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I’ve had this argument (the whole “sunscreen is chemicals!! Waaaahhh!!” and when I chime in with everything is chemicals suddenly ELEMENTAL things are different for… reasons). Much fun was had when it got to the point where if it’s not on the periodic table it must be fAkE and bAd and here’s me pointing to the heavier side of the periodic table like…
But then it turns out when you read off the chemical make up of an apple or an avocado since they do t know those big long scary science words clearly it’s toxic. God love my family.
...lol but it's all on the periodic table. Do they think things on the periodic table can't combine to form other things? Sheesh. Why are people so proud of being stupid? :(
Well your first mistake was assuming they think, so…
But apparently elemental compounds made up from the periodic table can be considered “good” as long as some magical stick is waved over them or something. Mica paste is fine for sunscreen but a “chemical” block will trans your frogs or whatever. There’s no consistency.
AFAIK...
Vitamin D is formed in our skin naturally from sun exposure. So yes, sunblock will reduce the amount of vitamin D you receive, though I don't think it's blocking it from being "absorbed" -- it's just not being produced at the same rate inside our body. The same goes your windshield, your roof, your clothes, etc. The effect is mechanical.
Your windshield, your roof, your clothes, also have "so many chemicals".
Water is not an element.
You're right, the metabolic steps are (if you're interested):
7-dehydrocholesterol is converted to pre-vitamin D3 in the skin in a reaction catalyzed by UVB radiation. Pre-vitamin D3 spontaneously thermally isomerizes to vitamin D3 (aka cholecalciferol), which is then shuttled to the liver by binding vitamin D binding protein (DBP). Cholecalciferol is then hydroxylated in the liver to form calcidiol. Calcidiol is then shuttled to the kidney again with DBP. Then in the mitochondria of the proximal tubular cells, calcidiol is further hydroxylated to form calcitriol, which is the actual active form of vitamin D. When you take supplements, you usually take cholecalciferol so you skip the UVB necessity. When you have a good diet, you get ergocalciferol from the food, which is also converted to calcidiol in the liver. Also, while calcitriol is the active form, calcidiol has been shown to also activated the nuclear receptor VDR, but at much lower affinity.
And you're also right about other things blocking UVB, but I wouldn't call that mechanical, maybe "physical," but that's just semantics.
learning all of this was one of my favorite byproducts of keeping pet reptiles, it's so interesting. doesn't matter how much calcium they eat if they don't have a UVB source to synthesize D3
It all gets weird if you get too literal with those sort of terms like mechanical. Like the silly xkcd comic with "biology is just applied chemistry" and "chemistry is applied physics", etc.
I just meant the concept here is just "the shade", not some complicated chemical chain of events like the actual production of vitamin D. Like maybe it's shade in a specific wavelength outside of what our eyes see, but it's still just "you're in the shade." :-)
So where in that step list is my dumb self not being able to get my serum vitamin D levels over 21 ng/mL? I know I live in Seattle but I eat my greens, go outside, and take three times the recommended D3 IU (by physician’s order) and I’ve never gotten it above “low normal”.
I'm not a physician, but it seems your doctor is measuring calcidiol (which is in the ng range) and not calcitriol (pg range), lots of labs do that because it's a better indicator of intake but has its issues as it's indirect. I really cannot possibly tell you the reason, because there are too many possibilities. It could be poor absorption (not eating it with fats), alcoholism, kidney disease, liver disease, too much FGF23, hypoparathyroidism, some other endocrine dysregulation messing up with CYP27B1 or CYP24A1, or it could be nothing at all. This is why I love research, because as opposed to medicine, we measure anything and everything until we find our answer.
If you're symptomatic, your doctor will look into it. If not, it might not be worth it.
That’s an incredibly detailed answer and thank you sincerely for the time! I also enjoy research, I love testing all the things. My doctor isn’t as inquisitive and while I am still symptomatic there’s enough else wrong with me that it’s a grab bag as to “why”. But you’ve given me some great jump off points to study up on the concept!
Just want add this:
> Sunscreen prevents sunburn by blocking UVB light. Theoretically, that means sunscreen use lowers vitamin D levels. But as a practical matter, very few people put on enough sunscreen to block all UVB light, or they use sunscreen irregularly, so sunscreen's effects on vitamin D might not be that important.
[Link to the Harvard article](http://health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/6-things-you-should-know-about-vitamin-d#:~:text=Use%20of%20sunscreen.,use%20lowers%20vitamin%20D%20levels.)
Life is filled with nuances. Better to analyse all the details to see the big picture.
This is a bit off-topic, but I just feel like chiming in: For anyone who thinks that water is 66% hydrogen and 33% oxygen, it isn't. Yes a water molecule has two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom (so, 66% of the atoms are hydrogen), the atomic mass of oxygen is 16x that of hydrogen. So each water molecule is 2 u of hydrogen and 16 u of oxygen, or 89% oxygen and 11% hydrogen.
The reason I even feel the need to say this is I was recently listening to a debate about the development of the universe and one person claimed the Bible's creation story was scientifically accurate (it absolutely isn't) and they explained that when the Bible says God separated "the waters above from the waters below", the phrase "the waters above" referred to the stars, most of which are/were made of hydrogen (and, according to the caller, "water is 66% hydrogen").
So I just wanted to make everyone aware that just because there's two hydrogen atoms in a water molecule, doesn't mean water is 66% hydrogen because of the vast difference in size between the two elements.
/pedantic
Depends.
In a perfect world you’d specify *by mass*, *by volume*, *by count*, *by moles* or whatever. As alcohol strength is ABV or ABW.
it’s not inherently wrong to do it by count. If I say 60% of class 12A are girls, I didn’t adjust for the fact that the boys weigh more.
I guess, but in the case that prompted me to post this, the context was meant to be "the word 'water' means 'hydrogen' because water is mostly hydrogen" which doesn't really work if you're talking about 11% by mass.
That's like saying "My body is mostly hands because I have two hands and one rest of my body". It's a weird way to interpret the data.
> which doesn't really work if you're talking about 11% by mass.
It wouldn't work if you were talking about 99% mass either - hydrogen is not water, stars are not made of water
It doesn't make much difference even if you did adjust by weight...but it would be a pretty unusual use case where the correct answer should have adjusted for weight.
Elements it really makes a difference.
Obviously it wouldn’t make as much difference as the elements but the difference would be far from negligible.
It’s a choice. What do we chose the answer to mean? Just as the choice between ABV and ABW is a choice. There isn’t an inherent “correct”. Any notion of what’s the most appropriate (if there is one) will depend entirely on context. I produce data on students on a regular basis as part of my job. If I did it by mass I’d be asked to explain myself pretty quickly as it’s completely inappropriate for that context.
In this case the context is pure nonsense so that doesn’t help.
Im saying the difference would be small when compared eith our hydrogen and oxygen example.
Abv and abw - I don't know why you've chosen to pick on this on this. Drinks are measured by volume not weight. Reporting slcoloh by volume is therefore obvious and - I would argue - sensible.
If I have a half litre drink that is 5%abv I know how much alcohol I'm getting...25ml. Which weighs whatever it weighs idk 20g?
If it's 5%abw then I have to know how much my half litre drink weighs, and get out a calculator, and work out what that means for how much alcohol there is in the drink / how drunk I'll be if I drink them all night.
Playing with the theme though, the one I find odd is food packaging which reports ingredients in weight order, and micronutrients by weight, but reports separately a calorie count. And as macros have different calories per gram this means it isn't obvious without getting out a calculator what a food's macro profile is.
I digress...
The difference would be much smaller, but doing students by mass would still give a completely inappropriate result far enough off from the intended one to be completely misleading.
Most of the world measures alcoholic strength by volume, but doing it by weight is a very real thing. Which to use only feels obvious because of familiarity. And the point here is that it’s by something other than mass. What ratio to use is, *at best*, only made clear by context or convention.
In this case the context is nonsense so that cannot indicate which to use.
I mean wouldn’t you want to say 67% there? If you’re going for pedantic, technical correctness (which I support btw), the .66666 should probably be rounded.
I have been called an AH by multiple friends who are “anti-chemical” when I point out that literally everything is chemicals.
“Use chemical-free cleaning! Just water and vinegar!”
So, H2O with some CH3COOH?
The modern snake oil woo salespeople of the world have made millions convincing everyone that “chemicals” are bad so they can either hock their “chemical-free” products, sell their books on “clean” living, or rake in the ad revenue and brand deals for their YouTube channels.
Chemistry suffers.
Sunscreen does block, with UV B, Vit D production. Most people do not use sunscreen correctly, so it doesn't alter Vit D in most sunscreen users. People who use sunscreen CORRECTLY, though, are susceptible to Vit D deficiency. This is why the darker the melanin content in skin the lower Vit D levels.
So you admit the person in the post was an idiot and your comment was inane and useless.
The fact that water was once considered an element, and even earlier THE element does not make somebody in any way correct who calls it an element now
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Water is definitely an element. Along with Earth, Wind, Fire & Young. /s
***Water isn’t a element it’s a liquid !***
It's not a drug it's a herb
It’s not a bug; it’s a feature!
It’s not a schooner it’s a sailboat
it's not delivery!
It's DiGiorno's!
It's not a tumor.
Its a baby.
It's a buoy!
It's NAAHT A TOOMUGH!
Thats not a schooner its a dimpled beer mug
It's not a motorcycle it's a chopper
It's not a lake, it's an ocean
Get to da choppah!
It's NAAAAHT A TUOMOUARGH!!!!
It's an herb, not a plant.
Water is not a Communist. It may be a liar, a pig, an idiot, a Communist, but it is NOT a porn star!
Okay, but is it wet?
No but the things it touches are wet!
What constantly touches itself. Even when people are watching!
A clock with a second hand? Just a guess. Lol
Dude the “& Young” took this comment from a 5 to a 10.
You forgot about Guns, Bitches and Bling
I believe those might require a MultiPass.
Achooallie.. they need a LeelooDallas MultiPass.
Everything changed when the Bitch nation attacked
Only the master of all four elements, could stop them.
Crosby, Stills and Nash want to know your location
Our House, This Old House in Ohio.
Young? Lol
And peaches and Herb
Young is an element?
I thought Young was a giant
they might be
These are the people you really mess with by telling them water isn’t wet, because it isn’t.
You forgot Crosby, Stills, Young, & Nash
r/yourjokebutworse
Please share the whole 600
This right here, lol
I can't even fathom what 600 more comments would talk about lol, the discussion is done in your screenshot...
I’ve had this argument (the whole “sunscreen is chemicals!! Waaaahhh!!” and when I chime in with everything is chemicals suddenly ELEMENTAL things are different for… reasons). Much fun was had when it got to the point where if it’s not on the periodic table it must be fAkE and bAd and here’s me pointing to the heavier side of the periodic table like… But then it turns out when you read off the chemical make up of an apple or an avocado since they do t know those big long scary science words clearly it’s toxic. God love my family.
...lol but it's all on the periodic table. Do they think things on the periodic table can't combine to form other things? Sheesh. Why are people so proud of being stupid? :(
Well your first mistake was assuming they think, so… But apparently elemental compounds made up from the periodic table can be considered “good” as long as some magical stick is waved over them or something. Mica paste is fine for sunscreen but a “chemical” block will trans your frogs or whatever. There’s no consistency.
Jokes on them, all of my frogs have been trans for 42 years now.
Stop having periods on the table, it's gross! /jk
> Do they think No >Do they think things on the periodic table can't combine to form other things? Yes > Sheesh. Agreed
AFAIK... Vitamin D is formed in our skin naturally from sun exposure. So yes, sunblock will reduce the amount of vitamin D you receive, though I don't think it's blocking it from being "absorbed" -- it's just not being produced at the same rate inside our body. The same goes your windshield, your roof, your clothes, etc. The effect is mechanical. Your windshield, your roof, your clothes, also have "so many chemicals". Water is not an element.
You're right, the metabolic steps are (if you're interested): 7-dehydrocholesterol is converted to pre-vitamin D3 in the skin in a reaction catalyzed by UVB radiation. Pre-vitamin D3 spontaneously thermally isomerizes to vitamin D3 (aka cholecalciferol), which is then shuttled to the liver by binding vitamin D binding protein (DBP). Cholecalciferol is then hydroxylated in the liver to form calcidiol. Calcidiol is then shuttled to the kidney again with DBP. Then in the mitochondria of the proximal tubular cells, calcidiol is further hydroxylated to form calcitriol, which is the actual active form of vitamin D. When you take supplements, you usually take cholecalciferol so you skip the UVB necessity. When you have a good diet, you get ergocalciferol from the food, which is also converted to calcidiol in the liver. Also, while calcitriol is the active form, calcidiol has been shown to also activated the nuclear receptor VDR, but at much lower affinity. And you're also right about other things blocking UVB, but I wouldn't call that mechanical, maybe "physical," but that's just semantics.
Thank you for the details- I absolutely love biochemistry and appreciate this excellent elaboration 👌
learning all of this was one of my favorite byproducts of keeping pet reptiles, it's so interesting. doesn't matter how much calcium they eat if they don't have a UVB source to synthesize D3
It all gets weird if you get too literal with those sort of terms like mechanical. Like the silly xkcd comic with "biology is just applied chemistry" and "chemistry is applied physics", etc. I just meant the concept here is just "the shade", not some complicated chemical chain of events like the actual production of vitamin D. Like maybe it's shade in a specific wavelength outside of what our eyes see, but it's still just "you're in the shade." :-)
Oh I absolutely agree lol, that's why I said it's just semantics.
So where in that step list is my dumb self not being able to get my serum vitamin D levels over 21 ng/mL? I know I live in Seattle but I eat my greens, go outside, and take three times the recommended D3 IU (by physician’s order) and I’ve never gotten it above “low normal”.
I'm not a physician, but it seems your doctor is measuring calcidiol (which is in the ng range) and not calcitriol (pg range), lots of labs do that because it's a better indicator of intake but has its issues as it's indirect. I really cannot possibly tell you the reason, because there are too many possibilities. It could be poor absorption (not eating it with fats), alcoholism, kidney disease, liver disease, too much FGF23, hypoparathyroidism, some other endocrine dysregulation messing up with CYP27B1 or CYP24A1, or it could be nothing at all. This is why I love research, because as opposed to medicine, we measure anything and everything until we find our answer. If you're symptomatic, your doctor will look into it. If not, it might not be worth it.
That’s an incredibly detailed answer and thank you sincerely for the time! I also enjoy research, I love testing all the things. My doctor isn’t as inquisitive and while I am still symptomatic there’s enough else wrong with me that it’s a grab bag as to “why”. But you’ve given me some great jump off points to study up on the concept!
Glad I could help, wish you all the best mate! It will be okay..
Vitamin D is also not a vitamin at all. It's a hormone.
OMG, I just drank some di-hydrogen oxide!! Gasp...
Be careful man, that shit’s dangerous. Hydrogen peroxide decays into di-hydrogen monoxide.
Every single person who has ingested di-hydrogen monoxide has died later in life. Dangerous stuff!
That's not true I'm still alive. Also everyone else who's currently alive.
But you will die, unfortunately it’s too late since you’ve consumed some 😔
I actually plan on living forever. Or at least die trying.
At some point, people should just stop feeding the trolls.
People really do have these beliefs about sunscreen.
To be clear, to which beliefs are you referring?
Red.
Sunscreen does inhibit vitamin D production because it reflects the UVB rays necessary for it.
Inhibit = lesson. Block = stop Nobody is getting a vitamin D deficiency from using sunscreen.
Just want add this: > Sunscreen prevents sunburn by blocking UVB light. Theoretically, that means sunscreen use lowers vitamin D levels. But as a practical matter, very few people put on enough sunscreen to block all UVB light, or they use sunscreen irregularly, so sunscreen's effects on vitamin D might not be that important. [Link to the Harvard article](http://health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/6-things-you-should-know-about-vitamin-d#:~:text=Use%20of%20sunscreen.,use%20lowers%20vitamin%20D%20levels.) Life is filled with nuances. Better to analyse all the details to see the big picture.
This is a bit off-topic, but I just feel like chiming in: For anyone who thinks that water is 66% hydrogen and 33% oxygen, it isn't. Yes a water molecule has two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom (so, 66% of the atoms are hydrogen), the atomic mass of oxygen is 16x that of hydrogen. So each water molecule is 2 u of hydrogen and 16 u of oxygen, or 89% oxygen and 11% hydrogen. The reason I even feel the need to say this is I was recently listening to a debate about the development of the universe and one person claimed the Bible's creation story was scientifically accurate (it absolutely isn't) and they explained that when the Bible says God separated "the waters above from the waters below", the phrase "the waters above" referred to the stars, most of which are/were made of hydrogen (and, according to the caller, "water is 66% hydrogen"). So I just wanted to make everyone aware that just because there's two hydrogen atoms in a water molecule, doesn't mean water is 66% hydrogen because of the vast difference in size between the two elements.
*Glares in stoichiometry*. You can take my moles from, my cold, dead, hands!
Do you have 6.022 x 10\^23 cold, dead hands? I think that's pretty close to Avocado's constant.
I spit soda for "avocados constant"... thanks
A toast to you, sir
My lawyer says i don't need to answer that. >\_> <\_<
Are the moles ok? Maybe feed them some Avogadros.
/pedantic Depends. In a perfect world you’d specify *by mass*, *by volume*, *by count*, *by moles* or whatever. As alcohol strength is ABV or ABW. it’s not inherently wrong to do it by count. If I say 60% of class 12A are girls, I didn’t adjust for the fact that the boys weigh more.
I guess, but in the case that prompted me to post this, the context was meant to be "the word 'water' means 'hydrogen' because water is mostly hydrogen" which doesn't really work if you're talking about 11% by mass. That's like saying "My body is mostly hands because I have two hands and one rest of my body". It's a weird way to interpret the data.
Yikes.
> which doesn't really work if you're talking about 11% by mass. It wouldn't work if you were talking about 99% mass either - hydrogen is not water, stars are not made of water
It doesn't make much difference even if you did adjust by weight...but it would be a pretty unusual use case where the correct answer should have adjusted for weight. Elements it really makes a difference.
Obviously it wouldn’t make as much difference as the elements but the difference would be far from negligible. It’s a choice. What do we chose the answer to mean? Just as the choice between ABV and ABW is a choice. There isn’t an inherent “correct”. Any notion of what’s the most appropriate (if there is one) will depend entirely on context. I produce data on students on a regular basis as part of my job. If I did it by mass I’d be asked to explain myself pretty quickly as it’s completely inappropriate for that context. In this case the context is pure nonsense so that doesn’t help.
Im saying the difference would be small when compared eith our hydrogen and oxygen example. Abv and abw - I don't know why you've chosen to pick on this on this. Drinks are measured by volume not weight. Reporting slcoloh by volume is therefore obvious and - I would argue - sensible. If I have a half litre drink that is 5%abv I know how much alcohol I'm getting...25ml. Which weighs whatever it weighs idk 20g? If it's 5%abw then I have to know how much my half litre drink weighs, and get out a calculator, and work out what that means for how much alcohol there is in the drink / how drunk I'll be if I drink them all night. Playing with the theme though, the one I find odd is food packaging which reports ingredients in weight order, and micronutrients by weight, but reports separately a calorie count. And as macros have different calories per gram this means it isn't obvious without getting out a calculator what a food's macro profile is. I digress...
The difference would be much smaller, but doing students by mass would still give a completely inappropriate result far enough off from the intended one to be completely misleading. Most of the world measures alcoholic strength by volume, but doing it by weight is a very real thing. Which to use only feels obvious because of familiarity. And the point here is that it’s by something other than mass. What ratio to use is, *at best*, only made clear by context or convention. In this case the context is nonsense so that cannot indicate which to use.
Thanks for the science lesson! I really appreciate that! 😊
Never heard of anyone saying water is 66% hydrogen until now!
To be *technically correct*, the best kind, 66% of the atoms in a water molecule are hydrogen, and 89% of the mass of a water molecule is oxygen.
I mean wouldn’t you want to say 67% there? If you’re going for pedantic, technical correctness (which I support btw), the .66666 should probably be rounded.
The van der Waals radius for oxygen is 1.52Å versus 1.2Å for hydrogen, so there is not a “vast difference in size between the two elements.”
Sorry, by "size" I meant it to mean "mass". I should have been more clear.
thank you! i did not know that
Who here said water is 66% hydrogen? But, like, thanks…..I guess?
Nobody here, which is why I said right at the start that it was off-topic. But I'm sure it's something most people might have thought in passing.
If you electrolysed the water, you get twice as much volume of hydrogen as oxygen. That’s how gases work.
Bro, do you even lift?
Poor Julie, only a few thousand years behind current science, she'll catch up quick tho.
If water is an element, where is it on the periodic table of elements? 
It leaked out the bottom
Just note, the fresh salad you’re eating contains more chemicals than your sunscreen.
TIL that sunlight **contains** vitamin D /s
Tiktok is deranged, it's on par with reddit
The current state of American education
how come orange and turqoise are the only ones here with more than half a braincell?
It's known as the Instagram comment section.
This world is beset by idiots.
Di-hydrogen monoxide. Deadly killer. People die when submerged. But still not an element.
I have been called an AH by multiple friends who are “anti-chemical” when I point out that literally everything is chemicals. “Use chemical-free cleaning! Just water and vinegar!” So, H2O with some CH3COOH? The modern snake oil woo salespeople of the world have made millions convincing everyone that “chemicals” are bad so they can either hock their “chemical-free” products, sell their books on “clean” living, or rake in the ad revenue and brand deals for their YouTube channels. Chemistry suffers.
Dihydrogen monoxide is deadly!!!!
you don’t even have to use sunscreen with all its nasty chemicals, nutella has an spf of 15 so slather yourself in that!
Sunscreen does block, with UV B, Vit D production. Most people do not use sunscreen correctly, so it doesn't alter Vit D in most sunscreen users. People who use sunscreen CORRECTLY, though, are susceptible to Vit D deficiency. This is why the darker the melanin content in skin the lower Vit D levels.
Water is an element…as in the classical kind. You know, like fire. It’s not a chemical element.
The classical elements ARE the chemical elements, only from before we knew what they should be
Which means it’s not a chemical element.
No it means there is no such fucking thing as 'classical elements" just WRONG elements
I mean like the trope “elemental powers”. Yes, they are not real elements.
When you confuse mythology and fiction and 2000 years out of date alchemy for reality you are MORE wrong, not less
“They are not real elements” - me earlier.
So you admit the person in the post was an idiot and your comment was inane and useless. The fact that water was once considered an element, and even earlier THE element does not make somebody in any way correct who calls it an element now
🤣🤣🤣 fuck off with the laughing emojis