Rowan Jacobson

And how much is too much?

And how much is too much?

And I think that's a really important part of this discussion, is even the scientists that are starting to say, it looks like maybe we need to get more sun exposure than a lot of us are getting, they're not calling for lying out on the beach for eight hours.

What they're really saying is,

A real deficiency in sunlight seems to be associated with higher levels of, you know, almost every disease you can think of.

So you want to avoid a severe deficiency of sunlight.

You want to make sure you get a little.

And most of the benefits seem to come from pretty modest exposure.

Yeah, and of course, this is all correlation.

So you can't prove causation without huge clinical trials.

But when you look at populations, what you pretty much always see is that the ones that get very little sun exposure have higher rates of, yeah, pretty much all of the chronic diseases of aging that you can think of, all the things that tend to get worse with age.

So cardiovascular disease, which includes heart attacks and strokes, diabetes,

dementia, Alzheimer's, definitely depression, and even certain cancers and autoimmune diseases, all these things are higher in populations that get very little light exposure.

And back in the day, when this data first came to light, people were like, well,

you know it it's we can't prove that it's causation maybe the healthier people are just going outside more but they're going outside because they're healthier to begin with but more recently better studies have come along that really have show that that does seem to be the case and you can still argue about why it might be but yeah like people who get almost no sun exposure have significantly higher rates of disease and shorter longevity

Yeah.

And I can't give you a number because we are all so individually different.

So there's just so many variables there.

And one of the big ones is skin tone.

Like some people who have very pale skin really shouldn't be getting too much sun exposure at all because they're very susceptible to skin cancer.