonstrable ways, why complicate your thesis with a completely unfounded assertion?
In any case, like “code smell” this article has a “journalism smell.” Hand-waving, breezy style; over-identification with certain groups of researchers. And of course, cursory treatment of the evidence. He points out the lack of improvement in certain end-points among subjects supplemented with vitamin D. Who were the subjects? Randomized? Matched controls? Matched how? We’re any outcomes positive? In other words are we seeing evidence cherry picking of evidence? In fact so little is mentioned in the article that he may as well have given a list of PubMed links and just directed the readers to figure it out for themselves. I don’t know what the right answer is, but the only TL;DR from this piece is “There’s some controversy here.”
Many comments here say this article is bad. I thought so after reading perex saying sunscreen is racist. Can you even write article these days without calling something racist?
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.
What 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…).
Sure, 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.)
As far as I can tell, the "340 000" person study was finally published in 2020[1]. The study was an observational analysis of 342,000 dialysis patients. There was no attempt to measure personal exposure to UV (FTA: "it was not feasible to determine personal exposures to UV radiation and temperature"). Rather, these exposures were approximated by dialysis center zip code.
I can understand why David Fisher would say that he doesn't question the data, but doesn't agree with the implications.
1 = https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/JAHA.119.013837
But agree with OP that in a world that is becoming less and less trusting of authority (to a dangerous extreme) that it would be nice for those in authority to have enough humility to accept when their work is questioned.
This is the same as the teeth flossing skeptics: observational studies suggesting a paradox are interesting, but they actually need to unearth convincing alternative models with at least as much support as the dominant one for why they're right.
As mentioned in article, but also some general knowledge in physics is that interaction of radiation with the matter is probabilistic. It is not like every quantum of UV radiation will always damage DNA, which always result in cancer. There's some "conversion funnel" that depends on a number of parameters, and the actual probability of cancer in the end could indeed be lower than probability of the negative consequences of low sun exposure. Even if physical mechanism of diseases is established, it does not mean we should always avoid the risk by disabling it by some expensive means. Sometimes it is low enough to accept it or mitigate (e.g. by efficient cancer treatment).
The digestive system involves a pit of acid and a diverse, poorly-understood, and variable biome. It is an extremely fraught and indirect way to introduce substances into the body. Obviously many things can be introduced this way, but the list of those that can't is probably longer than the list of things that can.
It's true there may be some important difference between sunlight-induced NO generation and whatever other supplement/injection/lotion/etc, but my point here is that the right approach is to focus on the mechanism, and avoid the naturalistic fallacy.
It's ironic that the author didn't consider that getting sunlight may similarly be the side effect of the true cause of the stated benefits (being active?).
Wait, has there been a study suggesting this? This implies that there's a narrow optimal range and exceeding it causes problems. Seems you would see this in the supplement trials. Vitamin D toxicity doesn't occur until you take many times the RDA for months, and presumably none of the supplementation trials went anywhere near that high. https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-h...
I agree that just dropping a seemingly safe belief should take effort. I have no problem challenging them on a regular basis, though. Especially with more than just arguments and thought experiments. More observational studies can almost certainly only be a good thing.
Also, that UV damages DNA and causes cancer isn't simply a "proposed" mechanism, it's been tested many times.
I would say pure "observation" per se has little value -- for it to be scientifically valid it needs to seek explanations.
The mechanism isn't really at question. But just as sun exposure can kill grass, so to can lack of sun. We know that humans don't do photosynthesis, but it seems reasonable to ask if we do get other benefits.
Note. Is reasonable to ask and study. Is not reasonable to just assume the conclusion.
The reporters goal is eyeballs. Job well done. By the time someone looks at it closely, nobody is talking about the article anymore.
One interesting paragraph was:
"When you spend much of your day treating patients with terrible melanomas, it’s natural to focus on preventing them, but you need to keep the big picture in mind. Orthopedic surgeons, after all, don’t advise their patients to avoid exercise in order to reduce the risk of knee injuries."
We need to avoid tunnel vision when making health decisions. And this coming from someone (me) who had skin cancer in the past (not that it makes me a specialist).
> it is good intuition that we survived for thousands of years stark naked without sunscreen and vitamin suplements
That, as an argument, is completely worthless. You don't know how those people lived, how they died, what diseases they had, all you can deduce is that some of them managed to reproduce before keeling over.
In NZ we get about 4000 in-situ melanoma diagnosis a year. I was one of them a couple of years ago (at 37).
Wear sunscreen!
Also NZ wasn’t really affected by ozone depletion, but the effects are definitely in our neighbourhood and we were worried. “While the ozone hole does not directly affect ozone concentrations over New Zealand, when it breaks up in spring it can send ‘plumes’ of ozone-depleted air towards us. This briefly decreases column ozone levels by around 5 percent, about the same amount as normal daily variation.”. Also see graph at https://niwa.co.nz/our-services/online-services/uv-ozone and notice ozone is lowest in NZ summer. Also measuring a column of ozone is most relevant in the tropics when the sun can be directly above one at noon, and less relevant when the sun doesn’t get so high above the horizon (location further towards poles, and winter versus summer). https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9671831/
I am reminded that, in addition to not going about stark naked, mesolithic humans in the British isles were dark skinned.
... without sunscreen.
Life expectancy is an average. If you have two children, and one dies before their first birthday but the other lives to the age of 70, their average life expectancy is 35.
That’s mathematically correct – and it certainly tells us something about the circumstances in which the children were raised. But it doesn’t give us the full picture. It also becomes especially problematic when looking at eras, or in regions, where there are high levels of infant mortality. Most of human history has been blighted by poor survival rates among children, and that continues in various countries today.”
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181002-how-long-did-anc...
Adjust for infant mortality, war, etc., humans are still humans.
We can also deduce from many sources that humanity did not just "managed to reproduce before keeling over".
If your goal is merely to survive until the age at which you can make a baby and rear it there are a lot of risks that can be disregarded. Skin cancer is one. So are all other cancers. No need to worry about long-term dental health either. So many fears and worries melt away. Embrace that hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
Alternatively, if you are hoping to live past your 30s (most of us would like to live at least 2.5x longer!) the lifestyles of ancient civilizations and our hunter-gatherer ancestors may not be your ticket to success.
This is not how people lived.We also completely changed our way of life. We don't live outside anymore so we have less pigment that protects us from UV.
Anyway, UV sucks, nobody is hurt by minimizing it and supplementing via diet. Hell, in the north the sun doesn’t even rise high enough to be a source of vit D for months on end. You have to get it from diet or not at all.
https://smarttan.com/news/index.php/how-to-safely-effectivel...
We also ate differently in the Stone Age, so our vitamin intake might have been different.
Finally, life expectancy in the Stone Age was much shorter. Even excluding infant deaths, few people lived long enough to get cancer. Cancer is a typical disease of old age.
Well, all those people in the past are dead, so no, they did not survive.
Sadly no current consumer devices exist on market that can track these two numbers. The Microsoft Band used to have both needed sensors, but AFAIK no one else has tried to widely release a consumer product with a UV exposure sensor on it.
FWIW that sensor was a major hassle, took up a lot of space, and finding a plastic cover for it that didn't also block UV was super hard.
Unlike a film badge, a calibrated dye could be visually interpreted against a colour scale by the user. Neat idea if it works!
https://www.wearshade.com/articles/comparison-of-wearable-uv... https://www.amazon.com/SunSprite-Wearable-Light-Tracker/dp/B...
I have the SunSprite and the June. The June is unreliable, I believe they stopped selling them years ago. The SunSprite worked well and once I'd worn it for a full year I had a good idea of my exposure at various times of year and stopped wearing it. The magnetic clasp on it sucked though, I would often find the sensor had slipped off and stuck to my car door (or anything else made of steel). Not sure if any of the sensors listed in the article are still for sale, but you can probably still find used ones on eBay.
You can also get simple wearable wristbands or tokens or cards that change color under UV exposure:
https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B004XMH95K https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B08HV91P77 https://smile.amazon.com/Fischuel-Photochromic-Indicator%EF%...
The cards are somewhat calibrated, but any of these technologies require taking into account your personal skin sensitivity.
The technology is out there, you could probably build your own sensor using an Arduino and UVA and UVB sensors. The SunSprite is cool in that it never needs charging since it charges from the Sun.
> The technology is out there, you could probably build your own sensor using an Arduino and UVA and UVB sensors.
Back in 2016 or so, we were able to order UV sensors, but since there was so little knowledge about how to use them on wearable, getting them to work was a challenge.
It was months just to find a lens material that didn't block UV at all, but was also affordable, could be put on a production line, and fit all our consumer use cases (durable, chemical resistant, etc).
The cards are cool, I forgot about them.
It is unfortunate none of the main wearable players, by which I really just mean Apple, have bothered, but the UV sensor on Microsoft Band 2 was responsible for Band 2's not so friendly looking clasp, so I can't say I blame anyone for not wanting to go down that route again.
Edit: FWIW our sensor gave us something, I forget what, but I remember it wasn't what we wanted, and we had to map it to UVI. From what I vaguely recall it was one of those things where we ordered a sensor, it says it did one thing, but the thing it actually did was related but not quite the same, so we had to create a mapping curve of some type.
I came up with the user story and user flow for what we shipped, sun exposure reminders. We were really smart about it, we had logic in there to tell when you briefly went out of the sun, such as going to the bathroom, vs when you spent extended time inside, and we also worked to separate out walks to and from your car VS actually spending time outside.
To take "breaks", I believe we had an accumulator and if you went out of the sun we started a timer and if the timer went off we reset the accumulator but if you went back into the sun the timer was cancelled.
Actually starting the accumulator worked the same way, get out of car, exposure starts, if you didn't have so many minutes of continuous exposure, we never started the accumulator, an example is walking between buildings.
Lots of use case design around what ended up being a couple of dialog boxes for a reminder to put on sun screen!
Parents loved it though. :) Lots of positive feedback from parents who used it to track their family's sunscreen applications.
Edit: From shade
> 5 days of battery on a single charge
Pretty sure if we just ran the UV sensor on band our battery life would've been forever and ever. :-D
If that is a sales page, they need to list power draw of their sensor for various sampling rates, that is the only thing anyone cares about when it comes to integration.
And if there were consumer devices, the next problem would be accuracy. Based on a bunch of reading I did several years ago (so maybe out of date), consumer excercise trackers were very innaccurate in many ways. Exercise misinformation devices.
Having worked on Microsoft Band, I can tell you that accuracy is a problem with UV exposure for a number of reasons, none of which involve the sensor itself.
Mostly it is around how people wear it, and was the sensor always facing the sun, people going in and out of the shade, long sleeves, and so forth. We settled on # of minutes of high exposure, I forget what index we considered "high" but basically it if it was above a certain threshold we considered you "in the sun".
The goal was sunscreen application reminders, no way would we have trusted it to tell people they had "enough" sun!
But in fairness, the sensor doesn't work with how people use it. We could make a sensor that straps to user foreheads and requires them to always face the sun. When integration fails, we can point the finger either way, or just say it wasn't a good fit.
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24697969/#:~:text=We%20found....
What you describe clearly is a problem with data collection, where crucial unobservable variables had to be replaced with questionable assumptions. We should be wary because we can't fully trust those assumptions, and hence not the data, not because of what the implications would be.
There are tools that can make this better (eg, finding an instrumental variable), but this wasn’t done here.
If you're looking for sunblock that won't give you cancer or ruin the environment, check out EWG:
https://www.ewg.org/sunscreen/
I think this is yet another case of us collectively ignoring common sense. We know that UV radiation is damaging to the skin and can cause skin cancer. Instead of rubbing chemicals on our skin to negate these effects, it is better to avoid being out in direct sunlight when the UV index is high, especially if you're super pale. If you have to go out at mid day for a decent length of time, wear a big hat and clothes that cover you up.
I'm on the pale end of the spectrum and if I go out at say 2pm when the UV index is at 10 it'll be physically painful within a few minutes.
However, when I go for my daily walks earlier in the day or later in the afternoon when the UV index is say 3-4, I go without sunscreen and feel great. And even though I supplement vitamin D, the effects of sunlight is clearly better.
Also I think it is safe to imagine that most of our ancient ancestors weren't going out in the most intense sunlight and stripping close to naked for hours to develop a nice tan.
If the mechanism is:
unfiltered sunlight -> Vitamin D production -> increased calcium absorption -> decreased risk of osteoporosis;
then in many Asian cultures, the desire for women to have fair skin, cover up as much as possible, use sunscreen judiciously, and even use umbrellas when going outside; would certainly cause a Vitamin D deficiency and increased risk of osteoporosis by old age.
Has anyone measured if this is possible?
Modern context: UV light therapy for newborns.
If most of your ancestors are from Nigeria and you stay in Sweden, you should catch as much sun as you can, and still take vitamin D supplements.
If you stay in a location where the bulk of your ancestors came from, you should probably be able to stay outside most of the time, as long as it is relativey constant from month to month. (Ie, anyone who stays inside all day for 11 months would have a risk of sunburn if they suddenly start spending all day on the beach in July without sunscreen.)
Sunscreen recommendations as I commonly encounter them are to stay out of the sun when it is strongest. It is to stay in shade when possible. It is that sunshine is healthy for producing vitamin D and for your general psychological well-being.
But it is to also wear sunscreen and that you should protect yourself from UV even when outside in shade.
The answer is: it depends on your family history, your lifestyle, and a bunch of other things.
I know that organizations like American Dermatology or Outdoor magazine have to water down their message so it’s digestible, but it annoys me when people expect “The Answer”. Science is constantly updating.
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.
> 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.
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!
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.
I don't think it's unreasonable that people expect clear public health guidelines. I don't want to trudge through a thousand pages of research, I want the department of health to say "well we had some experts read the papers, and if you do X and Y and Z you'll probably be fine." I'd appreciate more details beyond that, of course, especially if it's an area of particular interest to me. But I can't be that interested in everything, and sometimes it's good just to put out a guideline.
The reality of the advice for sun is probably similar to most things -- You need some sun, but not too much. And no one probably knows the answer, and it will probably change as a result of climate change and other factors. My wife is a high risk pregnancy because she’s over 35, but after probing the doctors what we realize is that for some women at some point between the ages of 30 and 45 the risks to your pregnancy may increase some variable amount but you know what is funny, that because these women are more closely monitored, high risk pregnancies may actually have better outcomes than low risk pregnancies! And so there’s this epically long laundry list of things that you’re not supposed to do, with very little specific guidance on the risks you might take on.
But if you really want experts. The Skin Cancer Foundation at Skincancer.org suggests a shotglass full of sunscreen over your entire body every day 30 minutes before you go out, even when it's cloudy. Also, that's not enough! For a full sun protection strategy seek the shade whenever possible, wear sun-safe clothing, a wide-brimmed hat and UV-blocking sunglasses:
https://www.skincancer.org/skin-cancer-prevention/sun-protec...
Smoking cigarettes to reduce throat irritation is fine. Oops.
Take thalidomide to ward off the effects of morning sickness. Oops.
Then there’s the whole communications fiasco around masks for COVID. A different kind of oops.
I mean whoever thought inhaling the output of small bonfire is no biggie should try it with a big one first.
As does my firefox installation. Trade offs, indeed.
https://lorienpsych.com/2020/12/19/light-therapy/#:~:text=El....
I spent a few years in a tropical country and never once got a sunburn. I paid no mind to sun and spent a ton of time outside. Moving back to the states, within 3 months I had gotten a bad sunburn. I don't know what is going on with this sunburn thing but I'm convinced it has more to do with just sun exposure. Maybe ozone, maybe an environmental factor that increases damage upon exposure, I don't know, but there's something there.
As far as sun exposure now, I'll put sunscreen on when I'm going to spend more than an hour in direct sunlight at a time. I spend a lot of time outside and I don't really get burned anymore.
> “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.
To paraphrase "the data isn't wrong, but it contradicts dogmatically held beliefs, and so a strict regime of pills and treatments are required first before indulging in this heresy".
It takes a lot to break persistent medical dogmas, and these platitudes of "avoid sun exposure at all costs because skin cancer" are starting to become generational sayings that are ingrained in prevalent thinking.
Also just want to point out what is touched on in the article - melanoma (skin cancer caused by UV) in the USA kills about 7000-8000, with that trend line decreasing. Heart disease kills around 700,000 people a year in the USA alone.
Food for thought.
He's tasked with fighting a battle, not winning a war.
As an anecdotal aside, I always read about people who treat cancers as being more militant in their beliefs, but they're also dealt with tough hands.
If the supposed benefits of UV light exposure can be achieved through an alternative treatment that poses a lower risk of skin cancer, then why wouldn't that be the superior treatment?
Okay, well that's your choice; but don't latch on to some argument about it being healthy, unless you're willing to endure scrutiny.
However, subsequently a meta-analysis (including that same paper) was published that found:
"Vitamin D [supplementation] was associated with significant reduction of cancer-related mortality compared with placebo [...]. Compared with placebo, Vitamin D was not associated with significant reduction of cancer incidence [...]".
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/20009666.2019.17...
I am now a stage 4 melanoma patient. They have taken my lymph nodes on one side, a chunk of my brain, and half of my right lung. Immunotherapy has so far saved my life, but there are no guarantees this will last.
Careful. I sincerely hope it plays out better for you..
It’s reasonable to question the current dogma (no sun ever) and determine if there’s a better balance (~30 minutes without sunscreen, but use sunscreen beyond that, or some other mix). Dermatologists are focused on skin health and more likely to overlook or ignore those other benefits.
Go tell your doctor You smoke two packs a day they’ll say stop smoking. If smoking two packs means you won’t kill yourself then they will weigh that. Then there are bad doctors too of course
Have to disagree with this one, everyone who can't escape sunlight and likes to go outside at all is affected. People in the American southwest from all walks of life age shockingly faster (in appearance) than their northern state counterparts. I'd meet women who were 25 and looked 35 (by northern expectations), and it only accelerates from there (35 looking like 50, 50 looking like 70).
https://www.techtimes.com/articles/67285/20150711/not-everyo...
>They found that the "biological age" of the participants in 2011, when they were 38 — as exhibited by the state of their organs, their immune systems, their heart health and their chromosomes — ranged from as young as 30 to as old as 60.
https://peterattiamd.com/ama35/
Even my cat had an episode of acne.
That rephrasing in itself can be describe as a dogmatic belief that supplements are bad/conspiracy. It’s a dogmatism pile.
Eat sun exposed mushrooms if vitamin d pills aren’t ones cup of tea, but in northern climes relying on sun for vitamin d is not realistic much of the year.
It's a bit much claiming those suspicious of pill pushing are part of the actual cult. If someone thinks taking vitamin D pills is necessary they're the one who has to provide the evidence, not the other way around.
I suspect anybody who recommends medication over natural resources has a bridge to sell.
"It’s entirely intuitive,” he responded. “Homo sapiens have been around for 200,000 years. Until the industrial revolution, we lived outside. How did we get through the Neolithic Era without sunscreen?"
By boning each other at the earliest possible age and procreating before we could die of cancer. DUH. The guy's a scientist but can't logically filter out causes of mortality that don't typically transpire until after child-bearing age?
> And perplexingly, outdoor workers have half the melanoma rate of indoor workers. Tanned people have lower rates in general. “The risk factor for melanoma appears to be intermittent sunshine and sunburn, especially when you’re young,” says Weller. “But there’s evidence that long-term sun exposure associates with less melanoma.”
This is actually borderline nonsensical in the context:
> People with low levels of vitamin D in their blood have significantly higher rates of virtually every disease and disorder you can think of: cancer, diabetes, obesity, osteoporosis, heart attack, stroke, depression, cognitive impairment, autoimmune conditions, and more.
How many need treatment? Can skin cancer be cured better than heart diseases?
And heart disease is a pretty broad term, if you say heart diseases you should say cancer not just skin cancer. And cancer killes 600,000 a year.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/high-blood-ch...
What I've always done is build up my tolerance by getting tan during the spring so I can walk around without sunscreen in summer. Of course I don't go crazy with it, and I try to avoid direct sunlight in high-UV situations (e.g. walking on the shaded side of the street) but I take it when there is no option. It works fine for me, I rarely get sunburn and when I do it's minor, just a little red glow and sensitivity. Even though I have very pale skin I tan and burn very slowly, luckily. I lived in Australia a while in the early '00s while the ozone hole was still around and the same approach worked even there
I live in a country (Spain) that has lots of sun so I don't want to go out with cream every day. The only times I use it is when I'm outside for a long time and I feel I'm getting close to burning.
I get that it's totally bad what I see many Northern European tourists do: They stay indoors most of the summer and then take a 2-week holiday to the costa's where they lay in the sun for 12 hours a day. Obviously this is totally bad, even with suncreen you will get totally burned to a crisp.
In any case, I'll see. Maybe I'm wrong but in that case the damage is done already. But I don't think sun exposure can be as bad as they say.
So instead of baking my body for hours on a sandy beach somewhere, I prefer to expose my body intermittently to the sun through the foliage.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3613501/
https://ozonewatch.gsfc.nasa.gov/ https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/sbuv2to/...
I get mine mostly from walking in the woods/mountains too and I usually wear long trousers even on hot days too. But it's really for a different reason. I just don't like shorts and I get cut a lot.
"Your tan isn’t doing anything." you say, despite clear evidence that melanin is associated with ancestral UV exposure and how your body develops a tan in response to UV exposure. Now you're suggesting a separate unnamed method of resilience associated with darker skinned people.
I guess go ahead and fear the sun, you do you.
Our bodies can deal with damaged DNA.
Proving that low rates of DNA damage increase cancer risk proportionaly to the risk asociated with high rates of damage seems nearly impossible.
So I don't understand the absolute certanty with which it gets proclaimed as fact.
Everyone has heard that melanin is the body's defense against too much UV exposure. Once during a visit with my dermatologist I asked if there was a connect between having vitiligo and increased skin cancer, expecting her to say yes. Instead she reacted as if I had asked a complete non sequitur. I had to make explicit my chain of reasoning (vitiligo means areas with no melanin production, meaning more UV damage, meaning more chance of skin cancer) and she half-heartedly told me no, she had never heard of such a thing.
It seems like there should be an obvious connection, but apparently not. It made me question whether she was just incurious or if there really is that loose of a connection between UV and skin cancer. BTW I've had two patches of skin cancer removed by this doctor, both on my neck/shoulder area, which is not affected by my vitiligo.
It's worth making friends with the ones who keep up with stuff. Doctors like to party but they're so fucking overworked that they hit you up at like 11pm most of the time.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6164767/
Although the SIRs of melanoma, cancers of oral cavity, hepatoma and lymphoma were also increased in vitiligo patients, the significance was lost after correction for multiple testing. No specific cancer occurred less frequently in vitiligo patients than in the general population.
https://sci-hub.se/10.1111/joim.12496
> First, it is not possible to differentiate between active sun exposure habits and a healthy lifestyle.
People who are healthy get outside more. People who engage in physical activity tend to do quite a bit of it outside.
Despite the term "sun avoidance" this is not about people who intentionally avoid the sun. It is about people who for whatever reason do not have much sun exposure.
I would post links but when I search for the studies I get a barrage of summaries without actually linking to the original study.
I think this study is part of it:
doi:10.1001/archderm.139.4.451
I think this summarizes another part of the study:
https://www.cancer.org.au/blog/world-leading-research-confir...
I don’t get the fundamental premise of the article: Dermatologists warn about skin cancer from sun exposure, and the author takes issue with vitamin D not curing cancer and heart diseases.
What is “wrong” ? These two facts look disjointed to me, with no specific opposition.
Vitamin D not directly linked to curing cancer and heart diseases is also nothing new, there is very few scientifically proven effects of vitamin D[0] and it’s usually offered as “just in case” supplement.
Dermatologists arguing skin cancer can happen doesn’t seem wrong or unproven either, and all the “sun benefits us” part doesn’t seem to contradict that part either.
Am I missing some important cultural background of the author that makes it all a bigger point ?
[0] https://www.webmd.com/vitamins/ai/ingredientmono-929/vitamin...
PS: is the author just arguing that extreme advice should be taken with a grain of salt ?
The CTA of the article seems to focused around that we may have been overdoing it with the sunscreen advice and that there is a healthy amount of sun exposure we should be getting.
On sunscreen, my personal impression was that people were sloppy enough that the impact would be mild at most (seems the subject has also been looked into [1]), and people going for really high blocking values usually do so for beauty preferences way more than health preoccupations.
[1 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30945275/
"Outdoor activities" is a terrible way to differentiate between sun exposure and large environments
For fair-skinned people like me, I would recommend generously applying sunscreen to face and hands and leaving the other areas uncovered if you are out in the sun for less than an hour or so with moderate UV index, or less than 20 minutes or so with high UV index. Longer than that, consider applying sunscreen to the rest of your body as well. Of course, ymmv.
There's a link around "put it in perspective." Following it through to the source leads to the 2016 study, which notes:
> We acknowledge several major limitations of this study. First, it is not possible to differentiate between active sun exposure habits and a healthy lifestyle, and secondly, the results are of an observational nature; therefore, a causal link cannot be proven. A further limitation is that we did not have access to exercise data from study initiation; however, similar sHR values were obtained when including exercise for those women who answered the second questionnaire in 2000. With the introduction of whole-genome scanning, a new method of getting closer to causality using observational data is Mendelian random analysis. A potential causal link between BMI and vitamin D levels has been demonstrated with this method 8. In addition, individuals with high BMI do not obtain the same increase in vitamin D levels by UV radiation as lean subjects 9. As a consequence, as BMI seems to be involved in the causal pathway of vitamin D, it should not be included as a confounder in analyses as has been performed in many studies.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/joim.12496
This adds nuance missing from the original article. Also, AFAICT, the study doesn't mention anything about sunscreen use by the women. Based on the discussion in the original article, this study looks like a smoking gun. But going a little deeper, not so much.
It'd put the study into the category "needs follow-up."
Balance is necessary but man, I started balding at 17, looking old is no big deal compared to feeling good.
When i shave and look younger I always kind of feel like OK I might have a few more years of not falling apart
I get the sentiment of course, but I think there’s value in seeing past it too.
Most sun exposure is on the nose, ears, arms. If some sun exposure is healthy, then the best way to do it is to be completely naked and only be in the sun for 10 minutes. By exposing more surface area, you can get as much sun in 10 minutes as you would by just exposing you face for 2 hours. No burns. In engineering terms, it's like load balancing the sun across several body parts.
There was just an article I saw last year about a sunscreen recall because it contained ingredients that caused leukemia or something. Not to mention some of the mental health benefits of sun.
If you want to reduce sun exposure, probably better to shade yourself with clothes or umbrellas than put chemicals on your skin, or use something natural like zinc on sensitive areas like nose and ears.
Also, there is more red light around sunrise/sunset. That's healthier light. You want to avoid blue light (UV), which is magnified (like a magnifying glass on the atmosphere) in the middle of the day.
The same general idea that you could light a room with a single LED die overdriven to thermal death in minutes, or many adequately-cooled underdriven ones virtually indefinitely.
Or maybe more similarly, cooking with a 10kW cutting laser rather than an electric stovetop would make a huge mess of your cookware.
This speculation on the author's part, at least, makes no sense.
People have been getting sunburns for a long time[1]. The word "sunburn" in English dates to 1650, but treatments for sunburn are at least as old as the ancient Egyptians, who wrote down numerous treatments for it, including breast milk.
I'm picturing all those Bedouin office workers wearing their keffiyehs and robes in the desert. Looks cool, sure, but might it also serve another purpose?
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23888738/
Also, cannot discount innate bias: love sunshine to the degree I had these solar lamps for winter.
But the fact that melanomas are less likely to be fatal overall amongst us outdoor weather-beaten folk is quite gratifying. I wonder if there are genetic markers.
I can sort of imagine what that might be enough to think that Wikipedia's 'lamp with solar panels' article with that name is definitely not what you mean, but I can't see anything else on it, do you have a link or model number or something?
If obesity and age explains the low sun exposure (less likely to be sunbathing on beaches, etc.), the assumed causality is at least oversimplified if not outright mistaken.
The evidence for a sunlight-triggered mechanism for the production of sunlight is interesting, though. I wish the article worked more to connect that finding to everything else.
Yes, randomized, controlled trials are better, and the gold standard. No, they aren't always available and sometimes--even often--science can draw conclusions with evidence that came from other sources.
[1] https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/363/bmj.k5094.full.pdf
And that's odd. Because that's the HUGE idea here. Yes, there are concerns about the harms associated with the UV end of the spectrum. But there are also the massive benefits from the Near Infrared (NIR) end.
Certain NIR wavelengths, around 810nm to 850nm, penetrate up to 5cm into the body and have a dramatically positive effect on mitochondria, creating the most powerful sub-cellular antioxidant (melatonin) to manage Oxidative Stress. This is well-established science now. Indeed, the exact mechanism is known (cytochrome c oxidase, etc).
It turns out that for good health it helps to be exposed to the Sun (and specifically NIR). We're more plant than we realise (a different mechanism obviously).
And, if you think about it, how on earth could we have not evolved to take advantage of the “free” energy provided by the Sun, particularly the NIR part of the spectrum which actually delivers about half of the energy.
Here's an explanation from MedCram: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YV_iKnzDRg&t=2878s
Sure, don't avoid the sun completely, but don't play with it
It's true that sunlight increases Vit D and Nitric Oxide, other claims are much feeble and holy mother of selection bias to claim all that is due to the sun!
30 minutes? I did that today for two hours. My arms, legs, face, and neck were all exposed without sunscreen, and I didn't burn at all. It all depends on your skin type.
I do this daily for up to 6 hrs on the weekend. I have never had a sunburn.
You seem to have assumed all humans are light-skinned, which is something the article warns about right at the top.
I stand by my comment and if you do have darker skin you can adjust that time for your case
I don't know what you think "assuming" means. I'm not assuming it. You said anyone should spend 30 min in the sun and see how badly it hurts them.
I can spend an entire day in the sun without being sunburned.
> if you do have darker skin you can adjust that time for your case
This further proves that light skin was a vital premise of your claim (which is false).
Your generalization necessarily can't apply to all skin types
For today's lucky 10,000:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuCn8ux2gbs
The rapper Logic is African American, but he probably needs more sunblock than Akon. I imagine Italians can tolerate more sunlight than Norwegians
Like with most medical advice what works for Billy might not work for Andy. But we have a massive medical industrial complex which needs to sell as much crap as possible.
Wouldn't surprise me if the sunblock manufacturers are behind some of this
Hm. So, having read the article I know how many times less likely are "sun worshippers" to die from melanoma but I don't know how higher is its incidence among them.
Why quantify one thing and not the other? That's one of the things that make this article read very fishy.
> Wouldn’t all those rays also raise rates of skin cancer? Yes, but skin cancer kills surprisingly few people: less than 3 per 100,000 in the U.S. each year
This is like saying "Don't people who slather themselves in honey and walk bare naked to the woods get eaten by bears more? Sure, but bears kill surprisingly few people, just 59 out of 1,000,000 yearly"
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trucker-accumulates-skin-damage...
- blue fish are the protein of the sea, eat many! Few years later blue fish are the pollutant-eaters of the sea, avoid them!
- cigarettes are good for health! They kill seasonal germs! Smoke! Few years later cigarettes should be banned they are absolutely unhealthy!
- artificial tanning is safe for skin than Sun exposure! Than artificial tanning provoke skin cancer!
- radioactivity at small doses are good for health, help fetus to develop stronger, help against baldness! Radioactivity is dangerous and lethal!
....
The REAL issue is that to avoid such phenomenon we need a PUBLIC-only really developed and religiously separate from the private sector public research for the society, with public bodies who publish their results for any cohort of citizens (witch means from real papers to abstracts for the large public) and of course the little we have had, when real innovation have happened, was destroyed quickly cannibalizing their results for private profits. Just see the outcome for IT or from big pharma. Oh BTW such move it's the key for the win of China and Russia, since both still have public research while we haven't anymore.
[1] YES, my dears fellow HNers we do have hyper-fast and hyper-big search engines BUT we have nothing public really good at finding really past events we do not know by some keywords, just try to generate let's say a map of how many floods per area we have experienced in recent years: IF someone have published that we can profit from such results, if not building out of the web it's far from easier. When someone do something similar for very specific aspects likely end up here on HN like the recent Reddit Map or some Babarasi network analyses etc because there is no public generic tool for such research
I do believe much of these problems exist because of the literal interpretation of the science. More people are thinking in absolutes rather than how one can moderate these things in our lives.
Even just last year, many “influencers” on social media were misinforming younger people about the dangers of the sun. Speaking in the sense of never going outside without proper products. Debating if those products will give you the same benefits without them on ridding the risk. But none the less, selling a product at the end of the day.
America is one big shopping mall with everyone holding their credit card out.
Would explain why vitamin D supplements don’t seem to work in the studies mentioned in the article.
Does anyone here know?
Everything seems to be racist these days. Sunscreen, math...
Great piece. Makes sense. Sun is pretty good with everything it shines on. And you can definitely feel it has a positive effect on your mood and your skin.
Anyone else noticing that a whole lot of lifestyle recommendations are slowly moving back toward "just do whatever they did like 2500 years ago"?
I understand that our pupils adapt a lot and give us an illusion of constant luminance when in fact there is actually a huge light difference between indoors and outdoors in the shade. But I never found any info linking this with vitamin D production?
Previously, I relied on unhealthy doses of steroids/corticoids and layers of vaseline covered by cotton medical apparel. Eczema got better during Summer (sunlight exposure).
Sainsbury's multi-vitamins have cured me. I don't need a study to tell me this is true
"Although they are a $30-plus billion market in the United States alone, vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin E, selenium, beta-carotene, glucosamine, chondroitin, and fish oil have now flopped in study after study."
What? Fish oil flopped? They did every study combination they could on Fish Oil and Omega 3? They even filtered out for genetics? They are just starting, it is no where near finished!
FADS1 and FADS2 Gene Polymorphisms Modulate the Relationship of Omega-3 and Omega-6 Fatty Acid Plasma Concentrations in Gestational Weight Gain: A NISAMI Cohort Study https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8912382/
Give vitamin B6 to someone who is deficient and guess what, it will not flop. But I would bet none of you have had a B6 test, correct?
The studies did not flop. They are still showing casualty but more work needs to be down on who they might help. Yet he talks about vitamin D like it has somehow escaped these problems? Because on guy said something?
That guy suffered from "my supplement is the best supplement and only supplement that effects health" disorder.
All my dry skin issues etc. went away…
What should I do?
[0]: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2004RG00...
[1]: https://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/ozone-aus.html
Those vit d supplements will only skew the one thing that actually tells you how much deficiencient you are in getting enough sunlight as it correlates quite directly with it (most other things look more long term).
> and quite possibly even racist
And I'm out.
Does racism exist? Of course.
Is everything everywhere always racism? Of course not.
It’s saying they’re pushing sun screen for people who don’t really need it.
This is 2 paragraphs after the one I quoted and it says it even more clearly: “And yet they are being told a very different story, misled into believing that sunscreen can prevent their melanomas, which Weller finds exasperating. “The cosmetic industry is now trying to push sunscreen at dark-skinned people,” he says. “At dermatology meetings, you get people standing up and saying, ‘We have to adapt products for this market.’ Well, no we don’t. This is a marketing ploy.””
> “I think that sun-protection advice,” [David Leffel, Yale] told me, “has always been directed at those most at risk”—people with fair skin or a family history of skin cancer. “While it is true that people with olive skin are at less risk, we do see an increasing number of people with that type of skin getting skin cancer. But skin cancer… is very rare in African Americans… and although they represent a spectrum of pigmentation, [they] are not at as much risk.”
Your original comment was effectively ‘why does everything have to be about race?’ and it matters in this context.
It's generally a damned good principle to live by. We know for certain that higher UV exposure = higher risk of melanoma. It may be a lower risk for people with darker skin, but where do you draw the line for how dark is dark enough to not need to bother with sunscreen? The article states that it's rare in African Americans, but not nonexistent. In the absence of other evidence, why not avoid UV exposure?
This article presents emerging studies that suggest that UV exposure does have some direct benefits and that avoiding it may be especially harmful to people with darker skin. If there's enough evidence to support the findings, the AAD should absolutely change its advice. That's the scientific process. The article uses the example of margarine to illustrate the point; we've gotten it wrong before.
Given the above, are you certain that the term "racism" is accurate here? What can we attribute to bias that can't be explained by a lack of scientific evidence?
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/radiation/alara.html
You say “systemic racism”, I say “the article cites one guy and gives his voice more weight than an entire industry body in order to contort this into a story about (maybe) racism”.
Science is messy. Doctors are very cautious by training and experience. So yes, they encourage everyone to use sunscreen until the preponderance of scientific evidence suggests otherwise. This is not racism in any form. To suggest otherwise is a slap in the face to people who have been subjected to real racism.
> No real science is performed to test their validity.
This is a ludicrous argument. Which scientific experiment do you want me to perform, exactly, to discover the definition of racism? It's a word, not a physical law.
> To suggest otherwise is a slap in the face to people who have been subjected to real racism.
And a true scottsman would never put sugar in his porridge, yes, yes.
Maybe the world needs a variant of Hanlon’s razor: never attribute to racism that which is adequate explained by stupidity (or incompetence or the desire to promote one’s product or profession, etc.).
The US tried /extremely/ hard to take 'color-blindness' as the solution to centuries of explicit racism. And it failed rather completely. There's two effects at play: a) the 'true' racists learned how to keep being horrible without ever explicitly talking about race, and b) we wound up with lots of 'data gaps' around race by ignoring real differences. This data gap is arguably at the root of what's called structural racism.
(Incidentally, an incredibly similar dynamic has played out with the rights of women. I'm currently reading Caroline Criado-Perez's 'Invisible Women' which is about a huge range of areas where the 'default' is male, and the resulting gaps in data about women lead to poor outcomes.)
So I'd say the article points to a particular kind of structural racism: That the medical advice for white people is assumed to also be good for people of color.
Maybe? The article is trying pretty hard to say that the medical advice is wrong for white people too. Of course, it’s plausible that the article is wrong, white people should use sunscreen, and black people (at least in Northern climates?) should not.
Here’s a more clear-cut example of structural racism in medicine:
https://sph.umich.edu/pursuit/2021posts/black-people-are-thr...
As an example, if you give 100 children a math test -- no word problems, just algebra -- and find that there is any correlation between skin color and test performance, then the test itself must be racist, and perhaps even math itself. Similarly here, if there is a difference in how cancer affects people... what must be the cause? That's right! Racism™!
This is a patently absurd understanding of racism, but I've found it extremely helpful to start discussions like these by pointing out that if we don't have a common definition of what it means for something to be racist, then we can't have a discussion about it.
PS: The classical definition of racism is the idea that skin color is indicative of performance. To look at the students before or after the test takes place, and make the assumption that skin color will effect performance. The extremely fine point here is that *the skin color itself* is what will cause (or caused) the difference.
That is racism.
And doctors don't want to differentiate because it's safer to just say "sure, wear sunscreen all day and wear a helmet too, in case you get hit by a meteor". Nobody will blame a doctor for repeating the currently-accepted dogma. Maybe they'll blame sunscreen companies in ten years, but not the doctor.
Could possibly be racially motivated, but greed seems likelier.
The can want to sell more suncreen, and the way they are achieving that might be racist. These two are not mutually-exclusive.
Particularly here, where the alternative action (not recommending sunscreen for dark-skinned people) could also be seen as racist, it seems unfair to claim one way or the other.
There's nothing about race in there anyway. Don't get tricked into these identity discussions. Both ignoring anything that has race in it as well as getting angry when they bait you with it ultimately means they have control over you, because you're easily manipulated with a single word.
Has there been an overreaction? Are too many things being blamed on racism now? Possibly. But the motivation is good and clear about attempting to get to the root of how people treat one another in the world, and what structures we've created to reinforce tribal or instinctual prejudices and how they're not even obvious to most people going through their lives in the world today.
This all has meaning. I urge you to not give up on the concept, to not discount those talking about it as "woke", or "virtue signalers" or "social justice warriors".
Some of them are overly angry and vitriolic, yes. Some are tired of explaining concepts that are clear and for granted to them, thinking that at this point anyone that disagrees is simply an agitator. Not all show good faith. Some are in it for themselves, and the glory of being holier-than-thou. I'm not going to pretend that doesn't exist.
But most of the concepts being discussed are sound. And there is a lot of fire behind the smoke. There is a lot of past, present, and future "racism" that still needs to be understood, and addressed.
To disregard legitimate concerns about racism because you've grown frustrated with false positives is evidence of a weak morality. It's prioritizing our selfish frustrations over significant harms that other people (the victims of racism) are experiencing.
Intelligent, moral people aren't obligated or forced to jump into action when someone makes an accusation of racism. We can take a moment to consider the available facts, the context, and decide whether the charge of racism seems credible.
It does take effort, so there's a limit to how much attention we can give to these things... But we can also respond to the false accusations, and push back on them for being distractions and wasting the patience of people.
We get the society that is as good as we choose to put in effort to make it.
If anyone lacks the time or patience to parse my comments, I would welcome them to skip reading my comments... Why should any of us feel obliged to read everything on HN? I sure as hell don't.
Personally, I find your comments to be far too simplistic and reductive, to the point that you lack the ability to do more than snipe and quip at a single idea at a time... But some ideas are complex enough to benefit from longer, more thorough treatment, in order to avoid miscommunication.
Or maybe some people just have more patience, or better reading comprehension skills? Ya know, so we don't mind reading a longer comment that does a better job making the point than a half-baked, single-sentence hot take?
BTW, if you made it this far... Why ARE you compelled to keep reading my comments, anyway? Just ignore me, and be happy with the existence you choose
I came here to read an article about sunscreen, not be implicitly lectured with distilled identity politics.
But from where I sit I do not see any diversity quotas that choose race/gender over skill. There might be exceptions somewhere, I won't lie. I only know about my corner which is big tech hiring.
What I see is an acknowledgement that much selection in our society (to universities, for jobs, etc) are subjective decisions that incorporate objective and subjective factors. Every student trying to get into Yale has perfect GPA, SATs, and a list of extra-curricular activities as long as my arm. So if they are equal on these measures, why not bring in slightly more folks from races that have been historically disadvantaged to offset past injustices? Is that fair to white students? No. But there is no "fair" way to make a choice like this.
Big tech hiring focus on diversity is much the same - the bar is NOT lowered for women or anyone from a minority race. The last step of hiring before an offer is an objective test of programming ability. And nobody gets through those except on merit. But the FIRST step of hiring for multi-billion dollar companies is to sift through thousands of interview applicants, or contact thousands of applicants on LinkedIn with identical sounding resumes. These steps are HIGHLY subjective and unscientific - they're based on keywords, feel of recruiters, overindexing on past signals (other big tech companies, big universities, etc). The first "screen out" phase of hiring has NEVER been a meritocracy. It's always been a gut feel of who "feels" like they would be a successful candidate.
This is where the diversity initiatives are focused - to try to shift the variables in a subjective non-meritocratic process to - again - offset past racial discriminations to try to even the playing field slightly.
I ask you to have patience with "being lectured about identity politics". I ask you to wonder why you find virtue signals "accusatory" if they're not talking to you or about you. Don't discount those talking about this subject as "woke", or "virtue signalers" or "social justice warriors".
Some of them are overly angry and vitriolic, yes. Some are tired of explaining concepts that are clear and for granted to them, thinking that at this point anyone that disagrees is simply an agitator. Not all show good faith. Some are in it for themselves, and the glory of being holier-than-thou. I'm not going to pretend that doesn't exist.
But most of the concepts being discussed are sound. And there is a lot of fire behind the smoke. There is a lot of past, present, and future "racism" that still needs to be understood, and addressed.
Introversion is still taken poorly, as if it is a sin. Despite introversion having almost no relation to job performance without further context.
People who work better on different schedules are still funneled primarily into a 9-6 rhythm, being told to suck it up.
"White students" from poor backgrounds now struggle to move up even more, as they are selected against for "not being diverse enough".
Really, most companies with diversity quotas might not hire Joe, but they'll hire Juan who's basically the same as Joe except he's Mexican and loves Taco Tuesday more than Pizza Friday. It's diversity in the most superficial sense, looking for the same car with a different paint job. They're not in this to combat "racial injustices", they're in this to appease some crowd with too much money in an attempt to get more money out of them.
Remote work should help with this. I have no idea how tall my coworkers are.
> Introversion
In my corner of the world - the tech industry - it's taken to be a baseline, so there is no discrimination.
There IS insufficient accordances made for neuroatypical (ADHD, Autistic) people with interviews, but there is active discussion happening about it.
> "White students" from poor backgrounds now struggle to move up even more
So long as any part of our society remains not a pure meritocracy, of course some people will struggle against others. Money is still the best way to get ahead. So poor people will struggle, and there is not enough opportunities for everyone. White people still get selected to "move up" by the forces that be, they just aren't the ONLY ones that do so. Instead of 99% of the scholarships going to white students, maybe 50%% are. But if that reflects the demographics of the part of society that is making that choice, where is the problem?
> diversity in the most superficial sense
It's a correction for discrimination in the most superficial sense. It's a start. It's a stepping stone towards not having any discrimination, and not needing corrective action like diversity initiatives.
>Big tech hiring focus on diversity is much the same - the bar is NOT lowered for women or anyone from a minority race.
When employers industry wide are tripping over themselves to hire minorities, then yes, the bar is absolutely lower and pay higher. Its a classic perverse incentive.
>The last step of hiring before an offer is an objective test of programming ability.
Having been on both ends, there is absolutely nothing objective about interviews, and its perfectly possible to even pass a hard leetcode interview while lacking hard/soft skills. This is the basis for the diversity overcorrection: the allegation was that the system was implicitly biased against minorities, and the solution was to apply bias in the other direction.
Except the fundamental premise, all of the "proof" upon which the justification for racist/sexist hiring is a giant conflation; inequality of outcome is not strong evidence of discrimination. Especially when you have a glaring and obvious pipeline problem.
You can't snap your fingers and decide that you're going to hire up a bunch of minorities to senior positions tomorrow when they don't even exist in college today without sacrificing merit. Statistics and the normal distribution guarantee that a smaller pool of candidates will have a disproportionately smaller pool of high achievers and once those are vacuumed by corps virtually signalling for ESG Goodboy points you are forced to either abandon quotas or draw from closer to the mean. It is a statistical inevitability that minority hiring quotas lead to reduced average competence.
Something about the road to hell and pavement.
You can, if OP's premise is sound - that you can get more diveristy hires simply by expanding the pool of candidates being considered.
I am deeply involved in hiring at Amazon, (and am a bar raiser) and we work super hard to make sure diversity candidates want to apply, are being considered fairly, don't fall through the cracks, but when it comes to the final on-site, it might as well be a blind audition. We teach interviewers to refer to candidates impartially and focus purely on the questions, and answers. The analysis and conclusions is reviewed in a group. There is no way to make a hire decision without supportive data from their performance on the coding test, or in their behavioural experience.
I can't speak for the entire tech industry, but I know at Amazon the bar has absolutely not lowered.
> Over the 20 years of the study, sun avoiders were twice as likely to die as sun worshippers.
> Avoidance of sun exposure is a risk factor of a similar magnitude as smoking, in terms of life expectancy.
> Vitamin D now looks like the tip of the solar iceberg. Sunlight triggers the release of a number of other important compounds in the body, not only nitric oxide but also serotonin and endorphins. It reduces the risk of prostate, breast, colorectal, and pancreatic cancers. It improves circadian rhythms. It reduces inflammation and dampens autoimmune responses. It improves virtually every mental condition you can think of. And it’s free.
> the current U.S. sun-exposure guidelines were written for the whitest people on earth
> People of color rarely get melanoma. The rate is 26 per 100,000 in Caucasians, 5 per 100,000 in Hispanics, and 1 per 100,000 in African Americans.
> Leffell, the Yale dermatologist, recommends what he calls a “sensible” approach. “I have always advised my patients that they don’t need to crawl under a rock but should use common sense and be conscious of cumulative sun exposure and sunburns in particular,”
This was the alarm bell for me. They completely leave out that people who get sun exposure are typically doing something more active than sitting at a desk or watching TV. Maybe the physical activity explains a lot of the benefits (think there are studies supporting that).
I might get a lot of hate for this, but I'm kind of tired about these articles. They claim things they can't possibly know about a topic that is largely irrelevant. It's like trying to argue about algorithmic time efficiencies without knowing the details of their use (in this case we're trying to biohack for lower mortality without knowing all the factors).
> They completely leave out that people who get sun exposure are typically doing something more active than sitting at a desk or watching TV.
Did the research (not the article) leave that out? Researchers aren't idiots and spent 10,000x as long thinking about the issue as we did about these HN posts.
>Meanwhile, that big picture just keeps getting more interesting. Vitamin D now looks like the tip of the solar iceberg. Sunlight triggers the release of a number of other important compounds in the body, not only nitric oxide but also serotonin and endorphins. It reduces the risk of prostate, breast, colorectal, and pancreatic cancers. It improves circadian rhythms. It reduces inflammation and dampens autoimmune responses. It improves virtually every mental condition you can think of. And it’s free.
The article didn't include links to the research, so who knows.
On top of that, I'd imagine that it would be hard to control for the physiological and psychological benefits of being outside (nature, activity, etc; or detriments of being indoors like air quality) unless the subjects were in a controlled environment. It would be interesting to see how the research controlled for these, if they did at all. Many studies following large cohorts in real life are not looking at proving causation, but showing correlation because they can't fully control all the variables.
But how much of it? The amount that gives you skin cancer? The article mentions "30 minutes of summer sunlight", but not a study, let alone a replicated one. And it doesn't simply mention "30 minutes of summer sunlight", but "the equivalent of 30 minutes of summer sunlight". The other studies mentioned in the first part of the article (office workers, tanned Swedes, etc.) might be accidental correlations. And mentioning the neolithicum is utterly ridiculous.
> It improves virtually every mental condition you can think of.
It still does that with sun screen. But it improves mental health only a bit. I've never read that exposing patients to a bit of sun light solved their depression, ADHD or schizophrenia.
Since the byline brings up race, its kind an aside but I'm almost convinced that a lot of our large scale nutritional/alternative medical studies give mixed results (and are not reproducable) because researchers are unwilling to sufficiently control for genes. High level categories like "black, white, hispanic, asian" are not enough.
Dietary genes aren’t correlated to race of course, except for rare ones like Inuits adapting to eating more fat.
For a large scale study I would check if they correlated for geography, blood markers and diet outside the supplements.
Hell, look at the distribution of lactose intolerance. Is drinking milk racist?
Actually, the most lactose intolerant people I know are totally white and I think actually have worse undiagnosed medical problems but just think they’re lactose intolerant. And Asians I know aren’t lactose intolerant because even though they “are Asian” culturally and would look Asian to you they’re actually 2/3 genetically Scottish.
Testing milk as a supplement would be interesting I guess; I know in the 90s we were all taught it was needed for bones but more recently this is said to not be true because 1. bones need vitamin K which we don’t get enough of and 2. cows milk contains galactose which is bad for bones and may cause osteoporosis.
When there are so many places where systemic racism shows up in clear and demonstrable ways, why complicate your thesis with a completely unfounded assertion?
In any case, like “code smell” this article has a “journalism smell.” Hand-waving, breezy style; over-identification with certain groups of researchers. And of course, cursory treatment of the evidence. He points out the lack of improvement in certain end-points among subjects supplemented with vitamin D. Who were the subjects? Randomized? Matched controls? Matched how? We’re any outcomes positive? In other words are we seeing evidence cherry picking of evidence? In fact so little is mentioned in the article that he may as well have given a list of PubMed links and just directed the readers to figure it out for themselves. I don’t know what the right answer is, but the only TL;DR from this piece is “There’s some controversy here.”
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.)
You gotta test with omnivores, and even then humans are more omnivorous than most other animals (like dogs are poisoned by grapes, chocolate, onions…).
(Hard to do this kind of research in humans, so you have to use animal models and use good judgement/guess at the applicability.)