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Newer, better sunscreens have not been approved by the FDA

theatlantic.com

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Re: Newer, better sunscreens have not been approved by the FDA

#101

Post by jandrese »

icegreentea2 wrote: post #50
scifibestfi wrote: post #16

> At 36, I am just old enough to remember when sunscreen wasn’t a big deal. My mom, despite being among the palest people alive, does not remember bringing it on our earliest vacations, or hearing any mention of sun protection by our pediatrician. > Now SPF is ubiquitous. You can find it in lotions, sprays, gels, oils, powders, and implements that look like grade-school glue sticks, as well as infused into skin-care…

Reasonable question. There appears to be a shift in the relative incidence rates based on age since 2000 ( https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamadermatology/fullarticle... ). Skin cancer rates were always weighted towards older (average age at detection is ~65), but at the same time skin cancers are one of the more common cancers found in young people. Since 2000 where appears to be a decrease in incidence of younger…

Are you suggesting that the skin cancer rates are a lagging indicator and the explosion in cases is the result of the lax attitudes of a few decades ago as described in the article?

One thing the article didn't mention is that even just 30 years ago sunscreens were nowhere near as effective as they are today. SPF 15 was extremely common and 30 was kinda rare and usually left you looking like you were whitewashed. Today it's nothing at all to find SPF 50 on the shelf. And if you use them properly they actually work, unlike some of the formulations of old. You can be out in the direct sun all afternoon and still come in still mostly pale.

Re: Newer, better sunscreens have not been approved by the FDA

#102

Post by FireBeyond »

endgame wrote: post #48
jakub_g wrote: post #12

*in US. Honestly, I was expecting an article about some ingredients being harmful to coral reef hence disallowed, or similar. Instead, the issue is slow process of FDA. > The FDA hasn’t added a new active ingredient to its sunscreen monograph [...] in decades. Also, what makes this article interesting (a "man bites a dog" kind of story) is that the US is more strict than EU in this area; in 95% of cases for all kinds…

The same FDA which made it all-but-impossible to test for SARS-CoV-2 in early 2020? I'd believe it. https://twitter.com/random_eddie/status/1232075455295037440

No post body was provided.

Re: Newer, better sunscreens have not been approved by the FDA

#103

Post by icelancer »

surfpel wrote: post #82
ntoskrnl wrote: post #8

You're also not allowed to have the best toothpaste in the world. Toothpaste with Novamin can't be sold in the US. Thankfully the internet makes it easy to get the good stuff anyhow.

Did some googling and found a study that doesn’t corroborate that. “…concluding that there are no significant difference of remineralization process obtained by using traditional toothpaste and Novamin.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7068624/

That's a single metareview paper which was started by an undergraduate. Maybe people find that valuable, but other studies on the topics that used actual experimentation present somewhat mixed reviews trending towards clinical relevance.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/jbm.b.34737

Re: Newer, better sunscreens have not been approved by the FDA

#104

Post by m463 »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #77
scifibestfi wrote: post #16

> At 36, I am just old enough to remember when sunscreen wasn’t a big deal. My mom, despite being among the palest people alive, does not remember bringing it on our earliest vacations, or hearing any mention of sun protection by our pediatrician. > Now SPF is ubiquitous. You can find it in lotions, sprays, gels, oils, powders, and implements that look like grade-school glue sticks, as well as infused into skin-care…

> So we went from little to no sunscreen to ubiquity over a few decades, but over that time rates of skin cancer have increased per 100k UV exposure patterns have changed significantly. Long-distance vacation travel to sunny locations is much more common now. Tanning beds are much more common. Both holidays and deliberate tanning often take people from indoor office life to the opposite extreme of sun exposure. Peopl…

> Tanning beds are much more common.

I think they were common, say 80's/90's, but I don't see them much anymore.

I remember meeting a woman once - early 20's and very attractive - except her skin was extremely wrinkled. She told me her parents had owned a tanning salon and she used it all the time. and a bit later that's how things ended up.

Re: Newer, better sunscreens have not been approved by the FDA

#105

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

medymed wrote: post #29
scifibestfi wrote: post #16

> At 36, I am just old enough to remember when sunscreen wasn’t a big deal. My mom, despite being among the palest people alive, does not remember bringing it on our earliest vacations, or hearing any mention of sun protection by our pediatrician. > Now SPF is ubiquitous. You can find it in lotions, sprays, gels, oils, powders, and implements that look like grade-school glue sticks, as well as infused into skin-care…

One explanation is a time delay. Most typical skin cancers (BCCs and SCCs), like other features of sun damaged skin, tend to arise decades after high levels of chronic or accumulated intermittent sun exposure at a younger age. (However that be less true for melanoma.)

I had two BCC’s at a very young age (26/27). They were almost certainly caused by frequent (1-2x a week) usage of tanning beds for several years in my early 20’s. I stopped using the beds around 24 and besides the two BCC’s at 26 and 27 have not had any issues for a decade.

And I know the word “cancer” sounds bad, but it’s very relative. BCC/SCC are very very unlikely to kill you, think of them as an extremely slow growing pimple. They could possibly kill you if you let them grow unchecked for several decades. Melanoma, on the other hand, is a entirely different beast that will kill you quickly if you don’t catch it early.

Re: Newer, better sunscreens have not been approved by the FDA

#106

Post by dang »

jkubicek wrote: post #13
ntoskrnl wrote: post #8

You're also not allowed to have the best toothpaste in the world. Toothpaste with Novamin can't be sold in the US. Thankfully the internet makes it easy to get the good stuff anyhow.

For those that are curious, here's[1] a mildly deep dive into the history of Novamin sales in the US. [1]: https://medium.com/@ravenstine/the-curious-history-of-novami...

Discussed here:

The curious history of NovaMin toothpaste (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26644350 - March 2021 (37 comments)

Re: Newer, better sunscreens have not been approved by the FDA

#107

Post by scotty79 »

undoware wrote: post #83
dghughes wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Canadian Cancer Society has a UV camera in a box. People stick their head in and it shows the hundred of freckles, blotches, sunspots under your skin you can't see now but will later. Then they ask you to put on sunscreen and where it is on your skin is opaque jet black.

impressive public-health comms technique, but again, will still 'show jet black' even if: - you're wearing a sunscreen which is itself carcinogenic, and are being affected by this - your sunscreen is destroying coral reefs - your sunscreen washes off easily - your suncreen is unpleasant to wear (making you unlikely to wear it) - your body actually needed some sunlight anyway: https://www.outsideonline.com/health/well…

'show jet black' is not the strategy of researching whole impact of sunscreen.

However once the impact of sunscreen is researched and it comes out positive you still need to convince people that applying sunscreen is a good idea. Just telling the information doesn't work that well. Demonstration like the one mentioned is better.

Re: Newer, better sunscreens have not been approved by the FDA

#108

Post by scotty79 »

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #65
jakub_g wrote: post #12

*in US. Honestly, I was expecting an article about some ingredients being harmful to coral reef hence disallowed, or similar. Instead, the issue is slow process of FDA. > The FDA hasn’t added a new active ingredient to its sunscreen monograph [...] in decades. Also, what makes this article interesting (a "man bites a dog" kind of story) is that the US is more strict than EU in this area; in 95% of cases for all kinds…

The other wild portion of this is that if you go to northern EU (Norway/Sweden/Finland) sunscreen is like, insanely expensive. Like at least triple the price of what you would pay in the states for the same product.

Maybe part of that is that there's not much sun there so sunscreen is a niche product not a staple?

Re: Newer, better sunscreens have not been approved by the FDA

#109

Post by culi »

akersten wrote: post #32
scifibestfi wrote: post #16

> At 36, I am just old enough to remember when sunscreen wasn’t a big deal. My mom, despite being among the palest people alive, does not remember bringing it on our earliest vacations, or hearing any mention of sun protection by our pediatrician. > Now SPF is ubiquitous. You can find it in lotions, sprays, gels, oils, powders, and implements that look like grade-school glue sticks, as well as infused into skin-care…

Better detection and screening for these cancers resulting in an apparently larger rate of incidence is an easy hypothesis to reach for.

What specific advances have been made in better detection and/or screening? Do we use better technology for this? If there was some sudden advancement then I'd assume we'd see a sudden jump in the graph. Rather, we see an incredibly smooth and steady increase.

Furthermore, the graph is split between male and female and there's very few, if any, little increases that are synchronized across these categories. If technology was a factor I'd assume we'd see increases in both

Re: Newer, better sunscreens have not been approved by the FDA

#110

Post by culi »

adastra22 wrote: post #95
cortesoft wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole in the ozone was a big deal in the 80s.

In Argentina.

Actually Australia had it the worst. I remember estimates that the MAJORITY of Australians will have had skin cancer in their lifetimes
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