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dunno man, just had melanoma removed from my ear and if it had moved to my lymph nodes I had a 50% chance of dying within 5 years. thankfully it didn't but it was caused by sun damage incurred in my youth. I'll be wearing sunscreen and mostly avoiding direct sunlight.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's instructive to look at people who drive for a living. One arm will have significantly more sun exposure than the other and it's trivial to spot the difference as the sun does have a very noticeable aging effect.
What's interesting is that sun exposure through a car window removes almost all UVB rays and most UVA rays. So it's closer to comparing lower sun exposure vs sun exposure with sunscreen.
> A study published last year, for instance, examined medical data from 360,000 light-skinned Brits and found that greater exposure to UV radiation—either from living in Britain’s sunnier southern bits rather than the darker north, or from regularly using sunbeds—was correlated with either a 12% and 15% lower risk, respectively, of dying, even when the raised risk of skin cancer was taken into account. Emphasis on “m…
I would like to know how regular sunlight compares to the combination of vitamin D supplementation and red light therapy. If you do both of those, is that equivalent or better since it doesn't have any damaging effects of the sun?
There are other benefits as well. For example, some eye exposure to violet or ultraviolet light have been shown to reduce myopia, which might be one reason why glasses usage has increased a lot. (Screen usage is a big myopia factor as well, but it’s not the whole story.) There are also studies suggesting that low-level UV exposure lowers risk of death by more than what can be explained by serum vitamin D levels alone…
If they claim causation in the paper it is usually controlled for, if they just claim a link it might not be.
> A study published last year, for instance, examined medical data from 360,000 light-skinned Brits and found that greater exposure to UV radiation—either from living in Britain’s sunnier southern bits rather than the darker north, or from regularly using sunbeds—was correlated with either a 12% and 15% lower risk, respectively, of dying, even when the raised risk of skin cancer was taken into account. Emphasis on “m…
Science is good, but restraining all decisions behind FUTON biased double-blind longitudinal meta-analysis is not only unreasonably cognitiviely expensive, but not even the greatest idea.
When making decisions to personally guide your life, you can also base them on values, heuristics, paternal advice, common wisdom, etc...
It's obvious that the ideal amount of sunlight is somewhere between 0 and 100% of the time, I don't need to read a "The Economist" article with a clickbaity, possibly misrepresented title of a nuanced meta-analysis.
The proof is on this comment, it's never enough data, the conclusion is always that you need more funding:
>360,000 light-skinned Brits
>Emphasis on “may” - this is hardly a gold standard study
I didn't even need 1 subject, you need more than 360,000. You are out there running kubernetes for a blog and asking for more EC2 instances on top of a 3M$ bill, I'm out here running the whole company on 2 raspberry pis.
If wealth can be achieved by increasing resources or reducing necessities, I have achieved the nirvana of wisdom of the second kind while you still strive to amass more information to make a decision:
Sun good
Isn't skin cancer 100% survivable if caught on time*, with the removal procedure begin a single 1-2 hour specialist visit? Where "on time" means during the trivial yearly screening that everyone should be getting.
That's a pretty good net survival rate [3], but it's not perfect. And it's possible that less care in avoiding excessive sun exposure could lead to any cancers being more aggressive. However, I don't have a reference for that musing, so feel free to ignore it.
[0]: Invasive means the tumor has left the tissue it started in.
[1]: https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/melan.html
[2]: It would be higher if the official method for calculating net survival didn't, in my opinion, needlessly bias itself against cancer patient survival. The last time I reviewed the methodology notes, they compared daily hazards of death between cancer patients and everyone else. But, if the cancer patients had a lower hazard for a day, the difference was treated as zero instead of negative. This is a hill I'll die on, because their method pretends any confounding variables not in the model have no effect. Patients who catch melanoma early are probably less likely to die soon compared to those of similar age, race, sex, and location. An early diagnosis likely means they care enough about their health to visit doctors regularly and make good use of those visits.
It’s tempting to see things like this and think “well of course it does, because that’s how we evolved”. But I think that might just be post-rationalization? At the very least, I think the argument _doesn’t_ hold for periodic famine, extreme temperatures, most disease, etc even though we also evolved with those things. Is there any guiding principle that separates the things-we-evolved-with-that-are-good vs the -that…
Since I was a little kid I was always skeptical of slathering something all over my body just to go outside. Just thought…how did people survive before this stuff if we really need it so bad.
> A study published last year, for instance, examined medical data from 360,000 light-skinned Brits and found that greater exposure to UV radiation—either from living in Britain’s sunnier southern bits rather than the darker north, or from regularly using sunbeds—was correlated with either a 12% and 15% lower risk, respectively, of dying, even when the raised risk of skin cancer was taken into account. Emphasis on “m…
Example: would you put on sunscreen when playing volleyball at the beach at 4:30pm, if the UV index at that time is 2 (UVI scale)? That seems completely unnecessary imo. And many people are vitamin d deficient anyway, so the minor sun exposure would certainly do more good.
If it’s around mid-day and/or the UV index is higher, say 4+, then i 100% agree with you that it’s prudent to apply sunscreen.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So just to clarify - yes, I do think looking at the sun directly for very short periods is good (especially if it's lower on the horizon). But overall, what I as trying to get at is that being outside and getting the bright light of the sun on your eyes is helpful. The best way to do this is on the water. When you look at the sun reflecting off the water, you are getting the bright light, but because the water is ref…
>why is it not considered bad to look at the sun's reflection on the water? Who said it's not? It may hurt you as fast but it's still bad for you. https://www.aao.org/eye-health/diseases/photokeratitis-snow-...
> A study published last year, for instance, examined medical data from 360,000 light-skinned Brits and found that greater exposure to UV radiation—either from living in Britain’s sunnier southern bits rather than the darker north, or from regularly using sunbeds—was correlated with either a 12% and 15% lower risk, respectively, of dying, even when the raised risk of skin cancer was taken into account. Emphasis on “m…
Sun good Science is good, but restraining all decisions behind FUTON biased double-blind longitudinal meta-analysis is not only unreasonably cognitiviely expensive, but not even the greatest idea. When making decisions to personally guide your life, you can also base them on values, heuristics, paternal advice, common wisdom, etc... It's obvious that the ideal amount of sunlight is somewhere between 0 and 100% of the…
The study says sun good. But the studies being described in the UV are specifically comparing people who stay indoors vs people who get exposed to UV by being outdoors. The studies listed are not looking at application of sunscreen, or wearing clothes to block UV, etc.
This generally makes sense; stop being cooped up indoors and do things outside, but also wear UV protection.