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John Lawrence Aspden's avatar

Berna Bleeker writes:

How long do you have to abstain from PUFAs to notice that effect? I've been avoiding them since January, but I get sunburned as fast as ever...

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John Lawrence Aspden's avatar

I don't know! As I said sunburn has never been an issue for me.

If you've got a lot of stored PUFA it might take a while to get the levels down. Years perhaps.

But there was a chap on r/saturatedfat claiming that a month or so of going back to eating PUFA-fries had brought back his ability to get sunburned, so you might be able to turn the effect on and off very quickly if you don't have that much PUFA 'in stores'.

It might be worth making a post to r/saturatedfat asking for sunproofing anecdotes?

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John Lawrence Aspden's avatar

https://www.reddit.com/r/SaturatedFat/comments/1ebvtmx/call_for_anecdotes_how_long_does_the_sunburn/

In summary, most people seem to think the effect gets stronger over time and six months is enough, one person took four whole years, and another person hasn't seen the effect at all.

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Experimental Fat Loss's avatar

The Devil's vitamin! What'd you think the D stood for?

- Written from my monstrous truck, stopped to shoot at something that moved

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John Lawrence Aspden's avatar

I'm glad you stopped. Commenting on substacks while driving can be dangerous!

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Experimental Fat Loss's avatar

What was I gonna hit, a cactus?

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John Lawrence Aspden's avatar

I guess it's a European thing. Every time I try to read the paper I cycle into an ancient monument.

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Experimental Fat Loss's avatar

I remember walking around Italy (it's about the size of a Costco parking lot) and you couldn't throw trash on the ground without hitting something that was 2000 years old.

Never been to England but I assume it's the same.

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John Lawrence Aspden's avatar

Actually no!

I was once in Greece and realised that the parking lot I was sitting in (they have quite nice parking lots) was a classical ruin that had been repurposed.

But in England, although there are quite a lot of things that are several hundred years old, there are not many that are thousands of years old and we try to take care of all of them. We weren't a centre of classical civilization.

And of course a lot of the mediaeval and even Victorian stuff we did have got bombed out in the second war, and unlike the sensible and pathologically romantic Germans we didn't put it back like it had been, but took the opportunity to replace it with modern horrors. Local government finished off the Luftwaffe's work for them after they'd lost interest. British cities are often quite ugly and full of cars.

The centres of towns will always have stuff that is old, especially things like cathedrals and churches, but rarely anything that dates back to Roman or even Saxon times.

But I live in the middle of Cambridge, and that in particular is full of very impressive mediaeval buildings. And these days tourists. Endless tourists....

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Experimental Fat Loss's avatar

Ugh, hate tourists! They ruin all the nice ruins.

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Chuck Remes's avatar

> Then it might be that vitamin D is correlated with a number of bad things.

Don't you mean "inversely correlated" here? As D levels rise, disease lowers. Describing it this way makes more sense to me.

> That which correlates with vitamin D is caused by PUFAs.

Outstanding. I like it.

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John Lawrence Aspden's avatar

Indeed I do! I tend to use 'correlated' to mean 'in a statistical relationship with'. I'll edit that to make it easier to understand. Thanks.

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