Sunscreen is the New Margarine

I’ve been harping on this topic for a long time. For years, the profiteering champions of SPF9000 sunscreen have declared chemical sunscreens to be our friend and the sun’s natural Vitamin D to be a cancer-carrying nuisance. Now there is a game-changing study due out this year that documents the benefits of sun exposure and the dangers of sun avoidance, and still, tediously conventional medical wisdom is shrieking about the danger of warning of the dangers of slopping oneself with sunscreen. That’s because as of 2016, the U.S. suncare market was estimated to be a $2 billion industry.

To quote the article:

At dermatology meetings, you get people standing up and saying, ‘We have to adapt products for this market.’ Well, no we don’t. This is a marketing ploy.

…People don’t realize this because several different diseases are lumped together under the term “skin cancer.” The most common by far are basal-cell carcinomas and squamous-cell carcinomas, which are almost never fatal. In fact, says Weller, “When I diagnose a basal-cell skin cancer in a patient, the first thing I say is congratulations, because you’re walking out of my office with a longer life expectancy than when you walked in.” That’s probably because people who get carcinomas, which are strongly linked to sun exposure, tend to be healthy types that are outside getting plenty of exercise and sunlight.

…When I spoke with Weller, I made the mistake of characterizing this notion as counterintuitive. “It’s entirely intuitive,” he responded. “Homo sapiens have been around for 200,000 years. Until the industrial revolution, we lived outside. How did we get through the Neolithic Era without sunscreen? Actually, perfectly well. What’s counterintuitive is that dermatologists run around saying, ‘Don’t go outside, you might die.’”

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7:20 am on January 24, 2019