Decoder Ring | The Fight Over Sunlight

Summary

Podcast Summary: Decoder Ring | The Fight Over Sunlight

Podcast: Slow Burn (Slate Podcasts)
Episode Date: July 29, 2026
Host: Willa Paskin
Featured Guests: Rowan Jacobson (science writer, author of In Defense of Sunlight), Catherine Cox (historian, Director of Syracuse University Press)

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Episode Overview

Main Theme:
This episode of Decoder Ring explores the long and complex history of health advice about sunlight—how it's swung between being celebrated as a vital force for wellness to being feared as a major public health hazard. It traces the science, social trends, and cultural forces that have shaped our attitudes toward sun exposure and suntanning over more than a century, surfacing the medical, racial, and class dynamics at play. The episode aims to explain why expert recommendations about sunlight keep changing, and why moderation—rather than panic or exuberance—remains elusive.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Flip-Flopping Nature of Health Advice

• Willa Paskin opens by reflecting on the whiplash the public experiences with health advice—one day red wine or coffee is good, the next it’s dangerous, fat is bad, now sugar is the true threat ([00:05–02:36]).

• Notable Quote:

  “The studies about coffee are so back and forth, it feels like you’re watching a tennis match.”
  — Willa Paskin & Catherine Cox ([01:28])

• She sets the stage for sunlight as another case study in expert consensus turning on its head—from good to bad to somewhere in between.

2. Current Relationship with Sun & Sunscreen

• Willa describes the sense of anxiety and routine around sun protection today:

  “When I don’t do all the stuff, I feel like I’m driving around in a car without a seatbelt. I feel like I’m doing something needlessly risky.” ([04:35])

• Rowan Jacobson recounts the inherited “conventional wisdom” that sun is dangerous and the uptick in skin cancer is proof we must avoid it ([05:35]).

3. Re-Emerging Science on Sunlight’s Benefits

• Jacobson explains that recent decades have delivered a mountain of studies showing sunlight boosts health outcomes (lower risks of cardiovascular diseases, depression, diabetes, etc.), despite the documented link between sunburn and skin cancer ([06:50–08:03]).
• Notable Quote:

  “People who don’t get very much light exposure at all have very bad health outcomes compared to people who get more light exposure.”
  — Rowan Jacobson ([08:03])

4. How Sunlight Became Medicine: Rickets & Industrialization

• The late 1800s Industrial Revolution left urban children with rickets (due to lack of sunlight) and outbreaks of tuberculosis. Medical science discovers vitamin D, first in cod liver oil and eventually in sunlight ([10:13–12:42]).
• The pendulum swings hugely pro-sun: doctors prescribe sunlight, public health campaigns urge “browning your baby,” and sun decks crop up on hospitals ([13:24]).
• Extreme practices emerge: “People actually start to believe that maybe sunburns are... the answer.” UV lamps are marketed for home use, even for babies ([13:47–14:24]).

5. The Birth of Suntanning and Its Cultural Roots

• Suntanning becomes fashionable in the early 20th century, flipping centuries of pale-skin-as-elite-prestige on its head ([16:14]).
• Myths credit Coco Chanel with starting the trend, but historian Catherine Cox shows this began 30–40 years earlier ([17:51]).
• Notable Quote:

  “It’s got everything to do with race, because you’re talking about a society... where skin color is all about race.”
  — Catherine Cox ([19:03])

• Industrialization shifts lower classes indoors, so tans become a sign of leisure and health, but Cox argues it’s also about race and the white American encounter with the tropics—a complicated dynamic where white tourists temporarily “put on” a darker identity ([19:26–28:23]).

6. The Pendulum Swings Back: Skin Cancer, Melanoma & Sunscreen

• Scientist awareness of UV’s link to skin cancer grows from the 1930s on. Melanoma was rare mid-century but climbs steeply from the 1950s to the 1980s ([29:45–32:59]).
• Sunscreen, invented for WWII pilots, evolves into a beauty aid and later into a public health tool. Early sunscreens fail to block UVA rays, so cases of the most dangerous skin cancers continue to rise ([34:13–39:12]).
• Public messaging (the Australian “Slip, Slap, Slop” campaign), fashion, and product marketing drive widespread sunscreen use, but broad-spectrum protection comes only later ([36:53]).

7. The Modern Sun Dilemma: Indoors, Melanoma, and “Tanmaxxing”

• Despite more sun avoidance, melanoma rates remain high—likely due to patterns of intense, intermittent exposure (e.g., indoor workers vacationing in the tropics).

• Notable Quote:

  “We now spend less time outdoors than any... people in history. We’re up somewhere above 23 hours a day indoors.”
  — Rowan Jacobson ([40:47])

• Jacobson champions moderate, routine sunlight exposure—not sunburn, not total avoidance. Sunlight aids vitamin D, but also many compounds critical to overall health ([42:31–43:27]).

• Major studies show people who get more daylight live longer and have lower risks for many diseases ([43:41]).

• Sunburn, not moderate sun, is most closely associated with melanoma risk ([41:22]).

8. Nuance, Race, and New Recommendations

• Current public health guidelines often ignore differences in skin tone; darker-skinned individuals are at lower risk of skin cancer but higher risk of vitamin D deficiency. Australia’s new three-tiered system is cited as a progressive model ([44:31–45:33]).
• The cultural pendulum now swings between extremes: fear of the sun (“living like a vampire”) and the new viral fad of “tanmaxxing” ([46:16]).

9. Science vs. Media vs. Culture Wars

• Sunlight becomes a partisan issue, amplified in right-leaning media and “just asking questions” spaces like Joe Rogan’s podcast ([46:53]).
• Jacobson is aware of the risk his work could be misappropriated:

  “Anytime you start to fall into the trap of tailoring your words to try to influence people’s behavior... you get in trouble.”
  — Rowan Jacobson ([48:03])

10. The Real Takeaway: Moderation Is (Still) Boring (But Key)

• Health debates, says Paskin, are always shaped by science and cultural anxieties.
• Notable Quote:

  “Health-wise, all the stories we’ve done about this kind of thing... have basically had the same takeaway, which unfortunately is not likely to generate a lot of clicks. It’s moderation. Balance. A little bit of anything is probably fine, too much of it is probably not.” ([49:25])

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Notable Quotes

• On the history of sun advice:

  “First, science drove a new awareness of the good the sun was doing to our bodies. That contributed to a deeply cold cultural and racialized craze for the sun, which itself eventually led to an SPF spackled backlash and more recently, a backlash to that backlash.”
  — Willa Paskin ([03:51])

• On the racial politics of tanning:

  “You can’t talk about white people darkening their skins in that context and not have it be about race. Why on earth would well-to-do white people want to look darker? It’s just bizarre.”
  — Catherine Cox ([19:41])

• On the futility of health panics:

  “Moderation. Balance. A little bit of anything is probably fine, too much of it is probably not.”
  — Willa Paskin ([49:25])

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Important Timestamps

• 00:05–03:51: Introduction, overview of shifting health advice, intro to sun as the latest battleground.
• 10:13–13:41: Rickets, tuberculosis, and the medicalization of sunlight.
• 16:14–19:41: Early 20th-century rise of tanning, racial/class subtext.
• 29:45–32:59: Skin cancer rise, public perceptions, lack of fear.
• 34:13–39:12: Invention of sunscreen, industry/marketing shift, SPF science gap.
• 41:22–43:27: Burn risk, intermittent sun, and how modern life alters exposure.
• 44:31–46:16: Skin tone, vitamin D, and Australia’s progressive advice.
• 46:16–48:38: Polarization, misinformation, the culture war dimension.
• 49:25–end: The boring truth—balance and moderation.

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Memorable Moments

• Discussion of 1920s–30s medical and pop culture’s sun worship—babies being “browned” for health; nudist societies flourishing ([13:24–14:24]).
• Catherine Cox’s breakdown of how tanning allowed white Americans to “play native” on vacation:

  “You go to the tropics to regain the youthful strength that’s associated with the natives during your vacation. ...you can have it on your beach vacation and you can go home, and then you can take it off.” ([24:40–28:23])

• Newsreel, advertising, and government campaigns framing sunscreen as a life or death choice; GI Joe and animated seagulls teach kids sunscreen safety ([36:53–37:29]).
• Sun advice entering the culture wars, with social media “tanmaxxing” trends and skepticism about sunscreen chemicals ([46:16–47:53]).

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Conclusion

The Fight Over Sunlight offers a textured and thought-provoking journey through over a century of evolving wisdom and cultural obsession with the sun. The takeaway is both simple and hard to market: we’d all be better off with regular, moderate sunlight exposure—protecting ourselves from burns, but not living like vampires for fear of melanoma. The pendulum may keep swinging, but the healthiest spot remains somewhere in the middle.

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Recommended Reading from the Episode:

• In Defense of Sunlight by Rowan Jacobson
• Tropical: The Rise of the Tourist South in the Americas by Catherine Cox

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Transcript

[Catherine Cox]

Foreign.

[Willa Paskin]

There's this thing I've noticed, not altogether infrequently, that I think you're probably familiar with. I'm imbibing the news on my phone, my computer, reading the paper, listening to the radio, whatever, and I come across a story that says that something I thought experts agreed was good or at least fine for me is not. Or sometimes it's the opposite, something I thought experts agreed was bad for me. Now they're saying it's good. Let me be concrete. Take alcohol.

[Rowan Jacobson]

There has been for years the belief by doctors in many countries that alcohol, in particular red wine, reduces the risk of heart disease.

[Willa Paskin]

Now it's been all but confirmed. Back in 1991, 60 Minutes ran an influential segment that convinced millions of Americans red wine was a kind of heart healthy miracle fluid. And a glass a day would keep the doctor away. But then, three decades later, the new

[Rowan Jacobson]

research that's out this morning suggests even small amounts of alcohol may increase the risk of developing several types of cancer.

[Willa Paskin]

Okay, so that's alcohol. It's also happened with coffee, which for a while experts seemed concerned might be a killer.

[Rowan Jacobson]

Now a new study finds drinking an average of four cups a day may increase the risk of death.

[Willa Paskin]

Until they weren't.

[Rowan Jacobson]

The latest study says a cup of joe a day could keep you living longer.

[Catherine Cox]

The studies about coffee are so back

[Willa Paskin]

and forth, it feels like you're watching a tennis match. There's more. For years, we were told cholesterol and fat were the enemy. And we were encouraged to eat things like Snackwell's cookies because they didn't have much of either of them. I'm so excited. Snackwell's is now making fudge brownies. This tank's so rich, I can't believe there's only 2 grams of fat. But then health professionals completely changed their minds and said, no. It's sugar filled processed foods like a Snackwells that are the real villains in our diets.

[Rowan Jacobson]

In fact, the new dietary guidelines exonerated fat and said we should not worry about total fat in our diet anymore. In fact, we shouldn't worry about cholesterol in our diet. It's a big 180. And it's because the science just doesn't support it anymore.

[Willa Paskin]

Popular health advice has toggled on so many other things too, some of which we've done episodes about protein, water, salt, chocolate. I mean, back in the 1970s, some doctors thought exercise might be bad for you. Once you notice this seesawing, you see it all the time.

[Catherine Cox]

And here we go again. It's all the rules that keep changing that too much caffeine is bad for you.

[Willa Paskin]

Now caffeine is good for you. I just recently learned about another example, something that experts agree affects our health, but sometimes have said is bad for us and sometimes have said is good for us. But it's far more primordial and essential than steak or cappuccino. Honestly, I never would have thought of it as being akin to alcohol, caffeine, diet or exercise. And yet when you stare at it directly, it hues to this same pattern. Shield your eyes. I'm talking about sunlight. This is decoder ring. I'm Willa Paskin. We really want to do the right things for our health, and yet what that right thing is seems to change all the time. I wanted to understand why. Why through presumably experts and our best intentions, we seem to so frequently flip flop about how healthy something is for us. And it was while I was thinking about all of this that I learned we've been flip flopping about how much sunlight we should be getting for over 100 years. First, science drove a new awareness of the good the sun was doing to our bodies. That contributed to a deeply cold cultural and racialized craze for the sun, which itself eventually led to an SBF spackled backlash and more recently, a backlash to that backlash. If that sounds like a lot of hard to follow twists and turns, that's the point. The way science percolates out to the public doesn't always make sense. And it sure doesn't just have to do with science. So today on decoder ring, why does our love for the sun keep rising and setting? It's July right now, dead middle of the summer, Pretty hot, very sunny. Every morning after I brush my teeth and wash my face, I apply face sunscreen. Then we make sure my kids are also sunscreened. I ask if they want to bring a hat to camp. They never, ever do. And I wonder if I should wear one, too. Or a shirt that covers my shoulders. I don't really love thinking about any of this, and I flat out hate the squirmy, oily chore of putting sunscreen on my children. But when I don't do all the stuff, I feel like I'm driving around in a car without a seatbelt. I feel like I'm doing something needlessly risky. And I know I'm not alone in this feeling.

[Rowan Jacobson]

I think I had kind of inherited the conventional wisdom that skin cancer rates were exploding and the sun was the reason and we needed to do a Much better job of avoiding the sun.

[Willa Paskin]

Rowan Jacobson is a longtime science writer, and he says it's no surprise many of us worry about the sun. We're told all the time to wear clothing, seek out shade, and especially put on sunscreen in order to protect ourselves from skin cancer.

[Catherine Cox]

Skin cancer remains the most commonly diagnosed cancer in the United States. Soaking up those rays comes with some serious risks.

[Rowan Jacobson]

Sure, it feels great on our skin, but we know it comes at a cost. Whenever you burn, that's a sure sign that your DNA in your skin cells has been damaged and, over time, can lead to skin cancer at the same time. I've always liked the sun. I always felt good on bright days. And I live in Vermont, so we have six months of long winter, and I always missed the sun during those dark months. But in the summer, you know, I'd be out all the time, and I would just feel my whole physiology transform my energy, my happiness.

[Willa Paskin]

Still, Rowan took the risks posed by the sun seriously, and so he stayed away.

[Rowan Jacobson]

And that started to change 10 years ago.

[Willa Paskin]

What changed?

[Rowan Jacobson]

New studies started popping up that definitely did not fit with what we'd been told about sun exposure.

[Willa Paskin]

Rowan began to dig into those studies and found lots of research showing that sunlight was actually good for us in all sorts of ways.

[Rowan Jacobson]

We now have really overwhelming evidence from hundreds of studies that have been done over the past couple of decades that at least modest amounts of sunlight will reduce your risk of all of the major diseases of civilization. So all the big cancers, all the big cardiovascular conditions, heart attack, stroke, diabetes, dementia, depression, all of that is lower in people who get more than a little sunlight.

[Willa Paskin]

What about skin cancer? People who are in the sun have

[Rowan Jacobson]

higher rates of skin cancer.

[Willa Paskin]

Yeah, but otherwise, good health outcomes.

[Rowan Jacobson]

Exactly.

[Willa Paskin]

Rowan's not denying the link between skin cancer and sunlight or saying it's no big deal. But it did start to seem to him that in focusing on only on the potential dangers of sunlight, we might be missing the danger in not getting enough sunlight.

[Rowan Jacobson]

You look at all the evidence, and it's very clear from a lot of different types of research, people who don't get very much light exposure at all have very bad health outcomes compared to people who get more light exposure. And, you know, everyone debates about why that is, but it's very well established that people who are exposed to very little daylight do not do well short term or long term.

[Willa Paskin]

Rowan thought this information, that sunlight doesn't just hurt us, in fact, it helps us, was not being clearly communicated to the public and decided to communicate it himself. In a new book called In Defense of Sunlight.

[Rowan Jacobson]

Risk assessment is always complicated, especially when you come down to public health recommendations. Nuance often gets lost. But we're only acting on the skin cancer part of it. The rest of it isn't being incorporated into public recommendations.

[Willa Paskin]

Later in this episode, we'll have Rowan go deeper into the claims and science included in his book. He's going to make his defense. But before we get there, I want to lay out how sunlight got to the place that it needs a defense at all. I want to lay out the pendulum swings that have beset sunlight as surely as they have beset alcohol and caffeine, but protein and sugar. Because sunlight sure didn't start in need of defending. For much of human history, we have worshiped the sun, organized our lives around it, its strength, its cycles. And even when we first started to pay attention to it, medically speaking, in the late 1800s, it wasn't because we thought it might be bad for us, not at all. It was because something unprecedented had happened that revealed how vital the sun was for our health. And what happened is that for the first time in history, some of us had started living without it. In the late 1800s, Northern Europe and the UK began to industrialize. And as they leave their agrarian economy behind, laborers move out of the fields and into the cities.

[Rowan Jacobson]

Suddenly, these farm kids were working in factories, living in tenement houses, using coal for power. So the cities are covered in coal smog, and all the kids start coming down with rickets. Rickets is a terrible disease where your bones don't get hard enough in childhood, and so you get deformations, you get bowed legs, you get a lot of bad things. But the kids in the countryside didn't have rickets, and they didn't know why

[Willa Paskin]

for a long time. Many people believed the problem was dietary,

[Rowan Jacobson]

because if you give cod liver oil to kids, the kids got over the rickets.

[Willa Paskin]

Cod liver oil was an age old folk remedy for a lot of ailments, so nobody really could explain why it worked. But eventually, after a number of experiments, they figured out there must be some mystery substance inside the cod liver oil responsible. A new kind of vitamin, different from the three that had been discovered so far.

[Rowan Jacobson]

And so they called it vitamin D.

[Willa Paskin]

But even more important was when they figured out how vitamin D got into the cod in the first place.

[Rowan Jacobson]

What they finally figured out was that the cod liver oil had the vitamin D in it because the fish had made the D with sunlight. And they discovered that if you shone ultraviolet light on skin, you could actually

[Willa Paskin]

create vitamin D. So the miracle substance wasn't some fish specific nutrient that you could only get from downing revolting spoonfuls of liver oil. Vitamin D was something humans could make themselves simply by letting UV rich sunlight hit our skin. Which wasn't happening much for the kids in the industrial slums of London.

[Rowan Jacobson]

The kids were never seeing the sun, were never making vitamin D and they're all coming down with rickets. And they figured out that sunlight would cure rickets. And at the same time, they discovered that sunlight could cure cutaneous tuberculosis. And tuberculosis was the worst disease Europe had in the 19th century. It killed like one out of four people.

[Willa Paskin]

The most famous form of tuberculosis is found in the lungs, but the cutaneous kind attacks the skin and then it

[Rowan Jacobson]

kind of like, you know, eats your flesh. And that form could be cured by sunlight. And the guy who discovered that won the Nobel Prize in 1903. So by the early 1900s, everyone is like, oh my God. Sunlight cures rickets, it cures tuberculosis. What else might it do?

[Willa Paskin]

Imagine a giant pendulum that represents sunlight. For all of human history, it's basically been hanging there, stable still. And now with a push from the medical establishment, it starts to move because they've learned the sun isn't just shining down on us ineffectually, it's medicine.

[Rowan Jacobson]

So this general sense came along that the sun could cure everything.

[Willa Paskin]

Doctors at tuberculosis sanitariums in the Alps start to prescribe sunlight to patients. In addition to fresh air, Thousands of Germans join nudist societies and do group gymnastics outdoors with their whole bodies exposed. Hospitals build sun decks on their roofs.

[Rowan Jacobson]

The medical establishment is 100% on board. Everybody needs to get sun. The US government prints pamphlets called Sunlight for Babies and distribute, which is about, like, you know, make sure you brown your baby on each side for a few minutes. Like kind of like a roast chicken or something. Yeah, like sun. Sun is the answer.

[Willa Paskin]

And pretty quickly, that pendulum that just started moving, it's hurtling to one side.

[Rowan Jacobson]

And then, as we always do, we go too far. And people actually start to believe that maybe sunburns are like, really the answer.

[Willa Paskin]

Like, people start to be like, pro sunburn.

[Rowan Jacobson]

Yeah. People start to think, oh, a sunburn that, you know, that keeps you healthy. Right. A good little burn is what you need. So companies like GE start marketing these ultraviolet lamps for the comfort of your own home. Where, you know, they would literally say, like, you know, you can get a burn in just 20 minutes or whatever. And people are encouraged to like, hang it over their babies cribs and, you know, use it themselves.

[Willa Paskin]

Not even in the sun, like, in their houses, Just sitting in front of, like, a UV lamp.

[Rowan Jacobson]

Yeah, yeah. And they hit their kids with it every day. You can see crazy photos like New York City school children being irradiated in their underwear in, like, 1931.

[Willa Paskin]

All of this is pretty extreme. And while it may have started for medicinal reasons, encouraged, at least at first, by doctors, that can't really explain all these people sitting at home using proto tanning beds to zap themselves. There was another reason sunlight got so hot, and it had nothing to do with science. It was that people liked how the sun made their bodies look. Getting sun wasn't just something doctors were telling people to do. It had become fashionable, stylish, cool. In other words, in the 20th century, the suntan as we know it arrived not as something incidental, but as something desirable. When we come back, the history of suntanning or why did a bunch of white people decide they wanted to darken their skin? Some years back, Katherine Cox, a historian and the director of the Syracuse University Press, was doing some research on the history of tourism in the early 20th century.

[Catherine Cox]

You know, reading cruise brochures and travel books about all the places that I was looking at and women's magazines.

[Willa Paskin]

And in all the advertisements and articles, she noticed something kept popping up.

[Catherine Cox]

You start to see this language around sun tanning. You have these rich people talking about bronzing their skin.

[Willa Paskin]

And it struck her how strange the whole concept of sun tanning is that people would intentionally start to darken their skins in the name of beauty or fashion. Before the 20th century, it was unthinkable.

[Catherine Cox]

For much of the previous two or three hundred years, women especially had been trying to be as pale as possible. Being pale is a sign of social prestige. And so to see wealthy white people start talking about suntanning was just. It was like, wait, where did this come from?

[Willa Paskin]

Now, there are popular stories you may have heard about how suntanning became a thing. The most famous is that suntanning became fashionable because of Coco Chanel. The elegant fashion designer supposedly came home from a holiday at a seaside French resort in the 1920s and shocked all of Paris with her new bronze glow. She then gave an interview to Vogue magazine, where she decreed, a golden tan is the index of chic and that the 1929 girl must be tanned. And voila. Single handedly, she sparked a sad. The one problem with this story is that it never happened. There's no evidence anybody connected Coco Chanel with tanning during her lifetime. And that 1929 Vogue magazine interview doesn't exist. The quote's actually from an advertisement completely unrelated to Chanel. Besides, she couldn't have kicked off a tanning trend in 1929, because tanning was already a trend with much deeper roots.

[Catherine Cox]

30 to 40 years deeper. I was seeing this stuff in the 1890s and the 1900s.

[Willa Paskin]

And the other standard origin story starts even earlier. And it has to do with something we've already talked about for hundreds of years. Most lower class people spent their days laboring outside in the sun and thus got tans. So having pale skin was desirable, a sign that you were wealthy enough to spend your time indoors. But that all changed. Thanks. Yes, that's right. To the Industrial Revolution.

[Catherine Cox]

Increasingly, poor and lower class people, instead of being in agricultural fields getting tan, are in factories inside staying pale.

[Willa Paskin]

Meanwhile, rich people are now free to go outside and enjoy a nice hike or play sports. And so everything flips. Pale skin marks you as poor and possibly ricket saddled, while a tan becomes a status symbol. And thus people started sunbathing. It's a very European story that sun tanning is essentially all about class. But every time Catherine heard it repeated, she felt like something did not add up.

[Catherine Cox]

I just, I thought, this is crazy. This cannot be the full story. It's got everything to do with race, because you're talking about a society in the United States where skin color is all about race. I mean, the early 20th century is really just the worst in terms of racial animus and global white supremacy.

[Willa Paskin]

White people in the United States first decided it was fashionable to have brown skin at a time when Jim Crow was becoming entrenched, when the Klan was being revived, when lynchings were rampant, and eugenics had never been more mainstream.

[Catherine Cox]

I mean, you can't talk about white people darkening their skins in that context and not have it be about race. Why on earth would. Well, to do white people want to look darker? It's just bizarre. And I wanted to understand that.

[Willa Paskin]

And what she found is that it's all tied up with the changing ways that white people vacation. Because it used to be very different. Today we're used to people seeking out some sunny, warm destination to lounge on the sand and catch some rays. But that is not what people did in the middle of the 19th century.

[Catherine Cox]

Beach going. The way we think of it, you know, to lie on the beach, to play in the water was not a thing.

[Willa Paskin]

And it certainly was not happening in places like Bermuda, Cancun, or Miami.

[Catherine Cox]

People did not think about going to the tropics on vacation, because the tropics were diseased and dangerous, especially for white people.

[Willa Paskin]

The tropics, white people thought to be so perilous, included some places we no longer think of as tropical. The Caribbean, Central America, sure, but also Florida and even southern California. And the concern wasn't just that these places could give white people diseases like malaria and yellow fever. There were more racist ideas about what made these places dangerous as well. They believed that particular climates naturally bred specific traits in the people who lived there.

[Catherine Cox]

And they say because the climate is so kind, they don't have to work hard. Food just literally falls off the tree for them. Whereas we sturdy northerners, we have to work for everything that we got. You know, this makes us smarter, more virtuous, harder working.

[Willa Paskin]

And white North Americans feared that going to the tropics would corrupt them.

[Catherine Cox]

That if you go there and spend time there, you will do what they call degenerate. You will become a lazy, promiscuous, dark skinned person. So there's a real sense that the place and the climate themselves will undermine everything that white people think makes them superior.

[Willa Paskin]

So no beach vacations down to Mexico, no suntanning on Daytona Beach. But then toward the end of the 1800s, some things gradually start to shift people's attitudes away from the idea that tropical climates are inherently bad for white people. One is germ theory, which is a

[Catherine Cox]

very different way of understanding disease.

[Willa Paskin]

Once people discover that diseases like malaria and yellow fever are caused by parasites and viruses carried by mosquitoes, it becomes possible to protect against them. Simultaneously, within the United States, investment and development are pushing south and west.

[Catherine Cox]

The people who go to Florida and the people who are heading into Southern California, they are also finding out that actually, it's kind of nice to live in a warm climate.

[Willa Paskin]

As they build railroads and resorts, travel boosters are reassuring people that the tropics have been tamed. They aren't dangerous and wild. They're a place you might relax for two months.

[Catherine Cox]

And the idea of a tropical vacation on a white sand beach with a sparkling blue sea is a key part of that expansion, of making the world safe, you know, for white people, basically.

[Willa Paskin]

So developers are making warm and sunny places safer, more comfortable, more civilized for white vacationers. But something else is happening, too. Some white people are starting to worry that their own lives have become too

[Catherine Cox]

civilized and that they've become weak because they sit inside too much and they just do office work and they aren't tough enough.

[Willa Paskin]

And a solution to this becomes turning to the places untouched by the Ills of the modern world, the tropics, where the locals supposedly lounge about all day free of want, never having to work.

[Catherine Cox]

You know the trope of a kind of return to nature and reclaiming a primordial health that supposedly we've lost through excess civilization.

[Willa Paskin]

And under this thinking, maybe it would be a good thing actually if some of those imagined qualities of so called native peoples, or to rub off on

[Catherine Cox]

them so that white people want to adopt certain traits that they associate with dark skinned people in order to strengthen themselves so that they can be even stronger white people.

[Willa Paskin]

All of the negative racist stereotypes are flipped to become positive racist stereotypes. Now, instead of lazy, immoral, promiscuous and stupid, the natives are seen as carefree, happy, vigorous, full of the innocence of childhood. And so white people are encouraged to go native temporarily. There's no fear that vacationing in the tropics will degenerate you, they say. Instead, it will rejuvenate you.

[Catherine Cox]

For tourists, it's very much a temporary thing. You go to the tropics to regain the youthful strength that's associated with the natives during your vacation. It's like you're taking all of the positive aspects of that identity into yourself, but you're remaining white.

[Willa Paskin]

Okay, it's now just about the turn of the 1900s, and vacations have been completely made over. Where white people once feared the so called tropics as degenerating and diseased, they now find them alluring, exciting, relaxing, recharging. And as vacation culture in places like Florida and Southern California begins to take off, so does beach culture. People are starting to head to the shores to go swimming. At first, swimming meant being covered up in layered woolen bathing suits that left everything to the imagination. But remarkably quickly, swimsuits shrank to the point where it was now socially acceptable to bear a whole lot of skin on the beach. And with more skin exposed, it opened the door for everyone to start sun tanning. In 1929, as people were already zapping themselves with UV rays for health, the New York Times described a growing cult of worshippers who lie for hours prone before the majesty of the sun, wearing garments specially designed to bear to his rays as much of their bodies as their conscience or the police will permit. Meanwhile, hundreds of Manhattan apartment buildings made like hospitals before them and altered their roofs to accommodate sunbathers. And movie stars like Greta Garbo, Kay Francis and Clara Bow all began to flaunt bronzed complexions. This may have been influenced by the ideas about health we've discussed, but clearly this wasn't just about health.

[Catherine Cox]

Everybody's writing about it. It's fashionable, it's trendy. The cosmetics companies are coming out with sun creams. And, you know, increasingly the fashion writers are like, you need to be beautiful. And this year, being beautiful means being bronzed. And here's how you do it.

[Willa Paskin]

And as the trendsetters and the cosmetics companies and the magazines keep hyping up the suntan, they're doing it in a very particular way.

[Catherine Cox]

All of the language that you see around tanning is racialized. You know, people will be described as brown, as an Indian, she's just like those bold South Seas girls.

[Willa Paskin]

Advertisements routinely promoted suntans as giving their wearers a tinge of the exotic Oriental Arabian. The Chicago Daily Tribune jokingly compared vacationers to bands of savages, their faces tanned to a deep mahogany, not unlike the natives of some tropical island. An editorial in 1932 described suntanners as living in a carefree, perpetual paradise and wondered if all these people with the beautiful brown skins represent a gradual return to the ancient civilization or pre civilization from which we are all sprung.

[Catherine Cox]

So it is about being able to put on the stereotypical identity of a supposed person of color for a short while, to enjoy all of the things that are wonderful about supposedly being a person of color. A bolder sexuality, physical health, childlike carefreeness, lying on the beach doing nothing and turning brown. And you can have it on your beach vacation and you can go home, and then you can take it off.

[Willa Paskin]

And that, Catherine concluded, is so much of the deep appeal of suntanning health class. They play a part, but they're not enough. They can't explain the lasting attraction of tanning, how tans have remained popular even as people of all classes can get one. And health advice has turned so decisively against them because it has. When we come back, the pendulum swings away from sunlight. But did it swing too far? So for the scientific and social reasons we've just outlined, by the 1920s, there is a full blown craze for sun tanning. It's medically advised and aesthetically desirable. And like flagpole sitting and dance marathons, a trend of its day. But with the clarity of hindsight, we can look back at this moment of people crisping their skins like chickens and know this trend is not quite as innocent as jitterbugging the night away. And that's because, though people thought they were just increasing their vitamin D with all that UV light, that is not, in fact, all they were doing. Rowan Jacobson again.

[Rowan Jacobson]

So the initial Studies came in the 30s, when the researchers were like, we think ultraviolet light might actually trigger skin cancer. We've learned, for example, that people who spend a lifetime of exposure outdoors constantly under the sun's rays are more apt to develop skin cancer than indoor workers. Why?

[Willa Paskin]

Here's why. The light that comes out of the sun comes in a range of wavelengths,

[Rowan Jacobson]

and that includes all the visible light. You know, Roy G. Biv, if you want to go back to high school. And the difference between all those colors is just how energetic they are and what their wavelength is.

[Willa Paskin]

But when the wavelengths start to get really small, shorter than 400 billionths of a meter, they become invisible to the eye. And that's ultraviolet light.

[Rowan Jacobson]

Ultraviolet is the highest energy type of light that comes out of the sun.

[Willa Paskin]

It's so high in energy that when it hits our skin, it can prompt our cells to start making vitamin D. But it's also so high in energy that it can damage the molecules in our cells.

[Rowan Jacobson]

It can actually, like, break the bonds in molecules, or it can mess up DNA. So that high energy is why it can cause skin cancer.

[Willa Paskin]

There are three kinds of skin cancer. Two types of carcinoma and melanoma. You don't want any of these, but carcinomas typically do not affect overall mortality.

[Rowan Jacobson]

Those basal cell carcinomas and squamous cell carcinomas, which make up the vast majority of skin cancers, like 97, 98%, they don't tend to have really bad health outcomes. Almost always they get cut off, and that's the end of it.

[Willa Paskin]

That's not the case with the third type of skin cancer, melanoma. Melanomas are very dangerous. But when scientists were starting to understand there was a connection between UV light and skin cancer, melanoma was uncommon.

[Rowan Jacobson]

It was very, very, very rare. Even in the 1950s, incidence rates were like, 2 per 100,000.

[Willa Paskin]

But as the 50s became the 60s and then the 70s, melanoma rates began to climb precipitously, and doctors started to sound the alarm.

[Rowan Jacobson]

That's the less common type of skin cancer, the one known as melanoma. But it is the most dangerous of all the skin cancers because it has the capacity to spread through the blood. If you had your way, would you

[Willa Paskin]

encourage people never to sunbake?

[Rowan Jacobson]

Oh, yes, I think definitely. The deliberate sunbaking is an unwise thing.

[Willa Paskin]

But even though doctors were talking about it and the rate of melanomas was rising rapidly, the total cases were still quite low. So though there was growing awareness that sun tanning might cause skin cancer, people Continued to sun tan. They weren't particularly scared that skin cancer was going to kill them.

[Rowan Jacobson]

Never thought about it much really.

[Catherine Cox]

Not really.

[Willa Paskin]

I haven't really given it much thought.

[Catherine Cox]

No, don't think about it. Don't think about any cancer.

[Rowan Jacobson]

People were doing some crazy things to their skin. The goal to get like, as dark as possible was strong. Like from, from today's perspective, it's just like it makes you wince.

[Willa Paskin]

And those melanoma rates, they kept exponentially climbing. The two incidences per 100,000 in the 1950s would get up to 20. Eventually it had become a hundred times more likely.

[Rowan Jacobson]

So that huge rise basically freaks out the doctors and they're not able to stop it.

[Willa Paskin]

Skin cancer was suddenly a public health emergency and something needed to be done to contain was. At this point, that attention turned in earnest to a niche product that had been invented 30 years prior, but was about to see its usage and fortunes completely change.

[Rowan Jacobson]

Sunscreen. It's got a bizarre history. The first US sunscreen arrived thanks to World War II and thanks to the US Air Force, actually. United States Liberator bombers and Lightning P38s attack a Japanese base off Bougainville in the Solomon islands. World War II was raging in the South Pacific. U.S. pilots were getting shot down and then were like getting fried on life rafts or on islands in the South Pacific while they waited for help. So the government actually went to Georgia because GE knew all about ultraviolet radiation because they were making the lamps that everyone was using and said, can you develop. We need something that can be in the kit that's on every life raft in every plane that the airmen can use when they're like, waiting for help.

[Willa Paskin]

The Air Force needed something that could keep a person from burning, that wouldn't wash off easily and that could survive being frozen at high altitude. GE eventually came up with a substance based off a red veterinary petroleum jelly for horses.

[Rowan Jacobson]

And it did all those things right. You could coat yourself in it. It definitely blocked any sunlight from hitting you. It never came off without great difficulty. It smelled bad and it looked terrible, but it worked.

[Willa Paskin]

Red Vet Pat, as it was known, became standard issue during World War II. When the war ended, a former airman decided to make something better for civilians. His breakthrough was to add cocoa butter and coconut oil.

[Rowan Jacobson]

And that smelled a whole lot better.

[Willa Paskin]

In 1946, he put his new and improved product on the market. What would become Coppertone Suntan Cream. And the name says it all. This was not sold as sunscreen. It wasn't supposed to protect you from the sun. It was supposed to be a cream, an aid for, for getting you that copper tone.

[Rowan Jacobson]

Get a deep, dark, long lasting tan. Get enriched copper tone.

[Catherine Cox]

Don't be a pale face. Use copper tone.

[Rowan Jacobson]

It was marketed as a product to help you tan without burning. It was not intended to be protection.

[Willa Paskin]

But by the 1970s, with skin cancer rates skyrocketing, suntan lotion companies saw an opportunity to reposition themselves to to rebrand their old products as something healthful. In America. They successfully lobbied the FDA to classify sunscreen as an over the counter drug which might help reduce the risk of cancer. And that's when they introduced something called spf.

[Rowan Jacobson]

So that's sun protection factor and it's just a multiple of how much longer you can stay out in the sun before you would burn.

[Willa Paskin]

The SPF or sun protection factor is determined this way. Let's say you burn in one hour. If you use an SPF of two, you'll burn in two hours.

[Rowan Jacobson]

So it starts to sound much more scientific and medical. And it was the best thing that ever happened to the industry in terms of sales. The sun has dried much hardier things than you. So imagine what it can do to your skin. Enter eclipse. Eclipse protects you with scientifically formulated sunscreens to kill, keep the damaging rays out. Let the tanning rays you want through. Suddenly it's like you need to protect yourself from death.

[Willa Paskin]

Protecting yourself from death. It sounds pretty good to me. And it sounded pretty good to the nation of Australia too.

[Rowan Jacobson]

1980, Australia, which has the worst skin cancer problems, rolls out its slip, slap, slop campaign.

[Willa Paskin]

The sun shining down, so desperate to brown. But skin cancer isn't so hot.

[Rowan Jacobson]

No, it's not.

[Willa Paskin]

In these ads, an animated seagull named Sid exhorts Australians to slip on a shirt, slop on some sunscreen and slap on a hat. Just say these simple words, slip, slop, slap.

[Catherine Cox]

It sounds like a breeze when you

[Willa Paskin]

say it like that.

[Catherine Cox]

Slip, slop, slap.

[Willa Paskin]

These ads, which have become the longest run running ad campaign in Australian history, were hugely successful and influential. And they heralded a huge change in the fortunes, not so much of shirts and hats, but of sunscreen.

[Rowan Jacobson]

Everyone in Australia starts using sunscreen. So then the other western countries basically copy Australia's marketing plan. Hey Stella, your friend's been out in the sun without protection. Leatherneck. Next time use the sunscreen. Wear a hat, the shirt. Look for some shade when it's really sunny. A bad sunburn could make you sick and even put you in the hospital. Now we know and knowing is half the battle GI Joe

[Willa Paskin]

and people listened. A 2022 study found that 71% of respondents regularly use one of the three forms of sun protection when they're outside. That's a hat, a shirt or sunscreen. So this has been an incredible public health messaging success, but it hasn't moved the needle on the public's health in the ways you might expect. Carcinoma rates have gone down. But even after sunscreen was widely adopted, rates of melanoma, the worst kind of skin cancer, continued to rise in most of the world throws through the 80s, the 90s, into the 2000s. These numbers are pretty staggering when you think about it.

[Rowan Jacobson]

And the numbers are going up.

[Willa Paskin]

Part of this is because sunscreen, the sunscreens we were all exhorted to use by a cartoon seagull and GI Joe and governments and sunscreen companies, it turns out they were actually just not very good at protecting us. See, ultraviolet rays come in two basic types, UVA and uvb. And the early SPF sunscreens were not designed to block UVA rays.

[Rowan Jacobson]

Everyone thought UVA was not a problem because it had less energy than uvb. They block all the uvb, which is the portion of the ultraviolet spectrum that causes sunburns. So if you just block uvb, you can stay out in the sun for hours and hours, you're never going to burn. But all that time, vast quantities of UVA radiation are going into your skin. And we now know that the UVA is the wavelength that is most strongly associated with melanoma.

[Willa Paskin]

Or to put this in totally self obsessed personal terms, for the entire 1980s and 90s, my childhood, we were all running around in sunscreen. That didn't really protect us very well at all.

[Rowan Jacobson]

Yeah, by, by allowing you to stay out in the sun that much longer and absorb all that uva, they were probably, you know, encouraging patterns of behavior that led to melanoma.

[Willa Paskin]

We now have broad spectrum sunscreens that protect better against both UVA and uvb and even more effective ones should be available in America soon. But the quality of sunscreen is not the only factor contributing to the counterintuitive rise in melanomas.

[Rowan Jacobson]

Ultimately, sunscreens, like everyone wants to talk about sunscreen. That's not the issue. The issue is too much time indoors. The rise in melanomas tracks directly with a plunge in the amount of time that we all spend outdoors.

[Willa Paskin]

If we started the story with newly minted industrial workers spending unprecedented amounts of time indoors. Well, think about us now. So many people have indoor jobs and our leisure increasingly Happens indoors, too.

[Rowan Jacobson]

We now spend less time outdoors than any, you know, people in history were up somewhere above 23 hours a day indoors.

[Willa Paskin]

Given everything we know about sunlight, you might assume this would make us pretty unhappy and unhealthy, but much less likely to get skin cancer. But while it does seem to equal less carcinoma, it does not seem to be the case for melanoma. And that's likely because of how we are now interacting with the sun when we do catch its rays. Not over long periods of low level exposure, but in short, intense bursts.

[Rowan Jacobson]

Melanoma is closely associated with history of sunburns and with intermittent sun exposure. So you get zero sun for most of your year, and then you suddenly get a lot of. And your skin's not ready for it.

[Willa Paskin]

So, I mean, you're saying melanoma then is associated with basically how lots of us industrialized, affluent people interact with the sun, which is like, we go on vacation. We're coming from February to the Caribbean.

[Rowan Jacobson]

Exactly, exactly. Most people have indoor jobs and then go to, you know, vacation for a week in Cancun and get nailed by the sun. And that's the recipe for melanoma.

[Willa Paskin]

Rowan says it would be better if instead we spent more time outdoors overall, got a decent amount of sunlight year round, not only in one intense go, and probably stayed out of the sun at the peak of the day, like experts recommend and humans have long been doing in places that get really hot. That would be better for us melanoma wise, and not just melanoma wise, because that kind of relationship with the sun. Rowan says the science shows this would be better for us in all sorts of ways.

[Rowan Jacobson]

So most famously, we know that sun creates vitamin D in the skin. And vitamin D is basically an anti cancer molecule. It kind of just like marshals the body's defenses, the body's healing mechanisms. But vitamin D, we didn't know this until the past 10 years. It's only one of a family of a couple of dozen different variations on that molecule that is produced in the skin by sunlight. And it's different amounts of sunlight combined with different enzymes that are in the skin that will produce this family of vitamin D like compounds. They lower blood pressure, they reduce inflammation throughout the body, they keep the immune system on an even keel. And then sunlight makes your metabolism run better, so you get lower rates of obesity and diabetes and just kind of like more energy and better functionality, better cognitive performance in people who get some sunlight.

[Willa Paskin]

Sunlight is helpful for your sleep, too, your mood. And Rowan says, you also might just Straight up, live longer. He told me about a recent study from the UK that compared how much light 90,000 volunteers got with their overall health.

[Rowan Jacobson]

And the ones who got more light in their days had profoundly better health. The high sun group was 34% less likely to die from any cause than the low sun group. So that's a huge number and very clear that staying indoors during the day really bad for you.

[Willa Paskin]

So Rowan wants people to get outside, however they're comfortable with sunscreen, with hats, with shirts, whatever, just outside. And he thinks that all the focus today on the risks of the sun, on how it might harm us, is a clear sign the pendulum has again swung way too far in the opposite direction from where it was in the sun. Mad 1920s.

[Rowan Jacobson]

Definitely you don't want to get skin cancer, but if you're hurting your health in other ways, then it becomes the interesting trade off question.

[Willa Paskin]

And the risk trade offs aren't the same for everyone because the recommendations rarely take differences in skin tone into account. Skin tone is an extraordinarily important factor in how much sun exposure people can tolerate and in fact even need to produce enough vitamin D. And yet most of the time, sun guidelines just aren't geared towards people with darker skin. The entire SPF system itself is based solely on the fairest people on earth. And it's not just Rowan who's saying this is a problem. So does Australia, who's been the leader once again in trying to deal with this. They recently introduced a new three tiered set of guidelines based around risk level that explicitly accounts for differences in skin tone.

[Catherine Cox]

People with very deeply pigmented skin are at actually very low risk of getting

[Willa Paskin]

skin cancer caused by exposure to the

[Catherine Cox]

sun, but they're at higher risk of vitamin D deficiency.

[Rowan Jacobson]

So our advice for them is to

[Catherine Cox]

actually try and spend a bit of time outdoors to get the benefit benefits

[Willa Paskin]

of sunshine, both vitamin D. Given all this, you might think we ought to be arriving in a new moderate age in our relationship to sunlight. That after all the extremes, the science that Rowan's work and Australia's recommendations are based on now suggests we should have a more balanced perspective, one in which our understandable concerns about skin cancer are tempered with an understanding that the sun helps us too. But instead, as we were working on this piece, we saw the pendulum begin to swing, basically in real time towards a new extreme. Tonight, as record heat roasts America, more and more young people are baking in that peak summer sun in the name of a viral trend.

[Catherine Cox]

Tan maxing.

[Willa Paskin]

I swear, we've evolved to be in the sun. Meanwhile, I feel like everyone is scared now and living like a vampire.

[Rowan Jacobson]

So sunscreen. But I'm always, like, super hesitant. I'm like, what's in that stuff? That we're gonna find out 15, 20 years from now.

[Willa Paskin]

Like, you're spraying this chemical on an

[Rowan Jacobson]

organ, which is your skin, so your skin's absorbing it. And I'm like, what's going on there? Yeah. And they used to say, oh, no, no, it's not absorbed very much. And then the FDA CDC did studies a few years ago and discovered that it's absorbed at very large amounts.

[Catherine Cox]

Yes.

[Willa Paskin]

That last clip is of Rowan chatting with Joe Rogan, host of the most popular podcast in the world. For what it's worth, when I asked Rowan about the chemicals in sunscreen, he said we didn't need to worry about them. The Joe Rogan Experience is the kind of show you might want to go on if you are promoting a book, and plenty of reputable people have. But Joe Rogan infamously gives a platform to all kinds of pseudoscience and moreover, is politically coded in a right leaning, just asking questions kind of way. It's. In other words, sunscreen and sunlight seem poised to become another highly polarized front in the never ending culture wars. And I was curious if Rowan was concerned about his work playing a part in that. Are we about to be in a place where again, people are like, no, no, you should get a sunburn. Like sunscreen and is for pussies and like, you're only eating 100%, like raw bison basted in beef tallow. And you don't wear sunscreen. Right.

[Rowan Jacobson]

Well, you can just use the beef tallow as the sunscreen.

[Willa Paskin]

Exactly right. Do you worry about, like, because it just feels like it fits with such a set of interests about like these little coddled men who can't even handle a sunburn, you know, like.

[Rowan Jacobson]

Right. Well, what do you think? Throughout history, there have always been, you know, nut balls out there. There will always be nut balls out there. And of course now, like, you know, those nut balls can be followed by other nut balls. Yeah. Well, not going to stop those nutballs by sort of like producing our own version of misinformation. Right. So you have to present the real information. I think anytime you start to fall into the trap of tailoring your words to try to influence people's behavior, like for a specific end, you get in trouble.

[Willa Paskin]

The things we're talking about here are presentation and reception, how scientific interpretation is disseminated and received. Rowan has a point of view, and he wants to get it out there. But not everyone agrees with him, including the American Academy of Dermatology. Some people who do agree with him seem likely to take things way too far. But though all of this back and forth which you now know follows decades of back and forth about sunlight has to do with science, it does not just have to do with science. These kinds of debates about health recommendations are always arriving in a particular time and place place, one with its own preoccupations and concerns and third rails. They're always arriving in a cultural context. This particular one we're in right now includes research that's often granular and undramatic, but a media landscape that only gives space to exceptional news, to the studies and articles, and takes that say X is going to kill you or Y will save your life. It also includes a society with many people fiercely skeptical of authority but surprisingly open to life hacks. As we try to safeguard our own health and well being, we latch onto new information and sometimes overdo it, treating anything that's supposed to be good for us as infinitely good for us, whether that's protein or peptides or water or sunlight. Health wise. All the stories we've done about this kind of thing on Decoder Ring have basically had the same same takeaway, which unfortunately is not likely to generate a lot of clicks. It's moderation balance. A little bit of anything is probably fine, too much of it is probably not. It's measured. Reasonable advice. If only we ever lived in reasonable times, we might be better at taking it.

[Rowan Jacobson]

Foreign.

[Willa Paskin]

This is Decoder Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. Please sign up for Decoder Ring. Plus you get to skip all the ads and listen to episodes of Decoder Rings. Back on our most recent episode, we entered a list listener question about a truly wild thing I did not previously know about but have since learned a whole lot about it is the mock car crash. You can hear it all by going to the Decoder Ring show page on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or visiting slate.comdecoder ring this episode was written by me and our supervising producer, Evan Chung, who also produced this episode. Decoder Ring is also produced by Max Friedman. Merrick Jacob is Senior Technical Director. Our intern is Phoebe Mulder. I want to direct you towards two books that we discussed, Rowan Jacobson's In Defense of Sunlight, which has so much more information about the science of sun and sunscreen and so much else in it, and I really have been thinking about it a lot. I also want to recommend Catherine Cox's book, Tropical the Rise of the Tourist south in the Americas, which is really expansive. The stuff about tanning is just one chapter. If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us@decoder ringlate.com you can also leave us a message on our Decoder Ring hotline. That number is 347-460-7281. We love hearing from you guys and we will see you in two weeks.