Does Sunscreen Prevent Skin Cancer? A Scientific Perspective

What Research Shows About UV Radiation, Sunscreen Use, and Skin Cancer Risk

Kendall Toerner

Published: December 1, 2025

All animals in nature live with UV exposure for most of the day, even in the shade.

Skin cancer is virtually absent in nature. It turns out there are no good studies that prove sunscreen helps with skin cancer, and this is because UV light from the sun is not bad for us.

The incidence of melanoma has increased rapidly over just the past fifty years in the United States.

We have gone from 17,000 cases in 1975 to around 100,000 in 2023. That’s a 600% increase. The estimate as of this writing is doubling for 2024, which would be near 200,000 cases. [1]

This is within a period of time where we are interacting less and less with nature, getting less sunlight, and spending more time than ever before working on our computers, using cell phones, and being bathed constantly in man-made indoor lighting.

How can UV light be the cause of increasing cases of skin cancer if we are spending less time around it than ever before?

Why have we been told sunscreen prevents skin cancer?

Ultraviolet light is an easy culprit to attack. Like blue light, UV light is a strong frequency of light. It is even strong enough to cause ionization and DNA damage.

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Expand - Learn why this isn’t bad

Studies that show damage from UV light have been done in completely artificial environments.

Just like evidence now coming out about blue light causing similar problems when dosed in an unnaturally high ratio, UV light gets the blame for damage in studies where they took out all other frequencies of light.

To make matters worse, these UV light experiments were largely done with artificial blue lights in the room as well. The key idea to understand here is that strong frequencies of light are dangerous on their own.

In nature this situation never occurs, because during all hours of the day roughly 50% of sunlight is red and infrared light.

Sunscreen does not prevent skin cancer

A study from 2018 with over 300,000 participants came to the conclusion that “neither melanoma nor non-melanoma skin cancer were associated with sunscreen use” [2] :

So what has caused such a rapid rise in skin cancer?

The rise in skin cancer cases can be correlated directly with our use of screens and indoor lights, as well as more time spent indoors.

Over the past 50 years, no one is here to argue this isn’t the case. The internet, computers, TVs, mobile phones, and LED lighting (all high in blue light) have all been invented and rapidly adopted in the past 50 years.

Blue light hurts our skin in many ways and leads to the damage accumulation and cellular dysfunction that likely results in skin cancer, More research in the future will be needed to confirm this theory without a doubt, but all the building blocks are there.

More evidence why the sun can’t cause skin cancer

Most patients with melanoma, the most dangerous type of skin cancer, have a Vitamin D deficiency upon initial diagnosis. [3] UV or ultraviolet light is responsible for creating Vitamin D with cholesterol in our skin.

If UV light causes skin cancer, but is responsible for creating Vitamin D, shouldn’t the initial diagnosis of skin cancer patients show sky-high Vitamin D levels and not a deficiency?

Skin cancer patients, after diagnosis, are usually told to avoid the sun, so once they are diagnosed with melanoma, they all have low Vitamin D levels by default. Low Vitamin D levels are associated with a worse outcome for metastatic melanoma skin cancer. [4] Low levels are also associated with a higher risk of melanoma. [5]

The sun’s UV light is the only way to get adequate Vitamin D levels before supplements existed. Food barely contains any Vitamin D.

So, why would we tell them to avoid the sun when they have skin cancer or when they want to prevent it, if Vitamin D improves cancer outcomes, prevents skin cancer, and can only be obtained naturally through UV exposure?

Even more evidence the sun doesn’t cause skin cancer

Melanoma is the deadliest type of skin cancer. It easily spreads throughout the body, a process called metastasis. Dermatologists point their fingers at the sun as the main cause of melanoma, but this is where things get really confusing.

In around half of melanoma cases, the melanoma is found on skin that the patient doesn’t normally expose to light — areas usually covered by clothes. If there’s a 50/50 chance melanoma will show up on sun exposed parts of your skin, this means that direct sun exposure causes no increase in risk of melanoma.

Dermatologists don’t have a good answer to this. A 2022 cross-sectional ecological study of 235,333 melanomas in 727 US counties showed “the UV daily dose, a variable the National Cancer Institute specifically developed for melanoma analyses, was uncorrelated with incidence.” [6]

There’s even more evidence than all that?

A study from 2005 that shows the more sunburns and the more sun exposure you have, the lower your chances of death from melanoma. [7]

Yes you read that correctly. More sunburns means lower chances of dying from the deadliest type of skin cancer.

How to actually prevent skin cancer

Avoid artificial blue light exposure

Exposure to blue light depletes your cells’ resources to defend against both blue and UV light. Blue light on it’s own is the likely culprit behind skin cancer rising by 600% in the last 50 years.

Get more sunlight Sunlight is almost 50% infrared light, and this will give your cells the balance they need for blue and UV light.
Avoid seed oils

The polyunsaturated fats in seed oils are rancid and deodorized before they even make their way into your food. This causes your cells to easily oxidize when exposed to high energy light.

Use an infrared sauna

Saunas like Saunaspace deliver a wide range of strong infrared light, more closely resembling natural sunlight if you can’t get enough year round.

Use a light therapy panel

Using products like an EMR-TEK red light (infrared) therapy lamp (aff) can deliver powerful infrared light with targeted frequencies deep into your body. Infrared light can pass easily through your body and into your deep tissues and organs because of it’s lower frequency.

Conclusion

You have come here for real science, not biased opinions and dogma.

We are not meant to be bathed in unbalanced blue light. The infrared light in sunlight is available at all times of day, and it is the key component missing in our indoor environments.

In modern society, we have adopted indoor lifestyles, combined with lights from screens and LED bulbs that emit mostly light in the blue spectrum, with almost no red or infrared.

Most people live indoors for over 90% of their day, whether in a building or in a car. Additionally, modern windows block half or more of the infrared light coming from the sun.

If we want to avoid the increasing risk of skin cancer, we must look to the new science of biophysics to understand what is truly happening within the human body in disease states.