Rowan Jacobson

You know, there's these data sets out there, and more often than not, that's what they show.

Again, it's just a correlation.

So what does that mean?

And one argument had been that, well, sure, people who use more sunscreen are going to get more skin cancer because who's using more sunscreen?

People who are spending more time in the sun or people who might have very fair skin and might need it more.

So, of course, they're going to get more skin cancer.

But then later studies came along and adjusted for that.

And there's often still...

higher rates of skin cancer in the sunscreen users, the ones who use sunscreen more.

So it's unclear.

But that doesn't make sense to anyone.

Because in the lab, you put sunscreen on a mouse, and it effectively blocks the UV from hitting the mouse and will lower the mouse's chance of getting skin cancer in the lab.

So why doesn't that necessarily translate to the real world is unclear.

The experts I've spoken with definitely do think that, you know, proper use of sunscreen of modern sunscreens will reduce your risk of

of skin cancer they're just hoping like waiting for better studies to come along to show that i think um i think part of the issue here is that sunscreen formulas have changed quite a bit over the years um the old ones were just not very good and that's that's clear like they only blocked uvb rays not uva rays and at the time people thought uvb was the only

ray that could cause skin cancer.

We now know that UVA is actually probably a significant cause of skin cancer.

So those old sunscreens were keeping you from burning, because UVB is what causes a burn.

But we're not blocking UVA, and in fact, might have allowed you to stay out in the sun longer and get more UVA, because you weren't burning.

So those sunscreens from the 60s, 70s, and 80s were probably pretty bad news.