I live in the northern latitudes of the continental U.S. and take strongly after my Scandinavian ancestors. If I spend even 12 minutes outside in spring or fall (never mind summer!) in direct sunlight without a high SPF sunscreen, I burn. It doesn't fade to tan. It fades back to pale white, then burns again next time.
I've tried building up a "tolerance" and it hasn't worked at all. I'm pasty white if I stay at or below 11 minutes and bright red if I hit 12. I'm not kidding when I say I would pay for an actual solution to this. I would love to spend more time outside in the sun.
Maybe also explore medium SPF sunscreen.
For me personally (not Scandinavian roots) after hibernation the first few exposures are key, and I try to be very conservative. Then I let myself recover for at least a day in between sun sessions. If I'm on vacation and I can't escape sun, then my recovery means high spf sunscreen. I treat it similar to exercise recovery - stress, rest, adaptation cycle.
I've also tried dminder, low SPF, all kinds of things. As far as I know, there isn't anything congenitally "wrong" with me or anything, but I wouldn't know what to look for to rule it out.
I even had someone tell me the GAPS diet would fix it, but I did that for two (very boring) years, and it didn't help either.
It could be that it's just hopeless, but it's bizarre to me that I should end up so evolutionarily unfit for my home planet.
It's mostly pretty intuitive, but the dye makes a bigger difference than you'd expect. A white cotton t-shirt might have a UPF rating around 5 (1/5th the UV exposure), while a colored shirt is likely above 20.
I wonder if you could select clothes so that you only get sun in locations that you can easily monitor and cover up when they start to burn. As a bonus, these should also be easy to keep an eye on for skin cancer, right?
IDK “get skin cancer somewhere you can see it easily” seems like a pretty stupid suggestion, now that I wrote it out. But I can’t think of anything better.
Once you have a good base tan you can drop down to SPF 8 or maybe less.
My ancestry is scadinavian and german and I will burn if I go out in the sun with my winter skin, but if I take some care I can get to the point where I don't really need sunscreen at all.
SPF 15 doesn't do a thing for me in terms of extending the time before I burn, but I'll be fine all day with 30 as long as friction from clothes doesn't rub it off or water doesn't wash it away.
(I offer the other details in case they make someone go, "Oh! I was the exact same way! Here's what ended up working for me," or some doctor goes, "Oh! With these fringe details, that tells me exactly why this is happening to you." I'm hoping someday LLMs will be able to take info like this and find the weird little niche answers that Google and other search engines' advertising focus have made impossible to find online.)
Along with a list of unapproved methods: https://www.newsweek.com/self-tanning-fake-tan-dangers-skin-...
> breast cancer, colorectal cancer, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, metabolic syndrome, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease, autism, asthma, type 1 diabetes and myopia. Vitamin D has long been considered the principal mediator of beneficial effects of sun exposure. However, oral vitamin D supplementation has not been convincingly shown to prevent the above conditions; thus, serum 25(OH)D as an indicator of vitamin D status may be a proxy for and not a mediator of beneficial effects of sun exposure.
Quite a few, not all, but most, of the maladies they list seem to be well connected to a sedentary lifestyle. Is it possible that this, rather than insufficient sunlight, could be the cause?
I also wonder (wild stereotyping here, but) if there could be some correlations between some of the childhood stuff—Autism, asthma, autoimmune disorders and parents’ class. For example, if someone is an indoor worker, they are probably more likely to be white collar, right? Are we more likely to detect autism for white collar parents (who tend to be a bit more intrusive)?
I don’t have any real suggestions, just a worry that amount of time spent outdoors is a proxy for tons of stuff, including class basically, so it seems incredibly hard to study.
[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s43630-021-00017-x
No perfect analogy for this. One of the many I have used over the years is to have someone imagine driving their car on the highway while pressing on the accelerator all the way down, as far as it will go. To control speed, use the brakes. And then, when the inevitable happens, we blame the brakes.
That's what's happening to billions of people. Except for corner cases, obesity is 100% caused by toxic nutrition. The same statement holds for type 2 diabetes.
In the US, the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) is complicit in that they do nothing to prevent what could be characterized as poisonous food from entering the market.
I think I can say that most food found at a supermarket is horrible stuff that will hurt you over the long run. Let's put it this way: Drugs require prescriptions because, among other things, they would be dangerous to consume freely, without a real medical reason to have them. If you read the ingredients in most food items sold, given what the consequences, it would be easy to wonder why this stuff doesn't require medical supervision to consume.
And then we blame vitamin D? C'mon. It's the brakes, not the engine going full throttle down the road. Right.
Many generalist will still prescribe vitamin D every winter as a standard procedure.
If it has a placebo effect, as long as producing vitamin D is not extremely polluting/costly I'd see it as win.
But otherwise, making an effort to get sun, and in particular managing one's life to not be locked in a building during the few sunny hours of a day should be valued more highly.
