It's completely pointless for the general public, the media, or anyone else to take any particular advice or truth from any single medical study. Even if it's a good study, and you know how to evaluate if its good, even if it's highly plausible and has a mechanism of action it's almost never the case that a single study will be likely to make a strong enough case to jump to a conclusion or even consider a conclusion highly likely.
What results? "People who go outside live longer"? "People who can afford to leave Sweden to go sunbathing live longer"? I agree with the point about single studies, but even if you have multiple studies they still have to be good studies that answer the actual question you had (which in this case is probably "should I wear a hat and sunscreen?").
No, I agree that touching grass is associated with being good for you, I just disagree that higher levels of UV exposure are what makes it good for you. Touching grass has been a confounding variable in every association study I've read which claims to be about sun exposure, and the phrase "sun exposure" is ambiguous enough that it's often misinterpreted as "UV exposure".
This is a glib and dismissive response that tells me nothing. It's about as helpful as "do your own research". Mate, I have done my own research, everything I can find is either a vague association study or has a tiny underpowered treatment group and reeks of publication bias.
If Google Scholar is providing you with papers (other than this one, which is about rich Swedish people/Swedish people who go outside more) that prove your hypothesis (which you haven't even stated, just hinted at) then you should either link to those papers or not reply.
I was just replying to the lazy untrue grandparent comment about this being a single study. I'm glad I don't need to do your research for you.
As for the discussion, there are multiple lines of evidence pointing to the fact that sunlight does in fact reduce mortality. First, this study controls for exercise, and also found that use of tanning beds reduces all cause mortality, so overall it's a pretty good study. We also know that vitamin D status is negatively correlated with mortality. We also know that nitric oxide reduces blood pressure, and is released from the skin by sunlight.
Seems kind of like a no brainer given what we know about skin cancer, but I'm kind of surprised if you control for that if it had any other great "opportunity" to increase your lifespan when you control for obvious ones like exercise, diet, and controlling stress. I'm not a big outside lover, but I do take a daily walk to hopefully get bit of vitamin D from it. I mostly exercise indoors and my hobbies are almost all indoors.
I’d say not at all, this is pretty common advice, but maybe depends on what you mean by unorthodox, exactly. The advice is fairly good (and routine) for studies and papers from any discipline. All kinds of things can cause a single paper, single set of authors, single methodology, single dataset, etc., to come to misleading conclusions. The study can even be accurate in their measurements but not representative in subtle ways that are important. Before using someone’s results or making decisions based on it, it’s good to wait for confirmation from someone else, and even more so for a meta analysis of multiple publications.
No, the orthodox advice is to get your information from your doctor or, if he's a doofus, directly from the local professional association (e.g. American Heart Association), who do the work of reviewing and weighing the literature for you.
Unorthodox but probably not wrong. Replication is key. They might have overlooked something obvious or unexpected, or they might have faked data, and we would never know without an attempted replication.
