[elenchev]

What's interesting about this study in Swedish women is that if you look at the results section the high sun exposure group has the highest disposable income and most years of education. Low exposure has the lowest disposable income and least years of education. Probably because for Swedish women high sun exposure means travel which is expensive.

It's hard to say if the study measures sun exposure or the ability to stay healthy with a higher income & better education.

[jakeydus]

This is the dirty secret about any health study that can be impacted by socioeconomic status: if it can be impacted, it is. More money, fewer problems. 99% of the time.

[esafak]

Disposable income and education are adjusted for.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/joim.12496#joim1...

[citadel_melon]

But does it control for family/relative income? One could be poor but could travel and maintain a safety net from their family.

Too many variables to control for imo to abductively say the sun helped. Once you start controlling for enough variables to start teasing out causation, degrees of freedom and the power of the tests become precarious.

Not to mention issues with data dragging/p-hacking: we don’t know if they just tested a bunch of random things and are only reporting the interesting finding.

But regardless, even if we give them the benefit of the doubt regarding p-hacking, this paper has not reached a sufficient level of abduction to convince me of anything. Even if there is a correlation between sunlight and health, this correlation doesn’t deduce the mechanism, meaning I can’t prescribe myself any solution. Is it because going outside and enjoying yourself causes less stress? Then video games would be just as good. Maybe it’s the vitamin D? I could then just supplement. Maybe people who go out more are more connected to family? I could spend time with them inside. One could argue the mechanism is not important, but that ignores that sun damage dramatically increases skin aging and skin cancer risk, and also ignores that I could expose myself to the sun and unintentionally avoid the real mechanism behind the desired effect.

[amarant]

More likely, there's a optimal amount of sun that you should get to live the longest and Sweden provides less sun than that.

This is especially likely since, as another commenter pointed out, they corrected for wealth factors already!

Stockholm is at 60N, the university that did this study, Lund, is at 55N. If you live further south than that, you might be getting optimal, or even more than optimal, amounts of sun even without sunbathing.

[7e]

They control for that. Sun exposure correlates with decreased mortality (with a dose dependent relationship) for people at the same income level. One of the figures plots it for “moderate income.”