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Benzene detected in many sunscreen products

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Re: Benzene detected in many sunscreen products

#281

Post by dcolkitt »

qvrjuec wrote: post #252
dcolkitt wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Medical doctors are no more trained to digest scientific evidence than anyone else. Especially when it comes to population epidemiology. Statistical illiteracy is widespread among medical doctors.[1] There's no reason to trust a doctor to interpret a p-value. For these types of questions you're much better off listening to a data scientist because they have actual training in interpretative statistics. [1] https://ww…

> Medical doctors are no more trained to digest scientific evidence It's about understanding and processing this evidence in the broader context of their medical training. You're trying to generalize the results of a study with many shortcomings to say everyone may be better off dealing with increasing their odds of developing malignant melanoma and dealing with its associated mortality risks. My issues with using th…

> Why not just tell people to supplement vitamin D instead?

One very consistent pattern with vitamin D research is that association studies will find a major relationship between serum vitamin D and some health outcome.[1] But an RCT using vitamin D supplementation will find no effect.[2]

That strongly suggests that serum vitamin D, at least as we measure it, is merely proxying for something else. The map is not the territory. There's an X-factor that's related to serum vitamin D, but is not just serum vitamin D. Artificial supplementation doesn't work. Since the vast majority of population vitamin D variance is related to sun exposure, that would strongly suggest that sun exposure is the X-factor that improves health.

[1]https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/proceedings-of-the-n... [2]https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/article-abst...

Re: Benzene detected in many sunscreen products

#282

Post by TylerE »

dcolkitt wrote: post #179
jpmattia wrote: post #21

My family recently went through the search for a decent sunscreen and settled on this link for useful info about which sunscreens have nasty chemicals: https://www.ewg.org/sunscreen/ Our search was not exhaustive (and I can't really vouch for the link that was used) so if you have a better link, please don't keep it a secret.

I'm gonna make a radical suggestion. Maybe just try ditching sunscreen altogether. Yes, it's probably true that exposure to the sun increases the risk of skin cancer. But in the US skin cancer accounts for fewer than 1% of all deaths. In contrast the quintile of people with the highest exposure to the sun have half the all-cause mortality as the quintile with the lowest sun exposure.[1] In particular sunbathers enjoy…

You're ignoring the obvious correlation - they aren't healthier because they get more sun, they get more sun because they spend more time walking/biking/whatever outside.

Re: Benzene detected in many sunscreen products

#283

Post by refurb »

infogulch wrote: post #54
buovjaga wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All around classy company: https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/miracleindustry/americas... Quote from the article: “Oh, they’ve already reserved for that stuff,” one of them told me during a coffee break. He meant that in Johnson & Johnson’s financials, there had been money taken from earnings and put into a column vaguely called “accrued liabilities,” in order to account for the expected billions that might still ha…

If anybody ever wondered, this is a concrete example of what it looks like when a company treats its negative externalities as a "cost of doing business".

No, it’s not that at all. Accrued liabilities is a standard accounting practice. It only sounds sinister to you because you don’t know how accounting works.

https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/knowledge/ac...

Re: Benzene detected in many sunscreen products

#284

Post by mr_toad »

rkk3 wrote: post #213
ceejayoz wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One molecule of benzene will guarantee a cancer case?

You aren't guaranteed to die from being shot in the head either. However there are things which the medical community recognizes have no safe level of exposure. From the original article: "The toxicity of benzene in humans has been well established for over 120 years. The hematotoxicity of benzene has been described as early as 1897. A study from 1939 on benzene stated that “exposure over a long period of time to any…

Yeah and you literally can’t breathe without risking being exposed to benzene. It’s in many adhesives, paints and petrol.

If you want to adopt a zero tolerance policy for benzene then you’d need to ban petrol. Or stop breathing.

Re: Benzene detected in many sunscreen products

#285

Post by refurb »

I sure hope no one is throwing out their skincare products.

- 2 ppm is a “best guess” on a safe limit. It’s not like 1 ppm is benign and 3ppm means you’re dead

- 2ppm is an incredibly small quantity of benzene. 3x a very small quantity is cause for concern (why is it there), but not much of a health hazard

- your roasted coffee has a ton of poly aromatic hydrocarbons in it, some of which are carcinogenic and nobody worries about their daily cup of coffee

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4933506/

Re: Benzene detected in many sunscreen products

#286

Post by devman0 »

ineedasername wrote: post #280
p49k wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might be true at the very low end of the market, but most sunscreen brands that people care about enough to have loyalty are uniquely sourced products.

Not if they're all getting a key component from the same supplier. Every niche brand and even someone like CVS isn't going to run it's own chemical refineries for each ingredient in the sunscreen. They're going to use a relatively small group of suppliers. It only takes one of them selling to dozens of manufacturers to taint both mainstream and obscure brands.

QA can be a big differentiator between competing companies that share upstream suppliers. It could be that one sunscreen maker is testing for crap/contaminated precursors and another isn't.

Re: Benzene detected in many sunscreen products

#287

Post by mr_toad »

notacoward wrote: post #110
hristov wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original article has a link to a petition the lab is making to the government. There they show a table of sunscreens sorted by concentration of benzene. Most of the top 20 entries are nutrogena.

I think that's a bit misleading. The clearest pattern I see in that data is that sprays are particularly bad. The top of the list is dominated by them, out of all proportion to their prevalence in the market overall. Any manufacturer who makes a lot of different products, and particularly spray products, is likely to have some entries on that list. Indeed, if you look at Appendix A (the "not detected" list) you'll fi…

If they use a hydrocarbon propellant it’s not unlikely that it would contain some benzene. You could probably find some in many spray cans.

The EPA recommends avoiding aerosols if possible.

One of the down sides of moving away from CFCs is that some of the other chemicals used have their own problems.

Re: Benzene detected in many sunscreen products

#288

Post by Chilko »

dcolkitt wrote: post #179
jpmattia wrote: post #21

My family recently went through the search for a decent sunscreen and settled on this link for useful info about which sunscreens have nasty chemicals: https://www.ewg.org/sunscreen/ Our search was not exhaustive (and I can't really vouch for the link that was used) so if you have a better link, please don't keep it a secret.

I'm gonna make a radical suggestion. Maybe just try ditching sunscreen altogether. Yes, it's probably true that exposure to the sun increases the risk of skin cancer. But in the US skin cancer accounts for fewer than 1% of all deaths. In contrast the quintile of people with the highest exposure to the sun have half the all-cause mortality as the quintile with the lowest sun exposure.[1] In particular sunbathers enjoy…

This is veryregion-specific. If you live in Oceania for instance then UV damage and skin cancer presents a much greater danger than in other places - the ol' ozone hole has made sun protection a lot more important here.

Melanoma rates are almost 3 times higher here than in North America, and we have have strong education surrounding sun protection: https://canceratlas.cancer.org/the-burden/oceania/

Re: Benzene detected in many sunscreen products

#289

Post by dcolkitt »

TylerE wrote: post #282
dcolkitt wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm gonna make a radical suggestion. Maybe just try ditching sunscreen altogether. Yes, it's probably true that exposure to the sun increases the risk of skin cancer. But in the US skin cancer accounts for fewer than 1% of all deaths. In contrast the quintile of people with the highest exposure to the sun have half the all-cause mortality as the quintile with the lowest sun exposure.[1] In particular sunbathers enjoy…

You're ignoring the obvious correlation - they aren't healthier because they get more sun, they get more sun because they spend more time walking/biking/whatever outside.

One possibility. But the original study carefully controlled for exercise and lifestyle factors. To corroborative the causal relationship, we also have extensive experimental evidence where UV and/or bright light on skin/eyes directly improves systematic biomarkers associated with longevity[1][2][3]. These improvements occurs independent of vitamin D synthesis.[4]

[1]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022202X1... [2]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03785... [3]https://www.hindawi.com/journals/bmri/2016/1934518/ [4]https://academic.oup.com/endo/article/159/5/1992/4931051?log...

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