In Defense Of Sunlight: The *Real Truth* About The Sun, Vitamin D, UVA, UVB, Sunscreen & More, With Rowan Jacobsen.

**Ben Greenfield** (0:00)
My name is Ben Greenfield, and on this episode of the Boundless Life podcast.

**Rowan Jacobsen** (0:05)
US sunscreens are definitely a generation behind. And the reason is that in the US., sunscreens are regulated as an over-the-counter drug.
But the scientists all know this. This is not news to most of the researchers in this field. It's baked into us to seek sunlight. It can be a really helpful tool, but it comes after things like hats and shirts.

**Ben Greenfield** (0:28)
Welcome to the Boundless Life with me, your host, Ben Greenfield. I'm a personal trainer, exercise physiologist, and nutritionist, and I'm passionate about helping you discover unparalleled levels of health, fitness, longevity, and beyond.
All right. If you're ready to upend everything you thought you knew about sun exposure, get ready for this episode. The author of the book, In Defense of Sunlight, Rowan Jacobsen joins me, and this book was great. It was like Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food, accepts an entire treatise on how we've been gaslit, I guess pun intended, when it comes to sunlight. We'll talk about sunscreen and UVA and UVB. Rowan writes about science and nature. He's a journalist and you can find his work in Harper's, Outside, The Atlantic, Scientific American, New York Times, Washington Post, it's all over the place. And just a great author and a really kind of a pattern interrupt of a book. So In Defense of Sunlight is the book. All the show notes are at bengreenfieldlife.com/sunpodcast.
Let's go talk with Rowan. I am late for today's podcast episode because I was out in the sunshine and justifying to myself the morning sun exposure based on my guest's book, which I listened to, fittingly enough, last week in Florida. Well, I was getting plenty of sun and this book made me proud of that fact. So Rowan, welcome to the show, man.

**Rowan Jacobsen** (2:08)
Thanks, man. Sounds like you're doing it all right.

**Ben Greenfield** (2:10)
Yeah. Well, you know what? I'm trying and you know, I actually, I listened to your book and I had never, I hadn't come across you before, take no offense. You were just a new author for me. I'm like, gosh, I got to get Rowan on the podcast and unleash him to the world. And so I'm literally like getting ready to drive from one side of Florida to the other on this hunt. And so I've got, you know, contact Rowan, figure out a way to contact Rowan in my notes. And then I flip on my phone and a Joe Rogan podcast with you appears like that. They have my crap.
He beat me to it.

**Rowan Jacobsen** (2:48)
So yeah, I mean, Joe gets around.

**Ben Greenfield** (2:51)
Yeah, I'm sure many more people know about you now after having done that show. But anyways, the book In Defense of Sunlight, like I mentioned earlier, for those of you listening in, I'll put all the show notes at bengreenfieldlife.com/sunpodcast, bengreenfieldlife.com/sunpodcast.
In Defense of Sunlight, obviously there was the old book, Rowan, I guess old at this time. Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food. So a little bit of a Pollan-esque thesis there. But what is the central thesis, if you could come at it from kind of a simple standpoint for the audience?

**Rowan Jacobsen** (3:27)
Yeah, so the basics are that the book is questioning the current paradigm we're in, where the standard recommendations are for people to avoid any unprotected sun exposure on their skin, to basically wear sunscreen 365 days a year, and basically avoid the sun in general. And once I got into the research, I realized that those recommendations were not really supported by the science. So the book is just calling for a reconsideration of what would be a good healthy amount of sun to be getting.

**Ben Greenfield** (4:04)
Right. So Michael was eat, was it eat food, mostly plants, not too much, something like that? And then how would you phrase your version of that for the sun?

**Rowan Jacobsen** (4:14)
Get sun.

**Ben Greenfield** (4:15)
Okay.

**Rowan Jacobsen** (4:16)
Not too much. Go outside.

**Ben Greenfield** (4:17)
Okay. Get sun. Not too much. Go outside.

**Rowan Jacobsen** (4:19)
But so the reason, yeah, so I think because people are not used to thinking of light as a type of input that can affect health, I thought, you know, what Pollan's book did so well was to show how something, you know, a couple of decades of bad nutritional science had led us into a bad place regarding how food can affect our health. And, you know, he was calling for sort of a return to a more primeval understanding of what those inputs should be. And light is kind of like the missing input. So that's why I wanted to reference Pollan's book in my title.