A New Book Says We Need to Get More Sun. Could There Be Something to It?

16.06.2026, 16:48 allure.com

“Get sun. Not too much. Go outside.” The Pollanian thesis of Rowan Jacobsen’s new book, In Defense of Sunlight, sounds reasonable enough. Parents everywhere have been peeling their children—and frankly themselves—away from screens and sending them out into the sun since those screens have been invented. “Touching grass” has become an aspirational activity.

“I wrote the book because I thought we were getting to a point where our avoidance of the sun had gone too far,” Jacobsen told me recently, while we sat on a bench in Cobble Hill Park in Brooklyn, a Callery pear tree providing shade on one of the first warm, sunny days this spring. (I was testing the new SPF 30 from Peach & Lily; Jacobsen was sunscreen-free.) “People were being told to apply sunscreen every two hours in the middle of winter when they were working indoors.”

I first learned of Jacobsen’s work in 2024, when he wrote an article for The Atlantic called “Against Sunscreen Absolutism.” The story was in praise of Australia’s then-recently-revised sun safety guidelines, which split the population into three groups and offered different SPF guidelines for each: People with pale skin and/or additional risk factors for skin cancer should keep wearing sunscreen every day, those with “olive or pale-brown skin” should only use it if the UV Index was above 3, and those with the deepest skin tones only need sunscreen for long beach days and other excursions that would lead to spending hours in the bright sunlight. “Yes, UV rays cause skin cancer, but for some, too much shade can be just as harmful as too much sun,” Jacobsen wrote at the time.

This story went viral in the very specific group chats I’m privy to as a beauty editor. Dermatologists felt this guy was trying to undo all the hard work they’d put into convincing people to wear sunscreen as a preventative health measure. The American Academy of Dermatologists (AAD) even released a formal statement saying Jacobsen’s article “contains misleading information that may discourage the public from using sun protection, thereby increasing their risk of skin cancer.” I also issued a formal response in this very publication, acknowledging that sunscreen evangelists can be a bit dramatic (no, I don’t actually think I need to apply SPF every two hours in the middle of January when I have no plans to leave my house), but also that being extreme can seem necessary to dermatologists who struggle to get their patients to use sunscreen at all.

Two years later, the general public only seems less convinced that sunscreen is a useful health care tool and more certain that they should be availing themselves of regular UV exposure. Tanning is on the rise, especially among Gens Z and Alpha although our current Boomer health secretary is also a fan. People on TikTok are sharing their “get ready to lay out with me” routines, and many more are tracking the UV Index to make sure they’re outside at peak hours for skin-darkening sun damage. Invasive melanoma rates have generally increased since the 1970s, and a recent study by the American Academy of Dermatology found that more than 20% of Gen Z respondents prioritized getting a tan over protecting their skin. Folks of a certain mindset are claiming that, actually, the sun is good and it’s sunscreen and sunglasses that are making you sick. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has reported that only 12% of men and 30% of women always use sunscreen if they’re going to be outside for more than an hour on a sunny day. In sun-adjacent news, the FDA recently blocked a bill that would have banned the use of tanning beds for anyone under 18. It would seem that there are plenty of folks—some of them with much public-health power—embracing UV rays in full force.

So do we really need to be defending the sun in 2026? Jacobsen is quick to clarify that he’s not in the anti-sunscreen, get-ready-to-lay-out-with-him camp, but also argues there’s no need to panic about our culture’s current wave of UV enthusiasm. His book is a tight 199 pages (268 if you count the glossary, resources, notes, and index at the end) and cites nearly as many studies—many published in peer-reviewed journals like the Journal of the American Medical Association, The Lancet, and even the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology—that point toward prolonged sun avoidance being quite dangerous.

“Sun deprivation was linked to heart attack, stroke, diabetes, dementia, depression, Parkinson’s, myopia, respiratory infections, certain cancers, and autoimmune conditions such as multiple sclerosis and inflammatory bowel disease,” he writes in the introduction. “That evidence had been showing up in various observational studies for decades, but it had been growing stronger as the tools got better.” At one point, he cites a study published in the Journal of Internal Medicine that found nonsmokers who avoided the sun had about the same life expectancy as smokers who embraced the sun. “Avoidance of sun exposure seems to be a risk factor of magnitude similar to smoking in terms of life expectancy,” the authors concluded.

“Sun deprivation” isn't an officially defined term; most of the studies Jacobsen cites look at self-reported time spent in (or avoiding) the sun alongside vitamin D levels and health outcomes. Jacobsen tells me his "not official nor a prescription, just one informed guy’s back-of-the-envelope rubric" is that you're probably “deprived” if you're not getting enough sun to maintain a vitamin D level of 20 ng/ml or above (without supplementation). The amount of time you'd need to spend outside to reach those levels will depend on the weather, season, your skin tone, and location. “But as a general rule, it’s never about getting lots of sunlight, it’s about making sure you get more than none,” he says.

On the flip side, spending some time in the sun is linked with, well, less of all the risks mentioned above: less depression, lower blood pressure, a lower risk of diabetes, enhanced wound healing, less heart disease, better mental health, less fatigue, fewer autoimmune disorders…essentially, being outside seems to be quite good for you. It used to be widely accepted that this was because UV rays help your body produce vitamin D. But, Jacobsen and many scientists now argue, if it was just a vitamin D thing, then you should be able to pop a pill and stay inside forever. Instead, more recent studies have found that, while vitamin D supplements do, indeed, raise vitamin D levels, those artificially-achieved higher levels don’t necessarily correlate with better health outcomes.

It seems that the sun provides some special sauce when it comes to human health, though the exact mechanism behind its benefits is still being studied. The nitric oxide we produce when UV rays hit our skin probably plays a role; the low levels of inflammation created by the sun may as well. To be clear, there is still zero science that recommends excessive amounts of unprotected sun exposure; 15 minutes a day seems to be plenty. Jacobsen compares it to allergies: Children who are introduced to small amounts of peanuts or exposed to microbes on farms are less likely to develop allergies and asthma as they grow up.

Jacobsen believes the messaging about sun protection has been so loud because the organizations behind it—like the Skin Cancer Foundation and the AAD—are well-funded enough to be very effective at achieving their goals, which is to spread the word about the risk of skin cancer. “There are no bad guys in this story,” he says. “Everybody is doing their job. But in the sciences now, your job tends to be very specialized.” Dermatologists care about skin cancer above all else. Cardiologists care about heart disease above all else. Neither doctor is more or less right in their convictions, but, when assessing risk, a human being must take into account all of the things that might kill them.

For its part, the AAD is still not on board with Jacobsen’s point of view. In a statement sent to Allure, the organization’s current president, Murad Alam, MD, said, “In Defense of Sunlight: The Surprising Science of Sun Exposure, seeks to undermine long established public health guidance aimed at preventing skin cancer, the most common cancer in the U.S.” Dr. Alam feels that the research Jacobsen cites is “weak evidence” that sunlight may provide health benefits. “Many of the claims in this book are inadequately supported by low-level evidence, a single supportive paper, or the personal opinions of one doctor,” he wrote. “On the other hand, the science linking unprotected sun exposure to skin cancers, including melanoma, is longstanding and well-established.”

Jacobsen is a science journalist. He does not have a medical degree in any specialty. He also doesn’t dispute the evidence that unprotected sun exposure leads to skin cancer and recommends wearing sunscreen throughout the book, as well as during our interview. But after nine years of research, reviewing hundreds of studies, and interviewing dozens of doctors and scientists, he’s concluded that a risk of skin cancer should not be anyone’s primary concern within the grand scheme of health conditions. “Globally, skin cancer doesn’t even make the list of 40 deadliest killers,” he writes in this new book, noting the gulf between its 120,000 annual deaths compared to the 20 million from cardiovascular disease and 10 million from other forms of cancer. Another anecdote that stuck with me: "When [dermatologist Richard Weller, MD] and his graduate student ran the numbers [from the UK Biobank dataset], they found that in the 15 years of tracking, a total of 40 people had died from skin cancer attributable to too much UV light, while 2,982 people had died from diseases attributable to a deficiency of sunlight." Of course, while skin cancer is far from the deadliest of cancers, it is—as the AAD points out—the most common in the U.S. And treating it often involves painful procedures and surgeries that