It does my head in why would you choose to cast aspersions on the science method. It's literally an example of science done by the book, published in a peer reviewed magazine. It's not amateur work, it's not fake news. It's ground breaking science: "We found this interesting thing and here we present it to you, with caveats, after some other people in the field did a quick sanity check on it".
I'm sorry for the tone, but I'm quite exasperated by people doing this kind of low key, subtle, disparaging of science under the guise of scepticism. It always happens when studies are posted on HN (or reddit), people seem to find a perverse joy in finding weird gotchas that the study already mentions and then saying: see, science is such a mess.
The study spends 2/3rds of the time ignoring the obvious analysis which is already established -- this is common in journalism. The title is "what if?", the article spends most of the time imagining what-if, and then at the end says "probably not".
why i chose to comment is that people do not weight parts of articles evenly, the read what they want to read into things. It is the responsibility of honest communication to make the most plausible conclusion the easiest to infer, and the least plausible, the hardest. If you want to think this study shows that more sunlight = more life, you should have to do a lot of cognitive work to get to that mumbojumbo.
This paper does the opposite. It toes the line of dishonesty, making deeply implausible pseudo-science an easy conclusion to infer.
But they're acknowledging the limitations of the study. As it is, it's a jumping off-point to do more research on the subject. They even mention confounding factors in the abstract.
I'm curious what alternative you'd propose, other than more funding on larger and more complex studies.
The same data could be used to conclude that low income and lack of education are risk factors for death similar to smoking...
A somewhat sophisticated person says something like the above.
People who change the world will wonder there’s something there. especially given the sober and candid examination of possible confounding factors and mechanisms of action.
the future is an exciting place.
in the meantime, “study finds…”
Who cares what these development delayed children think, we have another 15 years of hegemony
And take vitamin D supplements to compensate.
I hate these types of headlines. They're akin to "Coffee is a carcinogen", "Chocolate makes you live longer", "Making your child listen to Mozart 30 minutes a day boosts his IQ", etc. I.e. the results are probably either outright wrong, non-reproducible, or statistically insignificant.
Avoiding the outdoors won't shorten your lifespan if you take care of your health in general. Just live your life the way you want to and all will be well.
However I'm sceptical that vitamin D deficiency explains the entire effect given it is quite large. If sunlight itself isn't relevant I expect other confounders to be stacking on top of vitamin D deficiency.
You write this as if you somehow know this for sure. It’s well known that indoor air is significantly more polluted in most cases than outdoor air, at least in the west. Fresh exposure to outdoor air is also important not just exposure to the sun. I would definitely not want to spend most of my life breathing indoor air, and opening windows only gets you so far.
Source on that? It probably vastly depends on the "outdoor", because i highly doubt next to an American highway the air is cleaner than the average housing away from that highway, like i don't doubt a house next to the highway has worse air than a forest in the middle of nowhere.
> Americans, on average, spend approximately 90 percent of their time indoors,1 where the concentrations of some pollutants are often 2 to 5 times higher than typical outdoor concentrations
There’s been so much research on this by so many different organizations around the world, as far as I’ve known almost everybody was aware of this as fact.
There is an extraordinary amount of data online about this, should be easy to find. On average, outdoor air is healthier than indoor air, often by a wide margin. The above is from the EPA site: https://www.epa.gov/report-environment/indoor-air-quality
Also https://www.cnbc.com/2016/04/22/indoor-air-can-be-deadlier-t...
> indoors [...] concentrations of SOME pollutants are OFTEN [...] higher
Those two statements don't seem to be the same to me?
> World Health Organization has said that household cooking with coal or biomass-burning stoves led to 4.3 million deaths in 2012, compared with 3.7 million deaths from outdoor air pollution.
And that’s just talking about one of many different sources of pollution. There are so many sources of pollution indoors, sources that are very close to you physically, that you should carefully consider these factors and the statistics surrounding them.
It might not be true for everybody (sounds like you're fine sitting inside, popping vitamins, and grinding on the Peloton or whatever -- good for you) but don't make the mistake of thinking your experiences are others'.
Clearly there are things about "the outdoors" that can't be replicated indoors. Smells, the sheer size and variety of environs, O2/CO2 levels, etc. Unless you are living in some kind of enormous, elaborate bio-dome.
Or: people who live a long time, often go outside.
Or: non-sedentary lifestyles predict long-life.
Or: to quote the paper 2/3rds in,
This isn't doing the cultural perception of science any favours.