Sunlight Might Add Years to Your Life. Or Take Them.

Untangling the messy debate around whether the sun will kill us or cure us.

When I was 31, one of my best friends from high school called me. He’s the type of dude who spends his weekends driving the hell out of anything motorized and dangerous—ATVs, side-by-sides, dirt bikes, you name it.

“I have skin cancer,” he said. “It’s Stage 2.”

I immediately got a checkup. I was fine. And, thank God, my friend ended up fine, too.

Being outside and active is one of the best medicines on earth. Then again, the sun might give you cancer.

Given that it’s summer and we’re all spending more time outside—and with competing claims online about getting sun—I asked Sam Nichols to figure out what we should actually do. Sam is a top journalist who started his career at ABC News and Vice. He also happens to be from Australia, where, in 1956, a curious experiment revealed something important about the sun and health …

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Some quick housekeeping before Sam

🎙️ On the podcast: The Art and Science of Mindset

I sat down with two people. First, Cara Lai, a meditation teacher. But not the woo-woo kind. She’s profane. She’s hilarious. And she has an excellent approach to staying grounded when the world feels like it’s going to shit—with wars, inflation, and insanity in Washington. Then Roy Baumeister, PhD. He’s the top researcher on “negativity bias.” Roy explained why we evolved to focus more on bad than good—and what science says about building a more positive outlook.

• Listen to the episode here

• Watch the episode here

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Now here’s Sam:

I’ve always been conscious of what the sun can do to my body. It comes with the territory of growing up in a place like Australia.

But I’ve also always been confused, because this glowing orb is a contradiction: We need its light to be healthy, but its rays can also kill us.

Online, it’s just as unclear. Sunlight is either a cure or a threat.

The psychiatrist and health influencer Paul Saladino—who is, somehow, incredibly tan year-round—contests that sunscreen is poisonous and argues that sunlight is “a nutrient that we need.”

On the other hand, we have Bryan Johnson, the man spending literal millions to slow his aging process. He completely avoids the sun whenever possible because of the potential skin damage. Like when he did this interview at the Enhanced Games in Las Vegas:

The sun is famously a source of Vitamin D¹, a nutrient that’s essential for healthy bones, immune function, and more. But we’ll also have more than 8,500 deaths² from melanoma in the U.S. this year, making it the fifth-leading cause of cancer-related deaths.

So, how should a reasonable person relate to the sun?

To find out, I spoke with a leading epidemiologist and a dermatologist, and dug into the literature. Here’s what I found.

From here you’ll learn:

• How a 1956 experiment first mapped out the global prevalence of skin cancer

• Whether simply avoiding sunburns is enough to avoid skin cancer.

• Where melanoma most commonly strikes men versus women, and whether skin cancer detection apps work.

• The truth about Vitamin D pills, and the food swaps that unlock Vitamin D absorption.

• A massive 20-year study of 30,000 women showing what hiding from the sun does.

• Harvard researcher JoAnn Manson’s precise timing for safely gathering the sun’s non-vitamin benefits, and why where you live changes the UV math.