Sunlight benefits and risks: what science says about healthy sun exposure
Scientific American · LC · trust 33/100
Are we too afraid of the sun? Scientists rethink sun exposure risks and benefits
Could sunlight actually improve your health? New research suggests we may need to rethink total sun avoidance
By Rachel Feltman , Rowan Jacobsen , Fonda Mwangi & Alex Sugiura
Rachel Feltman: Hey listeners, it’s Rachel here. Before we get into today’s episode, I just wanted to acknowledge our unexplained absence from your feed over the last few weeks. To make a long story short, Scientific American was sold to a new parent company in June, which caught our team by surprise. There were lots of things to sort out during the transition from Springer Nature to LabX, but now we’re back at work on the pod. We’re sorry for the hiatus was so abrupt, but the good news is that Science Quickly isn’t going anywhere! Thanks for your patience as we get back up to speed. Without further ado, here’s a new episode for you to enjoy.
For Scientific American ’s Science Quickly , I’m Rachel Feltman.
I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with the sun. As the sole alabaster-skinned outlier in an otherwise solidly Mediterranean family, photographic evidence can confirm that, despite my parents’ good-faith efforts, I spent most of my childhood very, very sunburned. On one infamous trip to Aruba, I got second-degree burns across my shoulders that were so bad, I spent a week covered in zinc diaper cream for extra protection.
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While my SPF needs may have been considered offbeat and a little bit fussy back in the mid-1990s, we’ve since come a long way when it comes to societal attitudes around sun protection. The popularity of tanning lotions and baby oil have given way to cutting-edge sunscreen formulas, including plenty intended for everyday use. In fact, earlier this month, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first new sunscreen ingredient in 27 years .
At the same time, we’re starting to see a backlash to that wave of skin cancer prevention messaging about sun exposure—including from people in the White House. And while science definitely doesn’t support the use of tanning beds or endless, unprotected sun exposure, it is true that there could be a bit more nuance to the question of how much sunshine to seek out than you’ve been told.
Today’s guest is writer Rowan Jacobsen. He’s the author of a new book called In Defense of Sunlight: The Surprising Science of Sun Exposure . He’s here to unpack the latest research on the risks and benefits of unadulterated sunshine.
Thanks so much for coming on to chat with us today.
Rowan Jacobsen: Thanks. I’m excited to be here.
Feltman: So we’re in a pretty weird place right now with sun exposure in the U.S. You know, we have the mainstream medical guidelines on one end, and then we do have people in the White House trying to make it easier for teens to use tanning beds. So with that in mind, I would love to start at the top by making it clear what your book is not saying. You’re not busting open an antisun conspiracy and telling us that the science says we should throw away all sun protection forever and tan with abandon. Is that correct?
Jacobsen: Yeah, that gang is doing me no favors right now.
Feltman: But how did you get interested in the topic of the sun and, you know, in defending it? Because it turns out there is nuance to some of these recommendations that we have.
Jacobsen: There is a lot of nuance, which is why I decided a book was the right format so that you can actually get into all the nuance of it. But for me, it started about 10 years ago, when a few studies hit the scientific literature showing that sunlight actually had some beneficial qualities that we hadn’t previously taken into account.
So then, you know, you start asking, “Well, we know that sun has these negative qualities related to skin cancer, and the recommendations that existed, that you referred to, were based purely on that. But if suddenly we have these benefits, then does that mean we need to reevaluate the relationship there?” And so my book asks that question and tries to dive in and do that at some level.
Feltman: So how did we come to our current mainstream recommendations when it comes to sunlight?
Jacobsen: So basically, for a really long time, like 100 years, the one thing we knew that sunlight did that was good for you was vitamin D. When sunlight hits skin, it makes vitamin D. And we learned that, yeah, in, like, the 1920s, [in the] 1930s, 1940s, scientists started to discover that the ultraviolet light in the solar spectrum can cause skin cancer.
So suddenly, everybody had been very prosun up to that point. Suddenly, you know, they went, “Well, we gotta reconsider this ’cause it looks like too much sun exposure will raise your risk of skin cancer.” We learned more and more from there about those dangers, and at the same time, skin cancer rates in the U.S. started to explode after World War II, basically.
So it started to look like we had kind of an epidemic on our hand. So the warnings got more and more strident that you better be careful with sunlight. We still had the issue of vitamin D; we didn’t want people to be deficient in vitamin D, but you can also make a pill, and people could get vitamin D through their pills.
So basically, the current recommendations to avoid all sun exposure were based on the concept that you could make up for that by taking a vitamin D pill, and that would give you all the good stuff that you weren’t getting from the sunlight. And it has turned out that neither one of those—that calculus was not right. It turns out the…
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