Regenerative Health with Max Gulhane, MD
I speak with world leaders on circadian & quantum biology, metabolic medicine & regenerative farming in search of the most effective ways of optimising health and reversing chronic disease.
Regenerative Health with Max Gulhane, MD
81. Sunlight as Medicine with ICU Physician Roger Seheult, MD
Dr. Roger Seheult is a world leading medical educator and practicing Intensive Care physician from California, USA also board-certified in respiratory, sleep and internal medicine. He is the founder of the Medcram YouTube channel and has recently been the use of heliotherapy for patients with acute viral respiratory infections.
We discuss the importance of circadian rhyhtms, how infrared light is interacting with life, mitochondria and disease, problems of artificial light at nigth and the indoor environment, how to educate people on light as medicine and much much more.
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TIMESTAMPS
01:32 Exploring Circadian Rhythms
10:59 The Role of Light in Circadian Systems
18:20 Melanopsin and Light Sensitivity
22:23 The Impact of Artificial Light
28:43 The Importance of Near Infrared Light
36:45 Mitochondrial Function and Light Interaction
55:55 Exploring Mitochondrial Function and Health
01:01:12 The Impact of Sunlight on Health and Disease
01:06:19 Health Disparities and Sunlight Exposure
01:10:03 The Role of Sunlight in Disease Prevention
01:21:05 Reevaluating Sunlight's Role in Cancer Treatment
01:36:30 Integrating Light Therapy into Modern Medicine
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So today I have the absolute pleasure of speaking with Dr Roger Schwelt Now. He is a practicing sleep physician, general medicine physician, intensive care physician and respiratory physician. He is the founder of the YouTube channel, medcram, which has got over 1.5 million subscribers, and his flagship video, called Light as uh called light as medicine, has over four million views. So dr swelt is a true clinician, scientist, educator and and I think he is probably the leading, one of the leading people. Uh translating what I believe is a a massive body of basic science research proving about the benefits of sunlight for health, but that yet doesn't seem to have permeated through to the public and to clinical practice. So, roger, thank you so much for joining me.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you so much, Dr Gulhane. Should I call you Max? Yeah, please.
Speaker 1:Please, okay, and I was watching your videos about a decade ago when I was studying for my medical exam, so I've got a lot of gratitude for the work you do and your role in this. There's actually five broad categories I want to talk about and feel free to start wherever you want to, but those are circadian rhythms they are near infrared light and the mitochondrial melatonin and the work of Scott Zimmerman, russell Ryder and Bob Fosbury. There's the epidemiological data about sunlight and all-cause mortality and perhaps vitamin D deficiency. There's the metabolic health story and the exciting data we're getting out of labs like Glenn Jeffrey with regard to the effect of light on metabolic health, circadian meal timing and, finally, there's the clinical applications, and you're pioneering or I would say re-pioneering the use of heliotherapy for your patients. So those are the five broad topics that I'd like to talk about, but please start wherever you'd like to.
Speaker 2:No, let's jump in. Those are really apropos topics.
Speaker 1:Cool Circadian rhythms. This is so broad, but explain to us how you think about circadian rhythms in general.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the way I like to start out about talking about it is in terms of what we as human beings do during the day and what we do during the night, and the package deal that it is, and that's important to understand. The best way I have of explaining it is talking about a friend that I had back in high school. He used to work at Disneyland, which, as you know, is close to where I am. I'm in Southern California and he would work at Disneyland, but he would work at Disneyland which, as you know, is close to where I am. I'm in Southern California. He would work at Disneyland, but he would work at night.
Speaker 2:This is a park that never really closed. It closes to guests at around 12, maybe one in the morning, depending on the time of year. Then the real work begins because, he would tell me, he was in charge of cleaning and sweeping. But there was people he saw all around. The engineers were coming in and fixing the rides, shutting down the rides, the people were coming in, taking out the cash out of the cash registers, restocking the gift shops, planting new plants, weeding. All of this stuff was happening at night and none of this stuff, if you know anything about Walt Disney and how he wanted to make sure that the facade of Disneyland, walt Disney World, was kept so well that he actually, even in Walt Disney World, he had a whole subterranean floor where characters could go and walk out of the park so that no one could see them in their costume costume. So the point is is that there were very specific things that happened at night to make sure that the park was ready to open up the next morning, ready for business, as if it was brand new.
Speaker 2:And that's kind of what we are as human beings. When we wake up in the morning, we're ready to take on a new day. That's sort of the new start of the day. We're well more complicated than Disneyland is, and if you start to look down and see what the human body is doing and how it's timed, there is a certain time of the day where we are being prepared for the next day. That's at night. So there is breaking down, there is repairing, there is fixing, there's getting ready for the next day. All of that is happening during the nighttime, and then there's the daytime that next day. All of that is happening during the nighttime and then there's the daytime. That's when you do all the stuff that we do as human beings. That's when we eat, that's when we exercise, that's when we do. We're very active at that time. And that's the time of day that Disneyland does its things. It's got the rides, it's got the characters, it's got all that sort of stuff.
Speaker 2:So the problem comes in is that all of those things are tied in the circadian rhythm. So the circadian rhythm, which is the master clock in the suprachiasmatic nucleus in the brain. This is literally regulating all of the smaller clocks in the whole body. You could think of this as like the conductor of an orchestra and you've got the violins, you've got the rest of the strings, you've got the flutes, the woodwinds, the brass, the timpani, the rest of the percussion. All of these things are processes that have to be governed, otherwise the music that you're going to make is going to be dissonant and out of sync.
Speaker 2:And so when you start to look and see what are the major movers of circadian rhythm, it's food, okay, it's light. These are what we call zeitgebers, or things that intervene into the suprachiasmatic nucleus and therefore the entire circadian rhythm. And you start to get problems when you confuse that circadian rhythm by entering in zeitgebers into parts of that circadian rhythm where they're not supposed to be in the natural setting. So if you want to sort of go back a thousand, two thousand, ten thousand, however time you want to go back in time, generally speaking human beings would eat when the sun was up. That's when they were able to prepare the food, that's when they were able to get the food and that's when light was up. So it turns out that the things that are associated with the daytime business of things is food, eating and light, and so that is a very strong zeitgeber to tell the body that we should be doing the things that are associated with the day. And the lack of those things the lack of light, the lack of eating is associated with all of the breakdown.
Speaker 2:So just to break this down now let's get more detail is in terms of circadian rhythm and fasting and light. Certainly, it goes almost without saying that light is going to tell your circadian rhythm that it's day and the lack of light is going to tell you that it's at night. And if you flip those around, if you are not exposed to a lot of light during the day, that's confusing. And if you are exposing your light to your eyes to light at night. That's going to be confusing to the hard wiring of our circadian rhythm.
Speaker 2:Furthermore, we know that things are better dealt with at night, when we're supposed to be breaking things down, if we don't have food or carbohydrates in our stomach, and that is because the products of fat breakdown, specifically beta-oxidation, going to ketone bodies. This is something that happens during starvation, and starvation sounds like a really bad term here, but we're basically saying lack of carbohydrates, when you don't have carbohydrates because you're not eating. That's when your body, after about four or five hours after your last carbohydrate load it, goes into beta-oxidation of fat, and one of the key products of that process is our ketone bodies. Ketone bodies in and of themselves are very powerful stimulators of the breaking down and repair system, such that if you're eating when you should not be eating, late at night, you're not going to allow the system to do what it needs to do. So what does that all mean?
Speaker 2:In that analogy of Disneyland? It would mean that the gardener is coming in to weed the garden in front of it's a Small World while the guests are lighting up, or the people are in line to ride Space Mountain when the engineers are shutting down the ride, you're going to start to see that the application of Disneyland is now. You're now swimming upstream, you're trying to do the same processes, but it's not flowing and becomes a mess. If you've ever seen the Arc de Triomphe in France and you see that massive roundabout where all these cars are coming in, that's what your body looks like when you're out of sync, as opposed to a very well demarcated road where you have traffic lights and things are moving very efficiently.
Speaker 2:So circadian rhythm is so powerful, I would say, when things are happening during the day. It's so powerful that there's a whole branch of medicine pharmacology which is now going back and looking at all of the studies that they've ever done and realizing that not only the efficacy but the side effects of the medications that they tested on people could be different depending on the time of day that that medication was actually given. And it may actually be that medicines may have a higher efficacy if given at a certain time of day, depending on their circadian rhythm, versus another time of day. So it cannot be understated how important circadian rhythms are.
Speaker 1:It cannot be understated how important circadian rhythms are. Yeah, that whole field of chronobiology and chronopharmacology is fascinating, and one that I'm looking to see is going to be expanded. I really like the analogy of Disneyland. I also use an analogy of a yin and yang, with clock timing on it, and that to imply that there is a necessary dualistic need for bright daytime light during the day, and an absence of light other than moonlight, I would assume during the night. The problem, therefore I am framing this in today's world is really we're getting a whole lot less daylight than we should be and we're getting a whole lot more light at night than we should be.
Speaker 2:Yes, those demarcations that were very specific and very well lined up are becoming very blurred now. You're absolutely correct.
Speaker 1:Talk about the sensation or the perception of light in the circadian system, because this was an area of science and research that is relatively new, with regard to even the anatomy of the eye and, I guess, the visual vision forming versus light detecting functions.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we are all familiar with the rods and the cones that give us the difference between dark and light and color. But there are also something called intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells, and these are ganglion cells that are concentrated in the lower portion of the retina and because of that position, by the way, they're more sensitive to light in the upper visual fields, which is interesting because that's where the heavenly bodies of light are. Generally speaking, these are exquisitely sensitive to light in the evening time, but not very sensitive to light in the morning time. And that is a predicament for us because, remember now, this is hardwired. Now think about your circadian rhythm. You're a conductor, you're on stage, you're conducting this orchestra and you have no external cues other than these zeitgebers that I'm talking about. So when someone is eating, or let's talk about the most powerful one, which is light. So if the suprachiasmatic nucleus believes that it is night and night is coming on, it's going to be signaling the pineal gland to start secreting melatonin. However, if it gets a burst of light, of light sensation, from the intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells in the eye, it's going to say wow, there's light coming in. This means that I have been too early in my cueing the pineal gland to make melatonin, I must be too early in the program. So what I must do is I must shut down the melatonin completely, and any amount of light will do that. That's number one. And, by the way, I don't want to understate that by just moving on, because when you lose melatonin from the pineal gland, you're losing the secretion of probably one of the most powerful antioxidants known to man. It's even more powerful than glutathione. People talk about glutathione. Glutathione I mean melatonin actually upregulates glutathione, so it's not only a powerful antioxidant in and of itself, it also regulates so many other antioxidant systems. So it's really powerful. That gets shut down with light at night.
Speaker 2:That's the first problem. The second problem is that it doesn't want to be doing things in the wrong sense. It wants to be adjusting so that it is correct. So it's kind of like fool me once. It wants to be adjusting so that it is correct. So it's kind of like fool me once. You know, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. So it says to itself okay, I thought that this was nighttime, but apparently I'm wrong because I'm getting light in from the retina. Therefore I must be too early. I'm going to shift my timing so that now tomorrow I'm not going to be coming on at this time, I'm going to be coming on a little bit later. So that now tomorrow I'm not going to be coming on at this time, I'm going to be coming on a little bit later. And you can imagine, chronic stimulation of that retina over a long period of time is just going to continuously make that circadian rhythm come on later and later and later.
Speaker 2:So that's the major problem with having light when you should not be having light. Let's go the other way. If you're not getting light when you should be getting having light, let's go the other way If you're not getting light when you should be getting light in the morning time. Unfortunately, at that period of time the intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells are not as sensitive as they were in the evening, where literally just one photon of light can trigger that type of a shutdown. No, in fact it needs a lot more light.
Speaker 2:In fact you need to actually go outside to really get the amount of light and just sort of let's back up here and talk about something called lux. Lux is a measurement of the amplitude of the light that you're getting In a regular room in your house it's probably about 50 to 60 lux. You go outside it could be about 20,000, 30,000 lux. On a bright, full, sunny day, 100,000 lux. So you can see the difference between the amount of light that you get inside your home, even with windows, versus going outside into the bright, sunny light of that day, and that's the type of light that we're talking about.
Speaker 2:That you really need to have to send that signal to the suprachiasmatic nucleus and say yes, it is the morning time, you are getting your dose of light and we're going to anchor your circadian rhythm to start right now so that in your concert the first, second and third movements of the symphony that you're going to play for that day come on at exactly the right time. That's the big thing in terms of the timing. And, by the way, if you are somebody who has become a late owl because you've repeatedly stimulated your intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells to light at night, one of the ways of getting that back, of advancing your circadian rhythm so now it's coming on earlier in the night, one of the ways of getting that back, of advancing your circadian rhythm so now it's coming on earlier in the night, is to do exactly what we said expose your eyes to bright light in the morning time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the way I think about the exposure of artificial light at night is really, people are robbing themselves of melatonin, as you talk about. And when you understand the profound role of melatonin as essentially the guardian of the mitochondrial genome and you understand that chronic disease, cancer, neurodegenerative disease, type 2 diabetes, all these conditions are essentially an outcome of chronic mitochondrial dysfunction and I would say I know it has a lack of adequate mitochondrial DNA repair, which is also known as mitochondrial heteroplasmy, then you can see how artificial light at night leads to cancer and the data on breast cancer incidents, prostate cancer, these hormone sensitive cancers, and artificial light at night is unequivocal. And it's interesting though and we're going to talk about this later in the interview is that people can also deprive themselves of melatonin during the day. That is because a certain wavelength of natural sunlight generates melatonin in the mitochondria Before we get to that.
Speaker 1:I really want to emphasize this idea of timing. I've thought about and talked to a couple of people about the importance of why these rhythms evolved, and it seems like it was not only allowed us to time each of our body processes at the appropriate time, but also anticipate changes in the environment and as the day length and the season is constantly changing throughout the year. We're going to constantly need a different. We need to update that through these environmental sensing mechanisms and question specifically about how we're sensing this light. And we talked about the intrinsically photosensitive ganglion cells and they contain this really unique protein called melanopsin. Do you want to explain a little bit about melanopsin, how you think about it and what it's doing?
Speaker 2:It's basically like a neurotransmitter, from what I understand. It's interesting to me that, first of all, that these intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells are in the lower portion of the eye. We kind of mentioned that a little bit in terms of the fact that they're going to be more sensitive to light, that is, in the upper visual fields. They're also most sensitive to blue light. I don't know if that's what you're getting at in terms of that. Blue light is going to be the one that sets it off probably the most sensitively.
Speaker 2:But in practical terms, from what I've seen, there's a lot of things that have come out that have looked at blue light versus red light, and I would have to say that if you block all of the blue light and still have that light hitting your retina, that's still not as good as having no light.
Speaker 2:I think that's the key that we found. They did a study where they looked at changing the hue of digital screens and they noticed that really there wasn't that much of a difference as opposed to a study that they did where they took people reading at night a liquid crystal display like a Kindle book we call it, I guess versus a soft light on a regular book that you might have book we call it, I guess versus a soft light on a regular book that you might have, and there was a world of difference, not only in terms of the amount of light that was coming into the eye, but also the delay in the ability to fall asleep, because, again, of that melatonin shutdown. But, yeah, melanopsin is sensitive specifically to the blue light. I don't know how clinically relevant that is, though, because our attempts to modulate that really haven't panned out.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was going to ask you because in the clinical data there is evidence that melanopsin, this blue light detecting non-visual photoreceptor, which has this absorption peak at around 480 nanometers in the blue, which incidentally matches what we see naturally outdoors in the sky we're expressing this melanopsin receptor in our skin. We're also expressing it in deeper brain regions. So it really is pointing to me to this idea that the body is trying to collect as much light information from its environment as possible to entrain the circadian clocks not only in the eye and the brain and the retina, but all throughout the body.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's something that I haven't thought about, so I appreciate that. It's almost as if we are seeing that the body can do a lot more than we thought. I mean classically, probably 50 to 100 years ago, we thought that the only way that the body could sense light was through the eyes, and we're now discovering that that's maybe not the case.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's very fascinating Then when we also throw in the mix that we have these other non-visual photoreceptors, like Neuropsin, which is detecting in the UVA range in our retina and in the testes. This is like again not being really translated into human studies yet, but it really again points to this idea of humans as really these light beings that are so sensitive to environmental light cues and therefore disruptions or perturbations in this light. So let's talk about the artificial light problem, because you mentioned lux, and lux is, as you talked about, a measure of brightness. But the problem with artificial light is not only it's lower lux compared to the sun, but it's also a profoundly different spectrum compared to the sun and it's also got flicker. So this is nothing like the light that we evolved under.
Speaker 2:No, it's a cheap imitation actually and when you start to look at it you know superficially to the human eye and to the human brain. At first glance it may be similar, in that it's light. But you've just very adequately summarized the differences and maybe if we dig down. I'm not too familiar with the consequences of flicker. I don't think anybody really knows the true nature of how damaging that could be.
Speaker 1:It's mostly my bad, yeah, I mean the ability to concentrate.
Speaker 2:You know who knows where that train ends.
Speaker 2:But I think we are starting to get a fairly good understanding about the fact that, well, led lights the ones that at least are commercially available for us to put into our homes are completely devoid of light beyond 760 or the near-infrared spectrum, and it's not by accident.
Speaker 2:I mean it's done that on purpose. It's mentioned that this energy going into that area, those wavelengths, would be wasted, and the very reason why we have LED lights or we're asked to put those in I don't know how it is in Australia, but in the United States it's basically becoming mandatory and you can't find incandescent bulbs it's because of energy reduction. And, of course, for someone who doesn't understand that and I can say that 10, 15 years ago, when I first moved into my home and I wanted to make my home more efficient, yeah, it was worth spending the extra few dollars to get the LED versions and I noticed a significant improvement in my electric bill, but certainly the lack of infrared light was nowhere near close to being on my mind at that point. We're now starting to understand that that has ramifications, that that invisible light that we can't see with the naked eye, or at least perceive, may have a whole host of other health benefits.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I really want you to expand on this point, because I see natural solar radiation as necessary in all its different forms, and to distill and remove 90% of the solar spectrum, which is essentially what LED and compact fluorescent bulbs are, and then stick people in a room underneath that light all day, for, you know, six, eight hours to 12 hours, seems to be a recipe for disaster.
Speaker 2:Well, see, and that's the thing, what we've done in science, if you want to look at it philosophically is we've become reductionist. So we've looked at things in nature that are packaged together. The nature of science is, if something is good, if a product that has 10 ingredients in it we find to be very good for somebody, then what we're going to do is we're going to try to figure out which one of those ingredients is doing the goodness, if you will, of that person, completely ignoring the possibility that maybe it's not any one of those substances, but maybe one of those substances in conjunction with something else that it's packaged with, and maybe it's packaged in this way, in a way that interfaces with us in a specific way. So, to give you the examples of where we've completely missed the boat on that and it's not controversial whatsoever but we noticed many years ago that lung cancer patients did better if they were eating diets that were rich in vitamin A and vitamin E, and so the scientists thought well, maybe there's something about these antioxidants that's helping these patients with lung cancer. So they extracted the vitamin E, vitamin A, they concentrated it and they fed it to lung cancer patients. Well, what do you know? Those lung cancer. Patients that had high levels of vitamin E and A supplementations given to them did much worse than those that didn't get it. So obviously there's something that we have to realize that when we take it out of its environment it may act completely differently than what we think is going on.
Speaker 2:And so you have to realize that sunlight is more than 50% by photons for red light. So to say that the purpose of the sun, that the sun is wasting over 50% I won't say 50% of that energy, because those photons do have a lower energy than the visible in the ultraviolet. So it's not by energy but by photons that are coming from the sun. The majority of those photons are in the infrared spectrum. There's a lot about 38% of the photons are in the visible spectrum. And then what's ever about? 38% of the photons are in the visible spectrum. And then what's ever left over? You've got that in the ultraviolet A, ultraviolet B and then of course ultraviolet C, which hardly ever makes it into the atmosphere.
Speaker 2:It's a very specific package and it's packaged very specifically in that way. One has to wonder why that might be the case. But what we've done is we've said, okay, we're going to take that light. We're going to reduce that light and we're going to only limit it to the 38% that we're getting and, as you said you said it beautifully, you know put you in a room for six to eight hours a day and then assume that there's going to be no health benefits. It reminds me of what our defense secretary many years ago, donald Rumsfeld, said. He says you know, you've got the things that you know, that you know the things that you know that you don't know. But let's not forget, there's the things that you don't know, that you don't know.
Speaker 2:And clearly, I think when LED bulbs were being developed and this was going to be a great way to save on energy, I think that was the focus that everyone had was saving energy. There was concern about, you know, about global warming, the environment, these sorts of things, and the detriment to human health and infrared. I don't know if I can blame them too much, because a lot of the science has come about recently, but yes, there is this idea, this philosophical understanding that, hey, we're giving this light without the balance of this light. What's going to happen in that type of a situation? I don't think anyone's really thought about that, and so there was ignorance at that time, but I'll have to tell you, max, the excuse for ignorance is getting smaller and smaller, because I think the data is coming out and it's showing very clearly and we'll talk about this as we go on that infrared light is very beneficial.
Speaker 1:Yeah, undoubtedly, and you said it really well.
Speaker 1:The photon count when we're standing on Earth is majority is in that non-visible, near infrared, which is beyond red visible, and even if, by actual energy, most of the light we're getting is in the visible, and there's, I mean, a very, very kind of minor aside.
Speaker 1:We didn't talk about the blue light hazard, which is another consequence or detrimental effect of artificial blue light, mostly, I believe, at 420 rather than 480 nanometers. But the reason why and blue light is obviously causing issues like oxidative stress in the retina, the reason why that isn't a problem in natural sunlight, is precisely because that blue is balanced by red and infrared light. But the point I think that I really want to emphasize is that life and its evolution over 3.4 billion years would have made use of every single last piece of energy in the environment and adapted over an iterative period through natural selection to make use of absolutely everything that is available. So to presume that nature isn't using, as you say, 50% of the solar spectrum is a ridiculous proposition. And with work of Dr Bob Fosbury, Professor Bob Fosbury and Scott Zimmerman, of Dr Bob Fosbury, professor Bob Fosbury and Scott Zimmerman, we're kind of finding out how much the human body and plants animals, fungi are actually using that type of near-infrared light.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, regardless of what anyone's philosophies are on origins, it doesn't make any sense either way, whether by evolution or by creation. Let's take the creationist standpoint. Why would God create a sun that wastes 50% of its energy and not have it utilized by the human beings and the creatures that it created? And then you can look at it the other way. In terms of evolution, I mean, this is a tremendous amount of energy that's coming at that point and why not make use of it? I believe the allure of energy efficiency gave us the blinders to not have to consider that possibility, because it's a lot of energy that it takes to get that infrared going. I mean, for people to understand and to put this into terms of reality, when you go outside into the sun and you close your eyes and you've got maybe one or two layers that you're wearing of clothes on your body, you can still feel the sun. That's infrared light. That is the effect of infrared light penetrating through your clothes, penetrating through the top surface of your skin, exciting the heat receptors, and it doesn't stop there. It may be stopping there linearly, but then it starts to scatter in all directions and it can even penetrate even deeper. And that's where I think some people get confused about some of the studies about how deep can infrared light penetrate. Yes, there's a linear limit to its penetration, but then after that it just scatters until it gets absorbed by a weak absorber, as Scott Zimmerman likes to opine. But there's actual good data on that and this is a real key thing here is if you can't understand that, you'll understand this, and I like to use this analogy because it's all happened to all of us.
Speaker 2:Right, we pull up to a stoplight and there's somebody next to us playing that really loud music. What do we hear next to us? We hear the low frequency. We hear the boom, boom, the steering wheel shaking. Why? It's because low frequency energy is predominantly the type of energy that's penetrating through that person's car, then your car, and is actually resonating with the steering wheel and shaking the steering wheel. An electrical storm way off in the distance. The first sounds that you hear of an electrical storm is that low, booming frequency sound that you hear, not the high pitch ones. When you hear the high pitch ones, you know it's very close. And again, the reason is that low frequency energy penetrates solid objects very easily.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a great analogy for people to understand.
Speaker 1:A point about the fixation on energy efficiency and the lighting industry has a metric and it's called lumens per watt.
Speaker 1:And when they are mandating a lighting standard for energy saving, they're that they have to produce a bulb that turns all near-infrared deficient light and therefore put it in our schools, put it in our preschools, put it in our nursing homes, put it in our intensive care and emergency departments and therefore create profoundly unhealthy work and living spaces. But to really go deep again on the near-infrared light point, it seems like clinicians, our understanding or our teaching about light seems to be predominantly around the health effects or harms of UV light. We don't get taught in any way, shape or form the biological effects of visible and near-infrared. A lot of clinicians think that infrared can only penetrate half a centimeter into the body but, as you just mentioned, the work of Scott Zimmerman, who's actually an optics engineer and has modeled the optics of light penetration, showed that these near-infrared photons are essentially ping-ponging around like a pinball machine in the body and therefore penetrating deeper up to 10 centimeters, I believe. Yes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and not just through skin but also through bone, and this is something that's really hard for people to understand. But you and I, max, we know that when we went through medical school, one of the things that we did was to transilluminate the sinuses and by shining a light on the outward surface of the skin and we could see in a dark room, the maxilla or the hard palate illuminating, and that's because the light was able to pass through that. So that's visible light. Imagine if we used infrared light how much more that would be the case. So you mentioned LED lights, and certainly there are issues there in that industry.
Speaker 2:But another industry is the window industry. I don't know how it is in Australia, but I can tell you in California that the latest, greatest thing that's going to save so much energy it's not actually that new is something called low-E glass which blocks on purpose infrared light from getting inside because you don't want to overuse your air conditioner. You can tell if you've got low E glass pretty easily when the sun is coming through. If you can feel that warmth of that sun coming through that glass, it's probably not low E glass because it's allowing that infrared ray to come through. But if you're not feeling, if you're just getting light without any warmth feeling, then it's very likely that what you're dealing with there is low e-glass. And yet it's another reason that if you really want to get the benefits of this type of balanced light, you've got to go outside.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and to be clear for anyone who's interested, the only transparent surface that I'm aware of that actually permits full spectrum sunlight, including UV light, is quartz, and in one podcast Dr Jack Cruz talked about fitting NICU neonatal intensive care cribs with quartz covers so that they could get full-spectrum sunlight in. But that's an interesting aside. Let's talk about the physiological role of neonphrolight and what is it actually doing, and I want to reference a paper that I've seen you talk about a lot. It's called Melatonin and the Optics of the Human Body by Scott Zimmerman and Russell Ryder. I've described this as an instant, a classic album that gets discovered 20 years later. It isn't appreciated when it was first released, but this is such an important finding, so tell me what that paper meant for you.
Speaker 2:It was groundbreaking. I mean I could use all the puns that I like to use. It was eye-opening. It shed light on the topic. There's so many puns that I could use, they're all true.
Speaker 2:I just remember, max, I was at this point in my traveling here in my mind of COVID and all the things that were going on and vitamin D and whether vitamin D was working or not, and was there more to the sun than just vitamin D? These were little intrusive thoughts that were coming into my mind. And then, I don't even know how, but I came across this paper by Scott Zimmerman and Russell Ryder and it literally changed how I saw not only light but the human body and its interaction with light. There were so many points in that paper that just you know. First of all, the understanding of the mitochondria. The second was the fact that it could penetrate deeply. This opened up so many doors for potential therapeutics. This opened up so many doors for potential therapeutics. The idea that it could penetrate through bone, the ideas of the highly reflective nature of green plants. When I started hearing these things, all of these dots started to become connected all quickly. We have long-time data that shows that natural light in schools improve learning. We have long times of data that talked about the people that live in green spaces have less diabetes, less stress, they have lower diastolic blood pressure, they have lower urinary cortisol levels. We've had reams of data that shows that chronic diseases like heart disease, diabetes, obesity, dementia these are all related to mitochondrial dysfunction and long COVID and all of these things.
Speaker 2:And all of a sudden I went to work and I said you know what? We need to create a video? And I called Kyle, who's my partner at MedCraft. I said we need to do a video on this. This is the most incredible thing. So it took us about a month to really put it together and it was probably a little too ambitious because we looked at the circadian rhythm and then, after circadian rhythm, we talked about what we're talking about right now with infrared light, and I wish maybe we would have dedicated and in future videos we did dedicate it to just that aspect of it.
Speaker 2:But I tell you I was so giddy the night before we released that video because it's like I cannot wait to hear what people have to think about this and it was well documented and it just really changed my mind. It opened my mind, it made me see the possibilities about why all these things were happening. And then, of course, naturally I just followed into photobiomodulation, sort of looking at these things understanding. Naturally I just followed into photobiomodulation, sort of looking at these things understanding well, why is this happening? And it was fascinating. It was just amazing and explained a lot, explained a lot.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's a totemic paper, and the kind of key findings that I really have talked about is this discovery that we're actually synthesizing melatonin, this antioxidant.
Speaker 1:So it's not just a sign or a signal for sleep as it is having an endocrine or systemic effect, but it's actually having a local antioxidant effect, which Professor Fosbury has talked about as almost like the coolant. It's like the engine coolant that's being made on site in the mitochondria to mop up reactive oxygen species that are generated as a result of normal cellular respiration, and that is in itself incredible, and I think that explains what you talked about in terms of those broader, perhaps epidemiological or clinical data showing the benefit of the outdoors. But then the optics aspect of it was groundbreaking to me, because what Scott showed was that the amniotic fluid and the cerebrospinal fluid both had transmissive properties for near-infrared photons. What that essentially meant is that the human body was concentrating near-infrared light and bathing the fetus in a pregnant woman with these antioxidant-delivering near-infrared photons. I mean this is incredible stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it gives you new meaning to the term. A bun in the oven. It's literally being warmed, and it also is another reason why you know women who are pregnant and want to do the best for their babies is to get outside.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And to get even more of that sunlight.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and when Robert Fosbury did his spectrographic examinations on mushrooms, it turned out that they were concentrating the near-infrared photons in their reproductive or in nuts, I believe.
Speaker 2:It seemed like it was conserved in that other organisms were trying to concentrate near-infrared light into their reproductive, you know, into their products, so that they could perhaps optimize that process. Yeah, and of course we all know that we all get our mitochondria from our mothers for the most part, and that's going to be in the ovary, sorry, in the eggs which are in the ovary. Those seem to be pretty deep inside the body, but, as we saw with Scott's and Russell's paper, eight centimeters may be the depth that you need.
Speaker 1:Talk about the mitochondrial electron transport chain now, because this branches into the photobiomodulation research, because what is actually happening with regard to the interaction between different light wavelengths and this critical process in biology?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So for those that don't know about what happens in the mitochondria, it's like an engine. It's the engine of your cell. It produces ATP, which, if you can imagine an engine in your car is like an engine that's producing locomotion. It causes your car to go, but in the process of doing that it makes heat, and that heat has to be dealt with, otherwise it can make the engine very inefficient and eventually make it shut down. So the heat of the mitochondria is oxidative stress. So that is something that occurs in the process of what it does, just like an engine does.
Speaker 2:And so you've got to understand that, as the electron transport chain is occurring, is doing what it needs to do during the mitochondrial process. Essentially, what it's doing is it's basically handing off electrons, which are highly negative reduced electrons, I should say to more and more oxidized, until finally you have these extremely oxidized electrons and you've got to give it to something that's more oxidized than it is, and the only thing more oxidized than it is is oxygen itself, which is the reason why we need to breathe oxygen, because it needs to accept those final electrons at the end of that electron transport chain. So the process is this it needs to transfer four electrons to the oxygen molecule. If it does that, it's great, there's no problem. But if it's inefficient in any way, if it's damaged in any way, it may do three electrons, in which case it makes a hydroxy radical. If it does two electrons, it creates a hydrogen peroxide molecule. If it just does one electron, then it's giving you a superoxide. Now there are species of enzymes that are there to take care of this, like superoxide dismutase, catalase, the glutathione peroxidase system.
Speaker 2:But nevertheless, if you create these hydroxy radicals, hydroperoxide, these are so reactive that they only have to float a few I don't know angstroms, a few molecule lengths, and it will damage the very machinery that is trying to do the electron transport. It's the same thing with the engine that the pistons are moving up and down and unless there's oil in that engine and the oil is lubricating effectively, the heat is going to cause those pistons to enlarge and of course the cylinder to enlarge and it's going to get tighter and tighter until finally it seizes and you're actually damaging the very thing that it should be. And the more it gets damaged, the more heat it's going to make and the faster it's going to get damaged. It's exactly the same thing with oxidative stress. The more oxidative stress that you have, the more damage occurs. The more damage occurs, the less efficiently it's going to transpose those electrons to water, to oxygen to make water, and the more damage you're going to get. So it's a vicious cycle. The best thing to do is to make sure that your mitochondria are well taken care of, that there's an abundance of antioxidants all around, so that it can suck up those hydroxy radicals and the hydrogen peroxide and the superoxides faster than they can actually cause damage, and so for that you need an extremely powerful antioxidant, melatonin, that is able to upregulate around it. So that's really what we're seeing.
Speaker 2:What we're also seeing is that we are seeing that diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, obesity, dementia, cancer, inflammation, long COVID these are all diseases which have their root in mitochondrial dysfunction, and the reason why I got involved with this, max, from the very beginning was my treatment of COVID patients. I'm a pulmonary and critical care specialist, so I was front and center in dealing with those type of patients, and so there's, you know, we can talk about COVID. But the two big questions that I had that brought me to the table to look at this paper. The first question was why are we seeing? The people that are most susceptible to COVID-19 are the ones that are getting sick and dying the people with diabetes, the people with heart disease, the people with obesity, the people with dementia, these very people that have mitochondrial dysfunction are the very people that are most susceptible to dying if they get SARS-CoV-2. I thought that was interesting, so that led me down this path of oxidative stress.
Speaker 2:As it turns out, the SARS-CoV-2 virus binds the ACE2 receptor, and the ACE2 receptor, as it turns out, is not actually a receptor, it is a receptor for the virus, but that's not why it's there. The reason why it's there is to actually modulate, to help modulate and also be a cooling system itself for the engine to modulate and get rid of oxidative stress. As it turns out, it takes angiotensin 2 and converts it into angiotensin 1,7. Angiotensin 1,7 is actually an antioxidant. That's good. Angiotensin 2 is actually a pro-oxidant. Ace2 is actually a good molecule, it's a good enzyme, but it gets decimated. With SARS-CoV-2 virus. What happens? The cell becomes even more oxidative stress.
Speaker 2:If you have these, if you can imagine these diabetics, these obese people who are running around with engines that are running hot, why? Because they've got damaged engines already. And now what's happening is they get infected with the virus and so, instead of just having hot engines, they're now having to go up this hill called COVID-19. And these engines are going to burn out at the top of that hill, whereas people who have better running engines don't have chronic diseases. Their engines are running more coolly. Yes, they're going to run a little bit hotter, but because they're running so well to begin with, they're not going to poop out, they're not going to seize up on that hill called COVID-19.
Speaker 2:So that was the first question that I had that led me to this understanding. The second question that I had that led me to this understanding. This is why I started thinking about light is. It's unequivocal, it is not even controversial.
Speaker 2:We have ample evidence that shows that people who came in with COVID-19 and had good vitamin D levels did well, significantly better than those that came in with low vitamin D levels. Now, the first thing that they would tell you in that kind of a study, max, you and I both know when we went to medical school. What'd they say? Association does not necessarily mean causation, right, but hey, what else do we have, right? So what did we start giving our patients with COVID-19?. We started giving them vitamin D, and boy, the difference between those that had good vitamin D levels and bad vitamin D levels was so much that I think we were preparing ourselves for a great renaissance of vitamin D. That people would, if we just gave them vitamin D early enough and in just the right amount of doses, that we could save the world with vitamin D.
Speaker 2:The fact of the matter is that the results were mixed. There were some studies that seemed to indicate that it might be helpful, especially if you gave the active form, especially if you gave it early and especially if you gave it high enough doses. Then there were studies like Shade et cetera, where they gave high doses but not the active form, and it really didn't make much of a difference at all. So the results were all over the map. Look, I don't want to disparage people who supplement with vitamin D. I supplement with vitamin D. I think it is beneficial. It just wasn't as beneficial as we thought it would be. So then I began to think it's possible that vitamin d is a marker for something else that's doing the heavy lifting, and I think that sort of gets us into the whole idea of is there something about sunlight other than vitamin d. That's benefiting, and we just sort of alluded to it, because greater than 50 of the photons coming from the sun is in the infrared spectrum, which has absolutely nothing to do with vitamin D.
Speaker 1:Yeah, amazing, and that is such an important point that I'm going to really underline. And the vitamin D serum, 25 hydroxy vitamin D is a biomarker of how much sunlight that person has had, how much sunlight you've got, or how much full spectrum sunlight that you have. And Professor Richard Weller, who is the dermatologist looking at the systemic effects of sunlight on health, he's come to the same conclusion. And predominantly because there's such a big disconnect between the interventional data of supplementing purified vitamin D versus the observational data of these amazingly improved health outcomes of those people that have a higher storage form of vitamin D.
Speaker 1:And look, coming back to the reductionist point that you made earlier in our discussion, is to think that we can distill the incredible benefits of full-spectrum sunlight into a little pill. I mean you and I know that it would never that's. You know it's a completely hubristic thought, but I'm really excited to talk to this exact point. Just before we go into that, I just want to make a point about the effect of red light, and red light is also being absorbed by cyttochrome C oxidase, the fourth complex, and helping that process of oxidation, and it's also helping the….
Speaker 2:Yeah, you asked….
Speaker 1:Yeah, go on. No, no, go ahead. Atpa, such that you don't need to in full spectrum sunlight. You don't need electron inputs from food for the electron transport chain to work if you're receiving these light inputs.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So your original question was what's going on, and that is, I think, even Glenn Jeffrey, who did the landmark studies in 2021 and then just published this year, in 2024, on red light in the retina and red light on the back, to show mitochondrial improvement respectively. I think he would even say that we really don't know exactly what's going on. There's been a couple of theories. Obviously, cytochrome C let's just look at the name of the enzyme cytochrome chrome, meaning color. Obviously this is able to absorb specific wavelengths of light. Do we know exactly how it's working? I don't know. There's some papers that would seem to say that this is how it does work. Some papers would say maybe not. There's some papers that say that the infrared light and I know this from chemistry, just being a chemistry major is that if you look at an infrared spectroscopy and you look and see where the O and the H bonds are, it's right there in the infrared spectrum that you can see that there is wobble and where there is potential absorption. You can see this if you compare the solar radiation from the sun to what actually gets through the atmosphere. If there's water in the atmosphere, there's going to be a sharp absorption there at around 940. We'll get back to 940 later and why that's important, but it's possible at least they believe it's possible that that type of light is structuring the water in a way that allows the as you alluded to the kinetics of that FTAPase to rotate more efficiently and less viscous fluid, which is the thing responsible for the reason why it's actually able to ramp up.
Speaker 2:It might be worth noting just this one little thing that there's a theory of aging that as you get older, your mitochondria make 70% less ATP. Up to this point you might have been wondering, or your audience might have been wondering well, why is it so important to increase ATP output? And that's because when you're a baby, when you're two or three, up to 10 years of age, your mitochondria are working just fine, they're working very well. But as we get older, a lot of the chronic illnesses, a lot of the chronic diseases that we see, are a result of significant battery reduction in our mitochondria. So anything that we can do to biohack and get that ATP production back up, it's very likely that we're going to see a reduction in aging. We may even see a reversal in aging in terms of our ability and all of those things that are related to mitochondrial dysfunction.
Speaker 1:Yeah, amazing. And two quick points. Professor Michael Hamblin, who is the world leader on the photobiomodulation research, has published data suggesting the absorption characteristics of that cytochrome C and related to, I believe, the copper centers is one of the mechanisms. And he's also talked about interfacial water, so the fact that, as you alluded to, the water is actually acting as a chromophore itself to absorb that light and essentially structuring it, that's a very interesting detour. The second point I want to quickly make is that Dr Doug Wallace, who was at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and the world-leading researcher on mitochondria, who essentially worked out that the maternal inheritance of mitochondrial DNA allowed us to map that whole migration process, he has talked about this idea of heteroplasmy, which is the rate of mitochondrial DNA mutations which accumulate a decade on decade and decade, and the degree of mitochondrial heteroplasmy that one accumulates in an organ-specific manner dictates what flavor of those diseases that you mentioned earlier that you get.
Speaker 1:And obviously there's genetic predispositions. If you have family histories, maybe it's more likely to manifest chronic kidney disease versus type 2 diabetes. But that is a key point that you have just spoken to. In terms of the water production. Water is that other exhaust fume, I guess, out of mitochondrial respiration. It's obviously getting rid of carbon dioxide, but it's also producing water. So as mitochondrial efficiency reduces, water production in mitochondria decrease and then total body water content decreases. So, as you rightly said, Roger, that the key goal here is to optimize mitochondrial function into aging, meaning that we need to preserve our health as much as possible, and plugging into natural solar radiation seems to be.
Speaker 2:And plugging into natural solar radiation seems to be one of the most important things. Yeah, so let's just catalog real quickly some of the major headpoints here of Glenn Jeffrey and his lab at University College London. The one that's most notable is the most recent one, where he took healthy volunteers. One where he took healthy volunteers, he gave them a 75-gram load of glucose and he basically lit their backs with red light, not infrared light, but red light, as you alluded to. I think it was 670, if I'm not mistaken, yeah, 670. Yeah, and so he showed very, very elegantly that the mitochondrial efficiency improved so dramatically that there was actually a reduction in the peaking of that glucose I think by about 27% at peak, and they were able to show that this in fact wasn't you know, it wasn't like a sleight of hand here there was actual improvement in mitochondrial function because they were able to detect an increase in carbon dioxide in the breath of these people. That got that.
Speaker 2:The other point that it's really interesting to mention, too, is the idea that what he did three years earlier, where he took people who were older, who had an inability to distinguish between colors because of their retina and because of photo aging, of aging because of their eyes.
Speaker 2:One point to understand is that the retina is actually the part of the body that has the highest concentration of mitochondria, and all it took was three minutes of red light into the retina and these people were able to see better in terms of differentiating color, which is very energy dependent in terms of mitochondria, for five days. So something is going on where there is just enough that is needed to create a change that lasts for about five days. I think that's very encouraging, especially when we hear and we talk about people that are living in environments and climates where the sun doesn't come out every single day, where you might not be able to get the sun every single day, and it's encouraging to know that it's not like one of these things where the longer you spend in the sun, the better the effects are. There seems to be a switch at some point and that effect lasts for a number of days. I think that's really interesting.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's incredibly valuable and the work of I mean, that paper that Glenn Jeffrey did is, I think, groundbreaking as well in terms of this implication, which is, if red light is able to lower blood glucose and basically rev up mitochondrial metabolism, if you're in a room, an office, windowless room or low-e glass room with LED downlights, with no red and no infrared, then your mitochondrial efficiency is going to go down and the next step is obviously diabetes and prediabetes and insulin resistance because of that lack of external energy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, of external energy, yeah, yeah. So for me, I didn't approach this in terms of longevity. I didn't approach it in terms of the physiology I'm not a biologist. I simply approached this out of the necessity for, like, what am I doing for my patients? Like, why is vitamin D not working? What am I missing here? What does the sun get or provide? And there was a lot of studies that came out that were very tantalizing and built one upon the other. The first study for me that showed that the sun is more than just vitamin D was the study that looked at the surges of COVID-19 in Europe in 2020. And as the sun started to go down in Europe in the autumn of 2020, below the equator, into the Southern Hemisphere, down where you guys are, the first countries that got their surge was Finland, and then from there it went a little bit more south to Germany. Finally, the last out of all the countries in Europe to have their surge was Greece, the country that is most Southern. And they looked at the correlation. It had nothing to do with temperature, it had nothing to do with humidity. They plotted those out. Those R-squareds were flat, but the R-squared for the latitude was clearly correlative.
Speaker 2:Another study that was done out of the University of Edinburgh was they looked at mortality and light in the United States in areas where they could not get enough vitamin D. So they looked at the northern portions of the United States where there was no way enough ultraviolet B was coming through to make any sort of vitamin D. They still noticed in those areas that the more light that there was, the lower the COVID-19 mortality. They repeated those studies in England, found exactly the same results. Repeated again in Italy, found exactly the same results. So it's incredible that that was the case and actually I worked with a geographist from Mexico, margaret Skutch, and she and I looked at all of the countries of the entire world and we correlated that in those countries that had greater than 50% overweight rates in their population that there was a statistical significant correlation between mortality of COVID-19 and latitude.
Speaker 2:But you know what? It's not just COVID-19. So if, for instance, in the United States, if you were to go and look at the last four or five years and look at specifically every day of the year, you will see that whether it's pneumonia, influenza, heart disease, kidney disease, infections in general, all sorts of diseases, they all peak at the same time, roughly about a week or two after the shortest day of the year, and they all hit their nadir about one to two weeks after the longest day of the year. There was a study that Harvard did this is the Harvard Kennedy School and they looked at influenza, they looked at solar radiation data and they looked at influenza rates from the CDC and they were able to say conclusively, and I quote, that sunlight strongly protected against getting influenza.
Speaker 2:We as a country, we as a society, as an industrialized world, are moving towards being indoors, energy efficiency and basically doing everything that we possibly can to devoid ourselves of infrared light. It reminds me and somebody I think mentioned this, I don't know if it was you, maybe you did it or somebody else, I think it was maybe Bob Fosbury. He said that this is the new scurvy. We're putting people on ships without limes, lemons or vitamin C and they're all coming down with scurvy, and scurvy is now the new norm, and what we're finding is you add a couple of lemons back into the situation and you get these miraculous recoveries. It's not the fact that these lemons are causing miraculous recoveries. It's the fact that we're now supplementing a deficiency that we've caused over the last five or six decades.
Speaker 1:Yeah, amazing data, and it's just. These are all windows into the same room of the essential role of sunlight in health. That's how I think about it.
Speaker 2:I mean.
Speaker 1:I saw during COVID. I mean, I was on COVID wards during certain periods and I saw the patients who were deteriorating were the ones with the visceral fat. They were the ones that had pre-existing type 2 diabetes. They're the ones that had this smoldering metabolic inflammation, smoldering mitochondrial dysfunction and, as you alluded to earlier, when the virus kind of came and it provided that extra stressor up and above what they're already dealing with, you know, the wheels fell off the bus and they collapsed. So it's interesting. Sorry, go on.
Speaker 2:I was going to say for us, the very first people that came into our hospitals, the very first people that came in were nursing home patients, and unfortunately we know that these nursing home patients are dealt with, they're taken care of very well inside. They hardly ever get outside, and so they may be getting supplemental vitamin D, but again we saw that that wasn't enough. They need to get outside. I actually saw a few stories that people had sent me when I started talking about light, where they understood the benefits of sunlight. They seem to have known this and they were regularly getting their nursing home patients outside into the sun when the pandemic hit, and I think they were proud to say that maybe only one or two of them actually came down with COVID and none of them had to go to the hospital.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think it goes even beyond that and I think it actually accounts for the health disparities in ethnic groups, both in your country and my country and I spoke to Dr Alexis Cowan about this and there's a good reason to believe that the worst health outcomes of African-Americans and the greater prevalence of obesity and diabetes is the fact that epidermal melanin is essentially preventing the use, the utilization of the omega-ultraviolet light that they're getting when they do go outside. I think that's the same thing that's happening here in Australia, without Indigenous Australians who have such profoundly worse health outcomes than Australians of European descent. Yes, there are other social issues going on, but with such deep amount of pigmentation Fitzpatrick five or some of them even six their needs are so high and they're not being met if they're indoors all day, which we know from studies is on the order of 90% plus for the average person.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean the Aborigines, the native Australians, if I could say it that way. Their skin has adapted to being outside and as they've become modernized and they've come inside, these are exactly the same types of issues that we have when we have, for instance, Africans moving to the Nordic countries and not getting enough sunlight. In that sense, they're at risk for vitamin D deficiency. Certainly, but vitamin D is just one variable in that equation, right? That's just the UVB that we're talking about. How do you measure the lack of NIR? Those usually go together. If you're not getting enough vitamin D, you're probably not getting enough NIR as well.
Speaker 1:That's a great question. Maybe a melatonin breakdown product urinary we could perhaps measure.
Speaker 1:It was said that the Somalians, when they moved to Toronto and Detroit, there was no word for autism. They had no word for it in their native culture. And then, after migrating to these northern regions which, as you mentioned earlier, roger, have a seasonal absence of a build of ultraviolet B light. Therefore, no one, how naked they're standing, is able to generate any vitamin D because there's just no UVB light at all when they moved there, these kids started getting autistic. Unfortunately, and again from Doug Wallace's work, this is a mitochondrial issue. It's a neurodevelopmental disease, but it's reflecting mitochondrial dysfunction in the brain and likely. I mean, from what I've read I don't know if you've read into this, roger it's likely a neuronal migration problem related to near-infrared deficiency, sunlight deficiency and excess blue light.
Speaker 2:Well, I can tell you that I grew up in Toronto until I was about the age of nine and I remember distinctly in elementary school having fundraisers so that we could raise funds to do research on multiple sclerosis, a disease that I rarely heard about again when I moved to California. We know now that multiple sclerosis is definitely latitude and geographic in nature and it's not surprising. That has to do with latitude and it's interesting that it's at these high latitudes that we really see the stark issues related to sunlight exposure. Probably not unknown to you is the Sweden study, the famous Sweden study, where you have 30,000 Swedish women followed for 20 years, divided into three groups those women that avidly followed the sun avidly got outside. Those that got moderate sun exposure. Those that avoided the sun.
Speaker 2:And in a stepwise fashion you see a reduction in mortality in those that avidly went after the sun, not only in terms of cardiovascular mortality went after the sun, not only in terms of cardiovascular mortality, but also in cancer mortality and non-cardiovascular mortality, and the amplitude is significant.
Speaker 2:In fact, the authors in that study said that women who actively avoided the light, sunlight and did not smoke had the same mortality as those that avidly went after the sun and did smoke. So that's the type of I find it. You know, as a pulmonologist, I find it mildly humorous that at least here in the United States, people that wanted to smoke, we sent them outside. Little did we realize that we were actually doing them a favor by getting them outside. Who knows, maybe we need to get outside the ones that are not smoking, and maybe that would even improve our outcomes even more. I would say that recently, just in the last month, there was a paper that was published from UK Biobank data. 10 times the amount, not just 30,000, but 300,000, not just women, but men and women found almost exactly the same results. Those that were in solariums, those that went out into the light, had a reduction in all-cause mortality.
Speaker 1:Those two papers have been the subject of my podcast and discussion for the past year and they show profound findings, as you mentioned, which is lower all-cause mortality in those who self-reported more sun exposure and in the UK Biobank study those who lived at a lower latitude.
Speaker 1:So they actually ascertained in two separate ways. The profound, I guess, finding is that in that Sweden study, as you mentioned, is that if you avoid the sun, that is equivalent in magnitude of a risk of death as smoking. I mean you think about a patient coming into the emergency department with chest pain and we asked them about their risk factors Are you a smoker? I mean this data suggests we should ask them do you avoid the sun? Do you? Do you slip slop slap? You know, in Australia there was a there's been a program called slip slop slap about putting hats, sunscreens and sunglasses on. I mean, imagine if I asked the patient you know, do you diligently wear SPF 50 sunscreen, wear a long-sleeve shirt and hat whenever you go outside? A lot of my patients say yes. The Sweden study showed that that's a risk factor for all-cause death, cardiovascular disease and cerebrovascular disease.
Speaker 2:It's incredible. They're probably waiting for you to smile when they say, yes, I do that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the question that I want you to wonder if you have any input in is those are both Northern European populations. The Sweden study was in a Fitzpatrick native Swedish women. There was little immigration at the time that study was done, though the UV index in Sweden peaks around six because it's so North. It's my personal opinion that those UK Biobank and Swedish studies are applicable to low-weight latitude countries, but what would you say to someone that says, okay, that was Northern European, but it's not necessarily applicable everywhere else?
Speaker 2:Okay, I would direct them to data that might be interpretable. Have you heard about what they did in Louisville with the 8,000 trees? Okay, so we talked about at the beginning that not only does infrared light have the property of penetrating deeply into the skin, but that green plants, trees, are highly reflective of infrared light. And we have data that shows that people who live in green spaces have the same benefits as people who get lots of sunlight. And we already know, of course, that this is reflective of infrared light. So we think it wouldn't be a leap of logic to say that maybe this is what's going on. But we know that people that live in green spaces have a reduction in diabetes, a reduction in all-cause mortality, a reduction in cardiovascular mortality, and it's around the same amount 10%, 20%. So those same people that say, yeah, that's in Nordic countries, those same people would say, well, look, people who live in green spaces have better socioeconomic status, they have more money, they have better healthcare, they probably exercise more. It has nothing to do with infrared light. It has to do with all of those other comorbidities, or actually, in this case, confounders.
Speaker 2:Well, there's a beautiful study that basically put that all to rest, because, in a four square mile area in Southern Louisville, louisville, kentucky. Okay so this is not Nordic right, this is fairly low. They planted 8,000 plus mature trees. So these are trees, already with their leaves on. They're big. They just planted these trees into this area. The people living in that area did not change. They did not tell them to go on an exercise program, they just planted trees. That's all they did. They measured the highly sensitive CRP, which is a surrogate marker for cardiovascular disease, and they found that there was a 13% drop just by planting the trees. That's the only difference that happened. That may not sound like a lot 13% reduction but that's about what happens when somebody takes up regular exercise from being sedentary. So that's actually a fairly large reduction in inflammation that we're seeing. That's related to all of these chronic diseases that we're seeing and that's happening at a fairly low latitude.
Speaker 2:Okay, so what possibly could it be that these trees were doing?
Speaker 2:The trees did not get people out doing exercise. Okay, the trees did not get people out. You know, talking to each other and community, I mean, all of these things are possible, but the most likely thing that the trees did, the lowest common denominator that the trees would do, is simply, without doing anything, increase the amount of infrared light dramatically. I think Scott Zimmerman has shown that very well in his 2019 paper that shows the amount of infrared light that comes to the human being when you plant trees in their vicinity. It's the reason why, if you go out into the garden, the coolest place in the garden on a hot summer day is under a tree. Why is that? It's because those leaves are reflecting out all of that infrared energy and if you're outside and you're surrounded by these trees, this light is coming to you. You're getting bombarded, and if we can actually make physiological changes in a population in Kentucky by increasing infrared light, that should tell you that these people are not getting enough infrared light to begin with.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a very fascinating finding and inference. The other point I'll quickly go back to those two all-cause mortality studies because they were cohort studies and they basically used these measures of self-reported UV and sun-seeking behavior and they showed that the cohort that had the more sun exposure in the Swedish study had more skin cancer but they had lower skin cancer mortality and that was replicated in the Biobank study, meaning that yes, we might diagnose more BCCs, more squamous cell carcinomas and even perhaps more melanomas, but your likelihood of surviving that melanoma was, I believe, eightfold greater in the women who had that most active sun-seeking exposure behavior compared to the ones that avoided the sun.
Speaker 2:So yeah, and I've seen some studies, max, where the things that have increased the risk of death from melanoma would be things that you would assume, like the thickness of the melanoma, the fact that it may be axial or on the head and neck these are all things that would increase mortality, whereas things that would decrease mortality were things that would be that go against what we're told Like, for instance, solar elastosis, basically skin damage from the sun. That's a factor that actually reduces the mortality from melanoma. People who go out into the sun and who are exposed to the sun more were actually risk factors, beneficial factors, I should say, that reduce melanoma mortality. Fascinating.
Speaker 1:That's a great one. I'm really glad you took that off the tip of my tongue. The other one I was about to say is that they cultured malignant melanocytes in the cell culture and then they added in 125-dihydroxyvitamin D, which is the active form of vitamin D. What happened? The malignant melanocytes stopped dividing. So the more vitamin D you have, which you generate from UV light, that study suggested that was protective of the development or the growth of malignant melanoma.
Speaker 1:We also know that Breslau thickness is deeper is worse in people who are vitamin D deficient. There's another study in metastatic melanoma for patients receiving these checkpoint inhibitors that the outcome, the death, is greatly increased the lower the serum vitamin D is. And there's also an Italian study. Sorry, I'll let you speak just to quickly get this one in. There's also an Italian study sorry, I'll let you speak, just to quickly get this one in. There's an Italian study which showed the outcome of those diagnosed with melanoma and it was improved if they took a Mediterranean holiday or an overseas holiday versus those that didn't. I'm not sure exactly how they ascertained that, but these all go to show that maybe once a patient gets diagnosed with melanoma, we should actually be advising them low-level sun exposure, including a bit of UVB, to help build up that vitamin D level if we want a better outcome.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and let's just face it, let's take a step back here. The amount of evidence now has reached a critical mass that the dermatological world has to take notice. They have to raise their eyebrows and they got to see. And you reference Dr Weller. I'm sure you're aware that he recently published an article in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology, a major dermatological journal, and the title of his paper was Sunlight Time for a Rethink. And I actually just pulled up the article while you were talking because it made me think about it. He says basically here that there have been. He says here the Australian panel, endorsed by the Cancer Council of Australia and Australasian College of Dermatologists, have both just produced position statements recognizing that sunlight has beneficial effects that should be considered in formulating policy on sunlight exposure and highlighting the necessity of carrying out further research into these beneficial effects. We should take note. So I think we've reached a critical mass and I think people are starting to wake up and see it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and to maybe one more facet into this all-cause mortality picture is the vitamin D observational literature, and I guess we've explained pretty in depth that the vitamin D serum level is just a reflection of how much sunlight and near-infrared light, uv light that someone's getting. But we've known and there's mirror analysis since 2014, that all-cause mortality is linearly related to vitamin D status and with vitamin D deficiency being a risk factor for all-cause death and a range of other outcomes. So to me that is a really elegant reflection of what Weller found in the UK Biobank analysis, what Peli Lindquist found in his Melanoma in Southern Sweden cohort, because it's a different way of looking at the same thing, which is that the more time outside, the more sunlight you get, the longer you live.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. So you know where are we going with all of this, you know, should we be informing the manufacturers of LEDs? Should we be informing the architects, the people that build hospitals, the doctors that take care of patients in the hospitals? I just saw an article where they were talking about what they did in 1918. The outdoor air camps had significantly improved mortality over the ones. Even the ones that were in hospitals with the windows open did not do as well as those that were fully outside in full sunlight. And they said I remember reading one of the contemporaries they said look, it's clear to me. All you have to do is try it and you will see. It's very obvious that patients get better when they're outside. So here's this dichotomy. We've been talking about two things. We've been talking about how sunlight is a major elixir, if you will, for prevention, but as it turns out, it's actually a major way of treating the consequences of lack of sunlight, if you get to that point.
Speaker 2:Influenza, covid-19. And so I had the opportunity to actually treat a patient that came in with COVID-19 that was near intubation, and we were able to turn him around very, very quickly with infrared light. The reason why I was excited enough to try. It was because of this Brazilian study that I'm sure you're aware of, where they gave again 940 nanometer light wavelength, which is exactly at that frequency where water likes to absorb. I wonder whether or not that informed their decision to do 940 nanometers. But they only did it for 15 minutes a day and they did it once a day for seven days and those patients could take deeper breaths for longer, have better oxygen saturations, their immune systems improve faster and they were discharged from the hospital four days faster than their counterparts.
Speaker 2:And this was a randomized, placebo-controlled trial. So none of this association causation. This was an intervention trial that had inclusion criteria, that was randomized, placebo-controlled, and they were able to find highly statistical, significant numbers with just 30 patients. That's pretty impressive. Obviously, we need more studies to really nail that down and figure out what we're doing there, but that was enough for me, knowing what the risk factors. What's the risk of putting somebody in the sun for 15 minutes? Not a lot and potential benefits, potential upsides. So yeah, I had this gentleman that came in. He was on steroids already, he was getting conventional therapy and look, I'm not one of these people that'll say just use sunlight and don't do anything else.
Speaker 1:Do both. Sorry, roger, just to make the point, that's prednisolone, not anabolic steroids.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Thank you very much.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so not anabolic steroids. This is prednisolone. This is steroids that we give to reduce inflammation. So he was getting all the conventional therapy. That's the cornerstone of inpatient COVID-19 therapy is Decadron dexamethasone, six milligrams daily. He was up to 35 liters 100% oxygen.
Speaker 2:We went into his room. It was dark. I mean, as soon as I walked in. With all of this knowledge that you and I have now, can you imagine walking to this room and seeing a dark room with the windows closed, his daughter next to him with a mask on, he with a mask on? Well, I don't know if he had a mask on, but he had oxygen on 35 liters 100% FiO2.
Speaker 2:And I knew immediately that the only hope that this guy had was to get him outside into the sunlight. So we talked to our respiratory therapist and she was able to get two oxygen tanks together to do like a high flow nasal cannula and also like a non-rebreather. On top of that. We got him outside into the sunlight and we did it for 15 minutes a day. The next day he went from 35 liters 100% FiO2 to 15 liters oxymizer.
Speaker 2:The next day, after that, 10 liters oxymizer down to six liters nasal cannula, four liters and then finally, five days later, he was off. This was the fastest I've ever seen anybody go from almost needing intubation to not needing any oxygen at all, and it's really a testament to how fast this works, and I can understand very clearly now how somebody in a study could really get out of the hospital four days faster. It's fascinating to me, I believe, that this works in not just COVID-19. It probably works in just about any infectious disease, especially given the fact that our immune system, our rebuilding system, our lungs everything is based on and built on the need for ATP. If we're able to give ATP at higher rates and more efficient mitochondrial engines, I think it's very likely, given everything that we know, that sunlight for patients in the hospital could be very beneficial.
Speaker 1:Incredible. Was that study? You referenced the Brazilian study. Were they using the jackets?
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:So they delivered the near-infrared light via a jacket and elegantly and I think this really speaks to the quality of the study and the randomization intervention was that you can very easily placebo control this, because you can't see 940. No one can see 940 light, so you simply just turn off the control group's jackets and turn on the intervention group's jackets to deliver the intervention.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's essentially one of those bulbs at the end of your remote control. Yeah, that's basically. It's actually very similar. In fact, that may be where they got it from in bulk. They actually made their own jackets.
Speaker 1:Wow. So that was the basic science or the clinical foundation for you to have the confidence to take your patient outside and deliver his heliotherapy, and I think that's a very, very remarkable. But I'm not unexpected at all finding that he improved so dramatically. Did he have his skin exposed? Was he having some UVB on the skin?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so actually I will send you the picture that I took of him and the picture for those who are listening and can see it now. You'll see that I didn't take a full-on picture. I took it from his back because I didn't want to give his identity, although he did give me permission to talk about it and to take the picture. But basically he was sitting in a wheelchair with a gown on and his head is bald, but he's basically getting sunlight exposure on his head, but we know that that infrared light is penetrating deeply in through the hospital gown and going into his body.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the other point I really want to drive home is that this isn't a new practice and open-air. I guess clinics were used during the Spanish flu in the 20s and even prior to that heliotherapy was used both in Switzerland in the high Alps and in the USA for the treatment of tuberculosis.
Speaker 2:Yes, so interesting that you mentioned that, because I was looking into that and the history of that and it first started out in Europe and it was these kind of these hippies at the high altitude. They were very free thinkers. I say that because they were the doctor that was in charge of these people at these high altitudes in the sanitariums, had these people running around naked outside, basically because they really thought that that was really beneficial for ultraviolet. One of the guys from the United States who went over there to really study what they were doing, because they were getting very good cure rates at those altitudes. And for those of you who don't know, tuberculosis loves oxygen and at those altitudes you don't have a lot of oxygen. It's one of the reasons why, basically, tuberculosis likes to reactivate in the upper lobes of your lungs, because that's where oxygen content is the highest. At these high altitudes oxygen is very low. They're getting lots of ultraviolet radiation because the atmosphere is very thin at that altitude and the ultraviolet comes in at higher concentrations. But there's also infrared light as well, let's not forget.
Speaker 2:So one of the guys that was interested in this was a guy by the name of John Harvey Kellogg who was the medical director of, at that time, the world's largest hospital.
Speaker 2:It was in Battle Creek, michigan, known as the Battle Creek Sanitarium. What he tried to do was to emulate what they were doing there in Switzerland and high up in the Alps, to a place that was not very high altitude, you weren't getting a lot of ultraviolet light and there was plenty of oxygen, unfortunately. So he had to make do with what he was doing. He emphasized sunlight, he emphasized oxygen sorry, fresh air. He also emphasized light in the sense that he would make these light boxes. And what's really interesting about that it was that he made these light boxes but he refused to patent them because he really wanted the world to catch on and to build these things for themselves so that they could also do the light boxes. And what happened is that some Europeans ironically came over and saw what John Harvey Kellogg was doing and they adapted those and went over and built their own light boxes back in Europe. So it's kind of like this cross-pollination between Europe and the United States that came up with this idea of light and heliotherapy.
Speaker 1:It's such an interesting field and I've done some research myself, and it was Auguste Rollier who really pioneered this in Switzerland and he made some really interesting observations and I really encourage people to read some of his early papers. But he treated over I believe, cured over 1,300 patients of extra pulmonary tuberculosis and he made the note that essentially health was a function of pigment. So the more pigmented the patient was, the more robust they were, the quicker they healed, the more effective and prolonged the healing was from tuberculosis. So I mean, we've been talking a lot about infrared light, but it's my personal opinion that the UV is just as important and the fact is testament by the fact that it comes from the sun in this package of UV, visible and infrared.
Speaker 1:Are you familiar with pro-opioid melanocortin and that system at all? No, so if you're interested in going down that rabbit hole, yeah. So I mean, dr Jack Cruz, the neurosurgeon and theoretical quantum biologist, is really the person who's pioneering this from a theoretical point of view. But essentially, the process of melanin formation in response to ultraviolet light is a cleavage of alpha MSH from this pro-hormone polypeptide, pomc, and it's a really universal peptide. We haven't talked about metabolism. I don't know how much time you have, but alpha MSH in the hypothalamus has an appetite suppressing effect. So I think that putting people indoors and depriving them of UV light is driving the obesity epidemic. In addition to infrared and red deficiency that we talked about, it's driving hypophagia. Because full spectrum sunlight is such a profound appetite suppressant. I think because there's so much energy abundance that the body evolved an endocrine feedback mechanism to give us a satiety signal when we're in full spectrum sunlight.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I understand. I didn't understand what you were saying at the beginning, but yes, I am familiar with that pathway. What was new to me was the understanding of obesity and its relation to MSH. So that is interesting. Yeah, yeah, no, I think the more we learn, the more we realize that what we're learning is we're just relearning stuff that we've forgotten.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so maybe to tie a bow on this conversation. It's been amazingly such a great interview. I've really enjoyed speaking with you, roger, and maybe can you give us some suggestions or thoughts of how we can help not only people but our medical colleagues to understand or really start thinking about light as medicine, light and health, and the importance of natural sunlight and the harm of artificial light.
Speaker 2:I think it has to be with data. That's the only thing that's going to work. If we hit them over the head with saying that we're doing it wrong, you've been doing it wrong, and blame and things of that nature, I don't think it's, they're just barriers are going to come up. I think what we need to do is educate, and that's probably the primary, the first thing to do. The second thing that we should do is we should recommend it as many times as possible and then, when patients get better, we need to demonstrate it. You know, if you look at the 1800s, we did not have all of the scientific accoutrements that we have today. We don't have the blood tests, we don't have to be able to do gene monitoring and DNA and all this sort of stuff.
Speaker 2:Yet people like, for instance, florence Nightingale she was a nurse at the bedside of her patients. She was actually ironically known as the lady with the lamp, and you know what she says she actually saw the benefits of some of these interventions and if there's one thing that you can criticize, you can criticize them for not having the scientific accoutrements, but the one thing that you cannot criticize them is their keen ability to observe. You know in terms of heart sounds. People back in the ages with the stethoscope could tell you so much more about the heart than we can today with the same instrument. It's because they were so well equipped to be able to look at the body and make observations. This is what Florence Nightingale said back in the 1850s so well over 100 years ago. She says of all the remedies I have used or seen in use, I can find but one thing that I can call remedial for the whole disease, and that is a profuse supply of fresh air, second only to fresh air. However, I should be inclined to rank light in importance for the sick. Direct sunlight, not only daylight, is necessary for a speedy recovery. I think if she was able to see a dramatic difference with just putting people out into the sun.
Speaker 2:I think what we can do is two things. Number one, we can educate our colleagues on the science that is now coming through, because, thank goodness, we actually have the science which is demonstrating it. And number two, we can show how fast our patients start to get better. I found this true in the case that I mentioned to you After I got that patient outside and he dramatically improved in front of the staff. It was a witness to all of the staff that this is something that's actually a reasonable idea. So the next time you go and say let's get this patient outside, there's less resistance because they've seen that it works. So I think, gentle, hand-holding education and realize that the people that we are trying to convince that didn't believe us, that don't believe us, are in the same situation that we were in not too long ago, when we didn't understand that this is what was going on.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a very noble and, I think, kind way of pushing the message forward and I agree, and I agree wholeheartedly. The only, I guess, other thing that I would think about or suggest is that the way medicine is practiced in today's day and age is so pharmaceutical focused, and I believe it's that way because of economic incentive. And circling all the way back to the beginning of the interview, when we talked about reductionism and drug companies purify compounds, that's how they make their money, whether it's you name it.
Speaker 1:They'll purify it to then's how they make their money. Um, uh, whether it's you know, you name it. They'll purify it to then patent and monetize it, and the cynic in me is is suspicious or skeptical that certain guidelines will change in the time scale that we, that our patients, need to to prevent their diabetes. I mean, I speak to my patients about lifestyle and some of them said you know, I needed this, this information, 20 years ago and and it's a pretty bitter pill for some people to swallow, and so I'm just, yeah, I really admire you, roger, for your dedication to educating patients, and not necessarily, you know, doing everything within the hospital structure, but also trying to do your part to help people with their understanding out of the hospital and in such a general way. So, yeah, thank you a lot. Thanks for what you do. I really-.
Speaker 2:Max, you've been front and center in all of this I've had unfortunately, my abilities have been spread out very thin I've got clinical duties, I've got all of these things, and so I have concentrated a lot of my time on light. But there's other things that I'm also interested in as well, as you probably know, not the least of which is like the ability to induce a fever and the benefits of interferon and things, and I believe these things are actually probably connected at some point too.
Speaker 1:Amazing Cool. Is there any final thoughts at all?
Speaker 2:that you want to share, or handoffs or messages that you want to impart. I think we can look at this in a number of different ways. People who are watching this now they can sit from their armchair and say you guys, go for it. That's great, and then they go off and do it. But I think we have a real opportunity here, a real opportunity to make change, and we're doing our part and we'll continue to do our part.
Speaker 2:But the people that are listening to this also have a role to play as well. And what's that role? That role is to adopt some of the recommendations. So why don't we just, like we can, talk about some recommendations and then, if they adopt these recommendations, write back in on social media you know you on X and on YouTube and put their comments about how their lives have changed by adopting these things. That's very powerful. You know, it's one thing to watch a video that says one thing. It's another thing from an unsolicited comment from somebody who's made a change in their life and they've posted it there saying you know what? These guys are telling the truth, and this is really beneficial. I think we already have a couple of things going in favor of us, max, and that is that, obviously, us telling people to go out into the sun. There's no perverse reimbursement there, right, we're not getting paid by Big Sun, but we believe in this because we think it's going to make people healthy, and that's really why we got into this game in the first place, right?
Speaker 1:Exactly, exactly, so maybe list off your top tips or really actionable advice for people and patients advice for people and patients.
Speaker 2:So because of Glenn Jeffrey's research that shows that just shining about three minutes of light made a difference for five days, given the fact that we have that where 15 minutes a day for seven days has such a tremendous improvement, given the fact that there's a biphasic response where initially there's a benefit and then after a while that benefit kind of wears off and it's not there anymore, I'm not recommending that people go live their whole lives out into the sun. What I think would have the most impact would is that if everybody intentionally decided that they were going to get just 30 minutes more 20 to 30 minutes more of sunlight every single day, and I think if we had to decide what time of day that would be based on our discussion with circadian rhythm, I think the best time of day would be in the morning time. But to go outside number one, fresh air. Number two you're getting that sunlight, you're setting in motion all the things that you need for the rest of the day. I think that very small.
Speaker 2:Ask and see how that affects people's chronic disease, people's diabetes, their blood sugar. Today we have glucose monitors. I would love for somebody who has been monitoring their blood sugar to all of a sudden, without changing their diet, without changing their routine, now just going outside in the morning and having breakfast outside, or going outside after they have breakfast and just write back and say, hey, what effect is this having on your metabolic health? There's a lot of wearable technology now that people are wearing Now wouldn't it be amazing, instead of having to ask people what their behavior is in terms of sunlight, that if there was a monitor on there or something like that, that we can monitor how much infrared light was coming in and then we could correlate that with metabolic health? I think that would go a long way in sort of answering some of these questions that we have in terms of infrared light. So what's the ask? The ask is to get outside intentionally for an extra 20 to 30 minutes every single day, as we're moving now into wintertime in the Northern Hemisphere and into summertime in the Southern Hemisphere.
Speaker 2:It's going to be easy for those people down under. It's going to be a little bit more challenging for us here in the Northern Hemisphere, for those of you who are going to work before the sun comes up. You're not going to get a lot of infrared light from a light box, but it's going to be beneficial in terms of other things, in terms of depression and in terms of seasonal affective disorder. But I would say, do your best.
Speaker 2:You can get a lot of infrared light from a fireplace. That's generally going to be at nighttime and not in the morning, but if you're in the wintertime and you're in the northern hemisphere, if you're in the wintertime and you're in the southern hemisphere, when the sun is not getting up for a long period of time southern hemisphere, when the sun is not getting up for a long period of time, when it does go outside to meet it, get out there. Try to actually use that as a date or an appointment with the sun, because I believe that just 20 minutes a day, 30 minutes a day, is going to make a big difference in your metabolic health.
Speaker 1:Yeah, amazing and maybe some bonus points. If you can actually watch the sunrise and actually get a little bit of the sun on the skin, I think you'll get bonus points for that. So thank you so much, roger. Really enjoyed speaking with you and, yeah, maybe we can do another one in the future, but really really appreciate all your work and your efforts. So thanks a lot.
Speaker 1:Okay, what did you think of that episode? I thoroughly enjoyed speaking with Dr Roger Swelt. He is someone who is so impressive and in his knowledge, in his generosity is his willingness to teach and educate and he's just an all-round very, very nice guy. So I think that, particularly having conversations with Dr Shwelt and others in conventional practicing, in conventional and clinical medicine who, like him, are working in intensive care units, working with patients on internal medical wards, this is a really key point, I think, in bringing the acceptability of light as medicine into mainstream, into centralized medicine, and really rediscovering what we've known historically in the history of medicine for a very, very long time, and I'm specifically referring to the history of heliotherapy.
Speaker 1:There were aspects of this story that we didn't cover and those who have listened to my previous episodes and series might have thought there were topics that we didn't cover, specifically with regard to quantum biology and perhaps the role of light being emitted from the mitochondria and being emitted from the cell, that is an area that both of us are exploring still and I think will be the topic of future conversations. Having these types of conversations that could potentially move the needle and especially delivering it in a way that's hopefully palatable and understandable for not only people but also doctors, who can potentially have a lot of sway over the outcome and the health of patients by advising circadian lifestyle and sunlight as medicine. So thank you for listening and look forward to future episodes with Dr Shwell.
