Rowan Jacobsen

It's not huge.

Statistically significant, yeah.

There must be something weird about that guy.

It could be different lighting.

But so the thing is, so those sunscreens...

that were acting kind of like window glass in the 70s and 80s and even into the 90s before we got the broad spectrum sunscreens.

They're blocking the UVB, so you weren't going to ever burn.

And that's what SPF actually measures is how many more times you can be out in the sun without burning.

But it's based totally on UVB.

So if you've got SPF 30, in theory, you can spend 30 times as long outside before you start to burn.

That's a long time, right?

Yeah.

But all that time, UVA is just pouring into you.

And they now know that UVA is the one that probably is most likely to cause melanoma.

And they used to say, oh, no, no, it's not absorbed very much.

And then the FDA, CDC did studies a few years ago and discovered that it's absorbed at very large amounts.

It turns up at high doses or higher doses than they would like it to.

In blood, breast milk, urine, you name it.

So they're suspected to be hormone disruptors, all those classic chemical filters like oxybenzone.

There isn't much proof that they're dangerous in the amounts used.