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by eterpstra 842 days ago
"Avoiding the sun" does not mean "avoid going outside" Long sleeves, hat, sunglasses go a long way to prevent burns and skin cancer. Sunscreen, too, but something tells me this guy doesn't do sunscreen.

source: married to a dermatologist.

3 comments

There’s increasing evidence you need the UV, eg https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5890609/
It's almost impossible to run a good UV exposure association study because going outside correlates with health. Everything clever you can do to get around that (UV-B areas are what the article chooses) runs into issues with introducing even more uncontrolled variables.

I'm getting a bit jaded with vitamin D and UV studies and it's possible that one will come along and prove me wrong, but thus far they've generated a lot of hype but failed when experimentally tested.

To note, this advice is probably moot for people with high enough melanin living in low to mid sun exposure areas. Sunscreen becomes useful only when receiving sun doses that exceed skin's natural absorption capacity.
Isn’t the key to simply avoid burning, rather than cover up so much as to avoid exposure with the associated benefits?