153: The Anti-Sunscreen Movement (w/Sara Aniano & Michelle Wong)
Did you know that it’s not the sun that causes cancer, but sunscreen? Or that sunscreen is actually a Big Pharma creation to keep you from receiving the sun’s magical healing properties? How about the fact that sunscreen molecules can be found in your brain 10 years after application? And don’t even get me started on the life-changing effects of exposing your asshole to direct sunshine.
Ok, I promise that’s the last time I’m going to mention asshole sunning during this episode. As for the rest of those equally-absurd claims, I’ll be talking to cosmetic chemist, Michelle Wong, aka Lab Muffin Beauty Science, to dispose of the gibberish and give me a serious 101 on sunscreen. Before that, I’ll be talking to disinformation analyst Sara Aniano about the connection between the anti-sunscreen movement and antisemitism—because yes, that’s a thing, too.
Show Notes
Sara Aniano on Twitter
Michelle Wong on Instagram | TikTok
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I'm Derek Barris, flying solo this week, covering a topic I've been wanting to get into for a number of months now.
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Conspiratuality 153 the anti sunscreen movement Because yes, that's a thing.
Did you know that it's not the sun that causes cancer, but sunscreen?
Or that sunscreen is actually a big pharma creation to keep you from receiving the sun's magical healing properties?
How about the fact that sunscreen molecules can be found in your brain ten years after application?
And don't even get me started on the life-changing effects of exposing your asshole to direct sunshine.
Okay, I promise that's the last time I'm going to mention asshole sunning during this episode.
As for the rest of those equally absurd claims, I'll be talking to cosmetic chemist Michelle Wong, aka Lab Muffin Beauty Science, to dispose of the gibberish and give me a serious 101 on sunscreen.
But before that, I'll be talking to disinformation analyst Sarah Aniano about the connection between
the anti-sunscreen movement and anti-Semitism, because yeah, that's a thing too.
Did you know that the sun does not cause skin cancer?
You know what causes skin cancer?
Every type of cancer is caused by oxidative stress.
Can getting burnt to a crisp by the sun cause oxidative stress?
You betcha.
There are a lot of other things that cause oxidative stress as well, like a bad diet, using toxic products, not managing your stress well, and using skincare and sunscreen that has toxic seed oils and toxic chemicals in it that actually react to the sun to cause oxidative stress on your skin.
Since sunscreen came out, the rise of skin cancer has only gone up, up, and up.
The sun is not the enemy.
I would even argue that grounding yourself in the earth and getting healthy sun exposure can actually almost heal almost every ailment in the body.
Healthy sun exposure is crucial to the body's vitality.
And it is so important for kids to get healthy sun exposure, too.
So clean up your diet, throw away your toxic sunscreen, switch to non-nano zinc if you use anything for prolonged sun exposure only, and prioritize daily healthy sun exposure.
Here's a simple piece of advice, maybe even like a life rule that you can follow.
Anytime that you're starting a sentence with all forms of cancer and the following words are not are horrible and you're not an oncologist, Maybe don't say anything.
I mean, it's actually really easy to just shut up at that point.
But apparently not for everyone.
That's TikTok for you.
When it comes to science and health advice, you can bet a lot on this platform is questionable.
You just heard Lauren Kissy, a wellness influencer with 32,000 followers on TikTok and 12,000 on Instagram.
Her bio lists her credentials for making these claims.
She's a wife, mom, and wellness junkie.
She also works from her home in Oahu as a skincare consultant, but if you're looking for actual credentials, all she offers are anecdotes.
Her recovery from an autoimmune disease led her to spin up wellness content on social media.
No schooling or actual education is shared anywhere that I could identify.
There's also Izzy Ezenvalde, who has 162,000 TikTok followers, and she bills herself as the leader of the Clear Skin cult.
Trademark.
Not kidding.
Her Clean Skin Academy includes a $230 program that teaches you how to step into your power and the deeper wisdom within your body and heal your acne naturally.
No BS, no Band-Aid solutions.
Izzy also sells courses on getting rid of period cramps for £188, healing PMS with food for £45, and she sells a juice and smoothie book for £30.
Why she sells some in dollars and pounds, I'm not sure, but that's what's on her link tree.
One of her recent posts features her looking at herself in the camera, as so many of these posts do, and the following text is written over that.
Quote, So confused at all the people who are so shocked that I choose not to wear sunscreen?
Sunscreen is another example of our disconnect from nature.
Heliotherapy, suntanning, used to be prescribed as treatment for patients in hospitals.
The sun literally provides us with energy and life, and they want us to fear it and avoid it.
As if those chemical sunscreens and the processed junk food y'all eat aren't linked to skin cancer or anything.
XO!
Now what are Izzy's credentials?
All I could find was via the science website, the Daily Mail.
Okay, that's not a science website.
And it bills her as a holistic nutritionist.
She also calls herself a holistic health coach.
If you've ever listened to this podcast, you probably know those terms are effectively meaningless.
You can just pay for certificates to call yourself that online, or from what I've seen, you can just call yourself that and get away with it.
So this is all TikTok, right?
And it must get better with actual credentialed specialists, right?
I mean, someone like neuroscientist Andrew Huberman, who's host of the wildly popular Huberman Lab podcast, he certainly wouldn't spread misinformation on TikTok.
I remember hearing years ago, oh, there's stuff in sunscreen that will go into your brain.
I remember someone talking like, you're crazy.
What are you talking about?
I'm a scientist.
Turns out there are certain sunscreens that have molecules that can cross the blood brain barrier.
You can find them in neurons like 10 years after people have used the sunscreen topically.
So I've become not paranoid about this.
I don't tend to use sunscreen.
That clip inspired this episode.
I mean, I've actually wanted to cover the anti-sunscreen movement for a while, because on its face it's so absurd, but when someone on the level of Andrew Huberman is spreading pseudoscience, and as you'll hear in a little while, this is not reliable information that he's saying, I felt more of an urgency.
But I also get the impulse.
Putting chemicals on your skin might seem dodgy.
And the sun is, as our not-cosmetician-or-nutritionist friend said a moment ago, literally what created life on this planet.
But there are caveats, and those seem pretty damn important.
As our second guest today, an actual chemist, Michelle Wong, breaks down, most people get skin cancer during or after middle age, which is not an age that humans have historically reached in the past.
Massive amounts of people turning 50 or 60 or 70 is a relatively new phenomenon.
And it was on her feed, and she goes by Lab Muffin Beauty Science, that I found the Huberman clip.
It's a perfect example of how misinformation spreads.
Here you have Huberman talking both about his field of expertise, which is the brain, and not about his field of expertise, which is skin care, and spreading a dangerous talking point in less than 15 seconds.
And then you have Michelle, who spent days trying to track down the study that he's referencing to no avail.
In fact, she talked to other chemists and they all agreed that it's impossible to even track sunscreen molecules in neurons 10 years after topical application.
But that's the problem we're always dealing with, isn't it?
Quick to spout bullshit so hard to refute it.
And by the time it's refuted, the damage is done.
The influencer has moved on, and the followers are unlikely to have their minds changed because they've already ingested the pseudoscience.
Personally, it took me a long time to change my mind on this topic.
I was born at the Jersey Shore, and yes, the town that the show was later filmed in.
I grew up about an hour away, but spent all of my summers there.
I lifeguarded for six years in my hometown.
And for much of that time, I used either no sunscreen, or baby oil or coconut oil to enhance my tan.
Look, I was the product of the 80s, ignorant of what I was doing to my body.
That first burn of the summer turned into a golden brown by August.
And I'll also talk to Michelle about the cultural reasons for this type of look.
While so many darker skinned people aspire to look lighter, the opposite is also true, and Michelle offers great insights into this.
But then at some point you realize that, yeah, just put on sunscreen.
In fact, my wife is vigilant about it.
In every room of our house, and in both of our cars, are bottles of sunscreen.
I never thought much about skincare before her, to be honest.
Starting in my late 20s, I just slathered it on when I went to the beach, or when I was going outside for long stretches.
Now, I wear it at 6am when I'm leaving for my bike rides.
Maybe it's in part because I've had one type of cancer and I don't really want another, especially if there are steps I can take to avoid it.
In fact, the day this episode drops, I'll be going to a dermatologist to check out a small mole on my arm.
And it's likely nothing, and it's small, but there's nothing wrong with being cautious with these things.
And if I do happen to catch something early on, that's going to be better for me in the long run.
We really need to move beyond this natural vs. chemical or natural vs. artificial mindset that pervades the wellness industry.
You're most likely listening to this on a device while sitting in a climate-controlled room or car that enjoys the benefits of artificial light.
There are so many technological advances we enjoy every day that are such a part of the fabric of our lives that we pay them no attention.
But that, if stripped down to its essential components, would overturn any argument we make when demanding that the blueberries we drop into our smoothies be organic.
The influencer I opened the show with, the one yelling about toxic products causing oxidative stress, A few videos prior to that one, she's weighing out Botox because TikTok has made her lose confidence in herself and she wants fewer lines in her forehead.
And yet she doesn't want to look like everyone else.
No, this woman is in her mid-twenties.
And honestly, I don't understand the pressures of being an influencer.
My wrinkles?
They're all earned.
And those rivulets are only going to get deeper as I age.
Like my tattoos, they just mark periods of my life.
So I'm not here to give anyone beauty tips.
But if you're going to scream natural about one thing and eject a known toxin into your face, I'm gonna call bullshit on such hypocrisy.
Especially when you have no idea how cancer actually works in your body.
I try my best to recognize the limits of my knowledge, which is why I'm glad Michelle agreed to talk about the chemistry and pseudoscience around sunscreen.
And I want to thank Danielle Bilardo for introducing us, because I originally reached out to Danielle, who I also know is a big sunscreen junkie, and she said, oh, you gotta talk to Michelle, so really appreciate that connection.
And when I flagged that I was working on this episode on Twitter, a former podcast guest and fellow Jersey native, Sarah Aniano, she reached out and she said she'd actually researched the anti-sunscreen movement and it has some connections to anti-Semitism.
Now just a side note, this Saturday I'll be dropping a brief about anti-Semitism with the Banter co-founder, Ben Cohen, which I've been wanting to do for a few months.
But Sarah making that connection to the anti-sunscreen movement, that was a surprise.
And, as it happens, it involves an old friend of this podcast, the chiropractor and German New Medicine advocate Melissa Sell.
I posted a photo of her proudly displaying her sunburn and calling it late nutrition on her Instagram feed years ago, and Sarahhead independently dove into that nonsense herself, and then she chased it down Reddit threads, so you can imagine where that goes.
So let me let the experts speak.
Sarah Aniano is a disinformation analyst at the American Defamation League's Center on Extremism, and personally a favorite follow of mine on Twitter, not only for her insights into antisemitism, but also to keep me connected to my homeland and her perils in and love for New Jersey transit.
We'll talk about antisemitism in other topics.
And then I'll be talking to Michelle Wong, a science educator, chemistry PhD, and cosmetic chemist in Sydney, Australia.
Both of these women are awesome, and I stop to scroll whenever they appear in my feeds.
Last note from me.
As summer approaches, please use sunscreen.
As you'll hear, it doesn't really matter what kind, though it turns out that sticks don't provide the best protection.
But don't just listen to me.
Let's turn to the experts now.
You wind up at the ADL.
So you were already familiar with the techniques being used from your marketing career, is that right?
Sure.
I mean, everything related to marketing, especially today, has so much to do with social media and aesthetics and how you package things and how you sell things.
And nobody sells things like conspiracy theorists.
They do a very good job at it.
Wellness influencers, health influencers, as you well know.
are very good at it.
So I do think that thinking about this topic from a communications perspective,
not just as a grad student in communication, but also as somebody who worked in it,
definitely helped me have that angle in looking at how this stuff spreads,
especially online.
And I think that's a really important thing to think about.
Russell Brand will use the same techniques, them.
Have you looked into that at all?
Why people have that dissonance?
I think that today we have to remember that any public facing individual, whether they're a celebrity or a Twitter influencer or a TikToker, we are all kind of branding ourselves now.
And I think that recognizing these strategies coming from Like you said, corporations or pharmaceutical companies or what have you.
I think that's a lot easier because it doesn't seem like a thing that humans do.
It's a thing that the powers that be do, right?
But there's always a human behind every strategy and humans like Russell Brand are really good at employing those.
So again, I think that we have to kind of take the strategy part out of, oh, it must be a coordinated and very planned campaign versus this is just a thing that people are utilizing because it works well. It's a communication
strategy and it works.
What made you want to go from marketing to studying and trying to stop the spread of
disinformation? The short answer is that I hated it. I hated working in marketing, to be honest.
I hated selling things.
I hated trying to persuade people to do something or buy something.
Not that what I do now has nothing to do with persuasion, but I'm not selling anything and I really enjoy that.
But the longer answer is that during COVID, I had a lot of friends and kind of people in my circle, kind of family and family adjacent members who were starting to go down these weird rabbit holes, and these were not your typical Folks that you would think would do that.
These were trusted individuals and people that I spent a lot of time with.
And you always kind of other the conspiracy theorist, right?
It's like, oh, I don't know that guy.
That guy's a kooky guy in the corner, right?
But that's not what happened.
And we know that that's not what happened, especially during COVID and during lockdown.
So Once I saw that, and I had already started my Master's in Communication, I realized that that was a really interesting communication event.
And I was specifically looking at it through the lens of Instagram, because at the time I was looking at QAnon.
And so that combination of I'm looking at this from a marketing and communication lens, combined with I'm really genuinely concerned about the people that I love and the people in this world.
I think that that combination is what made me make the big switch.
Not that it happened overnight, but it was pretty swift.
As I'm working on this anti-sunscreen episode, I pinged it on Twitter just being like, hey, this is kind of fascinating.
I'm looking into this more.
And you DM'd me, which I'm very grateful for, because I'm looking at this through the lens of health and health misinformation.
And then you're like, hey, I've done some research on this.
And it goes back in some ways to anti-Semitism, which everything seems to go back to.
I am truly ignorant of your research and I am waiting just to hear what you have to tell me.
Sure.
So I did start looking into this just before I joined ADL as the disinformation analyst at our Center on Extremism.
So everything that I look at That kind of has to be centered around extremist narratives or ideologies.
So there's a million and one conspiracy theories and misinformation narratives in the world, right?
But what I usually look at is, does that narrative skew in any direction that would suggest it is hate speech or extremist?
So what I found in the What I've kind of referred to as the pro-sun exposure move.
I don't know.
I mean, it's anti-sunscreen, but it's also really, really pro-sun.
And the theories range in specifics, but they're centered around various false claims about the sun and about sunscreen.
The sunscreen causing cancer claim, which is really popular in these circles, is not entirely new.
And in July of 2021, I think there was a recall from Johnson & Johnson of certain sunscreen products that contained these trace levels of benzene, which is a known carcinogen.
And so obviously, there's some truth kind of rooted in this theory, which is not unusual for conspiracy theories and medical misinformation.
The conspiracy theory part of that, of course, Is that the people making these products, in this case Johnson & Johnson or the Big Pharma, whatever, are deliberately making them to hurt you, harm you, or in some cases kill you.
And there was one particular influencer on Instagram I call her an influencer.
I don't know if I should do that.
I really don't want to give her a lot of air time, but her name is Melissa Sell.
Are you familiar with her at all?
Oh, she's the one who inspired this episode.
The sun is light nutrition.
Light nutrition, I have that in my notes!
It's not a sunburn, it's light nutrition.
The power of perspective, the power of her kind of paradigm that she pulls from, which is Germanic New Medicine.
So Germanic New Medicine, and this is kind of where I'm going to try and draw the line between the anti-sun stuff and Anti-Semitism.
Again, it's not a direct line, but I will explain.
So, Dramatic New Medicine was kind of this theory created by a doctor who was an actual practicing physician, Reichard Hammer.
I think I'm going to say that right.
Hopefully, I'm not butchering it too bad.
He was a horrible person, so it's okay if you do.
He was a bad person, yeah.
He lost his license for malpractice because he was doing all these crazy pseudoscience things.
There was actually a court case in 1996 where the parents of a cancer patient were tried for inflicting harm on their daughter after they refused chemotherapy treatment at the recommendation of Dr. Hummer, who I think at the time he had already lost his medical license.
And of course, refusing this conventional treatment allowed the tumor to grow and doctors eventually had to intervene.
Here's the thing.
Homer also allegedly believed that Jews created these conventional medical treatments, including chemotherapy, to kill or harm non-Jews.
Does this mean that Melissa Selle and everyone who follows Dramatic New Medicine are anti-Semitic?
Probably not, but honestly when conspiracy theorists refer to these shadowy powers that be, it's not unusual for them to eventually land on the universal scapegoat that is rich and powerful Jewish individuals, which of course we see a lot.
Not to mention that looking back in pretty recent and also years past posts on 4chan, A lot of people straight up just say that Jews made sunscreen.
And I'm reading from this right now, people saying that sunscreen is a Jewish psyop, a Jewish chemical cancer cocktail.
Sunscreen is Jewish.
They have like the echo symbol around sunscreen to indicate that it is Jewish.
There's kind of two ways to look at it.
You know, it's the chicken or the egg thing.
I did the anti-Semitic part come first.
And is that what kind of inspired the normies down the line to adopt this anti-sunscreen thing or are people kind of just getting red-pilled on TikTok or whatever from these like pretty wellness influencers who say that like the sun is making their heart glow or whatever and eventually going back and tracing it back to see who to blame.
I should also point out that Hammer said that chemotherapy was used everywhere in the world except for Israel.
Right, yeah.
Yeah, he was an interesting fellow.
Hasn't gotten enough attention in this discourse and in this topic, in my opinion.
I'm always very curious to learn more about these kind of quack doctors who ends up being really responsible for a lot of medical misinformation.
Same with Andrew Wakefield and the anti-vax movement.
I mean, there's a lot of trust that people put in actual doctors.
And when those doctors kind of flip the script and decide that they don't have to Follow what they learned anymore.
It's really great for conspiracy theorists because they can say, hey, see this guy?
He's got a bunch of letters after his name.
We should trust him, right?
Like we said before, strategy is a very human thing.
And if this doctor finds more benefits in the strategy of conspiracism, then all that medical knowledge goes out the window.
Yeah, I mean you have someone like Samuel Hahnemann who is a physician who actually did not like the barbaric practices like bloodletting and so created homeopathy and actually was a fan of vaccines because he thought vaccines showed that homeopathy had efficacy even though he diluted his distillations beyond any recognizable molecules in what is in the potentization process in homeopathy.
Someone like Hammer leaves to be a physician, creates this complete pseudoscience that's based on something that happened with him in testicular cancer and has no bearing whatsoever in any clinical science.
And then you have someone like Melissa Selk.
She actually, from what I've seen, doesn't talk about antisemitism, does talk about anti-trans ideology.
Yes.
She's going down her own rabbit hole.
Yeah, exactly.
But you have to look at where the people are coming from, and if they're rooted in something without any clinical science, then that's going to be suspect.
And she's selling a lot of courses right now that are based on Hammer's work in her own sort of configuration, and there's no science behind it whatsoever.
And she's a chiropractor.
Right.
That should be pointed out as well.
Yeah, so that's kind of the big part is that it's not a medical doctor.
And then now to be clear, I have no evidence to suggest that these narratives are disinformation.
That would suggest that it has been coordinated and strategic to push an agenda and kind of crafted.
I do believe that these people fully believe and are fully invested in this theory.
I believe that they think they're doing a good thing by spreading it.
And it's sad because we actually don't know the long term consequences of that.
We can probably predict that maybe some people have long term serious harm
from this, but I was I was looking at Tick Tock before. And there's a lot of young girls who believe this theory. And I
actually I pulled something that I want to read from quickly, I
think it's so interesting. And I'm always trying to remind myself that Tick Tock exists, because as a millennial, I'm
like, what is that? But I have to understand that that's such a
primary mode of how people get their information. Now, this one
says, surprised at the amount of people appalled that I don't wear sunscreen when it blocks all the nourishing benefits
of the life giver of our planet that regulates our bodily
processes and increases our mitochondrial health.
So we know that's not true, right?
You're talking about probably like vitamin D absorption, which that narrative has been debunked time and time again.
Sunscreen does not inhibit vitamin D absorption.
As if all of nature doesn't revolve around the sun, but we got to hide from it, like they'd rather slather man-made chemicals on their largest organ to protect themselves.
Another user says inflammatory seed oils also play a huge role in how your body reacts to the sun.
So it's just this constant feedback loop of these same tropes, vitamin D, seed oils,
somewhere down the line is gonna be 5G.
It's all kind of in the same sphere.
And because that same sphere can include anti-trans, anti-Semitism, racism, traditionalist rhetoric,
embrace tradition, it can get really, really scary.
And you can see how all these little health things can end up being a big red pill for a lot of people.
And like I said before, we don't know what the long-term effect
of that is gonna be yet.
And I am concerned about it.
I just found out we grew up a town apart, and one town over where I went to school at Rutgers, you have Johnson & Johnson's World Corporate Headquarters.
I worked at Robert Wood Johnson for two years.
They have an amazing cancer center there.
Obviously, of course, pharmaceutical companies have bad track records, of course, as well.
Have you noticed anything else in the broader sphere of anti-Semitism aimed at the pharmaceutical industry or health industry in particular?
Oh, sure.
In terms of anti-Semitism, there is one notable anti-Semitic hate group called GDL, but there are others like them that spread this narrative, sometimes in the form of memes, sometimes in the form of like physical flyer drops that say every aspect of the COVID vaccine or the COVID pandemic is Jewish and they will target all Allegedly Jewish individuals that were involved in mitigating the COVID pandemic or in creating vaccines.
So that's just one example of many, but you'll see it kind of mainstreamed in a way where they'll say like, oh, the globalist rich corporations want you to take the vaccine.
But in like the overt extremist spaces, the quiet part is very much out loud.
What are some of the real world consequences of this that you think are worth bringing attention to?
And I'm talking about spreading of antisemitism as it relates to health disinformation.
It means that maybe sooner, maybe later, there is going to be more antisemitic rhetoric that has to do with health crises.
If there is another pandemic, It will probably be blamed on the Jews by the same people for the same reason.
And the same with the anti-vax movement.
There's just this deep distrust in health and government institutions, a lot of which is understandable, but the universal scapegoat is always In some way, Jewish people or, you know, famous heads of media organizations or corporations or companies that happen to be Jewish.
I even saw it with the recent Bud Light stuff, targeting the VP of Marketing, who was involved in collaborating with that trans influencer that they did, targeting her for being Jewish.
Like, it doesn't really take all that much to find that line being drawn.
Obviously, we have On record, like a serious and concerning rise in anti-Semitic hate crimes and incidents in America that we noted in the past year.
So it does not benefit that or anybody else to be blaming all these wild and like verifiably untrue health claims on anybody, let alone Jewish people.
You mentioned TikTok, you mentioned 4chan and Reddit.
Are those the main vectors that you're noticing anti-Semitism in or are there other social media channels that you see a rise in rhetoric?
So on mainstream social media, it tends to be less overt because Even today with the mess that social media and platforms like Twitter are, there is still some form of content moderation.
So there tend to be, again, on mainstream social, more dog whistles, more kind of veiled attempts at spreading this stuff.
Sometimes it'll be in an emoji, it'll be in a coded word or a hashtag.
But on places like 4chan, Gab, telegram, there are no safeguards and they can pretty much
say and get away with anything.
And that's the same with alternative streaming platforms and video is harder still to mitigate
when it's just audio that is spreading the rhetoric. So as alternative media or alternative
social media as well become more prevalent and more widespread and more accessible.
Not to mention the threat of deepfakes, which is a whole other thing.
I do think that people have more avenues than they used to, to, like I said before, say the quiet part out loud without consequence.
I know this is the million dollar or billion dollar question, but your work is focusing on combating misinformation and disinformation.
I think it is important to draw the lines that they are different things.
Do you see any evidence that this sort of work is helping to get people out of these red pill rabbit holes that they're going down?
There's research that suggests that methods like pre-bunking, so kind of getting ahead of a false narrative before the public gets to the conspiratorial part of it, there's evidence that strategies like that work.
I don't think it's a scalable or realistic solution right now because there's just so much information out there.
So we are always exploring kind of new research and new ideas on how to mitigate.
I do think that one form of action that kind of feels more like inaction is to not help spread the harmful rhetoric and to not help platform the harmful individuals who are sharing it.
So don't directly link to extremist resources online.
Don't directly retweet or quote tweet a bad actor.
If you're showing a meme or a hate speech flyer or a sign, be sure to blur out any websites or people being targeted.
There are things that we can do that kind of feel like Band-Aid solutions, but at scale can help prevent it.
So is it possible to change the hearts and minds of everybody right now?
No, but we as kind of the ones fighting for the good side of it can take measures to not worsen it and that's Hard to quantify the effects of, but there is a lot of communication research that suggests that reducing amplification can help.
Folks should remember that medical misinformation sometimes feels like its own entity, unrelated to hate and extremism.
But I do like to remind people that they are all cut from the same terrible, terrible cloth.
Andrew Huberman claiming that sunscreen molecules can be found in neurons 10 years after application.
You were saying, I don't know about this, and you sort of put out a call to other people looking for papers.
It seemed like you spent days looking for proof of this, didn't find anything.
Run me through what happened in your head when you initially saw this post.
The claim is he said people had used sunscreen, stopped using them for 10 years, and then they were finding sunscreen in people's neurons.
So I thought, well, Andrew Huberman is a neuroscientist.
This is kind of his field.
So I don't see why I should doubt this.
And then I started thinking more and going, hang on, Well, I assume it's sunscreen molecules.
And of the sunscreen molecules that would be in someone's brain, he is American, there's only about, I think, eight common chemical sunscreens that could even get through skin and end up in the brain.
But how would anyone test this?
Because sunscreen molecules aren't just used in sunscreens, they're also used in lots of other products like, say, hand soap.
So it's used to protect the product from UV, it stops the colour change in hand soap.
So I mean, everyone goes to public toilets and uses hand soaps.
How could you control for that?
How could you make sure these people hadn't used a hand soap?
And then I started asking biologists, so I'm a chemist by training, so biology and any sort of clinical study is kind of a bit of a mystery to me, how any of that operates.
And they're like, this would be very difficult to pass through an ethical review board.
And how could you actually do this on, let's say, cadavers?
It's just not possible.
How could you make sure someone happened to stop using sunscreen 10 years before they died and their body got donated to science?
There would be a lot of logistical difficulty.
So yeah, it's just...
Not a finding that's possible.
You might not be surprised to know, or maybe you do already know, there is also an anti-handwashing movement, so it might be some of those people you can't test for them either.
One thing that Andrew said as well, Dory, and you pointed it out and I went back and found it on Raja Patrick's podcast, was I'm more afraid of sunscreen than melanoma.
Now as a chemist and as someone who specializes in The science of sunscreen.
What do you say to someone who says that to you?
It's really concerning, firstly, because that's also a trend that's happening in Australia.
So we have the Cancer Council here.
Obviously, Australia is just full of people with skin cancer.
Lots of people here are white and we have a big hole in the ozone layer.
We have excellent weather.
Everyone's always outside at the beach enjoying the sun.
But yeah, we are like the skin cancer capital of the world.
So our Cancer Council did a survey where they looked at people's attitudes towards sunscreen and yeah, more people are becoming more scared of sunscreen than the sun, which is concerning because I think it's something like two out of three Australians get skin cancer by the age of 70.
Everyone in Australia knows a bunch of people who have gotten chunks of their face cut out with skin cancer.
One of my dance teachers recently had a chunk cut out of her face, so it's just very bizarre.
And then on the flip side, with sunscreen, no one has actually been hurt by sunscreen, like recorded, apart from things like allergies and things like if you accidentally get it in your eye, that sort of very short-term effect.
Not great, but still short term.
But there's never been any sort of, say, cancer or endocrine disruption based effect that's been recorded in anyone using sunscreen.
Plus there is a lot of regulation around sunscreen.
The percentages allowed in sunscreens are based on very, very cautious interpretations of the toxicological data.
There are so many documented cases of skin cancer and no documented cases of long-term harms from sunscreen, yet even people with this direct knowledge of it, direct experience with it, are still getting scared of sunscreen.
Your feed reminds me somewhat of food science, babe, because you both talk about toxicology and the fact that dose matters.
In the wellness world that I broker in and deal with, people will see an ingredient on a list and then learn that it's a carcinogen, but they have no idea about the dose.
Seed oils I want to talk to you about, that's one thing, for example.
How do you educate someone to understand that just because something is carcinogenic at a high level, it's not going to affect them at the level that they're experiencing with applying sunscreen, for example?
Well, the way I usually do it is by relating it with analogies.
So other things that we know are carcinogens, things like UV, for example.
I mean, we know that people who spend longer in the sun are going to get skin cancer or Have a higher chance of getting skin cancer.
We know that if we go outside for a few seconds, we are probably not going to increase our risk that much.
And it's the same with anything else in our lives that is a potential carcinogen.
And I think that sometimes like there's a lot of very confusing scientific terminology floating around.
So for example, the IARC, they have these carcinogen categories.
They have like a known carcinogen, a probable carcinogen, a possible carcinogen.
And I think those words They are in a toxicological context so even a known carcinogen like UV we know that it causes skin cancer but again it's about dose and yeah just trying to explain that to people with examples that they're experienced with I think that tends to help a lot.
Do you think I think that there's a cultural element that you've noticed with beauty products in general, but specifically sunscreen, and I ask because in general I've noticed Asian cultures will be more willing to put on sunscreen, whereas in America a lot more white people are the ones who are anti-sunscreen, saying the sun is natural.
Do you think there's something in different cultures that Change the dynamic and relationship around people's understanding of these products.
Definitely.
I think there's a huge cultural element.
So I think there's a lot of contributors to it as well.
So first off, I think there's the idea of what is more valued in each culture.
So I think it was in the 1920s where in Western culture, people became more interested in getting tanned.
So having a tan became a symbol of having more money because I think it was Coco Chanel
who went on a summer holiday in the 1920s and they came back with a tan and that was
like in all the newspapers and that became something to aspire to.
So even now you'll see people in the UK for example, they are really into fake tan.
There's a huge culture around that.
Lots of different countries really.
Like that became something that was like a symbol of luxury, an aesthetic to aspire to.
In a lot of Asian countries then it's the opposite because if you have a tan that meant that you worked in the field.
If you had money you would stay inside and you would stay pale and that became really treasured.
But a lot of them have ended up with particular colors.
So India, the Philippines, Southeast Asia, Japan, Korea, China, all of these countries have different reasons why people generally prefer to be white.
There are still subcultures where people will prefer to be tan, kind of like as a counterculture sort of movement.
But overall, there is that sort of element.
And then I think there's also a sort of backlash against science in Western cultures where people, I guess, maybe treasure science less because they have Less problems, maybe, that are solved by science.
I guess outside of the US, outside of developed Western countries, there's still lots of health problems that we kind of take for granted.
So yeah, I think in that sense there's a bit of a victim of its own success kind of thing with the anti-vax movement, with things like not vaccinating your children for measles.
That has now become something to aspire to.
Like, you're too good for measles.
I know our listenership, we're based in America, one of our hosts is in Canada, but our second biggest audience is in Australia and I know there's a wellness scene there.
So I also know from a lot of listeners who contact us that there is a conspirituality movement there, meaning there's a lot of conspiracy theories in the wellness.
When I first talked to you on email for a different story that I was writing for this online publication, you had mentioned that there's this idea that people think that the sun is natural, but you said we've evolved differently over time.
We have different circumstances with how we relate to sun exposure.
Is that correct?
Yes.
There's this idea that we evolve with the sun.
Our skin should be resilient enough to the sun.
But I think the thing that a lot of people forget about evolution is that the only thing evolution cares about is getting old enough to pass on your genes.
And that is not very old.
That's like 20s, 30s.
We haven't done that much evolving since a lot of our world has changed.
Like we have lots of air travel now.
We have summer holidays where we lie around in the beach for two weeks and get super toasted.
That is not something that used to happen.
But skin cancer usually develops later in life.
It usually develops after the age of 40.
Our skin never evolved to deal with skin cancer.
The reason that our skin colors changed as humans moved away from the equator is actually because of folate.
So UV also destroys folate and It's thought that people evolved melanin in their skin to protect their skin and protect their folate stores.
And then as they moved away from the equator into less sunny locations, they lost that melanin because they didn't need to protect their folate as much.
Skin colour has It's never been about skin cancer and people always think, you know, dark skin can't get skin cancer, which is relatively true because melanin is very protective against UV for DNA as well as folate.
But then people think, you know, if I get a tan, that will protect my skin against skin cancer.
And it's like, no, it will reduce your folate loss, which is never something anyone talks about.
Not so much with the skin cancer.
There's another idea that mineral sunscreens are better than chemical sunscreens, and I don't really know where to even start with the science of this.
I'm not a chemist, so can you explain if there's any truth to that or why it's not true?
I'm not sure where to start with that either because it is such a big topic.
And yes, it is everywhere.
So I guess the idea is minerals are natural.
They're basically the same substances as in rocks.
You know, the whole natural is better.
The problems with this is first off, they aren't natural.
Usually a lot of the time they are synthesized because the natural versions, if you get them from rocks, they're often contaminated with heavy metals, which is definitely bad for you.
So first off, they aren't really natural.
Secondly, even if they are nature identical, so you make exactly the same compounds in a lab, a lot of the time they end up coated with synthetic polymers.
And the reason is basically it's like clay.
It's like mud or dirt.
If you have it in some sort of cream, it tends to clump up together.
And if you want something to protect your skin, you want it to spread out nicely.
You don't want it in big lumps because then there's lots of gaps in between.
Usually the better ones tend to be coated.
On top of that, it's really whitening.
It ends up with a white cast on skin, which a lot of people have seen.
And if it shows up white on your skin, you tend to use less.
But the problem is, if you use less, then you have less protection on your skin.
And so you're not letting the sunscreen work as effectively.
It can't form as complete a layer.
On top of that it also feels very gritty because you can't dissolve it like you can with organic or chemical sunscreens.
So because it's all gritty and heavy it tends to clump up on your skin more and it tends to dry out and it tends to clump up even more when your skin gets wet with sweat or if you go into the water.
So there's only two mineral sunscreens available, titanium dioxide and zinc oxide, and both of those are just not ideal for all of these reasons.
They're just inherently Insoluble, gritty, particulate, whitening.
On top of that, it seems like titanium dioxide is potentially carcinogenic if you inhale it.
There's also some suspicion that it could be causing hair loss in some people when they get it near their hairline.
It isn't confirmed, but that seems to be one of the likely culprits at the moment.
And titanium dioxide has always been really tricky because it is phototoxic.
It tends to react in sunlight to generate free radicals.
So you have all of these problems with these two, which are the only two available.
On the flip side, we have organic sunscreens, which are also called chemical sunscreens.
They're carbon based.
And because carbon is such a versatile chemical, you can make so many different structures that will absorb UV really well.
And so I think we're up to about 20 something chemical sunscreens.
All of these have very different properties.
They have different molecular sizes, for example.
Some of them are purposely really big.
So they do not absorb through skin very well.
But everyone tends to just lump chemical sunscreens into this one category and just assume that any of the ones that have ever been used that have had any effects are just bad.
But yeah, there's so many and they're so versatile.
You can do so many things with them.
You can make really lightweight, comfortable sunscreens that still protect well.
But because of all these biases against, you know, lab made synthetic, people are missing out on all this amazing technology.
Your video kind of blew my mind about, you said applicability, and you showed about sunscreen sticks.
And I'm a cyclist, so I often use a stick on my face and arms before I go out riding.
That's probably not the best way to go, from what I gather.
I should probably use something a little more heavy duty, correct?
Yeah, so the problem with sticks is they don't have much volatile content, like they don't have water in them.
So with a sunscreen lotion, it's probably somewhere like 70% water.
So once you apply that, that 70% evaporates and you end up with like the 30% left as a film that will protect you.
The problem with sticks is that they have the same protection at the start, but nothing evaporates.
So you still have 100% to get that SPF 50.
You've got about three times as much stuff on your skin to get the same protection.
So you end up having a lot thicker layer and most people do not apply that thicker layer.
That was definitely eye-opening for me.
Let's go through two more things that I believe are myths and I want to hear your take on them.
One is that sunscreen blocks vitamin D absorption.
I guess it makes sense actually and this is actually an area of ongoing research.
So UVB, once that gets into skin, it can turn pre-vitamin D into vitamin D and that's one of our biggest sources of vitamin D.
Now obviously we can still get it from oral sources like from food and from supplements but that tends to be the biggest source for most people.
So obviously sunscreen blocks UVB and it will block some vitamin D production.
Now whether or not that's a problem Is still being researched, but it seems like it isn't a problem because no one applies enough sunscreen.
First off, people don't tend to apply the right amount to the parts they're applying to.
People tend to apply less than half of what they're meant to apply.
So that doesn't seem to be a problem through that.
Plus, you're also missing a whole bunch of areas.
Like no one applies it entirely to their scalp, for example, or to like the gaps between their fingers.
And if you go out into the sun with sunscreen on, most of the time when you apply sunscreen, you are about to go into the sun.
All those gaps seem to be enough to give you vitamin D. And it seems to be people who actually actively avoid sun exposure, whether they stay inside, whether they have very high coverage clothing for religious reasons, for example, they tend to be the people who have vitamin D deficiency more than the rest of the population.
Now, there are some countries where you just do not get enough vitamin D because you have no sun.
Like in England, this is a really big problem.
And in that case, it seems to be supplementation and some intentional sun exposure.
It seems like if the UV index is low, which means there's not much UV, You should be getting a little bit of intentional sun exposure but the amount you need is not that much for vitamin D. You only need probably about 10 minutes if you have lighter skin and it seems like a little bit more if you have darker skin but even with dark skin it doesn't seem like that prevents vitamin D synthesis that much.
So yeah it's still ongoing research but this sort of idea that you have to lie in the sun for hours and bake and Have your whole body exposed and flip a whole bunch of times.
Basically just cook yourself in the sun to get vitamin D, and that is just not true.
In terms of getting exposure, so you always hear about going outside, but when you're inside, if there are no lights on, you're still getting UV rays because it's light outside.
At what point does that affect you, either positively or negatively, just being inside?
Is there any risk of getting any cancers or stuff if you're inside and not wearing sunscreen?
There is a risk, but it's both higher and lower than people expect.
There's kind of two schools of thought.
US-based dermatologists tend to really promote the idea that you have to wear sunscreen all the time.
And I think there's a bunch of reasons for this, but it's definitely not the consensus everywhere around the world.
And it's not even the case in Australia where we have so much sun.
And then there's the idea that, you know, once you're indoors, you don't need sunscreen.
You probably don't need sunscreen even if you go outside and glass blocks UVB.
So there's only really UVA coming indoors.
UVA is lower energy, but it penetrates deeper and it seems to possibly be one of the big causes of melanoma.
The type of UV that's in tanning beds and tanning beds have been very strongly linked to melanoma more strongly than smoking and lung cancer.
If you're sitting in the sun, if there's sun coming through your glass window and it's hitting you on the face, then that is probably going to be damaging.
On top of melanoma, it also causes skin aging, so if you're a bit vain and you're worried about wrinkles, that is definitely something to look out for.
But if you're away from the sun and if you don't have big windows, that tends to be very safe.
So there's this idea called sky view, which is how much sky you can see.
Something that people aren't really aware of is that if you're in the middle of an open field in the sun, about 40% of your UV exposure comes directly from the sun shining on you and 60% comes from the sky reflecting it onto you.
So if you imagine yourself in like a hemisphere of sky, that's 60% of your UV exposure, and then how much of that sky you see will be how much of that 60% you're getting.
So if you have a giant window, you see tons of blue sky, and you have the sun shining on you through glass, then that is a very high exposure situation.
Also, if you're in a car, you're seeing lots of sky around you, you're probably having the sun shining through glass on you.
That is also high UV exposure.
But if you don't have much sky, like you've got trees blocking half the sky out your window, if you have small windows, you're not in the sun and you're indoors, then yeah, that will be quite low UV and you probably don't need sunscreen.
That's awesome.
Thank you for breaking that down.
Last one, seed oils is a big one right now about the dangers of seed oils.
I can't escape it.
What are your thoughts on that?
It's very weird in skincare.
So I believe the big issue with seed oils is everyone seems to be scared of omega-6 or linoleic acid.
I think the idea is because there's that double bond in it, it's really reactive and it can cause free radicals.
I haven't looked that deep into the food part of it, but interestingly for skin, it seems like Omega-6 is one of the best oils for skin.
So the Omega-6, that linoleic acid, it gets converted in your skin to different ceramides and different substances.
And it seems like that is excellent for your skin.
There's been studies where people have applied sunflower oil to their skin.
And it's been converted to these ceramides and they get much less dry flakiness during winter.
It seems to be Omega-9 that's not great for skin, which is a lake acid, which people seem to be fine with, I believe.
I don't know if that's moved on.
After this podcast, that's it.
That's it.
They're going to be all over it after this one.
Yeah, so it's really bizarre because, yeah, linoleic acid seems to be so good for skin and all these studies where they've directly applied it to babies, to people's dry winter skin, and yeah, and then there's all this stuff about cedar oil.
So yeah, no, you naturally have omega-6 in your skin because it helps keep your skin intact and together and not falling apart.
In winter?
It seems like it doesn't make a difference in the sun either.
Like putting sunflower oil on your skin does not make you burn faster compared to other types of oils.
I have found nothing on this.
I think anecdotally a lot of people do say, I don't know how true the anecdotes are because of course anecdotal evidence is not that reliable, but once they changed their diet they got sunburned less.
And there is some evidence that some parts of your diet can help that and usually it's not about oils.
It can be about plant antioxidants.
There are some antioxidants that seem to be able to increase your resistance to sunlight but Again, the amount is really low.
It tends to be like the equivalent of SPF 1 or 2, which can make a difference if you are really sun sensitive.
But another thing is just like very low amounts of sun exposure might also help that as well.
It seems like your resistance to the sun does increase a little bit.
with extra exposure.
Not to the point of getting a base tan or anything, but if you go out in the sun once a year,
your skin is more likely to burn than the second time you go out into the sun that year.
So yeah, there's lots of influences, but CETOS does not seem to be any of it.
Speaking of anecdotes, when I posted that you were going to be on for this episode,
a lot of listeners were very excited.
You have a huge following of people who are very interested in what you're saying.
It's awesome.
But I am wondering, given this anti-science climate that we exist in, do people push back on you?
I'm not talking about toxic trolls, but I'm just talking about people coming at you with bunk science arguments, probably viciously sometimes.
And then how do you deal with that?
How do you maintain being a science influencer in the best possible way in today's climate?
That's a really good question.
There's a lot of discipline involved in knowing when to step back.
But I think on the other hand, once you do have a bigger platform, once you are educating more of your audience, they often jump into the arguments for you.
And they make really good arguments because, you know, you have kind of taught them well.
And I do tend to think that because of this anti-science climate, there is a bigger, like, science, pro-science movement as well.
I think there are a lot of people who realise that, like, all this anti-science stuff, it makes, it has no internal consistency.
It makes no sense.
It doesn't actually work.
Like, they've tried it and they've come back.
And they realise that, yeah, science seems to be the way to go for most things, at least.
So yeah, I think there is A bit of a pushback with that, and that definitely helps.
I do think it is more difficult.
Looking at the research, it does seem like women do tend to get harassed a lot more, especially if they talk about science.
People just don't seem to believe women when they talk about science.
And of course, like, being a woman of colour, it's kind of like... I mean, I'm not in the worst situation because people do tend to assume Asians are smart and good at maths and science, but Kind of, you know, 50-50 there.
But yeah, I think having support groups is really helpful as well.
So I have a few support groups where I can just, you know, rant and get advice and that is super helpful.
So yeah, having a community definitely helps.
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