Rowan Jacobsen: In Defense of Sunlight – Why People Who Get More Sun Live Longer

0:03Darin Olien:Welcome to Super Life with me, Darin Olien, a podcast where we explore, discover, and share solutions that promote a healthier life and a better world. Together, we'll ignite possibilities, inspire change, and build sovereignty, creating a roadmap towards a super life for you and for all. Get ready to start living your super life.

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2:07Darin Olien:You're helping you by putting clean products in your mouth and you're helping the environment because Bite Toothpaste is one of the best companies I've seen looking at all aspects of their supply chain and their refillable, reusable, sustainable, regenerative practices. So Bite is offering you, all my listeners, 20 % off your first order. Go to trybite.com, T-R-Y-B-I-T-E forward slash Darren20 or just use the promo code Darren20, D-A-R-I-N, and you can get 20 % off your first order with a great new toothpaste without using the tube. Welcome back to the Super Life Podcast. Today we're exposing one of the most persistent and damaging health myths of our time, the fear of the sun.

2:58Darin Olien:Joining me is Rowan Jacobson, an award-winning science writer and former night science journalism fellow at MIT, who took a hard, data-driven look at our relationship with the sunlight and completely upended decades of conventional wisdom. We may have just got it wrong. In this episode, we dive into the fascinating research behind Rowan's new book, Dismantling the One-Size-Fits-All narrative that tells us to avoid the sun at all costs. Never bought into this. We explore how regular, moderate sun exposure is intrinsically tied to longevity, significantly lowering blood pressure, reducing cardiovascular disease, and dropping the risk of certain cancers by signaling our bodies to reduce inflammation, all from sun, from these beautiful photons.

4:02Darin Olien:Rowan unpacks the brilliant mechanisms of the skin, not just as a barrier, but a very complex observatory that produces essential compounds like nitric oxide and over 20 different siblings of vitamin D, all of which you simply can't get from a pill. We also tackle the critical importance of getting outside to escape biological darkness, how our eyes rely on the massive lux difference of the natural daylight to set our circadian rhythms, and why building sun resilience is like exercise for your skin. This is an incredible conversation about trusting your instincts, questioning the narrative, and reclaiming your relationship with the very powerful star that gives us all of life.

5:01Let's dive in.

5:02Darin Olien:Rowan, thank you for jumping on here. Welcome to the Super Life Podcast. There's so many things. I first want to say thank you for chasing the truth about photons and the sun because it's been a thing, right? And it's been a fear that has never made sense to me, but at the same time confusing because, you know, like anything, if there's too much of something that it can have an edge and you can fall off that edge and there can be damage. But there's decades and decades of narrative that just keeps getting pushed. So I'm grateful that you dove into this and that, you know, in defense of the sun, you've started to uncover this.

6:00Darin Olien:And plus, you're a badass writer and investigator and stuff like that, too. So I'm really excited to dig into more of your work as well, because it really shows that you're committed to what it is that you're diving into so that you can illuminate that for other people. So thank you for that. Well, thanks, man. I appreciate it. Yeah, proud to be here. And yeah, like you just said, the dynamic, I just felt for a long time, was kind of between this very strong messaging that we've been getting and just like basic critical thinking, basic common sense. And those two things have just been in tension for a while.

6:39And yeah, so that's kind of what got my attention originally. It's like, are my instincts really that far off? And your instincts for you were saying what? um well and i think you've you've you've even um you've referenced this um in some of your shows like how could the environment that we evolved under and the lifestyle that we evolved in be so wrong for us suddenly right like that right there raises a red flag so i mean i'm open to like i'm I'm happy for like, you know, some scientist to convince me that we need to depart from our evolutionary norms because they've discovered something dramatic.

7:25But the bar for evidence is pretty high. If you're going to convince me to do something new, like rub a bunch of chemicals on my body, avoid something that, you know, my ancestors evolved with for really millions of years, if you go, you know, back beyond the Homo sapiens era. Well, so, yeah, the bar has to be high. And once I started digging into it, I felt like the evidence to convince me that that made sense wasn't very good.

7:52Darin Olien:Yeah, so, I mean, there's a lot to unpack here. What was, as you were diving into this, because, you know, digging into, even though we know some things about some things, when you set apart yourself and dedicate yourself to writing a book and digging in, it's always revelatory, right? It's always like, wow, what were some of those points for you in writing this book about the sun and our health and whatnot? What were some of those revelatory things that popped up while you were writing? Yeah. So for me, it all started, I guess it was like 2017, 2018. I had a year-long fellowship. I was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow, which is a program at MIT where they basically pay you a salary for a year, for an academic year, to just learn more about science.

8:50Because science writers, you know, so often they don't have the time to go too deep. Like, you know, if you have to crank out a new story every week, you could only learn so much. And so there's always like this issue, you know, do they understand enough about the science that they're writing about? So this was this was like a fortunate thing where I had my job was just to learn more about stuff. And I was looking at different areas of science. But a couple of studies popped up during that year, which, you know, to your point, that was like, really, what? And that made me want to know more. So one of them was a study that I know you've referenced that people who get sun exposure have lower blood pressure than people who don't.

9:37And that got my attention because I thought, you know, we hear so much about how deadly the sun is and how you should avoid it. So then this study popped up. Um, if, and like, wait a minute, if people who are in the sun have lower blood pressure than people who don't, that's weird. And, uh, the dermatologist who had done that study, a guy named Richard Weller, uh, in the UK, he had a TED talk and I watched his TED talk. His TED talk was called like, you know, could sunlight be good for your heart? And had a lot of views and, and pissed off a lot of dermatologists. And so that got my attention.

10:17And at some point, I just, you know, I still had like sort of absorbed the conventional wisdom that sun exposure was bad for you. So I kind of like Googled, you know, like, well, how much, you know, people who get sun exposure, how much shorter are their lives, right? Like how much does it hurt your longevity? And of course, as you know, what I found was that it was the opposite, that it tracks very reliably. more sun exposure leads to longer longevity and lower rates of all the classic chronic diseases, the classic lifestyle diseases. So at that point, I was like, why do we never hear this? Why do we only hear about skin cancer?

10:59Like when skin cancer was clearly one part of a much more complicated picture. And so that was when I started just basically devoting all my time to diving into the literature, which turned out to go back decades. And what I found was that in all these other fields, other than dermatology, there were scientists who had been uncovering these connections between sun and health, but it wasn't their job to let the public know. They would just do their work, publish their papers, and go on with their careers. So I kind of felt like I could be the person to pull it all together and try to make sense of this big, complicated picture.

11:34Darin Olien:yeah you know it's like this society gets so strange because it you know our brains are geared to reduce things down to make sense of the world make sense of ourselves in the world it's constantly doing that all the time and then as as time goes by we grab conclusions and then bring them into them now and then conclude on top of conclusions and next thing you know was that even correct because as you know science is a current point of view based on the testing protocols based on the reductionist view based on trying the controls like it's it's just a current point of view and if the point of view is skewed from the beginning and then it's passed on through decades then you're like well how to your point like how did this big ball of fire become detrimental when it's actually creating life and we are that too so it's like it's such a we it's like philosophical scientific and then just a bad you know we're bad at questioning things.

12:46You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. And the way the scientific process is set up is reductionist, like you said. And it kind of has to be to do what it does. Because everything is so complicated, so science tries to break it down to just one piece of the puzzle and really try to nail that piece of the puzzle. But then what we always forget is that it's just one piece of the puzzle, and we should really be humble about what we think that tells us about how life works and how health works and how the body works. And we always need to sort of default to the big picture of, you know, what's natural, what we know contributes to health, and not take any of these sort of like micro pieces of the puzzle to be like the whole thing.

13:36Darin Olien:Right. And some of the studies you're referencing, too, is large, large populations, right? There's, what was that, that Swedish study? Like 50 ,000, 80 ,000 people, the more exposure to sun, the less overall mortalities. And then there's that one thing where, you can state it better than me, but it's something like trying to prevent a skin cancer, which, by the way, doesn't actually kill that many people when you look at other things that kill people. So trying to minimize that too much actually contributes to greater causes of issues throughout your life, right? Yeah, exactly. And that's why we got to try to keep that big picture in mind.

14:31And like, yeah, like, you know, the researchers have looked have said that, yes, like, ultimately, a lot of sun exposure, you know, it does, it will raise your risk of skin cancer. It can lead to extra skin cancer deaths. But what they found, and that was a UK study that you're referencing, is that reducing everyone's sun exposure to the drastic levels necessary to prevent these skin cancer deaths, which are fairly rare, as you said, enough sun exposure reduction to save one life from skin cancer would actually cause an extra 75 deaths from other diseases. that can be prevented by moderate sun exposure with like cardiovascular disease being the biggest and cancer being number two.

15:25And that's, yeah, as you said, that was the other thing, one of my big like eye-opening moments when I was doing my research is I had this sense that skin cancer was a leading killer because we hear about it so much, right? Right. And I mean, that's to the credit of the organizations whose job it is to warn people about skin cancer. Like that's their job is for us to hear about. So they're doing a great job in that. But it's surprising how in terms of total deaths or total amount of disability, skin cancer is not up on the chart really at all. Like in the US, maybe, you know, like about 8 ,000 deaths a year are due to skin cancer, where other cancers are more like 600 ,000 deaths, almost 100 times as many.

16:10and cardiovascular disease is more like a million deaths. So those are the big players. And anything that can reduce those, even a small amount, is going to have a big impact on public health. So that's why some of these researchers in the past 10 years or so have started to sort of nervously say, like, well, you know, maybe the risk-reward here, maybe we got it wrong and maybe we need to rethink it a little and not telling everyone to go fry on the beach, but maybe make sure people aren't hiding from the sun.

16:46Darin Olien:Yeah, and we'll get into some of those details that people can take away in terms of where they are and how they should relate to the sun and what that means to moderately get exposure and not overexposure and all of that stuff. And I want to unpack that because it's important. But going back to, you know, it's still not fully gotten and internalized what the sun is doing, right? We look at it as, oh, it's hurting my skin. And then we've somehow punted vitamin D to a thing you've got to take. You know what I mean? We've done all this weird stuff when it's actually the miraculousness of our body that just blows us away in terms of how incredible this thing we get to use, this body we get to use.

17:43Darin Olien:It's got its own manufacturing capability of vitamin D. And lo and behold, it's done through the skin, the photons hitting the skin and all of that stuff. So that's where it's not fully grokked still, I think, you know? Yeah, yeah. And then, so because people don't think of that, of, hey, the sun exposure is good for your cardiovascular disease, you know? So tell me a little bit about mechanistically what you were finding interesting as you were diving into all of this. yeah and i think it's best to start with vitamin d which is the one thing that everyone knows like sun does for you like when sun hits skin it takes uh sort of a cholesterol molecule and just helps transform it into vitamin d and that's the normal way we make vitamin d but you know this is a classic example of again like we didn't know enough so um and we were not like sort of humble in making recommendations that was the only thing we knew by the sun did uh we being sort of like the greater uh research community you know 40 years ago um so when they started realizing that um that too much sun could increase your risk of skin cancer and they started saying just avoid the sun entirely the one problem that they knew that would cause was a vast drop in vitamin D levels.

19:18But then they said, no problem, just take a vitamin D pill. It's exactly the same, same stuff, problems solved. And, you know, surprise, surprise, we've now learned more and more things that get produced in the skin besides vitamin D. But even with vitamin D, it turns out taking the pill is not the same as the D that you make in your skin. For one thing, your skin actually is making that d for itself your skin cells on your epidermis they're producing that d as a defense against the problem the sun can cause so it's like the medicine's built in so they get hit by sunlight they produce vitamin d um and they keep it right there inside themselves and vitamin d is anti-cancer anti-proliferation anti-inflammatory it basically is there to fix the damage, the small amount of damage that a regular amount of sunlight can cause.

20:17So it's all, that's the way the system is supposed to work. But one thing that we've really learned over the past 20 years, and the main guy who's been researching this is at University of Alabama, a guy named Andrei Slominski, is that vitamin D is one of about 20 different compounds, all related. So you can kind of think of them as like siblings of vitamin D that all get produced in the skin by different enzymes mixed with different amounts of sun exposure. So when we told people, oh, just take the vitamin D pill, you know, it's the same orally as it is being made in the skin. Not only is it not getting to where you want it to be, but that's one of 20 different compounds that all seem to have either anti-inflammatory or anti-cancer abilities or they're antioxidants.

21:07So we're just starting to learn what some of them do. But what happens is they're there in the skin to protect the skin, but then they actually do migrate into the circulation. So suddenly some of these scientists, like Slominski, are saying, well, wait a minute. There's at least 20 of these things that can be made by this reaction between these cholesterol molecules and enzymes and different amounts of sunlight. Probably there's a reason the body's doing that, right? And it looks to be like it is part of this big mechanism for protecting against oxidative damage, protecting against free radicals, reducing inflammation.

21:47And then there's nitric oxide, which we mentioned. And this was discovered, you know, maybe 10, 15 years ago. The skin has a lot of nitrates in it. And when sunlight hits the nitrates, it breaks them apart into nitric oxide. and nitric oxide is famous for dilating blood vessels it's used it you know it's a bunch of a bunch of medicines that lower blood pressure work through nitric oxide so we now know that when sun hits skin it makes nitric oxide that circulates through the blood and dilates your blood vessels lowers your blood pressure and blood pressure is connected to all the cardiovascular diseases and more, actually.

22:34So when you're not getting the sunlight, you're going to have higher blood pressure, and that alone is going to be way worse for you than the raised risk of skin cancer. But then there also seems to be more complicated ways that the body uses sun that have to do with the immune system. And there, it's not quite as mechanistic as the skin makes this one chemical when hit by sunlight, and then that has this one specific effect on the body. It's more like the skin is kind of like, I think of it like an observatory, where it's monitoring everything that's happening outside you and sort of setting the dials internally.

23:19So when it gets lots of sun signals, then that's a sign that you're basically you're out you're cruising around uh it's you know things are good things are normal and so um hormones and cytokines and all these different signaling molecules get sent from the skin to the body basically saying everything's good normal day keep inflammation low immune system can like relax for the moment um and that translates to better health. When it doesn't see any sign that there's light around, which we get when we're indoors or, you know, it's, we're just avoiding the sun. That's more like something's weird out there or it's deep winter, right?

24:05So time to hibernate, calories might be scarce. So time to like basically power down the whole system. So you get lower cognition, you get, you get all the things that, you know, a hibernating bear gets only to a lesser extent. So everything just kind of slows down, clogs up a little bit. The immune system is a little, maybe a little more alert to trouble. It's just the body's in a slightly more stressed state. So it's really this whole holistic effect that happens when you get normal light exposure. Yeah.

24:41Darin Olien:I mean, listen, you know, it's like so we have different flavors of what vitamin d is and does shocker we we it's a lot more complicated than what we think it is right and uh and that that that again that's where when we think we know gets dangerous when you fully conclude and kind of divorce yourself from nature and then the obvious thing is the the photoreceptivity the circadian rhythm you've got infinite amount of signaling going on beyond this just the skin going into the hormones going into regulatory processes going into chemical processes going into getting ready for the day going getting ready for the evening.

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27:23Darin Olien:That's M-A-N-N-A vitality.com. Use the code DAREN20 and you get 20 % off your order. This isn't about health. It's about living in harmony with your greatest and highest potential what are some let's go through some of the top things that you found with healthy sun exposure and then of course we'll get into what that looks like and then i'd love to get into it's also not just direct either it's like every person is different based on skin tonality or skin melanin, where they're at geographically, even what they're consuming. And I'll stop there. So let's get into the top things that that you see are detrimental to not getting enough sun exposure.

28:35Darin Olien:And we can unpack that. And then what does healthy exposure look like? Yeah, you mentioned circadian rhythms, and that's probably the easiest place to start, because that's a biggie. And it's not controversial, in a sense, because that's mostly through the eyes, probably. Although I think the skin plays a role there, too. Like the skin has opsins in it, the same kind of photo detectors that the eyes have. So skin knows whether it's light or dark, whether it's being hit with light or not. But the eyes, we know, have a whole system for detecting daylight and sending that signal to the brain and detecting lack of daylight, blue light in particular, and sending that signal to the brain.

29:17And when the light disappears, that is the sign to trigger melatonin release in the brain, which circulates and basically tells all the cells, night is here, time to start thinking about sleep. so um for for good sleep and for good rest and repair in the evening you need that diurnal signal and often when this gets talked about in the media they talk about the problems of artificial light at night um and that is that's definitely a part of it like if you're if you're not experiencing true darkness at night if you've got too much light telling your your eyes it's not really dark, like the day's still going, you're not going to get that melatonin release in the brain, you're not going to sleep as well.

30:04And with then, you know, every health problem you can think of is downstream of bad sleep. But the part that people have not paid as much attention to, and this is turning out to be more important than they realized, is you really need that bright light during the day. Because it's not like the way the brain tracks the day is really the difference between the magnitude of the light during the day and the darkness at night. So if your days are not that light because you're staying indoors all the time, darkness isn't going to seem that different to your brain, and you're not going to get the same kind of nice diurnal patterns.

30:45And we kind of don't realize how bright it is outside in the real light because our eyes are really good at adjusting, you know, like changing pupil size. So changing by hundreds of times the amount of light that enters the eye to adjust to kind of keep it regular. But you can measure light with like any light meter. You can download a free one on your phone. And I did. I kind of got obsessed with this for a while because I was shocked at the differences. Like you could be sitting here at a desk and you might have 300 lux of light around you. They measure it in lux. If it's a sort of like a dim romantic dining room, it might be more like 100 lux.

31:23But even a bright office is like 400 or 500 lux, right? Step outside on a cloudy day and you're immediately in like 10 ,000 lux, 20 ,000 lux. Then the sun comes out and it's 100 ,000 lux. So the difference between 400 lux indoors and 100 ,000 lux walking around outside in the sun is dramatic. And your eye is counting. Your eye is measuring those locks very accurately. So a lot of us just are like the, you know, the circadian experts, they call it biological darkness. Like even though we're cruising around these indoor spaces to the receptor in our eye that tracks that stuff, it's still basically like twilight.