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Sample coverage:
https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/937387
I first saw this on the alexa device in my kitchen. Basically, the same kind of people who relentlessly bask in the sun tend to overdo on other things that are harmful to their body, and so if you are interested in further reducing skin damage / skin cancer due to sun exposure, ya gotta design your messaging accordingly.
Things I have learned:
(1) There is a journal called Investigational Dermatology. I mean, what’s not to love?
(2) The first thing I wanted to do with this information was craft a “Florida Man” or “Florida Woman” joke, in which the punch line or set up was, “The next time you are tempted to make a Florida Person joke, consider this.” Which, you know, self-referential / hypocritical / offensively moralizing, etc.
Things I have not learned, but would observe anyway: all my anecdata lines up with this result.
Journal article can be found here: https://www.jidonline.org/article/S0022-202X(20)32049-2/fulltext
At least as I post this, the full text is available with no paywall / credentialing required.
ETA:
OK, so, I have read it once (but not the methods and materials, because come on). I would observe that overall, this is a stupendously well-put together piece of reasoning with solid evidence in support. The twins study shows very strong heritability. They separated out sun-exposure-at-home (easy) from sun-exposure-from-travel, and addressed class issues inherent in the latter. They did recognize that kids do not get to pick where they travel; they did NOT adequately address spousal influence on travel choices, but, shrug.
Because this is a bunch of dermatologists (I mean, duh), there is a specialty-wide blind spot involving vitamin D. Because the risk of skin cancer goes up with exposure to sun, and because the sun does a lot of un-aesthetic things to skin, dermatologists are pretty anti-sun. They consistently ignore other body systems, their cancers, and how vitamin D modulates them (short form: if the dermatologists eliminated skin cancer by getting everyone to avoid the sun, total cancer and total morbidity and mortality from cancer would skyrocket because of the drop off in vitamin D). And because this is a bunch of dermatologists, their goal here is to figure out why all their advice about avoiding the sun is conspicuously Not Working. This is a theory about why it is not working (sunseekers are addicts, and our messaging did not take that into consideration, so we should).
It is quite difficult to imagine that taking the addictive nature of sunseeking into consideration in messaging about sun exposure is going to help. I mean, it is not like our other messaging around addictive stuff works particularly well! But I would further note that as with the cancer / vitamin D issue, it might be counter productive. That is, if a bunch of addicts suffer from executive function issues, and overconsumption of mind-altering substances and are also sunseekers, and you _stop them sunseeking_, what happens to the rest of the profile? I bet it does not get better! If a bunch of addicts are substituting from MJ or alcohol or nicotine or whatever to sun, you do not want to reverse that!
Finally, I am once again forced to wonder about why we are not including in this type of analysis any kind of detailed vitamin D status. (Probably not in the data sets! But maybe — NHS has a lot of stuff in it.) I _know_ that people who over-generate vitamin D from the sun avoid it like They Hate to Be Called Vampires. I also know that there are people who do bonkers things to get more sun. Are they doing that because there is something messed up with their ability to produce vitamin D? If we got them vitamin D in the right amounts at the right time, would they quit overdoing the sun exposure, the MJ, the alcohol, the nicotine, you name it?
I do not know if we are headed in the right direction, but this was a really interesting presentation, and I would encourage people to think pretty hard about the elements of it. We worry about a lot of food / vitamin / health behavior stuff, but I feel like the vitamin D thing is still poorly understood and what is understood is underappreciated.
https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/937387
I first saw this on the alexa device in my kitchen. Basically, the same kind of people who relentlessly bask in the sun tend to overdo on other things that are harmful to their body, and so if you are interested in further reducing skin damage / skin cancer due to sun exposure, ya gotta design your messaging accordingly.
Things I have learned:
(1) There is a journal called Investigational Dermatology. I mean, what’s not to love?
(2) The first thing I wanted to do with this information was craft a “Florida Man” or “Florida Woman” joke, in which the punch line or set up was, “The next time you are tempted to make a Florida Person joke, consider this.” Which, you know, self-referential / hypocritical / offensively moralizing, etc.
Things I have not learned, but would observe anyway: all my anecdata lines up with this result.
Journal article can be found here: https://www.jidonline.org/article/S0022-202X(20)32049-2/fulltext
At least as I post this, the full text is available with no paywall / credentialing required.
ETA:
OK, so, I have read it once (but not the methods and materials, because come on). I would observe that overall, this is a stupendously well-put together piece of reasoning with solid evidence in support. The twins study shows very strong heritability. They separated out sun-exposure-at-home (easy) from sun-exposure-from-travel, and addressed class issues inherent in the latter. They did recognize that kids do not get to pick where they travel; they did NOT adequately address spousal influence on travel choices, but, shrug.
Because this is a bunch of dermatologists (I mean, duh), there is a specialty-wide blind spot involving vitamin D. Because the risk of skin cancer goes up with exposure to sun, and because the sun does a lot of un-aesthetic things to skin, dermatologists are pretty anti-sun. They consistently ignore other body systems, their cancers, and how vitamin D modulates them (short form: if the dermatologists eliminated skin cancer by getting everyone to avoid the sun, total cancer and total morbidity and mortality from cancer would skyrocket because of the drop off in vitamin D). And because this is a bunch of dermatologists, their goal here is to figure out why all their advice about avoiding the sun is conspicuously Not Working. This is a theory about why it is not working (sunseekers are addicts, and our messaging did not take that into consideration, so we should).
It is quite difficult to imagine that taking the addictive nature of sunseeking into consideration in messaging about sun exposure is going to help. I mean, it is not like our other messaging around addictive stuff works particularly well! But I would further note that as with the cancer / vitamin D issue, it might be counter productive. That is, if a bunch of addicts suffer from executive function issues, and overconsumption of mind-altering substances and are also sunseekers, and you _stop them sunseeking_, what happens to the rest of the profile? I bet it does not get better! If a bunch of addicts are substituting from MJ or alcohol or nicotine or whatever to sun, you do not want to reverse that!
Finally, I am once again forced to wonder about why we are not including in this type of analysis any kind of detailed vitamin D status. (Probably not in the data sets! But maybe — NHS has a lot of stuff in it.) I _know_ that people who over-generate vitamin D from the sun avoid it like They Hate to Be Called Vampires. I also know that there are people who do bonkers things to get more sun. Are they doing that because there is something messed up with their ability to produce vitamin D? If we got them vitamin D in the right amounts at the right time, would they quit overdoing the sun exposure, the MJ, the alcohol, the nicotine, you name it?
I do not know if we are headed in the right direction, but this was a really interesting presentation, and I would encourage people to think pretty hard about the elements of it. We worry about a lot of food / vitamin / health behavior stuff, but I feel like the vitamin D thing is still poorly understood and what is understood is underappreciated.