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The health benefits of sunlight may outweigh the risk of skin cancer

economist.com

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Re: The health benefits of sunlight may outweigh the risk of skin cancer

#171

Post by quickthrowman »

ToDougie wrote: post #109
Nevermark wrote: post #90

For winter I got a standing tanning machine. Which I use 2-4x a week for 1 minute per use. I calculated this was equivalent to 5-15 minutes outside, depending on time, but engages the entirety of the bodies largest organ. My (anecdotal, subjective) experience is that it helps. Both vitamin D and nitric oxide are good rationales for that. This would be economically impossible at a tanning salon. If you like to be tan,…

> I also have bright rope LEDs surrounding a few of my room ceilings, hidden behind coving. That light reflects smoothly off the entirety of the white ceilings. A great combination of very high intensity lighting, that is also gentle, diffuse and calming. Summer days, indoors, all year round. I am intrigued -- please can you share any publicly available image of this solution? I'm not sure what to google search, or w…

“Cove lighting” is the architectural lighting term used for this sort lighting installation. You build coves out of gypsum or wood and then install LED tape lighting into a plastic or metal channel and bounce the light off the cove to create indirect lighting. You can use cove lighting to illuminate a ceiling, or accent a wall, which is called perimeter cove lighting.

There are a number of other types of indirect light fixtures (and direct/indirect fixtures, most commonly as suspended linear fixtures with LEDs on both the top and bottom of the fixture).

The first picture in the article linked below has an architectural elevation diagram (basically a side profile) of cove lighting: https://www.architectmagazine.com/technology/lighting/cove-l...

Re: The health benefits of sunlight may outweigh the risk of skin cancer

#172

Post by atombender »

biimugan wrote: post #170

I think people should be highly skeptical of articles like this, even without knowing anything about the subject in question. No byline/author. No citations/links to the studies in question. Confirmation of preconceived notions that people would like to be true (e.g. the sun as a wellness remedy instead of damaging to skin), including unfounded "just so" stories and claims about evolution, diabetes, and other unrelat…

> No byline/author.

This is The Economist; they don't use bylines, and their articles are all anonymous.

Re: The health benefits of sunlight may outweigh the risk of skin cancer

#174

Post by lstodd »

TinkersW wrote: post #94
lstodd wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

56th latitude person can be literally baked by northern mediterannean (~42 lat) March sun in a couple of days. But a couple months later.. no problems climbing mountains all day. We are very adaptable.

You can choose to bake, and your skin will harden up and deal with it, but it will also cause long term leathery skin, which many find unattractive, and increased skin cancer risk. Tho I agree with economist article, sun exposure is very good for you, just not high UV exposure.

I'd say more like comments here: it's not high UV, it's high delta between actual UV flux and what one's skin was expecting. So pace it, like you would do when first starting lifting weights. The final tolerance is suprisingly high.

Re: The health benefits of sunlight may outweigh the risk of skin cancer

#175

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

Personally, I associate sunlight with less health because of how it makes me feel - uncomfortable on a good day but often like having the flu.

Some of that is tied to our daily 85° dew points but once the sun goes down the dp feels livable.

But even without high heat and humidity, sunlight feels relentlessly, painfully bright. The best I can hope for is to ignore it.

Conversely, cool cloudy days feel like the relief after a long, bad headache. And fog is the finest weather there is.

Re: The health benefits of sunlight may outweigh the risk of skin cancer

#176

Post by avalys »

atombender wrote: post #172
biimugan wrote: post #170

I think people should be highly skeptical of articles like this, even without knowing anything about the subject in question. No byline/author. No citations/links to the studies in question. Confirmation of preconceived notions that people would like to be true (e.g. the sun as a wellness remedy instead of damaging to skin), including unfounded "just so" stories and claims about evolution, diabetes, and other unrelat…

> No byline/author. This is The Economist; they don't use bylines, and their articles are all anonymous.

+1

The byline is “The Economist”, and the lack of links is the house style, like a printed newspaper.

A relic from the times when the name and reputation of the institution alone was enough to earn your trust.

Personally I still find them a high-quality source, especially because they are a weekly publication based in the UK and distanced (but not entirely removed) from the bullshit of the US media cycle.

Re: The health benefits of sunlight may outweigh the risk of skin cancer

#177

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

cpncrunch wrote: post #161
tejohnso wrote: post #106

"The big picture is that the benefits of sunlight outweigh the risks—provided you don’t get sunburnt,” argues Richard Weller, a dermatologist at the University of Edinburg Also, Dr. Roger Seheult has some strong opinions on this as well. Considers sun exposure one of the pillars of health and avoiding the sun to be as dangerous as smoking.

That does seem to be the case. The Lindqvist study specifically said that sun avoidance was as bad as smoking iirc. Sun exposure has been one of my main activities for over 10 years. The evidence is now overwhelming.

I'm in the other camp. Sunlight never feels great and the best I've ever felt is working nights.

Re: The health benefits of sunlight may outweigh the risk of skin cancer

#178

Post by whatever1 »

I’m looking at the correlation between melanoma incidence and geographic latitude, and it doesn’t appear to be very strong. For instance, I observe a significantly higher incidence in countries like Norway compared to Italy.

Shouldn’t we expect a much stronger correlation?

Re: The health benefits of sunlight may outweigh the risk of skin cancer

#179

Post by aidenn0 »

brightball wrote: post #66
pinkmuffinere wrote: post #33

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.

I live at a much lower latitude (about the same as Morocco) than my Celtic ancestors did.

Re: The health benefits of sunlight may outweigh the risk of skin cancer

#180

Post by sershe »

Weren't there studies showing that 1) some health conditions correlate with low vitamin D level, 2) vitamin D supplements do nothing for these conditions?

Clearly, there's a third variable that causes both. Since we don't understand what the heck it is and I like being in the sun despite being pale (nearly never getting burned, although I did get burned a lot as a teen), I personally call it SUN MAGIC.

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