Ok, finally have a bit of time to sit down and throw out some thoughts.

First of all, I could care less who is right and who is wrong, I am not here to defend anyone nor defend any side of whatever argument that is trying to be made. I am simply watching this documentary and analyzing it for anything that seems lacking in some sort of reasonable basis / looking for obvious errors. I am not saying that the guy or the lady in the video are incorrect, because I don’t know what they know, and perhaps they would say all the things I would expect to hear in the first place had this been a 3 hour podcast discussion with both speaking for an hour and a half each. Th documentary simply did not give me enough to go on, while throwing up some logical red flags.

Also, I am not that interested in the subject to dive into any cited resources. Maybe one day… but not today. I have a plan for the day and I don’t intend on derailing it. I don’t think this makes what I say any less credible unless I took a stance one way or another and tried to disprove the other side (which I am not). 

Lastly, I think this is an interesting documentary because it makes you think and question a bit, and may be helpful to those who are extremely sun-o-phobic (I made that up). Like all things in life, there is no black and white, this or that answer. There is a balance to be achieved with pros and cons of too much or too little on both sides. Just as your video concludes - who would die first? - if it feels unhealthy to be hiding from the sun, it probably is. 

Ok.. lots of preface junk and I probably missed 50% of what I wanted to preface with. Now to the points that I had issues with. I’m not going to quote everything word for word, then we’ll have word pickers try to make me seem like I’m “wrong” (even though I am not trying to be right), simply because I misquoted what was said.

Point one: the gentleman in the video made some strong “damning” statements about lab UV tests and targeted treatment on shaved mice. He pointed out that this is not how things work naturally - I agree. But, this entire point is irrelevant because it leads the viewer to make the connection with “lab results stupid, sun fine”. One being true (lab results stupid), does not make the other false (sun being bad - to an extent). You can have stupid lab results in one study and still have sun damage your cells. Maybe this is just the nature of the documentary in how it connects the two, maybe I am the only one to draw this perceived conclusion but somehow I doubt it. Yes, you can have a botched study and still make the other half of the argument. I won’t go into how you can basically find any study to support your claim, that is another topic altogether.

Point two: The whole thing about which cancel is bad, and which is easy to treat was kind of ridiculous. If I heard correctly, the guy in the video seems to be saying that “yeah there might be a cancel story here” and points out that you are more likely to survive melanoma with sun exposure than without. Ok sounds great! BUT… what are the chances of developing melanoma without the same level of UV exposure? That is not even mentioned. Again, I am only talking about the documentary because I am not expected to read all the studies he might be thinking about. To me, this is like saying “yeah, you can train to fight with a dragon and go into that cave, but you are more likely to survive if you train vs. not training at all” Well yeah.. .if you are intent on fighting dragons you WILL have higher chances if you train. If you don’t train and don’t intend fighting them, then you’ll probably have a higher chance of surviving.

Point three: The whole thing he said about “your body thinks it’s night time when you’re lying at the beach and you’re just getting blasted” Like.. what? Where is the science here? Yeah, you’re getting blasted, but less so if you’re shirtless all day laboring in the sun? I mean logically, yeah you are getting less exposure if you are clothed and walking down the street vs laying out naked in the sun. I’ll give him that. But, body thinks it’s sleeping? C’mon… and somehow not laying down signals to the body you’re awake? Is this the level of elementary thinking we have to accept? Or does he know something else that is simply not stated in the documentary for the sake of entertainment value? I don’t know… but I can’t hear that and think “oh right…” And if this IS a fact, as far as facts go, I’d love to learn about it some day (just not today).

Point four: evolutionary speaking, humans have been without “inside”. This to me is bonkers as well. Yeah, that may have been true, even if we ignore primitive shelters, caves, being dirty all the time, etc… but we also have to look at human life spans. We have almost doubled our life span in the last 600 years, and I don’t even know what the life span was before that, probably even less. People used to die in their late 30’s, early 40’s as recently as circa 1400 ad. To say that, oh but humans evolved for millions of years without shelter is totally irrelevant because we could have been dying in late 20’s for all I know and at that point who cares if you get skin cancer… What matters is that we now live MUCH longer than we did before. I am careful not to attribute this longevity to any one thing because that would be false too. 

I do not have any beef with any circadian rhythm points - I think all were valid.

So.. how do I wrap up my thoughts… I think it’s helpful to try to understand what this documentary is about and what conclusions you’d like people to make. It is not clear to me what the expectations are. The title is “Is the sun really going to kill you?” Then we have some statements like “embrace the sun” and “hide at home” or something along those lines. How much embracing should we do? How much hiding is harmful? This is the point I was trying to make at the very begging in that this documentary might be helpful to the sun-o-phobes who absolutely must be slathered in sunblock all the time. It’s pretty clear there are benefits to sun exposure, but the real question is probably “how much exposure is ok?” And I feel like this documentary didn’t really address that. If I had to take a guess, I’d probably say too much of either is not great. You probably want sunlight, and you probably want to limit exposure. How you do that is none of my business. But what I wouldn’t say is “yeah go ahead and stay in the sun all day, or go ahead and hide at home in the dark room all day”. And I am not saying that you are saying this - it’s up to the individual to how they interpret “embrace the sun”. Personally I do both - I walk around plenty without sunblock, but I also apply it on really high UV rate days, and try to avoid primary because of the heat not any possible increase of melanomas. Where I live it’s simply fking hot all the time so I prefer the AC which naturally limits my exposure. 

I hope this makes some sense of where I’m coming from. I’m probably not articulating it as well as I could if I had some coffee and had a day to do so. Right now I’d rather get back to working on Nostr ;)