Question Everything: The Sunscreen Paradox

0:0098 of the top 100 U.S. accounting firms trust Bill to simplify and secure Bill Pay. That's proven financial infrastructure built on over a trillion dollars of secure payments. Visit Bill.com slash proven for a special offer. There's one thing that will forever change the way you sleep, and it's the softest 100 % organic cotton sheets from Bowlin Branch. You'll fall asleep faster, wrapped in the most luxurious comfort. You'll never sleep hot again with sheets that feel breathable to sleep in. You'll experience the purest softness on night one and feel your sheets get even softer with every wash.

0:36Discover the difference with 15 % off your first set of sheets at bowlandbranch.com with code BUTTERY. Exclusions apply. See site for details.

0:54Hey everyone, it's Mary Harris. And it's Labor Day, which means the staff is closing out the summer with a day off. Hopefully you are too. But even though we're out, we wanted to still share something great with you. This is an episode of KCRW's Question Everything, hosted by Brian Reed. Earlier this summer, the folks over at Question Everything started seeing weird rumors online about how sunscreen actually causes skin cancer, which is obviously wild to say and not true. So the show investigated where these rumors came from. Turns out it involved Matt Gaetz's television show. So while you're at the beach, hopefully using sunscreen, please enjoy Question Everything.

1:36And what next? We'll be back here tomorrow with our regularly scheduled programming.

1:53There are these videos I saw last week on Instagram. A couple people I know told me they've been popping up in their feeds. And they seem innocuous enough. Mommy bloggers showing how they prep their kids for the summer sun. Happy music playing. One of them's using a makeup sponge to put sunscreen on her little kid. Caption, my favorite hack for applying sunscreen to my kids. Another's brushing sunscreen on her blonde toddler's head.

2:21Cute. But then, in the comments of all these videos, something strange and kind of alarming. People claiming that using sunscreen will give you cancer rather than prevent it. Do not put sunblock on your baby, says one commenter on one of these videos. It causes cancer. Another, recent scientific studies prove that there is a link between sunscreen use and cancer. Another commenter, no thank you, skipping that toxic crap. Another, sunscreen is harmful for humans. And as one person said, rather simply, sunscreen is cancer. Sunscreen, for the record, is not cancer. It does not cause cancer. In fact, used properly, it can save you from cancer of the skin.

3:06So where the hell does this idea come from? And why is it gaining traction on the internet right now? Because it has taken off in just the last few weeks, according to experts who monitor online misinformation. It turns out this is not some naturally occurring viral delusion that has sprung up organically as people head to the beach. There are actually two specific guys who are behind it. From Placement Theory and KCRW, I'm Brian Reed. This is Question Everything. We investigate how the truth gets buried, distorted, and denied, and the ways people are fighting to make it matter again. Today on the show, a little ditty about summer disinformation.

3:43We find out who's responsible for injecting this odd and dangerous lie into the social media bloodstream and the surprising scientific phenomenon they are weaponizing to do it. Stick around.

4:13support and flexibility to get the W. Walden's online programs are designed for working professionals like you. You'll gain hands-on skills to take on real-world challenges and succeed. Your future is waiting and Walden is here to help you achieve it. Take the first step to make your impact. Visit waldenu.edu. Walden University. Set a course for change. Certified to operate by Shev. I love days like these at the pool, but my moderate to severe plaque psoriasis can sometimes take me out of the moment. I'm ready to make a splash with clearer skin thanks to SkyRizzy, Rizinkizumab RZA. SkyRizzy is a prescription-only injection for adults who are candidates for systemic or phototherapy.

4:55At four months, most people saw 90 % clearer skin when measured from head to toe, and many were even 100 % plaque-free. People also saw significant improvement in psoriasis symptoms of pain, redness, itching, and burning. Don't use if allergic to SkyRizzy. Serious allergic reactions, increased infections, or lower ability to fight them may occur. Before treatment, get checked for infections and tuberculosis. Tell your doctor about any flu-like symptoms or vaccines. Now there's nothing on my skin, thanks to SkyRizzy. And that means everything. Ask your doctor about SkyRizzy, the number one dermatologist prescribed biologic and psoriasis.

5:29Visit SkyRizzy.com or call 1-866-SKYRizzy to learn more.

5:37Hi, this is Mark Bittman from the podcast Food with Mark Bittman. I've been writing about food and restaurants for almost 50 years, my whole career really. And what I know is that the good restaurants all have something in common. They're busy, genuinely, chaotically busy. And somehow in the last few years, the best of them have begun to make it look easy. And do you know why? Because they're running on Toast's technology. Toast is built for restaurant owners who understand that Toast's tools keep the line moving and keep their customers happy, with fewer mistakes and hiccups in ordering and paying.

6:15For owners, that turns busy into business. To learn more, head to toasttab.com. That's T-O-A-S-T-T-A-B, toasttab.com. Toast, built for busy.

6:34Now and again on this show, we like to check in with the folks over at NewsGuard, a fact-checking company that each week chooses a false claim of the week and debunks it. When they do this, I like that you get to see where the false claims originate and how they grow online. The paths these things take often are telling. And last week, I saw that the false claim of the week was a study found that sunscreen use increased your risk of skin cancer. This is John Gregory, a health editor at NewsGuard. He's worked there for eight years, debunking health misinformation online. John says this claim, that using sunscreen can give you skin cancer, started flashing on the NewsGuard radar screens about three weeks ago.

7:17Their team regularly monitors certain search terms. Skin cancer, cancer is one of those that we monitor. And these posts started popping up. More than 17 ,000 posts, to be exact, in seven languages across 44 countries. spreading this fabrication to millions of people. And as someone who spends every day ingesting health misinformation, John says this claim stuck out. This kind of really out there health misinformation, one that is not focused on vaccines, not focused on kind of a core issue of RFK Jr. and the Maha crowd, is a special kind of circumstance. We usually don't see conservative media telling you, hey, don't wear sunscreen, it might cause skin cancer.

8:06And the risk involved. I mean, you're telling people to potentially adopt a dangerous behavior, go outside in the sun unprotected for hours on end. Right, like this could have real impacts on people. Absolutely. That risk of harm also factors into how we pick the false claim of the week. As they looked at the activity on social media boosting this claim, John and his team saw that many of the posts were resharing or referencing this one clip from cable news. One American News Network featured it on Matt Gaetz's show, Foreigner Congressman Matt Gaetz, who was at one point set to be President Trump's attorney general.

8:45He has a show now on One America. He's an anchor. Yeah, he does have a show on OAN. If you don't know it, One American News Network is like a more extreme and less factual network than Fox News. And Matt Gaetz, you might recall, is a former Florida congressman who eventually withdrew himself from the running to be attorney general because a House ethics committee found evidence that he'd paid women for sex and had sex with a 17-year-old, which is statutory rape in Florida. He said these findings are untruthful and defamatory. Now he's a news anchor. The guest Gaetz had on to talk about sunscreen.

9:19A anti-vaccine epidemiologist by the name of Nicholas Holzer. Gates asked Holzer, Have I been lied to as a Florida man about sunscreen protecting me from cancer? Holzer responded, Yes, it appears we've all been lied to, unfortunately. The claim that was being spread was based around a November 2023 study done in the UK. This massive study of over 470 ,000 people confirms it. When they compared sunscreen users to non-sunscreen users, the sunscreen users face increased risks of all the major skin cancers. We'll dig into that study in a bit. But that interview happened on June 26th. The guest, Nick Hulsher, posted a clip of it on X and got 2.9 million views in four days.

10:10He also went on other shows, like comedian Jimmy Dore's podcast, which has nearly 2 million subscribers on YouTube. Nick Hulsher was out there pushing this claim. And did you know who that guy was? Oh, yes. He's a very frequent purveyor of health misinformation, often in the anti-vaccine space. He's also a big promoter of ivermectin as not only a treatment for COVID-19, but also as a cancer treatment. Ivermectin, used to deworm horses, also used to treat some conditions in humans, not supposed to be used to treat COVID-19 or cancer. But since the pandemic, it's become gospel among some people on the right that it's a go-to cure for just about everything.

10:50John says Holschert got his master's in public health from the University of Michigan. And on paper, he's sort of unremarkable. When you Google him, he seems like a relatively normal researcher. He has a whole profile on a research website listing scientific journals he's published in. But it's who he works with that's noteworthy. He's one of the writers on a substack called The Focal Points. It has about 138 ,000 subscribers. Wow. The more famous author on that substack is someone that Holzer has worked for for a number of years named Dr. Peter McAuliffe, who's one of the big sources of misinformation from the COVID pandemic.

11:31If I was not listing them off, he'd be in the top five in terms of like sources of bad information, particularly about COVID vaccines. If you look at Nick Hulsher, the sunscreen guy's resume, John says his entire professional career as an epidemiologist since graduating just a few years ago is working with Peter McCullough, who is a real doctor. He's a cardiologist. He had affiliations with major institutions like Baylor University prior to becoming this big misinformation purveyor. He left in early 2021, and Baylor later had to sue him in order to get him to stop mentioning his affiliation with them as if it were current because they didn't want to be associated with the claims he was starting to make about COVID vaccines.

12:21Together, Dr. McCullough, Nick Hulsher write this prolific newsletter on Substack, Focal Points. This Substack alone is responsible for, you know, dozens of false health claims. I'm probably being conservative with that. It's not 100 % in line with RFK Jr. They've had some articles that are a little critical of RFK Jr. for basically not moving fast enough on issues. I mean, these are people that want to see COVID vaccines 100 % pulled off the market because in their eyes and their claims, it's killed millions of people. That's what they claim on this sub stack. Yeah, they have actually claimed that it's killed more people than, you know, World War I, World War II and Vietnam combined, at least for the U.S.

13:09death toll. So back to the sunscreen. A few weeks before he went on Matt Gaetz's show, on June 9th, amid all these other Focal Points articles about vaccines killing people and the government doing biowarfare experiments with ticks and vaccines causing autism, Nick Hulsher published a Substack post about sunscreen. The headline is study finds sunscreen use linked to higher risk of multiple skin cancers. And then further down, he's got this graphic that says sunscreen use linked up to a 292 % higher risk of multiple skin cancers. There's an image of a man and a woman in their bathing suits slathering sunscreen on their skin, oblivious to the danger.

13:53Next to them are dermatological sketches of the layers of skin with cancer in it. The Substack Post centers on a study of more than 470 ,000 people in the UK. And what did it find? So it did find that people who reported using sunscreen more frequently did also report having higher rates of skin cancers. What was that? It's not what it sounds like. We'll get into it after a quick break.

14:25This episode is brought to you by FreshBooks. Whether you just launched your service business or you've been at it for years, the money side has a way of pulling you from the work you actually love doing. FreshBooks changes that. FreshBooks makes the money side of your service-based business easy. You log your hours, you send a branded invoice, you get paid and know your numbers instead of chasing them. Money in, money out, all in one place. No more juggling one app for clients, another for billing, plus a pile of spreadsheets and emails. FreshBooks is designed for how small business owners think about money.

14:58not how an accountant does. You don't need a financial background to use FreshBooks. It's simple on purpose. Most owners are up and running in minutes, not days. And if you need help, a real person is available on every plan. FreshBooks has been trusted by service businesses for over 20 years, helping over 500 ,000 owners and solopreneurs run their business confidently. Right now, my listeners can get FreshBooks for less than three bucks a month for your first four months, that is 90 % off. Head to freshbooks.com slash podcast to get started. That's 90 % off under three bucks a month for four months at freshbooks.com slash podcast.

15:41There are two types of business owners, those who are busy and those who want to be busy. Toast is designed for both with tools to keep you humming and help turn grind into growth. That's how you turn busy into business. Toast. Built for busy.

16:04So this epidemiologist, Nick Hulsher, who's spreading the claim about sunscreen causing skin cancer, he's basing his claim on a 2023 study in the UK, which was investigating a very technical scientific question related to skin cancer. but as part of the research looked at the correlation between people who self-report using sunscreen and the occurrence they have of skin cancer. This is a real scientific study conducted by real doctors and published in a peer-reviewed journal called Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers and Prevention. But did find that people who reported using sunscreen more frequently did also report having higher rates of skin cancers.

16:44But the study was very clear right as they made that finding that this was a paradoxical finding. That's the exact terminology they use. It had been seen in similar studies because people who report using sunscreen more regularly also might tan more regularly and or a lack of reapplication of sunscreen throughout the day, this so-called sunscreen paradox. Wait, this is a thing like in science, the sunscreen paradox? Yeah. Apparently, this is a recognized phenomenon that scientists have seen in multiple dermatological studies, not just this one. I just want to make sure I'm getting this right. Basically, the sunscreen paradox is people who report higher use of sunscreen tend to have higher instances of skin cancer.

17:30But the understanding of scientists doing this research is that that might be happening because people who report a lot of sunscreen use might just go in the sun more. And so they have skin cancer for that reason, or they think they're using it properly. either stay in the sun a long time feeling they're safe and they don't reapply it. And so they do have higher instances of skin cancer, but it's not because of the use of the sunscreen. Right. It's they've given themselves kind of a false sense of protection by just saying, oh, well, I use it. But like, you know, they're applying it once and then staying out for hours and hours on end and spend more time out in the sun without really using the sunscreen properly for the amount of time they're in the sunlight.

18:11John says in other studies, where instead of simply asking people to say how regularly they use sunscreen, researchers are following people over time and checking that they're using it properly, applying enough, reapplying it over the course of the day, the sunscreen paradox goes away. And in fact, the results show that sunscreen used properly decreases instances of skin cancer. A study in Australia showed daily use of sunscreen reduced the incidence of melanoma by 50%. A Norwegian study found using SPF-15 lotion reduced melanoma risk by about 30%. There are similar findings for other skin cancers, too.

18:50But Nick Holscher's Substack post concluded the exact opposite, that sunscreen use can cause skin cancer. John and his team at NewsGuard contacted one of the authors of the UK study, Dr. Ivan Lipinoff at McGill University, who told them Holscher's take was a misrepresentation of their findings. He said, quote, the proper use of sunscreen combined with other sun protection measures reduces the risk of skin cancer. But again, Heena's co-authors also said this in the study itself, the very study that Nick Hulsher is supposedly reading and summarizing on the Focal Point Substack and later on One American News.

19:26Does he ever report in this Substack post that the authors of the study have said that their study should not be interpreted this way? No. And should not be interpreted to link skin cancer to use of sunscreen? No, he never provides that countervailing information. There's no mention of what's in the study about the paradoxical finding or the comments they made since then. He cherry-picked and just worked around that. So Nicholas Holzer, do you have a sense, like, does he believe that sunscreen causes cancer? It's hard to discount with any single health misinformation source whether or not they believe this stuff.

20:10His motivation seems to be railing against vaccine and mainstream medical opinion. Whether he actually believes in it or not, I think someone would have to be inside his head to really get into it. The explanation here is he either didn't read the whole study or he did and specifically left out the really important information that the authors of this study said the opposite thing is true than what he's saying. Right. Yeah. And it's just, you know, only he would know whether he deliberately cherry picked or he just stopped reading at a certain point when he felt like he had his narrative set in stone.

20:51We emailed Holscher and McCullough to ask if they believed it or were purposely deceiving people. They didn't answer us. There is a profit motive behind a bunch of the disinformation Holscher and McCullough push on Focal Points. For one, they have subscribers to the newsletter, nearly 140 ,000 of them, some portion of those paid. But more important, McCullough and Holscher are involved in a for-profit company called The Wellness Company, which sells certain prescription drugs and other medical products online. And on the Substack, they're like encouraging people to go buy stuff from the wellness company.

21:26They do talk about their products, provide links to it, and they have put up stuff that we would consider, frankly, just advertising for the wellness company. It might be kind of couched in an article that's about like, you know, if they're talking about ivermectin, they probably will insert. By the way, you can go buy it here and link out to the wellness company site. Which, of course, sells ivermectin. Any sense of how much money they're making? For them, no. We don't know exactly how much money they pull in. But, you know, you can look at their website and see they're selling drugs that are, you know, generic drugs that probably cost, you know, cents to produce at this point.

22:15things like ivermectin, and they're selling them for hundreds of dollars. So I would imagine, while I can't put a round number on it, their margins are extremely high. But here's the interesting thing about the shoddy sunscreen claim. Holscher and McCullough don't appear to be leveraging that to sell any specific product. It's not like ivermectin, where they're claiming falsely that it cures cancer and then directing people to go buy it from their website. I didn't see any skin cancer or sun-related products that they might be trying to trick people into paying them for. They're not selling hats or rash guards.

22:53In fact, Hulsher doesn't tell people to swear off sunscreen totally. He writes, Sunburns are clearly harmful. Aim for sensible sunlight exposure. Spending enough time in the sun to reap the benefits without reaching the point of burning. He suggests mineral sunscreens for long sun exposure. Quote, The takeaway is not to fear sunlight, but to respect it. John says in his near decade covering health disinformation, this actually tracks. I think there's sometimes a misconception that health misinformation like this always has to be based on, for one, a consistent agenda that doesn't contradict itself or that it's selling something.

23:36And in this case, it's not doing either of those things. It's really just about seems to be just about contrarianism, that whatever mainstream medical science says, whatever health authorities say, people like Nicholas Holzer have to have a counter narrative. They have to say, no, they're lying to you. And this is the real secret truth that you're being let in on. They are trying to keep that audience engaged with them that is expecting to hear a alternative view on everything that comes out of mainstream medicine and mainstream news. The misinformation itself is the product. That's John Gregory at NewsGuard.

24:21Since we're on the topic, a few quick tips for proper sunscreen application from the American Academy of Dermatology. For adults, use a broad-spectrum formula, at least SPF 30, on all exposed skin 15 minutes before you head into the sun. Most adults need to use at least one ounce, a shot glass, for all skin that's not covered by clothing. Not as much as I thought, but that's why I'm not a dermatologist. The American Academy of Dermatology also says make sure to reapply every two hours or after swimming or sweating. If you found this episode edifying, please send it to a friend. And if you're new here, go check out our recent episodes about chatbots and conspiracy theorists, Ashley St.

25:01Clair, Meta, and also our two-parter from earlier this year about deported journalist Mario Guevara. Another request, please follow Question Everything wherever you get your podcasts. It helps us reach more people who should hear the reporting we're doing. And follow us on Instagram at questioneverything.podcast. Today's show was produced by Sam Egan and edited by Jen Kinney. Robin Simeon and I are the executive producers of Question Everything. our team also includes producer zachst louis managing editor kevin sullivan contributing editor neil drumming and associate producer kevin shepherd this episode was fact checked by annika robbins mixing and sound designed by brendan baker our music is by matt mcginley evie kwang manages our social media special thanks to dana chivas our partners at kcrw include arnie seipel tajal ajamera natalie hill and jennifer farrow we'll see you next time

25:56Hey, it's Paige DeSorbo from Giggly Squad. Everyone is always looking for a new way to make some extra cash, but sometimes the easiest place to start is your own closet, with a little help from Depop. Think about how many clothes you have that you love, but you just don't wear anymore. On Depop, it's quick and easy to list those pieces, there's no selling fees, and suddenly those clothes have a chance to find someone who actually wants them. And the best part? You're making room for whatever you're into next. Make money on Depop with no selling fees and find what you want for less. This message is brought to you by Depop.

26:52It's just four doses a year after two starter doses. Don't use if allergic to SkyRizzy. Serious allergic reactions, increased infections, or lower ability to fight them may occur. Before treatment, get checked for infections and tuberculosis. Tell your doctor about any flu-like symptoms or vaccines. Thanks to SkyRizzy, there's nothing like clearer skin and better movement. And that means everything.

27:19Ask your doctor about SkyRizzy. Visit SkyRizzy.com or call 1-866-SKY-Rizzy to learn more.