Paul Saladino· MD
I just cannot be convinced that those are equivalent and many people will say well I live in Nebraska like where you're at right now I live somewhere where there's no Sun and I think like well there's other ways to get Sun but for those of us who have access to the Sun at least in the summer we should be in it and we should not fear the damage or we should not fear that the Sun will do damage to our skin certainly if we are fair-skinned that means we are efficient Sun harvesters and we may need to use sunscreen if we're out at a lower latitude for longer amounts of time but be careful with the type of sunscreen you're using because some of them are gonna have plenty of xenoestrogens in them so I'm Mediterranean when I go out in the Sun I don't need sunscreen it like this latitude of San Diego and I go to Hawaii I'm probably gonna need some sunscreen unless I have a really good based in and there are plenty of sunscreens there's zinc base that don't have these bad additives but all of us will probably need sunscreen if we go like really equatorial in the summer I think that there's so much of a fascinating conversation around this with how the fatty acid composition of our cell membranes affects the way that our skin reacts to the Sun I think anyone in the eczema psoriasis dermatitis community is gonna be aware this - you hear people say this and it's only really started to kind of coalesce for me on ketogenic and carnivore diets people will anecdotally know that they get burned less often and I think it's probably because we're eating less vegetable oils and I think that these polyunsaturated vegetable oils which are already oxidized or susceptible to oxidation are the main problem with skin issues skin cancers and burning of the skin when we eat more saturated fat which I strongly believe is healthy for all humans we're still gonna eat some monounsaturated fat and a very small amount of poof polyunsaturated fat with this ratio between poly mono and saturated I think is something that we all have to get right to get adequate skin health in the Sun super important and I think that's so much of what we might be seeing regarding the incidence of skin cancers and people in the Sun specifically squamous and basal is related to overconsumption of vegetable oils at large by our population which is something that we all know happens widely interestingly enough melanoma incidence is lower in people who have chronic low-level sun exposure and melanomas really not felt to be an exclusively sun based cancer squamous and basal yes and I think that that is more of the vegetable oil thing but melanoma is the one most people worry about they're all concerning but I think it's a big problem with the oils in our dye and how they react so I encourage people to get out into a real Sun not processed sunlight like a vitamin D pill because there are other things just like there are parts of the organs that we don't really even know about that are probably beneficial for us I think there are many things that happen when we are in the Sun that are so beneficial that we can't even be aware of now we know that there's endorphins there's all kinds of things that happen in the skin there's nitric oxide in the Sun we don't get that from taking a vitamin D pill so real sunlight no substitute for that in my opinion both for circadian rhythm and for all these other good things in our human body way beyond vitamin D