Comments
By breppp 2025-09-195:27 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 unrelated topics. Named individuals seem to "specialize" in sunlight as a wellness remedy (seems like a big red flag to me). No actual physical theory as to how it could be true (more vitamin D reduces death by up to 50%? how? your body only needs so much vitamin D and it's not actually all that much).
And sure enough, if you look up any details on the studies in question, they are highly questionable. Vastly different populations studied with very weak controls. For example, sunscreen use -- both chemical and physical, i.e. hats -- was not controlled for. Seems like a big problem since that's the primary claim being made! And it seems like such an obvious thing. It makes one wonder why it was omitted.
The facts of the "status quo" of sun exposure dangers, on the other hand, have quite a lot more going for them, both in terms of study quality and in terms of physical explanation/interpretation. UV radiation physically damages DNA, even when you don't burn. Tanning is a response to skin cell damage, so any additional melanin production in your skin is indication that your DNA is being damaged. Damaged DNA means when your cells reproduce, they reproduce the damage and/or otherwise mutate. If that damage or mutation happens to be cancerous, then you have a big problem. Tanning, contrary to what people seem to think, doesn't inoculate you against skin cancer or damage. It merely helps absorb a higher percentage of UV radiation -- meaning your skin is still getting damaged, just at a slightly lower rate (a helpful, though marginal, evolutionary advantage).
By pazimzadeh 2025-09-203:043 reply Sure but you should also be highly skeptical of people telling you that sunscreen is always required to go outside. A lot of the studies are funded by sunscreen companies which stand to make a lot of money.
> Tanning is a response to skin cell damage
I don't think this is true in any meaningful sense. Damage is part of life. Your body repairs minor damage and it is usually a good thing to trigger the repair pathways once in a while. This is also the basis for exercise - your muscles and tendons are damaged when you work out, but they get rebuilt stronger. Your DNA is also repaired, and turning repair pathways on can sometimes improve tissue quality/collagen production or get rid of imperfections - this is the basis of microneedling and cosmetic techniques, some of which involve light exposure. UV therapy is also a treatment for psoriasis (skin inflammation).
If any amount of sunlight is bad, ask yourself why melanoma typically occurs on the trunk region (in men) or legs (women) rather than say the face or arms. Those are regions that are normally hidden, but are then suddenly exposed when you go shirtless/at the beach.
The most dangerous thing is to go straight from non-exposure to high exposure. But if you gradually increase exposure, the body has many ways of dealing with non-overwhelming amounts of damage. Damage can in fact trigger repair which is often beneficial, as this article alludes to.
Most importantly, the more beneficial UV rays (UVB) for vitamin D production are weaker than the more harmful ones (UVA), so any sunscreen or glass that "blocks UV" necessarily blocks all UVB before you get close to blocking all UVA. Nothing can actually block 100% of UVA. But let's say you slather sunscreen on every time you go out. Now imagine one day you forget it or run out of it or for whatever emergency reason can't apply it. Now your pale unready skin is exposed to a large dose which could actually do more damage than your body is ready to repair.
The best time to get UVB is actually around solar noon. So, depending on your skin type, the best thing to do is to expose yourself to sunlight for short amounts of time (start with 1 minute if you want) without sunscreen before applying sunscreen. Then gradually increase the non-sunscreen time as your skin turns up repair pathways (and you get tanner).
> This is also the basis for exercise - your muscles and tendons are damaged when you work out, but they get rebuilt stronger
This is an outdated view, evidence shows muscle/tendon growth/adaptation occurs primarily via mechanical tension and metabolic stress, with damage playing a minimal or even counterproductive role. hypertrophy happens despite it, not because of it.
[The development of skeletal muscle hypertrophy through resistance training: the role of muscle damage and muscle protein synthesis. Schoenfeld et al., 2017](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29282529/)
By pazimzadeh 2025-09-2018:06 That’s interesting, thanks for the link.
Nevertheless, exercise turns on repair pathways in multiple tissue types.
Molecular mechanisms of exercise contributing to tissue regeneration (2022) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41392-022-01233-2
Exercise Promotes Tissue Regeneration: Mechanisms Involved and Therapeutic Scope (2023) https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10164224/
By tehnub 2025-09-206:21 Solar noon sunlight microdose is now on my todo list for tomorrow, thanks.
Are you sure about this? I always heard about Australians (especially surfers) that had a high melanoma incidence and that it had made it clear that even if you are adapted (tanned) cancer risks still rises with exposure time.
By pazimzadeh 2025-09-2021:41 It matters what type of skin you have, there’s a genetic component. Most “Australians” are of Irish/British descent and not ready for that much sun even with a bit of a tan/priming. Indigenous Australians do not have high melanoma incidence.
Although skin color is an obvious visual indicator, two people with the same shade of skin can have very different responses to sunlight because there are non-tan-related genes which affect rapid DNA/tissue repair on your skin:
Clinical and Biological Characterization of Skin Pigmentation Diversity and Its Consequences on UV Impact https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6163216/
So what I said is especially applicable to people who are not the palest on earth. If you are mixed like me (French and Iranian combo) then you can push it more than a say “pure” Irish person.
Thankfully the paler you are the less time in the sun you need to make vitamin D. But I will bet that some sun exposure is still better than none.
By atombender 2025-09-1923:491 reply > 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.
By esafak 2025-09-201:11 It's a foolish tradition of theirs not to provide hyperlinked citations in online articles. It would cost them little.
By alfiedotwtf 2025-09-201:481 reply The Economist a few years back did an article on Steon (free energy engine) but it was essentially a PR piece soliciting investors… so take them with a grain of salt
Journalists fucked up massively when they allowed sponsored content to masquerade as editorial content. Now people don't trust media as much as they used to and are moving to other sources to get their information. What journalists around the world need to do is come together and build consensus in the industry on separating sponsored content from their own. A tiny, fine print at the bottom of a full page sponsor is grossly insufficient. It has to be more explicit. Perhaps reserve colors and styles exclusively for indigenous content or frame all sponsored content in a clearly identifiable manner. One way or another, they need to figure out how to reclaim their reputation.
By sevensor 2025-09-2014:12 I canceled my subscription to the local daily over this. Not only were they presenting advertisement as if they were editorial content, they weren’t even reading it themselves. If they were, they would have noticed that they’d printed, on actual paper, an unreadable article full of broken html fragments. That was the last straw for me. Stunning disrespect for the people who pay for the paper.
By MangoToupe 2025-09-205:41 Or even better, allow people to pay to remove ads.
By t0lo 2025-09-208:10 How few average people care about any of this any more? Especially the incoming generation. There's not care about quality.
By throwaway2037 2025-09-2013:27
The UK has their own media cycle. With the exception of Financial Times, the quality of newspapers has fallen dramatically in the last 30 years. Even the FT prints low quality "political swamp reporting" articles. I am always surprised how poor is their reporting on national UK politics. As a result, I avoid those articles. Even the BBC News is much worse than 10 years ago.> bullshit of the US media cycle
This is the Lindqvist and Weller paper: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s43630-025-00743-6
By hombre_fatal 2025-09-206:44 So it’s a narrative review, the op ed of journals. Basically worthless.
Very simple, studies all confirm that people who spend more time outdoors have better eyesight at youth (avoids myopia) and health (exercise), use sunscreen (avoid skin cancer). No need to speculate more.
No, it’s not very simple.
I’ve spent on average 15 hours outside as a kid, still -6. So take all those “studies” with a grain of salt, they might be not applicable to you.
It is very simple. You can't expect to be the average member of every cohort you are part of.
But is that cause or correlation?
Kids with bad sight or health might be more drawn to indoor pursuits.
By mgh2 2025-09-2020:30 You should read the research: 1st comment link https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25907356
Taiwan case study: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/01/shortsighted-t...
By hollerith 2025-09-2020:35 >Tanning is a response to skin cell damage
That might be true, but it is also true that the positive health effects of aerobic exercise (e.g., increased fitness, increased insulin sensitivity) are responses to the oxidative damage caused by the exercise.
By marstall 2025-09-2114:29 the economist doesn't have bylines, never has. you go by the reputation of the publication, which is top notch for science reporting!
> 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 “may” - this is hardly a gold standard study. Living in sunnier/warmer climates as a proxy for UV exposure as opposed to lifestyle differences afforded by such a climate, regional culture differences, etc. makes all of this very dubious to me.
I’m going to keep wearing my sunscreen most of the time when I need to be in direct sun, and continue regular screening for skin cancer.
Double-blind experiments on this are probably impossible, but it's not like large population studies are totally worthless. It's probably best to go where the evidence points, and the article mentions other studies with similar conclusions, as well as work on possible biological mechanisms.
My strategy is to get short sun exposures, use sunscreen only when I'm going to be out long enough to get burnt, and also do my dermatology appointments.
By namuol 2025-09-200:30 Yep this about lines up with my current approach.
But also let’s not forget the things that tend to correlate with moderate sun exposure: Fresher air, exercise, social activity, daylight exposure on the eyes, stimulation of all the senses, etc.
By legacynl 2025-09-2014:14 > Double-blind experiments on this are probably impossible, but it's not like large population studies are totally worthless.
Large population studies in itself are fine, it's just the quoted study is worthless. Socially there's just so many differences between the two groups that it becomes almost impossible to validly compare these two.
A better study design would be to treat each region separately. And compare 'time spent outside' with health outcomes in each region. That would give a much more reliable and useful insight in if time spent outside equals better/less health. Bonus points if you also ask them if they regularly use sunscreen.
That data would actually be useful. That way you could compare if spending time outside is healthy in itself, or if it has to do with the sun. For example if the sun would be a net negative, you would find relatively more skin cancer in the groups in sunnier climates that spend a lot of time outside versus those in greyer regions. If the sun would be a net-benefit, you would see less skin cancer instead. And quite likely you would see that people who spend more time outside have better health outcomes no matter which region you are in, although the size of those groups may differ greatly depending on the climate.
The only time you will see anything stated as an absolute is when there is low or no scientific rigor.
Thinking you are somehow holding the authors into account is akin to doubting a paper's veracity because it has "too many authors" or some other meaningless if not ironic standard.
By namuol 2025-09-200:22 Agree - my original comment was trying to highlight the actual info from the study in contrast to the suggestive headline: That there’s no causal link being claimed by the study that UV exposure decreases all-cause mortality, or in other words, sunscreen isn’t killing us.
Bear in mind that this study is about the UK, and London is on the same latitude as Calgary, give or take.
The sun does get strong enough to burn here, but not for much of the year - especially considering the relatively high % cloud cover (not Seattle high maybe, but high). Skin cancer cases here are AFAIK most commonly related to overseas travel or people with outdoor lifestyles in the southwest of the country.
By cameronh90 2025-09-1920:58 > but not for much of the year
Speak for yourself. Thanks to my Celtic genetics, I get sunburnt if I put my phone brightness too high. ;)
By lurking_swe 2025-09-1920:132 reply time of day and UV index is the most important thing, right? That is how you can accurately assess the “risk” of being exposed in direct sunlight.
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.
How reliable are UV indexes? Genuine question. The iOS weather app is far from 100% reliable and I wonder the margin of error regarding the UV index number it provides.
By lurking_swe 2025-09-1921:54 great question! My understanding is the UV index shown online and in apps is “modeled” data, not realtime.
Basically it takes into account things like ozone measurements from satellites, latitude, forecasted cloud cover, and distance from sun (time of year).
See section “Calculating the UV index” here:
https://www.epa.gov/sunsafety/learn-about-uv-index
It’s not intended to be realtime. It’s more about understanding, generally, what the risk is.
By hollerith 2025-09-1922:32 On cloudless days it it very accurate because on those days UV strength depends almost entirely on the solar altitude, which can be calculated very accurately from the location, the date and the time.
A sibling comment mentions the ozone layer, but I severely doubt it varies enough to be a source of inaccuracy.
By ComputerGuru 2025-09-1922:431 reply I am in a unique position to confirm that they are a load of bunk. I have solar urticaria and develop hives in response to UV exposure, directly proportional to how much UV is getting through. I’ve developed hives in minutes while the UV index was supposedly only 4 and gone for relatively too long without erupting in hives the next day even when the UV index was supposedly 10.
By lurking_swe 2025-09-200:22 i hate to be that person that quotes chatgpt, but this seems VERY relevant to your complaint:
“Solar urticaria is a rare condition where the skin reacts to specific wavelengths of light rather than the overall UV intensity. The UV index is a general measure of the total amount of erythema-causing UV radiation (mainly UVB) that can cause sunburn in the average person.
But in solar urticaria, the trigger might be UVA, visible light, or even a narrow band of wavelengths — and the UV index doesn’t capture that nuance.
So it’s not that the forecast is wrong — just that the UV index isn’t designed to reflect the sensitivity profile of solar urticaria.”
In other words, you’re (literally) a special case. :)
By jbjbjbjb 2025-09-208:05 People don’t have a nuanced view of when to use sunscreen. You can see for yourself in the comments, there’s plenty of loud certainty and context is left behind. And I’d have expected this group to at least understand that the need for sunscreen is based on the position of the sun during the day.
By JumpCrisscross 2025-09-1921:321 reply > I’m going to keep wearing my sunscreen most of the time when I need to be in direct sun, and continue regular screening for skin cancer
Sunscreen reduces vitamin D production, but it doesn't stop it. Wearn sunscreen. Get screened. And don't stay indoors for fear of UV.
By kijin 2025-09-204:59 Also, getting sunburnt is not the only way to get vitamin D. Wear sunscreen and go out. Enjoy the sun. And eat healthy foods that contain vitamin D.
Yes, dubious indeed.
How about looking at descendants of fair-skinned Britains in sunnier climes?
Australia has the highest rate of skin cancer in the world. This is due to a combination of factors: very high levels of ultraviolet (UV) radiation, outdoor lifestyles, and a largely fair-skinned population that is more vulnerable to sun damage. Rates of both melanoma (the deadliest form of skin cancer) and non-melanoma skin cancers are higher in Australia than anywhere else. New Zealand follows closely behind.
By verteu 2025-09-203:21 > Australia has the highest rate of skin cancer in the world.
It also has excellent life expectancy.
The key question is: For all-cause mortality, do the benefits outweigh the risks?
The helper verb 'may' should accompany any scientific result as the scientific method usually cannot prove causations but only negate the null hypothesis.
I still think “increased sun exposure correlates with decreased all cause mortality” makes a better headline, but then maybe that’s why I’m not an editor.
By tsoukase 2025-09-207:41 The word 'correlates' in a title is borderline click bait-y due to possible intended confusion with 'causes'. Also it has little value. Consider the equivalent "decreased all cause mortality correlates with increased sun exposure". The word play is crazy. 'May' captures the relation and is correct philosophically.
By Spooky23 2025-09-202:34 I think it’s difficult to study this sort of thing because people and behavior is so different. I lost someone dear to me to melanoma and one of the things we learned was that a single blistering sunburn as a child increases cancer risk significantly. So small variations have big impacts.
I’d love to see a study where people wear a meter to sample exposure. My mom was an avid gardener who never wore sunscreen - she dressed appropriately with a hat.
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 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
By bobthepanda 2025-09-1920:331 reply Two things can be true.
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.
By namuol 2025-09-200:38 Thank you, this is a much better comment than my original one, but this was exactly my point. Go outside more. Sunscreen probably isn’t killing you.
By mrandish 2025-09-1922:39 Yeah, I agree. This always seemed pretty obvious to me but it was also obvious that it's nuanced and can be highly variable depending on skin type, medical history, locale, lifestyle and preferences.
But when it comes to things which are very probably "mostly beneficial for most people most of the time - but (obviously) not always beneficial for all the people all the time", there's a reluctance to say anything unless you've got study data to fully support everything you say into "the nines". But the world is full of things that are hard, expensive or impossible to study experimentally with that kind of rigor.
By namuol 2025-09-200:37 > I didn't even need 1 subject, you need more than 360,000
If you read my whole comment, my point was that I will continue to enjoy the sun, with sunscreen. Sun good. You say sunscreen bad? No. We agree.
