Regenerative Health with Max Gulhane, MD
I speak with world leaders on circadian & quantum health, metabolic medicine, regenerative farming in search of the most effective ways of optimising health and reversing chronic disease. Contact me regenerativehealth@proton.me
Regenerative Health with Max Gulhane, MD
Sunlight, Vitamin D & Chronic Disease: Rethinking Sun Exposure Risks | Dr Max Gulhane
In this presentation I cover the evidence for greater sunlight & ultraviolet light exposure & lower all-cause death. I also make the case for a decentralized approach to chronic disease prevention & management, and the role pharmaceutical industry influence in medicine.
This presentation was delivered for the Australian Medical Network, https://www.australianmedicalnetwork.com/. Head to YouTube to watch with slides.
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The title of my talk is Sunlight All-Cause Mortality and Decentralized Health, and I'm going to walk you through some of the medical research that underlies the benefits of getting more sunlight exposure. And the reason why I'm going to do that is because the narratives and the beliefs around sun avoidance are so entrenched in Australia, particularly compared to perhaps even anywhere else in the world, that I think it's important to look at the data and look at the research that we have to support this idea that more sun not avoiding the sun, is actually a very powerful tool in the toolkit of longevity and health optimization. So let's get started. The overview a little bit about sunlight and death what does the data say? A little bit about vitamin D deficiency and, again, what does the data tell us about that? A little bit about skin cancer and a little bit about decentralized health, and to me it seems like this organization, diana, is really angled around decentralizing health and really providing health information to people, and I'm very much aligned with that mission because I believe that that that is an important way of of giving people the tools to improve their own health and not necessarily, uh, waiting for that, uh for that, that the practice to incorporate it into a mainstream treatment approach, because the lag time between research and translating into guidelines can be a very, very, very long time, and people don't have a long time.
Speaker 1:So I want to start with this study and this is basically a landmark study that was conducted over a period of more than 25 years and it was a cohort study done by a bunch of Swedish researchers in Sweden. And what they did is they got together a whole bunch of Swedish women and they asked them four questions. When they sat out with this research question and simply the name of the research study tells you a lot which is the Melanoma in Southern Sweden cohort they were looking to essentially confirm the hypothesis that the women who got more sun exposure were going to get more melanoma and die more frequently. So to really answer this research question, they asked women four questions when they enrolled them and then again when they did some follow-up interim analyses. So what they asked is do you sunbathe in summer, do you sunbathe in winter? Do you go to tanning salons to tan and do you travel overseas to tan? And they were expecting that the women, as I mentioned, who had these greater sun-seeking behaviors and they essentially graded them by their responses to these questions is people who had higher sun exposure habits, medium and lowest sun-seeking behavior habits. So what they found was essentially stunning to them and was the complete opposite of their hypothesis. And what they found and these graphs show the same thing in different ways is that those who avoided sun exposure, they basically died at twice the rate of those who had the most sun exposure. And similarly, there was this dose response, meaning the more sun you got, or the more active self-reported sun exposure habits, the less you'll all cause death. And that is that difference here. And mean survival was what they essentially measured.
Speaker 1:And this is really important because death by any cause is the hardest endpoint in this field of epidemiology, meaning there's no faking where epidemiology can be manipulated in some way, in some regard, to serve outcomes, specifically in the realm of nutritional epidemiology, with things like recall questionnaires and a bunch of other methodological slats of hand. But this study controlled for a whole bunch of what we call confounding variables that might, uh, that might suggest another explanation or another causative factor for why these women live longer. But and they this is a very high quality study, and what they they concluded was that women who avoid the sun, who avoid sun exposure are at increased risk of all cause death, with a twofold increased mortality rate as compared to those with the highest sun exposure. So, as I mentioned, this was completely opposite to what the researchers were expecting. So what else did they conclude? Well, they essentially found that the avoidance of sun exposure was a risk factor for all cause death, and this was at the same magnitude as smoking. What that translates to in plain English is that the women who smoked but had high sun exposure habits had the same mortality as those women who didn't smoke but avoided the sun. So when we think about risk in medicine and in epidemiology, we're talking about risks. What are the different risks or competing risks? And that was a really elegant way to show that those women who avoided the sun, that behavior it suggested that smoking was on par sun avoidance was on par with smoking in terms of its risk of all-cause death. So this is something that you will not hear. You won't hear anywhere, really, because this was such a it's such an impactful finding, but it really goes against a whole lot of narratives.
Speaker 1:And look, there are some allowances and I'll talk about them soon particularly but there's a lot of reasons why I believe this finding is generalizable outside of these Swedish women. So they didn't focus on the cause of death. However, the effect was presumably attributed to cancer, heart disease, um, and cerebrovascular disease. So a reduction in those causes of death, because they are the biggest killers and although I'm not going to mention it, I'm going to slightly touch on skin cancer and, uh, skin cancer doesn't is not a cause of reduction of life and longevity in an all-cause mortality point of view. So when we look at things that are killing people, it is ischemic heart disease, it's cerebrovascular disease or stroke and it is internal cancers like colorectal cancer, like breast cancer, prostate cancers. So the way to look at this is an actual number or metric called years of potential life lost. And if you compare the years of potential life lost to melanoma and non-melanoma skin cancers, it is an absolute fraction of the years of life lost to heart disease, stroke and these internal cancers.
Speaker 1:So what this melanoma in Sweden cohort study was showing was that suggesting is that those women who went out and tanning, they traveled down to Spain because they were in Europe. Obviously they were dying less of these key killers in society. And we know that there's a seasonal variation in both heart disease and stroke, with increased risks during winter and spring compared to summer. So the next question is all right, we've got this one study. Well, where else do we have a similar finding? Because in science and medicine we are interested in repeatability and what that means is say we observe one finding, we want to see that multiple times in different forms to confirm to ourselves that this is not just an associational relationship, but this is a causal relationship.
Speaker 1:And the gold standard of discerning cause in the current medical paradigm is this randomized control trial. Yet we can't randomize people to sunlight and low sunlight because it's over a long period of time. It's just not possible. So we have to look at all these different streams of long-term observational data to kind of get to a place where we can decide about causation. So this study was actually published this year and the long and the short of it is that they confirmed the findings of the melanoma in southern Sweden cohort. So it was a UK cohort, it was almost 400,000 people and they determined how much UV light that the people were getting, and they did that by asking them questions about sun exposure and sun-seeking behavior, but also by the latitude that they lived and remember, the higher your latitude. So the closer to the North Pole, the less UV light there is in winter and just generally. So they followed them for 12.7 years and, as I said, they repeated these findings. So those with the greatest sun-seeking behavior had lower risk of all-cause mortality, cardiovascular mortality and cancer mortality, and this was translating to about 50 extra days of time of life. That was the association, so the English. They're very happy about that because they've repeated these very important findings.
Speaker 1:So I want to make this point. This is an excerpt from the paper and I'm going to read it out. What they found is that people with more active sun-seeking behavior and those living at lower latitudes had lower crude mortality from cancers of the digestive system, so bowel, potentially stomach too, and breast cancer. They also had lower crude mortality from skin cancer and that is a really important point which suggests that even if the incidence of skin cancer in certain populations increases with greater sun exposure, the data we have suggests that mortality is lower. And that in itself is a two-hour talk, but a very nuanced and interesting point that people I think will find interesting and again, isn't mentioned anywhere.
Speaker 1:So what did these authors suggest in the highlights of their paper? They said that there's benefits of ultraviolet light for several health outcomes. They found that the higher UV exposures were associated with lower all-cause mortality, as I've mentioned. And what they say here is that public health messaging on sunlight exposure may need reconsideration. And I think that is in the current context of where we are at this point, and particularly in Europe because they have adopted Australian sun avoidance regulation and advice is even more important and relevant. But it is also relevant for us and I'm going to explain even more why.
Speaker 1:So these are not new findings and this is a paper from 1940, and it was written by Frank Appley and was titled the Relation of Solar Radiation to Cancer Mortality in North America, and this is what we call an ecological type of study, and he basically looked at the mortality cancer mortality in the different states of the US and Canada and he plotted them against how much UV radiation hits that area and what he concluded. One of the conclusions was that the total cancer mortalities of the various American states and Canadian provinces are shown to fall with increasing solar radiation and with the number of people exposed thereto, and are independent of the production of skin cancer. And this is showing that we knew even as far back as 1940, that we knew even as far back as 1940, however, 88 AD, four years ago that this is a beneficial thing and that what we can do is those areas with more solar exposure is having a meaningful health impact. That was the suggestion of this and that was the basis of asking those questions of the more recent studies that I raised. So let's look at this another way.
Speaker 1:So what I've got here is a diagram, and this is a little bit scientific, but I want people to understand this, because what this diagram shows is that we make a very, very, very, very, very, very, very important hormone called vitamin D on exposure to natural sunlight, and this is unprotected sunlight, and what I mean by that is we need ultraviolet B light in this band, this wavelength, between this wavelength band between 290 and 315 nanometers. What that will do is it essentially changes the structure of cholesterol in our skin to um, to a vitamin, uh, this, this fat soluble vitamin. Why I'm bringing this up is because if you don't get uh enough uvb, whether whether you live in a really high latitude country area where there's seasonal absence of vitamin D, or you're simulating a low UV environment and you can do that yourself you can simulate a low UV environment by wearing sunscreens, by covering up your skin from the sun and by not going outside. So you can either live in an area with low environmental UV light or you can simulate that in a place like Brisbane, queensland, by specifically avoiding the sun. So what we know is that this vitamin d level that you can get measured from your doctor, it's it's actually it's a proxy of the total sunlight exposure that you had. It's like a biomarker of of how much sun you you've got, um of all wavelengths. So what do we know?
Speaker 1:Well, they've done meta-analyses and these are the highest level of evidence again in this paradigm that we're in and they looked at all-cause mortality, again, death by any cause, according to vitamin D levels, and what they found was that people with serum vitamin D levels less than 22 nanomoles had nearly twice the age-adjusted death rate compared to those with greater than 125. And again, another study this has been known for a decade that these authors studied the vitamin D levels from almost close to a million participants and concluded that 12.8% of all US deaths, or 340,000 per year, and 9.4% of deaths in Europe, could be attributed to serum vitamin Ds of less than 75 nanomoles. So the hard stop here and I've thrown a lot of science at you but the hard stop and the point that I really want you to all take away is that the greater the UV light exposure, the greater sun-seeking behavior and the higher serum and vitamin D, which are all windows into the same room, demonstrate that there's less all-cause mortality. So I really like how Dr Jack Cruz has framed it and this is an explanation, and I'm not going to go in depth into why this is the case. I've done previous presentations. The most recent one on this topic was in April at Regenerate, where I talked about the likely mechanism by which sunlight and UV light is reducing cardiovascular disease mortality, and you can get into some somewhat complex mechanisms, but you don't really need to know that exactly how. You just need to know that it does.
Speaker 1:Dr Jack Cruz, who is one of the most, I guess, iconoclastic and, frankly, brilliant thinkers in this space. He's put it a very elegant way and he says longevity in humans is linked to optimal solar exposure, and the reason is simple. This protects the seven layers of energy generation inside the cell. The more sun a human gets, the more diseases they can avoid, and the number one risk of most diseases is age. Solar exposure effectively makes you younger because it lengthens the TET mechanisms inside of cells to improve the Hayflick limit in all cell lines. This is having an effect on longevity and mortality fundamentally because it is improving the bioenergetics of your cells. That is how it's operating. It is tuning and optimizing mitochondrial function and your longevity is fundamentally linked to how well your colony of mitochondria, those tiny organelles in all your cells, are operating. So when you're plugging into solar radiation as an energy source, you are delaying the process of decay. Life is just or optimal. Health is just the slowest form of death. That's one way of thinking about it, and the sun is how we harness that energy to die as slowly as possible.
Speaker 1:So what about skin cancer? And this is again a very important question because we do live in Australia there is a very high UV yield and there's a high UV yield. Not only is that relevant because it's high UV yield in Africa there's high UV yield in many places in the world but the importance as it relates to our country, in Australia, is that there is a mismatch between the skin colours of the native people, the Indigenous Australians, who walked and adapted here over 60,000 years and adapted to this environment and subsequently developed deep melanin, essentially highly melanated surfaces compared to, I guess, the European arrivals, immigrants later on, who are adapted to this northern latitudes and therefore don't have the melanin, uh, in in the skin in the same amount. To deal with this, this uv light yield, um, however, what we are being told and is that to to avoid the sun whenever the uv index climbs above a three, then we are to employ this five-step protocol slip, slop, slap, seek, shade and slide and I agree with three of those, which is the slip, the slap and the seek, especially for these people, four of us who are mismatched to our environment because we don't have the same amount of melanin, as I mentioned, as the people who evolved in this area. But the issue I do have is with using things like sunscreens, because they are essentially blocking those UVB wavelengths that we need to generate vitamin D. So it's a fine balance and that's actually a topic of a whole entire course that I've written to, I guess, make sense of this and how to guide the appropriate amount of sun exposure for your skin type, and it's an individual formulation. But the reason why I brought this up is because there's some discrepancies that we need to try and understand. So if you're following the logic, and the logic is that the sun is the most important modifiable risk factor in development of both non-melanoma and melanoma skin cancer, then these skin cancer patients should have high vitamin D levels Because, remember, vitamin D is synthesized when UVB light hits our skin and they should therefore have high vitamin D levels. That is a simple proposition. It's not too complicated. Again, this is a conditional If sun exposure is the major modifiable issue here in the development of skin cancer.
Speaker 1:So what does some of the research show? Well, and I'm sorry if this is a bit wordy, but this paper showed that vitamin D insufficiency was associated with the increased incidence, meaning the more frequent development of melanoma of the skin, as well as less favorable what we call Breslau tumor depth. So what that translates to is that those people who had vitamin D deficiency are more associated with developing melanoma more associated with developing melanoma. So these are the head-scratching moments if we're really being consistent with this kind of suggestion of a causal pathway that we're being told this one decreased vitamin D serum levels at melanoma diagnosis are associated with a tumor ulceration and higher mitototic rate. So a significant association between vitamin D level at diagnosis and tumor rate and ulceration was found.
Speaker 1:And what else? It's not only melanoma, but the non-melanoma skin cancers. So these include basal cell carcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma, which are really traditionally pinned on sun exposure, and not to say that it's not the sun. And I'll just redefine it quickly, which is that more than half or half of these patients were vitamin D deficient and 41% were insufficient. So no one was sufficient and that means having a vitamin D level over 75 nanomoles.
Speaker 1:So even for these types of skin cancers, which are again traditionally pinned on sun exposure, we're finding that vitamin D deficiency is playing a role. And if you remember back to what I mentioned about vitamin D as being a marker of sun exposure, it's just a proxy of how much that person gets in the sun. Then being deficient or insufficient tells me that person is living under artificial light. They're living an indoor lifestyle under artificial light, indoor lifestyle under artificial light and fundamentally that is breaking their body's ability to deal with cancerous cells and those processes are related to apoptosis and autophagy, which are how the body naturally breaks down cancerous cells. So the problem here is again putting a spanner in the works of the narrative that we need to be really avoiding sun exposure, because why are these skin cancer patients so vitamin D deficient? So vitamin D deficient.
Speaker 1:And the final one is that in those who developed severe metastatic melanoma not only metastatic but stage one, all the way up to stage four 84% are vitamin D deficient. So that again, and prognosis, the likelihood of you dying after developing malignant melanoma is higher if you're vitamin D deficient. So these things really need to be thought about in terms of this sun avoidance narrative. So, just to recap, vitamin D deficiency is associated with increased incidence of melanoma, non-melanoma skin cancer, aggressiveness and depth in malignant melanoma or a clinical outcome in metastatic melanoma, and a larger tumor size and risk of recurrence in basal cell carcinoma. So we actually need more sun, sensible, unprotected sun exposure, not less.
Speaker 1:And the way to quickly understand about what is going on with the sun and I'm going to go into it quite briefly is that we're getting all this amount of radiation that's being emitted naturally from our sun and we have this protection, this atmospheric protection that is filtering that solar radiation, such that what we get on planet Earth is only a tiny fraction of what is actually coming off the sun. And this is why, in my opinion that long-term existence in space or in, say, somewhere like Mars, is fundamentally a doom proposal, because those planets' atmospheres are not able to filter in the same way and create the same electromagnetic environment on that planet that our atmosphere provides us. And what we know is that the astronauts that sit in the space station, they develop mitochondrial diseases, and part of it is because they're under LED lighting, but another part of it is because they're essentially exposed to the full force of an unshielded electromagnetic spectrum from the sun. That's an interesting aside. It's a nerdy point, but an interesting one. So what are we actually getting on planet Earth?
Speaker 1:And this becomes again really important when we think about you as an individual. How do I get sunlight safely? How do I get sunlight appropriately? And how do I explore? How do I understand a more nuanced approach than simply UV index above three? Turn yourself into the equivalent of Michelin man with all kinds of sunscreens and other things on.
Speaker 1:So what is happening and this is I'm going to explain this really simply is that, uh, on, on this axis here we have um, the, the spectral irradiance. Just it means the, the energy that's essentially hitting earth, and on this axis it's we're talking about the wavelength of of that of these photons, of this energy, and what? What this shows is that a tiny part of of the light that we get is ultraviolet and, and actually we only get that um ultra b we get. We can get ultraviolet a because of its of its properties is much more abundant, it's 95% of ultraviolet light. But ultraviolet B is only available at certain sun angles and that's because the angle of the sun in the atmosphere and the amount of atmosphere and ozone particularly, will dictate how much it gets through.
Speaker 1:But there's abundance of visible light and that is most of the actual solar energy. Abundance of of visible light, um, and that is the most of the actual solar energy is in the visible light and that that's what what what plants are using to photosynthesize interestingly is is is the blue and the red light and they reflect all the green light and that's why leaves are green. So, uh, but interestingly that look at all this massive amount of light here, this is all infrared and this is all non-visible. And notice that or I'm going to make the point soon is that whenever you are outside in natural sunlight, you're always getting ultraviolet and it's always paired with red and infrared. It's always a balanced plate of light nutrients and we're never getting ultraviolet in isolation.
Speaker 1:And the reason why that's relevant is because the data or the experimental evidence that is really implicated ultraviolet light and demonized UV exposure is being done in nocturnal mammals, in mice, in animal models, and it's fundamentally used mimicking, trying to mimic sunlight, but essentially only using ultraviolet light and not having the protection of this infrared spectrum, which we don't have time to go into, but is really fundamentally undoing and fixing a lot of the ionizing or mutagenic effects. So DNA-damaging effects of ultraviolet light and ultraviolet light really can be thought of as this. It's a double-edged sword. It's both critical for life, as we've explained through the vitamin d data, but it also does have the power to to break dna bonds, and but the key point is that we essentially need to support our body's innate dna repair mechanisms and our innate essentially healing mechanisms that have evolved to deal with this, this ultraviolet light exposure that exists in our environment.
Speaker 1:The other point that I really want to make is that UV light is not always present in our environment and I think this type of education about well, it's essentially the astronomical properties of the sun and the earth. This isn't taught in school. Maybe it probably should. But what this illustrates is that in the morning, in the sunrise, you get visible light and you get a lot of red light, and you get a lot of red light and you get a lot of infrared light, particularly in that near infrared. And then as the day progresses and as the angle of the sun climbs on the from the horizon up to, uh, its peak at sol on noon, you progressively get this more of this shorter wavelength, essentially essentially blue and UV light. And in some places, particularly in Europe in winter, then the sun angle only ever climbs to where my cursor is here the mid-morning. That's how low the sun keeps in the sky, such that you never get UVB, but this process kind of reverses itself over the period of the day.
Speaker 1:Why you need to know this is because when you know exactly how much UV light and what proportion is present in your environment, then you can start making intentional choices and exposing yourself to the sun in ways that is appropriate to your skin type, without burning. And that is a key part of building this solar callus, or essential getting safe, deliberate sun exposure and not turning into a prawn that you see a UK tourist who's just hopped off the plane in Sydney's Bondi Beach, which is not the goal by any way, shape or form. So the question, I guess. So I've presented a heap of information about why the sun is beneficial and how it is, what the properties of the sun are, but the question is why is sunlight not emphasized in the modern medical paradigm, despite the overwhelming evidence of benefit? So I really, briefly, to finish off, want to discuss why I think this is the case.
Speaker 1:And fundamentally, we have this process of developing research and it involves the creation of scientific research by clinician researchers, often affiliated with universities, and we go through a process of funding or publication and formulation of best practice guidelines, and then the arrival of treatment guidelines that are inevitably emphasized pharmaceutical-based treatment, and at every step of the way there's influence of the pharmaceutical industry in these processes, in these processes. So what that means is that the cream of the crop of MD-PhD researchers, who are the most smart and intelligent people. They do clinical research but they get honoraria from pharmaceutical industry. They ask questions not about the effect of sunlight on health, but essentially the superiority of a novel pharmaceutical agent over the standard of care. And the whole structure, the whole paradigm, is based around finding a more appropriate or perhaps more effective and newer pharmaceutical treatment to a problem, whether that's type 2 diabetes, whether that is obesity, whether that is autoimmune disease or cancer. And these are well-meaning clinicians.
Speaker 1:But the fundamental problem is the paradigm of thought and the fact that we're not even looking for the crux of the issue. Because if there's no financial incentive for a patient to, hypothetically speaking, fast eat unprocessed food, build up a solar callus and get their serum vitamin D level to 150 nanomoles plus their serum vitamin D level to 150 nanomoles plus, that is a patient who would essentially become non-diabetic, they would become no longer hypertensive, they would essentially resolve the original reasons why they fell sick, address the original reasons why they fell sick. They fell sick, address the original reasons why they fell sick and therefore they would not be a customer anymore. And I don't say something like that lightly, but that's been my experience and my understanding of how this system operates. And don't get me wrong, there's a place for centralized treatments and centralized advancements in treatments, especially through emergency care and critical care. There's amazing improvements and that's very valuable.
Speaker 1:But what is not so valuable and what is essentially bankrupting these modern Western economies that we live in is the way that chronic disease is being managed and not cured and whether that's manifesting is ballooning pharmaceutical budgets, rollout of medications like a Zempik now in the US to younger and younger people expending on dialysis machines for diabetic nephropathy these are all different manifestations of an unaddressed chronic disease epidemic and the fundamental reasons is because we as doctors are not addressing the key reasons why our patients are falling sick and they relate to fundamentally, I believe that they relate to a dysregulated relationship with light and, secondarily, but almost just as importantly, dysregulated relationship with light and, secondarily, but almost just as importantly, a dysregulated relationship with food and the corruption of food and food guidelines. But that is kind of an overview of this process. And there's publication bias, there's citation rings, there's a broken nature of the scientific inquiry as it relates to the creation of scientific evidence and again it comes back to funding and financial interest. So to recap that there's an absence of intent to cure chronic diseases in this centralized health model. There's an overemphasis on medications and surgical intervention, there's an underemphasis of effective gold standard lifestyle advice and these are essentially what are ancestral health behaviors, meaning these are simply, if you transplant someone into the evolutionary niche of our species, when you mimic the light exposures, the circadian environment, the food content and frequency. Then you don't get chronic disease, you resolve chronic disease. So this gold standard lifestyle advice, it doesn't have the randomized control evidence that there is currently now evidence that there is currently now. But I would argue that the barrier that we need in terms of justifying advising this type of lifestyle is so much lower because it simply reflects the evolutionary norm for Homo sapiens, for our species. That was what we were doing. We were under full spectrum sunlight all day, every day, at our skin type, congruent with our environmental UV yield, with an absence of artificial light at night, had a completely regulated circadian rhythm and that was normal. So we don't need in my opinion I'm going to argue, we don't need more studies showing the benefit of sunlight on health. We don't need more studies to show that circadian disruption leads to obesity and diabetes. We actually just need this existing evidence to percolate through into lifestyle change. And that is why we're doing this presentation is because neither of us are necessarily optimistic that that's going to happen anytime soon, obviously not losing hope, and this is a slow process, but the process of getting through to people who are interested and receptive can be the more expeditious way.
Speaker 1:And finally, there are pervasive, deep-rooted financial conflicts of interest. I think I've made that clear on the previous slide. I don't really want to go into this in depth because it's really just laboring the point, but this is an article that was published in 2023 that essentially showed that there was a revolving door between regulators in the US Food and Drug Association, who essentially give a green or a red card to medications that get approved in that country, and pharmaceutical industry. So, after holding oversight roles for COVID vaccines, two regulators from the US FDA went to work for Moderna and really this is just a track record. So 11 of 16 FDA medical examiners who worked on 28 drug approvals then left the agency for new jobs and are now employed or by or consult for the companies that they recently regulated.
Speaker 1:This can create at least the appearance of conflicts of interest. Well, I mean, that's an understatement if there ever were one. So this is a reflection of this concept of regulatory capture as it applies to the pharmaceutical industry. This is not a unique phenomenon. If you go into the agricultural industry, you have people who work for the companies that produce agricultural herbicides, essentially influencing in the US the Environmental Protection Agency to determine what is a safe exposure level for that chemical and inevitably the regulation reflects the interests of the industry and not the interests of the public. It's simple and medicine is not unique in this phenomenon. It is pervasive and itout were the beneficiaries of that. So this is a problem. It's fundamentally a problem. If we continue ignoring the fact that these deep-seated conflicts of interest exist, then we're not going to get any closer to curing or reversing this tidal wave of chronic disease because, as I mentioned earlier, the financial interests are always pushing for more drugs, more late treatments, symptomatic or otherwise, to later presenting disease, and they're not aligned for reversal.
Speaker 1:This is a quote by Marcia Angle MD. She was one of the most distinguished and long-term medical editors of the New England Journal of Medicine, the most prestigious and I use that word in inverted commas because it is also being one of the most, I guess, influenced by those interests that I mentioned and what she said. So this is a quote from her. It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine. So she's an insider, she has seen the inner workings, she's seen behind the curtain. So when an insider like this tells you that there's issues, there's conflicts of interest that render the validity of something like medical treatment guidelines, when she tells you that, then if you're paying attention, then if you're smart, I would suggest that you should pay attention to that. So it's worrying and it's concerning, but it fundamentally, I think, reflects that much of what the centralized paradigm is built upon is in some way, shape or form influenced. And I think, if anyone's really, really interested in delving deeper into this, the Stanford epidemiologist called John Ioannidis, who is basically one of the world's leading experts in medical rigor and rigorous science, he published a paper I think it was 2005, so it's coming up to 20 years now, which is quite a long time, and it's titled why Most Published Research is False, and he very elegantly explains a lot of what Marsha Engel has suggested in this quote.
Speaker 1:So I mean I don't want to end on a pessimistic note. So what is the solution and how do we walk back and how do you? And I want to speak to you as an individual, because I think, fundamentally this is an individual process and health is an individual process because when we externalize our health and we rely on others, again, if you're in a more difficult accident, absolutely you're going to rely on you, on the emergency physician who's resuscitating you. But from a chronic disease point of view, if you externalize the treatment, then you're potentially putting yourself in a disempowered position where you are a victim of those currents, and they're bigger than one person, they're system-wide currents that I've mentioned. So a decentralized health approach is what I think can be a benefit to people, and that is because, like I said, it is going to emphasize what was the niche for our species from an evolutionary biology point of view.
Speaker 1:So the level of evidence that we need to reach in order to implement this is so much lower, because this was just what our ancestors were doing, and that is ancestral nutrition which is built upon whole foods, unprocessed foods, foods free from industrial agricultural inputs like broadacre herbicides and glyphosate and others. It's nutrition that is predominantly of animal origin, that's rich in ruminant meat, that's rich in wild harvested seafood. That was what we know from paleoanthropological data, was fundamental in building our brains, building everything that we know to be what makes us uniquely human. So it's also reliant on regenerative farming, and it is so because that is the process by which this food is produced. And it's produced in a way that improves the quality of the soil, it improves the quality of the food, improves the quality of the food and it reflects the animal in its native habitat. And, rather than being a scourge, an environmental problem, ruminant grazing, when done in this fully grass-fed, rotational manner, is a boon for the environment. It's regenerating landscapes, it's improving soil fertility. So that's another whole topic in and of itself, but that's a fundamental pillar, because this is how we move away from an industrialised food system that produces foods that contribute to the chronic disease epidemic and we move back towards ancestrally appropriate nutrition that is of benefit to the animals, to ourselves and to the planet.
Speaker 1:And I think the most important piece of this puzzle is circadian and quantum biology, and that means the practices of getting deliberate sun exposure unexposed on your skin, uncovered, and respecting this 24-hour rhythm which is known as the circadian rhythm. And look, I haven't gone into it in depth because I wanted to kind of emphasize other points. But the proliferation of artificial light, artificial light at night, is underlying, in my opinion, the explosion in chronic disease and I think processed food is adding massive amounts of fuel onto a fire that starts with broken circadian rhythms, with exposure to non-native electromagnetic radiation from a range of sources and again, that's not the topic of this talk, but it's fundamentally the foundation of improving health is to fix our relationship with light, and the best thing about this decentralized health in pillars is that they're free. They're all very, very cheap and a pharmaceutical option again warranted. For some it's completely optional, it's up to you, but they are somewhat more expensive ways of dealing with the consequences of ignoring these ancestral needs that we had and still have. If you want to learn more about the role of light in health and it's really been a focus of mine for the past six months at least on my podcast, no, over a year now then I would really suggest checking out my podcast. It's called Regenerative Health and I've talked to a whole range of experts on various facets of this problem and I'll quickly give you an overview.
Speaker 1:Robert Fosbury, astrophysicist, talking about infrared light and life interactions with your mitochondria and why this modern light environment is such a contributor to diabetes from a very, very fundamental point of view. This is Professor Glenn Jeffery. He's a neuroscientist who has studied the amazing power of red light in the deep red to essentially reduce blood glucose by improving mitochondrial function. This is Professor Richard Weller, who led that UK Biobank cohort study analysis and is advocating for more UV light exposure because of its profound effects on preventing cardiovascular disease and improving cardiovascular health and general health. This is Professor Michael Holick cardiovascular health and general health. This is Professor Michael Hollick. He is the world expert on vitamin D and his research has consistently shown how important unprotected sun exposure is for general health. This is Alexis Cowan. She is a Princeton-trained PhD researcher, again exploring quantum biology and circadian biology and talking about these decentralized health topics that, again, are not being reflected in mainstream guidelines. And this is Dr Martin Moorheed, who is a world expert circadian researcher and he's talking and advocating for the change of our line environment to stop this circadian disruption which is underlying so much of our poor health.
Speaker 1:If you want to learn more and you specifically want to ask me your questions, you can do that and I'm very happy to help you with a more in-depth and more personalized help in my private community. So all these changes are and honestly it can be like drinking from a fire hose and it can be overwhelming, completely overwhelming, because there are a lot to change and the modern environment from a circadian point of view, from a dietary point of view environment from a circadian point of view, from a dietary point of view, is fundamentally hostile to what I've discussed as being beneficial for your health. So I have a private community group, I do a weekly Q&A not too dissimilar to this, but I'm simply just answering questions and a whole bunch of very smart and motivated and very patient and welcoming supportive community, some of whom are listening now, who can help them, and it's a great community. So I'd encourage you, if you are really interested, then to join us and we can definitely offer you some help. And I've got some courses and these courses will walk you through the real basics of how to harness light and circadian reset.
Speaker 1:I kind of run it every month. Although you can access the content, you can purchase it whenever you like but I try and do it, emphasize it at the beginning of every month and really walk people through a couple of key behaviors that you can do, like this red light is one of them to mitigate the effects of this artificial light environment on our health and solar callus. That refers to this human photoprotective response which we generate on prolonged exposure daily, in small amounts at first, to develop essentially a response to ultraviolet light that allows us to harness more and more ultraviolet light without burning and, essentially, as I hope I've showed you earlier in the presentation, the more UV light you can harness, the longer your longevity, the more disease you can postpone or avoid. Solar calluses is some real deep cuts. It's very, very detailed. If you're interested in learning exactly why, then it's about nine hours of lessons, and it's about nine hours of lessons similar to this, but even, in some cases, very similar to this, to really provide a rebuttal to these narratives of sign avoidance that are so pervasive.
Speaker 1:I've talked about that and these are my contacts. So this is my YouTube channel. You can find the podcast on Apple Podcasts, spotify. I'm on Instagram. I'm on ex formerly Twitter, and that's my email address if you want to get a hold of me, and my website too. So thank you everyone for listening and, yeah, I'm happy to answer any questions that you might have about the talk. So thanks a lot.
