AMA #61: Sun exposure, sunscreen, and skin health: relationship between sun exposure and skin cancer, vitamin D production, and photoaging, how to choose a sunscreen, and more

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
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Welcome to Ask Me Anything, Episode 61 And I'm once again joined by my co-host, Nick Stenson. In today's episode, we cover two topics that we have not covered before, but that we've seen a lot of questions over the years. They are skin cancer and sunscreen. We begin the conversation by laying the foundation on what UV is and the impacts that UV has on vitamin D conversion, photoaging, and its role in skin cancer. We look at various skin types and what the implications are of these skin types on sun exposure, vitamin D levels, as well as how to understand where you may fall on the scale and what the implications are. We talk about photoaging and the factors that contribute to it, and then we dive into the different types of skin cancers. We talk about UV and its role specifically in melanoma, which is of course the skin cancer that matters most, as well as other risk factors besides the sun that pertain to melanoma. We speak about tanning beds, skin checks, and why it's probably important to catch skin cancer earlier rather than later. From there, we move into the topic of sunscreen, which seems to be clouded with some confusion. We discuss all things related to sunscreen, its impact on UV radiation, its impact on skin cancer, what SPF levels to look for. And finally, we talk about the differences between organic sunscreens and mineral sunscreens. If you're a subscriber and want to watch the full video of this podcast, you can find it on the show notes page. If you're not a subscriber, you can watch a sneak peek of the video on our YouTube page. So without further delay, I hope you enjoy AMA number 61

**Nick Stenson** (2:42)
Peter, welcome to an AMA.

**Peter Attia** (2:44)
Good, thanks for having me.

**Nick Stenson** (2:46)
Always welcome here. You are always welcome on your own show, so I'm happy to have you. It'd be a little awkward without you, to tell the truth. But for today's AMA, we're going to cover two topics, a little bit related, that we see a lot of questions come through. Also appears to be a lot of confusion around, which I think is why we see so many questions, and that is skin cancer and sunscreen.
And so what we did is we gathered all the questions on this, organized them. We're going to start with skin cancer, move to sunscreen.
We have a lot to cover through this, so I think we'll hit it right away. But anything that you want to add before we get rolling?

**Peter Attia** (3:24)
No, I mean, look, I think this is a topic that I know we internally took very seriously, because it is, I think, easy to just assume the standard chant. And we came at this from first principles, is basically what I can say. So months and months of work by the part of our team, in particular, one of our analysts who, I think, now literally probably knows more about this subject than anyone else, including me.
And so I'm excited to kind of dive into it.

**Nick Stenson** (3:52)
As we get going on the first skin cancer section, I think it'd be important to just quickly cover, what is the impact of UV radiation on the skin?

**Peter Attia** (4:02)
I think we should spend a minute talking about what UV is, but given that we're going to talk about that in a second, there are really three things that you want to be thinking about, right? You want to understand the impact that UV has on vitamin D conversion.
You want to understand the impact that ultraviolet light has on photo aging. And then ultimately you want to understand the role it plays on skin cancers. And we're going to break those out into two buckets.