136: Rethinking Sun Exposure From Scratch

136: Rethinking Sun Exposure From Scratch
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You know, for a long time I thought that if you eat right, ditch the seed oils and live a clean ancestral lifestyle, you become basically bulletproof in the sun. You know, just walk outside shirtless in July. No sunscreen, no problem. You know, your inner caveman will handle it. And to be clear, you know, I still think diet matters enormously, and we'll talk more about that.

But this spring I've been burned a few times, not metaphorically, actually burned and. What changed is that we moved to a larger property last fall. You know, we are now taking homesteading more seriously. We're an entire different level now with cattle and pigs and po and rabbits and honeybees and you know, the whole nine yard.

And so I spent most of. The day outside, you know, maybe not every day, but on most days I spent more time on the outside than inside. And that's a pattern change that's different from how it used to be when we were still on a smaller property and all we had is chicken bees and rabbits. And now suddenly I'm significantly more exposed, and especially during times when the U UV index is the highest.

You know? And so today I wanna walk through what I actually think or what I now think about sun exposure, why I try to protect myself in certain cases, how my timing of my sun exposure has changed. I. Why I'm still not really wearing sunscreen. Occasionally I do, and I'm gonna share with you how and why and what brand I use, but it's still not something that I am a huge fan of.

But one thing I have noticed, and I think it's more my wife who kept pointing it out and pointing it out, you know, it's not about the risk of skin cancer, you know, I think that risk is dramatically overblown. Even if I would get sunburns more often, I don't think I would develop skin cancer just based on the underlying physiology of how cancer develops and how my lifestyle is conducive so that that's not gonna happen, or at least not very likely to happening.

But one thing that is certainly true is photo aging. You know, the skin ages quicker if you get exposed to UV above your skin's capacity. If you get a sunburn, that's an indication that you overshot, right? And that can lead to faster aging. Now, I'm not super concerned about cosmetics. You know, I, I don't, you know, I'm not a model or anything, but obviously I also don't wanna look like, you know, 80 when I'm only 50.

Welcome to the Primer Shift podcast. And so. I started rethinking a couple of things and I come to, came to realize that both camps like the, you know, mainstream dermatology and you know, the ancestral, you know, bros, you know, both get it wrong in many cases. You know, on the one side, obviously, you know, if you go to a dermatologist, you know, they tell you, oh, SPS 50, you know, every time you step outside, even inside because UV can, you know, through this.

The, the window, et cetera, and the sun is a pure threat. That's bullshit. You know, on the flip side, you know the ancestral pro-science, you know that, you know saying that all clean diet means unlimited sun exposure and burns are just signals. I think both sides really miss what's actually happening at the skin level and.

As far as I'm concerned, you know, UV is a stressor, like cold, like exercise, like sauna bathing, like fasting, and your capacity to handle that stressor is trainable. It's also acceptable, you know, and the damage from overdoing it isn't again about skin cancer, you know, it's about collagen breakdown. It's about elastin loss and accelerated aging, you know, and how, and obviously, you know, those things might be more important to someone else.

And to me, or vice versa, you know, I can tell that for my wife, the cosmetic aspect is significantly more important than it is to me, but it's also not irrelevant to me. Right. And so you need to kind of figure out where you fall into that and how important it is, how old your skin looks. But there are certain things that have changed for me just in the last.

I wanna say a couple of weeks because ever since, you know, it's warmer outside. The first chance I had is to take off my shirt and because I, I love being in the sun, you know, and I love getting a tan and, and looking, looking tan and producing vitamin D and, and hormones and. And positively influencing laser circadian rhythm and all of the good things that come with sun exposure, that, you know, sun exposure is just so incredibly important.

But I've also realized that all of my thinking, all of my strategy, was really based on a concept that no longer applies where I would spend most of the time indoors in front of a computer, for example, and only a few hours, maybe outside, typically in the morning, and maybe then, you know, later. But during the day.

I was inside a lot that has changed. You know, I'm now outside with the animals a lot. I build infrastructure, you know, fencing and, and touches and you know, all of the things that are required to run our homestead. And so I spent significantly more time. Outside. And the same goes for the kids and everyone really, because also we live in a tiny home now.

And also the space on the inside is limited, which means we want to spend more time outside and that's all a good thing, but it also means our sun becher patterns have changed and I've crossed my personal threshold and and capacity to deal with uv. I think. Twice this year where I got sunburned, not catastrophically, but enough that I'm like, okay, I, I had more than my skin could handle, you know?

And it's especially, um, deceptive a little bit in spring here because it, it doesn't feel quite as hot yet. It's not as, the humidity is relatively low. You feel good outside, you know, spending all day, you know, digging a garden or what have you. But the UV index is no chalk with a couple of days with the UV index was at 10 or even higher, um, in March.

You know, it, it was quite a bit. And so I noticed, okay, I gotta rethink. Um, what I do and before we get into how my schedule looks like right now, I wanna talk a little bit about, you know, the diet angle, because that's still super important as far as your capacity to deal with the stressor. That is UV light.

You know, your skin, your skin's UV tolerance is really built from the inside out.

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Now back to the episode. You know, if you consume seed oils, you know that are high in a specific Omega six polyunsaturated fatty acid, like linoleic acid. You know, and that's a lot of in canola oil and soybean and corn and sunflower oil, you know that linoleic acid accumulates in tissues, including your skin, especially with long time, you know, year long exposure.

And under the influence of uv, those polyunsaturated fats oxidize. Much more readily than saturated or monounsaturated fats. That's the reason why you wanna have your olive oil in a dark bottle. Not that olive oil is a, a huge source of, of PUFAs, but nonetheless, fatty acids, unless they're saturated like in butter, you wanna protect them from sunlight, from oxygen and from heat because, and from.

I mean, air is oxygen. So those three factors can cause those polyunsaturated fatty acids, those bonds relatively weak bonds between the, the molecule from the to deteriorate and. As they become rancid or oxidized, they become inflammatory, you know, and that lipid peroxidation cascade is a major driver for what we call sun damage.

You know, it's, it's really if you consume a high pufa diet and your, your, your fatty acids in your tissue, including your skin. Are not very stable and oxidized quickly, then you have a much, much higher chance of getting sunburned than someone who does not. And the other half of. That is your repair capacity.

So there's first a capacity to withstand the stressor that is uv. And, but if you get skin damage, then your repair capacity is also important. And so to have a proper repair capacity, you know, you benefit from consuming, uh, a lot of retinal, you know, the real vitamin A from liver and egg yolks, not just the beta carotene in, well, carrots and, and plants.

You need zinc and selenium and copper and B vitamins and you know, quality animal protein for glutathione precursors. You know, all of that is important to have a properly functioning recovery capacity. And if you have a proper tolerance and a good recovery capacity, and that is very much lifestyle and diet influenced then.

The sun is significantly less problematic, but it can still be an issue because you still have a threshold, a total capacity to deal with the stressor that is uv. And inflammation is really the common threat across all of those things. You know, chronic low-grade inflammation, you know, caused by consuming ultra processed foods, sugar seed oils, and you know, poor sleep.

Primes every tissue for damage. And the same pathways that accelerate skin aging, also feed cardiovascular disease and insulin resistant and cancer initiation and all of those things. And you cannot just topically paint over a systemically inflamed body that's not gonna work. It's like painting, you know, over rotten wood.

It's still gonna keep rotting. You know, you need to have a proper foundation before you know anything. Like a, you know, maybe a, a non-toxic sunscreen even makes sense. And there are a couple of interesting, uh, statistics that I also wanna point out, you know, that are related to sunscreen and skin cancer, uh, et cetera.

And. You know, if you've been following up or reading up on sunscreen a little bit, you might know that sunscreen really went mainstream in the 1970s and then exploded, uh, in the eighties and nineties and over the same window. You know, US melanoma incidents has climbed dramatically as well. Roughly several folds since the met seventies, you know, and the other factor that also climbed.

Roughly at the same rate is our linoleic acid consumption or the amount of linoleic acid in body fat. At least that's for America, and I can only assume that's also true for the rest of the world as well. So our linoleic acid, uh, percentage in our body fat has tripled over the last century, and with the steepest rise overlapping the same decades were melanoma and sunscreen use went up as well.

Now, I don't wanna oversell this, you know, correlation, certainly not a causation. And some of that, you know, increase. There are con confounding factors. There are tanning bats that people started using. There is, you know, cheap air travel. You know, the higher you get up, the more exposed you are. Uh, there is thinner clothing.

There is, you know, there are a lot of things going on that can confound all of those numbers because it's very difficult to run a controlled experiment over 15 years of human behavior. But one thing is clear, you know, as we've been using more and more sunscreen. We've not reduced our incidence of skin cancer.

Quite the opposite is the case. Both have been climbing, so the sunscreen does not necessarily fix or prevent skin cancer. I think that's a fair statement. We've seen this in the data, but the mehan or the mechanism, you know, linking dietary proof accumulation to UV damage has real. Biochemical coherence and animal model support.

So there, I think there is a lot to it of what you eat influences how likely you're gonna get skin cancer and. Incur UV damage, whether or not it's gonna lead them to skin cancer or not, you know, is a, is a different argument. But nonetheless, we've seen that PHA diets, you know, and intense infrequent unacclimated exposure to sun, and then the chemical sunscreen ingredients layer together, you know, is really.

Is an at the end of that, an evolutionary novelty. You know, our bodies was never built for, you know, that's, that has never happened. You know, throughout the course of human history that we consumed a whole lot of PUFAs only exposed ourselves every result. Maybe, you know, summer vacation to UV and then, you know, use chemically sunscreen.

You know, that just is not something that our bodies have ever been. Adapted to. Now, I'm not saying that sunscreen causes cancer, but I'm saying that sunscreen is likely not gonna prevent cancer. What's gonna prevent cancer is to be metabolically healthy, to eat a proper diet, to have, you know, low pufa intake and all of those things.

And in the context of skin cancer in particular, you know, you need to build up your tolerance already during winter when the sun or the UV index is lower and combined with everything else that you need to do to have a. To be metabolically healthy. You know, you can prepare your skin to have a higher UV tolerance.

And so what my protocol right now looks like, or at least that's what I'm trying to, sometimes I have no choice but to go out when the UV index is the highest. But then I have a choice of using protective closing at least. But my timeline right now, or my, my protocol involves. Outside work and animal care first thing in the morning.

I mean, typically, you know, morning chores are what they are anyway. And then I try to spend as much time as I can outside. So I get the morning sun, I get, you know, all of the, the, the, the red light, all of the good stuff from those frequencies in the morning into my retina, into my eyes to set my circadian rhythm, to, uh, allow my body.

Uh, better deal with the uv, the little UV that's in the sunlight. During those early hours, then I come inside and do my computer work, my administrative work. I mean, right now, for example, as of this recording, it's 1:20 PM. You know, so I do all of my stuff on the inside and I try to fit my work in between one and 3:00 PM I mean, that's a solid four hours of productive work.

You know, I, I'm not significantly more productive for longer anyway, so that's when I'm gonna do my busy work. And then after three, I spend time outside again where I get still. Decent UV to help my body improve my tolerance, but it's not quite as strong where I might risk burning or where I might have to use sunscreen.

Now, if I have to work outside during the day, I, during peak hours, that is, I wear sunscreen only on my neck typically. So because I, you know, I'm already a redneck, uh, quite literally sometimes, and figuratively speaking as well, you know, ever since we've become more or less farmers. But I wanna protect my neck area because typically I only wear a baseball cap.

Sometimes I wear like, you know, like a wire brim hat, depending on what I wear. But the, the, the neck is often something that, that gets exposed. You know, I wear something like I'm wearing right now. If you're watching this on YouTube, you can see it's a marina wool, uh, shirt. I have different, uh. From different brands, marina wool shirts, they're breathable.

They don't stink. Even when I sweat like a pick and they're long sleeve so I can then, you know, just, you know, move it up if I want to expose my forearms a little bit or I move them down if I wanna protect myself. Um, and together with a hat. I'm typically protected enough that I don't need to use sunscreen, with the exception that, you know, on my neck, that's, that's one area where I have a hard time sometimes, you know, preventing long-term exposure, because especially if I work, typically the way I work is there's always sun on my neck, you know, and that's the part if I, if I have sunlight on my neck.

During the higher, during peak time, and I spent hours and hours and hours outside, I'm going to burn. There is just no way around that, and so that's what I wanna prevent and the sunscreen that I use. That little sunscreen that I use when I use it is from one skin. It has, it always one peptide that actively repairs the skin, uh, that reduces all signs of aging, slows down aging causes or preventing.

Cells, senescence the accumulation of dead cells and it has, you know, it's a non-toxic formula using zinc. So it's the best sunscreen I found. It applies easily. I don't mind putting it on. It's not super sticky or anything. So that's the one I use sometimes on the tip of my nose. I have a fairly big noses, you can probably tell.

Uh, but that's pretty much it. Um, but again, my first line of defense is really to build up my resilience over time. To stay out of the sun when it's the strongest, especially if I have to spend hours and hours outside and you know. Make sure I follow a proper item. And that's something I, I, I do anyway.

And then I pay attention. You know, if I feel like, Hmm, I can't do that, my body cannot handle that yet. Maybe because I haven't built up enough sun call, so to say, then I work on that, you know, and I don't just burn blindly and say, oh, it's not gonna matter. It's not gonna matter. I think from a cancer perspective, I'm not too concerned about that.

But photo aging is real and. Even though I'm not a model, you know, I also don't wanna look 10 years older than I actually am. I'm fine looking just as old as I am. I don't need to look any younger, but, you know, I, I wanna keep it within reason. And with that, we're gonna wrap it up. If you know someone who is either super afraid of the sun or someone who thinks the sun is.

Completely unproblematic because they're following an animal based diet and they can burn just as much as they want to without any negative side effects. Maybe share this episode with them. Engage. That's really one of the best ways of helping others find this content, you know, to let the algorithm know that people care, people engage.

So leave a comment. Leave a testimonial. If you are on watch or listening to this on Apple Podcast or Spotify, leave a comment if you're watching this on YouTube and, uh, we're gonna wrap it up. Thanks so much for listening in, for tuning in. I'll see you next week.