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
85. Optimal Circadian Living | Roudy Nassif
Aligning your lifestyle to natural light cycles has the potential to transform your health. I speak with Roudy Nassif, who shares his seven steps for improving your light environment for optimal circadian health and we discuss why light is the missing piece in the health & longevity puzzle.
Roudy is the founder of blue light blocking glasses company VivaRays. Purchase a pair of VivaRays here and use the code DRMAX for 10% off https://vivarays.com/dr-maxgulhane
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TIMESTAMPS
0:00:00 Understanding Circadian Biology and Light
0:17:20 The Power of Natural Light
0:24:42 The Impact of Nature on Health
0:42:28 Living a Circadian Intentional Lifestyle
0:47:08 Optimizing Circadian Lifestyle With Nature
0:56:49 The Importance of Light and Darkness
01:10:02 Embodying Circadian Knowledge Through Technology
01:14:39 Simple Steps for Living Intentionally
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DISCLAIMER: The content in this podcast is purely for informational purposes and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on this podcast or YouTube channel. Do not make medication changes without first consulting your treating clinician.
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Welcome back to the Regenerative Health Podcast. This morning I'm talking with Rudy Nassif. Now he is founder of Blue Light Blocking Glass Company, VibraRays, and leader in applied circadian biology, and this is an area of health practice that is really helping people take what we, I guess, know intellectually from the scientific literature about circadian rhythms and helping implement it for individuals to improve their health. So, Rudy, thanks for joining me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thanks for having me, Mark.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thanks for having me, Max. Let's kick this off with how you think about circadian health. This is still in 2024, a pretty niche area of health which is very much dominated by diet and exercise. How do you conceive or think about circadian rhythms in the context of this holistic health picture?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:When I speak with people, when we speak about light and its impact on circadian biology, and when I speak about the importance of light, I often see people really getting puzzled. I often see people really getting puzzled and it all boils down to the belief that light is essentially something superficial that we can turn on and off that allow us to see the world around us. But in fact, light is a lot more than this. It's the language that is spoken by every living thing on earth, from the smallest bacteria to the largest mammals. A lot more than this, it's the language that is spoken by every living thing on earth, from the smallest bacteria to the largest mammals, and light has driven evolution throughout billions of years, guiding the growth of the plants, the movement of the animals and the rhythm of the day and the night. Light is the language that nature speaks and whispers to us, essentially providing us with the information that our biology needs to thrive essential information and, just like the information that we allow into our minds, can either trap us in fear or, equally, empower us. Light also is a double-edged sword it can either elevate us or makes us sick, and it's literally impacting us on a cellular level. And it's literally impacting us on a cellular level. So when we speak about circadian biology, we're talking about these central clocks that are sitting in front of our cells, capturing light, information and reporting to the billions of the cells about the time of the day and the time of the seasons. And we have this central clock in our brain. Essentially think of it as the conductor of a musical symphony, and just like the conductor of a musical symphony reads musical notes and cues the musician on how to produce harmonious music and create a harmonious symphony. Also, this central clock that we call circadian clock in our brain is essentially getting cues from light and darkness and it's cueing all of our organs, all of our cells and mitochondria on how to synchronize together to produce harmonious music. So this circadian clock is controlling when we sleep and when we wake up, how well we sleep, how rested we feel when we wake up. It's controlling our energy levels, which mood we are in, how much focus we have and how much we can get done.
Speaker 2:And all of these mechanisms happen by this clock controlling the timing of hormonal production in our body. And, to put it in a very simple way, timing is everything and when we do the right thing at the right time, it produces phenomenal results, whether it's in business, whether it's in relationship or in health. And sometimes, if we do that same thing at the wrong time, it just messes up everything. That same move that could have generated business success could become a disastrous move that put a business down. And in the body is the same thing. When the body is producing the right hormones at the right time, we produce a harmonious symphony that we call optimal health and well-being. We could see this in farmers. They have a quality of light in their eyes that I've never seen in the community of folks who are following dogmatic diets and taking a thousand different supplements. And similarly, if the body is continuously producing the wrong hormone at the wrong time, it produces dissonance in the body in the form of chronic issues. And we see this all the time, with countless people trying every diet imaginable.
Speaker 2:I was that person. I personally was struggling with insomnia, chronic fatigue and suicidal depression as a kid. Also in school, I was diagnosed with ADHD. Now, growing up, I turned into a night owl and I would stay up very late, and then I would wake up the second day, feeling constant fatigue, low on energy and unmotivation all day long and no matter what. I tried biomechanics, martial arts, climbing, freezing mountains with Wim Hof. I tried every diet imaginable. I cut down on sugar and on carbs, taking the best supplements for mitochondrial health, for sleep Nothing seemed to work. I was feeling the same and the issue was that I was continuously being exposed to the wrong frequency of light at the wrong time and that was causing my body to secrete the wrong hormones at the right at the wrong time.
Speaker 2:And essentially, if we think about it, at night, when we are exposed to artificial lighting, this messes up our brain because the brain would think it's daytime when it's actually nighttime and we start producing cortisol, which is very helpful first thing in the morning, when we get that sunlight in our eyes, but after the sunset it makes us feel wired, anxious and stimulated.
Speaker 2:And this also explains why for so many years in my life, I thought I had a night owl problem. But it turns out I didn't have a night owl problem, I had a light problem. And you probably know, and you probably discussed this many times on the podcast we're not supposed to have cortisol at night in our bodies because it actually also destroys the cellular cleaning crew, autophagy, mitophagy and apoptosis and there's also tremendous negative impact. That happens when cortisol in our body. It increases blood glucose and that's because the body is continuously trying to run away from that predator, without even having a tiger in the room, and that causes the blood glucose to spike at night. And essentially this explains why so many people today they experience cravings for sugar and carbs as soon as they sit down and watch that Netflix movie and essentially light is messing up with their blood glucose. And when blood glucose is not stable it negatively impacts everything our thinking, our decision-making, our relationships and even our connection to food, connection to food.
Speaker 1:Yeah, great explanation and I will harp on a couple of points that you made. One is this idea of light as this conception that it's just something we turn off and on and in reality light isn't or the absence of light isn't ever-present input into our life and into our health. And I think that that's a key point that people miss, and especially people who are really emphasizing food as the primary kind of input into health, to health, and this is the fact that we are constantly sending our body, our brain and our eyes, via the skin, a signal about the time of day with the light that we're exposing ourselves to. And, as you mentioned, ancestrally or in the evolutionary history of the world and life on earth, then it was supposed to be bright sunlight during the day and essentially moonlight at night. Yet people don't realize that they are so thoroughly disturbing that process with artificial light and not enough bright sunlight during the day and an excess of artificial artificial light, particularly in the blue wavelengths, uh, after dark and the.
Speaker 1:The other point I'll make is that the light is this as information, and you think about, once you understand, or down this road of circadian biology, that that we're speaking about, that you're really careful about the first light that you put in your body, just like and you're really careful about the first information that you put in your body, just like. You're really careful about the first information that you put in your body, and that was something that I learned myself after waking up and doom scrolling, which is you can set the tone for your day by what type of information that you read. Are you reading something positive or are you just reading the latest mainstream media fear-mongering news stories? So I really like the analogy of being extremely diligent about the first light that you get and maybe the first information that you put in your body.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. And in the food context, most people are very aware about the importance of having full-spectrum minerals and vitamins so that we can live an optimal lifestyle. And when it comes to light, we continuously miss that because, essentially, we're living an indoor existence where we are chronically being exposed to a frequency of light that is very different than the light that we get from nature. So think about your LED bulbs and screens. These are devices that emit blue light in isolation at 455 nanometer, and this is a very different form of blue light than the one that we get from sunlight, because if you look at the spectra curve of sunlight, we get full spectrum blue light that comes symbiotically with the polar opposite of yellow, orange, red and infrared and throughout evolution, anytime we've been exposed to any form of blue light, it came with the balancing effect of the reds and the oranges.
Speaker 2:However, today we are overdosing on the 455 nanometer frequency and anybody in the food industry knows that if we actually overdose on a mineral or a vitamin, it creates a toxicity effect and it makes us sick, and in the same way, overdosing a mineral completely throws off our biology. Also, overdosing on a frequency of light of 455 nanometers, day and night, continuously throws off our biology and makes us sick. And you could think of nature as this mechanism that is continuously playing an optimal symphony for all biological organisms to stay in sync with the environment. But when we ourselves miss the notes, when we alienate ourselves from nature's symphony, we literally make ourselves sick.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a good analogy and I've variously used the analogies of methamphetamine. But more recently I'm using the analogy of high fructose corn syrup for artificial blue light and I really think that's a little bit more appropriate because it implies that the distillation or the refinement of the corn gets you high fructose corn syrup, which is obviously bad for your health and perhaps in certain contexts a natural corn cob grown locally and organically as part of a diet is not a problem. But really the light analogy here is that these energy-saving, cool white LED bulbs are the high fructose corn syrup of light and we are essentially shotting high fructose corn syrup light first thing in the morning when we look at our phones at the first thing, and then we are continually having high fructose corn syrup light throughout the day and then especially at nighttime. So when you understand the circadian biology which you so nicely gave to people to understand, then it becomes completely baffling and extremely harmful to be exposed to this type of light for 15, 16, 17, 18 hours per day.
Speaker 2:Yes, absolutely. And if we think about the mitochondria, which most people today realize, is this power engine within every cell that is fueling everything that we do, from thinking to moving to resting. And even Dr Douglas Wallace won an award for his groundbreaking discovery that 90% or more of modern chronic diseases are originating in the mitochondria losing their efficiency. And one big reason they lose efficiency is because of lack of sunlight and overexposure to artificial lights. There's a gentleman I believe he's a biochemist, albert St Gordy. He spoke about how sunlight excites the electron and the electron transport chain of the mitochondria, generating the electricity that the mitochondria need to metabolize food into energy. And in fact, in the food paradigm, most people think that 100% of the energy that we get come from food, but it turns out that about 70% of the energy that we're getting actually comes from the light. And there's later research from two scientists, martinek and Berezin. They showed how different frequencies of sunlight can make enzymes that are related to digestion, cellular repair and metabolism up to 500% more effective. So imagine that 500% better energy production, absorbing and assimilating nutrients from food into your bloodstream and cleaning your cells. So in the context of circadian biology and light, if you're listening to this.
Speaker 2:I want you to ask yourself how would this impact your overall health and well-being? And think about how much more you'd get from the things that you're already doing. Think about how much money and time you'd save from supplements and food. You'd save from supplements and food. Theoretically, you could cut down the amount of supplements and food that you're eating by five times. And this is not a medical advice, but anecdotally, seven or eight years ago, when I was still profoundly struggling with my health, I was eating seven or eight meals per day and I was spending thousands of dollars on supplements. And today, fast forward, I'm feeling better than ever before, more alive than ever before, younger than ever before, and I only eat one to two times per day, rhythmically at the same time every day, which ties to the importance of also circadian biology, which we can talk about. And guess what, max, I haven't taken one supplement for the past five years. Isn't this fascinating? Literally, and I'm feeling better than ever before.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and frankly, it's shattering to a lot of the paradigms of functional medicine and a lot of other practitioners that I guess rely on this idea that we're going to kind of analogy opposite or analogy to what we do in mainstream medicine with the medication of chronic disease. And I say to people that you can't medicate your way to optimal health, you can't get from surviving to thriving through pharmaceutical medications, and I don't believe you can get there either with, with supplements. So, and it really speaks to a more fundamental driver of health and disease, and that is what we're exactly what we're discussing, which is which is light and circadian biology, and I really want to hear your thoughts on on chrononutrition, but maybe briefly, why do you think this is underemphasized to the degree it is in society, despite the fact that we know how transformative the correct light signals are for people's health?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a great question when I think about it and given my experience of really struggling with ADHD, depression, chronic fatigue, trying all these different things without any chance to improve. What happened Max is? One day it was 1 am in the the morning, I believe March 2017 I was laying down in bed next to my former partner in our dark basement in Canada, scrolling through my phone, and the blue light was shining on my face. My eyes are squinting, I'm feeling drained mentally and physically, and then a video pops up on my feed. I almost skip it, but but then I click. Title Artificial Light is Killing Us by Dr Jack Cruz, and I was squeezing my brain trying to understand what he's saying. But then I woke up the second day and there's this one sentence that kept echoing in my mind you can't get healthy in the same light environment that made you sick. Now, in that that moment, when I heard this sentence, I felt really puzzled. I'm like what the heck is this guy talking about? I've never heard anything like that, and I completely disregarded what he said and I kept going on my own way.
Speaker 2:A few months later, I realized that my ways are not getting me anywhere and that I'm actually struggling more than ever before. And having shared about that video with my partner, she comes to me with an unexpected surprise. She said Rudy, pack your stuff. We're going to volunteer on an organic farm up in Northern Quebec in Canada. I felt extremely doubtful. I'm thinking to myself oh my god, volunteering on an organic farm, how is this going to help me? But then here we are, driving in the car for seven hours from Ontario to Quebec. We arrived there at night, max. No electricity, no artificial lights, only open, pristine skies. We set up our tent under the twinkling stars and the only source of light was coming from the fire flickering in front of us.
Speaker 2:Now, on day one, I wake up and my body is exhausted, feeling so heavy, so resistant. I don't want to be outside, I don't want to be around people. Day three, something completely unexpected happens. I wake up and for the first time in my life, I feel like a sustainable urge of energy. My body is feeling alive, rested and overflowing with joy. I couldn't help but smile. I open the door of the tent, I step outside. The world around me is glowing with the magical light of the dawn Birds are singing. It's mesmerizing and for the first time ever, max, I feel like an intense connection to everything around me. I feel like a deep sense of purpose and connectedness to my Everything around me. I feel like a deep sense of purpose and connectedness to my existence. And the night owl in me, who used to stay up late until 2 am, is now sleeping shortly after the sunset, naturally.
Speaker 2:Now I'm going to share one more thing that happened that literally blew my mind. I think most of us in today's world have no idea how this simple core, fundamental principles of physics literally control every aspect of our biology. But this morning I was crouched over the ground weeding the crops and the farmer walks over to me, he places his hand on my shoulder and he says Rudy, what a powerful focus you have. I've never seen anything like it. And Max, literally this moment cracks me open. I am the ADHD kid who can't focus for 25 years and in this moment I had a deep, intense moment of realization. Everything I thought to be wrong with me my ADHD, my depression, my chronic fatigue it wasn't about me, it was my light environment. And it wasn't until I was in an environment that was conducive to health that helped me to build up the neurotransmitters that control the way I think, the way I feel and the way I act, that I had this resourcefulness within myself to see things as they are.
Speaker 2:And the issue, Max, is probably all of us in today's world. We're born in big cities. At the age of three or four we're taken to schools and we are put in boxes under artificial lights and we're being asked to memorize and repeat by our teachers and we are being measured as smart or not smart by how much we could acquire information through our senses and how much we can repeat stuff, our senses and how much we can repeat stuff. And if you think about the whole story of circadian biology and light, most of it is beyond our senses. Most of it is happening beyond the range of what our eyes could see.
Speaker 2:And for most of us, we want measurable things. We want to see and quantify things. We could look at a diet and say, oh, this is a healthy diet, this is an unhealthy diet. We could make sense of those things through our senses and through our observations, but when it comes to sunlight, when it comes to our connection to nature and these fundamental programs that have driven our evolution for thousands of years, they're so intrinsic and yet it's not as easy to perceive them through the senses. They come through embodiment, through actually going there and living and being with nature on a day-to-day basis.
Speaker 2:And when we give ourselves that gift for only three days, which I love, what you're doing with your people, because you're taking people on those retreats for three to four days to help them see what it looks like to being an embodied person of this circadian concept.
Speaker 2:Because it's one thing to sit down here and talk about it and share about the mitochondria and the quantum biophysics and all of these intellectual concepts, but it's another thing to take a step back and revisit how our ancestors lived for thousands of years. Reconnect back to the farmers and you'll start observing that all of those farmers have a quality of vitality that you'll never see around, people who are continuously jumping from one big health summit to another, baking themselves under artificial light for four days and going from one booth to another learning about the latest biohacks. I think this is almost crazy that we go to Florida for four days and we're inside boxes, baking ourselves under artificial light and going from one booth to another to learn about the benefits of red light therapy and infrared light, when, if we take a moment and step outside. We'll have it all outside in the sun, and people are so disconnected from that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, an amazing story. Thank you for sharing that, and it really reminded me of what uh, one of our mutual friends, uh kira lee, said, which is that you, you're not broken, it's your environment that's broken. And I think your, your story, really, really sum sum that up. I, uh I guess it's also from my perspective another, another facet of disconnection from nature and from health. And, just as people are disconnected from the effects of different foods that they have on their body and they're disconnected from their lived sense of self and the benefits of exercise, I think there's a collective disconnection and maybe that is cultivated to some degree or emergently out of the society that we live in, so that, yeah, people suffer and they don't really know why they're suffering.
Speaker 1:And perhaps it's analogous to having a dirty pair of dirt or fog appears on those glasses over a period of years and you might never have known what it's like to have clear glasses or a clear windscreen.
Speaker 1:Then it's easy to keep trudging along in a quagmire and of poor health. But what it sounded like that when you went out into a rural area with zero light pollution, with zero artificial light at night, with only this magnificent natural symphony of full spectrum, you know 100,000 plus lux natural sunlight during the day and you know less than 0.1 lux of moonlight at night. That was enough to, over a period of three days, reset your circadian clocks, reset your circadian rhythm and finally allow your body to release the correct hormonal factors and neurotransmitters at the right time. And your body knew what to do. It simply needed the environmental inputs to be corrected and to be normalized, and you, your body, gave you um optimal health. And, uh, that's that's really my message as as well, which is, before we start going down different rabbit holes with, as you mentioned, say, supplements or devices or even specific diets, let's get these fundamental inputs fixed first and see what happens.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. And when you think about it from that lens it becomes a lot simpler because a lot of the concepts that are presented in the wellness and health and wellness space and industry, if you examine them and examine the relationship to nature, it becomes so easy to get rid of a lot of them because you realize that so many of them are not actually true to nature and the very few that are true to nature are very simple and easy to implement. And it didn't take me that long when I was on that farm to realize that these farmers up north they were doing it right and essentially I could observe the way they did things is that they woke up every single morning before the sunrise. Naturally, they spent most of their day outside in natural lighting. Their feet and their hands were continuously connected to the earth. They ate at the same time every day and they fasted after sunset and they continuously ate what grew in their own environment under the sun where they are living. Because essentially, if we think about it, food is but light that is being stored in plants and when we eat that plants we assimilate this uh, plant or whatever energy into back back to light.
Speaker 2:So what the farmers did had a tremendous impact on my view of things and my choice of which diet do I choose? Is it going to be vegan better or vegetarian? Or is it keto or is it carnivore? Do I eat this or do I eat that? Well, all of this got extremely simplified because the answer to those questions became which environment am I living in right now and what kind of food is growing around me right now? And essentially that really simplified the equation for me of what kind of food am I living in right now and what kind of food is growing around me right now? And essentially, that really simplified the equation for me of what kind of food am I going to eat in this moment?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and let's talk about that, because this idea of seasonal eating and this idea, which is eating appropriate to the location that we're in, and chrononutrition, which in itself is a fledging subfield of circadian biological research, which is the timing of the food throughout the day and how that is affecting health, I think those are two critical areas of discussion that would alleviate so much. That would alleviate so much angst and confusion about what is an appropriate diet.
Speaker 2:So explain again from your perspective what you should eat and when you should eat? Yeah, that's a great question. So back to my experience on the farm, max. During that time, what I realized? That I did not have the convenience to go open the fridge and start preparing all the food that I wanted to prepare.
Speaker 2:So essentially what that meant throughout evolution, for thousands and thousands and thousands of years, we as humans, as diurnal beings, we've always woke up with the sun and we've used the first few hours of the day to go forage and hunt before the sun becomes really intense, and then we've eaten our food during the daylight hours when the sun is up, and we've fasted when the sun is down, and that wasn't a matter of choice. And essentially it's so interesting because I see this over and over again and it ties back sometimes to a misconception of the word freedom. But at times when you limit your choices, you actually create a lot of freedom in your life and you're able to connect to the essence of truth, as is. And one of the things that really happened on the farm is I did not have the choice, max, to go and wake up at like 10 pm as I'm scrolling on my phone and watching Netflix, and then I'll get this intense desire to go and cook a chicken. That is not possible, because there's no way that we could do this if we did not have artificial lighting after the sunset, and because we did this for thousands and thousands and thousands of years.
Speaker 2:Of course, food is another very powerful zeitgeber and essentially it's not as powerful as light and darkness. But also the peripheral clocks in our pancreas and liver and in our guts are also receiving information about the time of the day by examining the timing of the food that is entering our mouth, by examining the timing of the food that is entering our mouth. And what this means is how can we harvest and harness the power of this circadian clocks in the peripheral organs? By making sure that we are eating at the similar time every day and, I think, even more importantly than this, by making sure that we are fasting at least two to three hours before going to bed, so that the body could run the proper repair and rejuvenation programs that we spoke about mitophagy, autophagy and apoptosis Because essentially, the body cannot be breaking down food and repairing at the same time. It's either making fat or breaking fat.
Speaker 1:Yeah, fantastic point. And that goes to the heart of the circadian mechanism, which is this idea of coordinating opposaling body processes. And if you have processes that are fundamentally diametrically opposite, then the body in evolution has separated them temporally in time to occur at different times of day, occur at different times of day, and if you try and uh eat at 10 pm at night, then you're asking your body to do the job that it should have done at 2 pm, uh at a later period, and that is going to have a disrupting effect on on your body and it's going to have uh, it's going to change the way energy is metabolized and handled in the body in a profoundly negative way. And I think type 2 diabetes and metabolic dysfunction fundamentally has its origin or its genesis in disrupted circadian rhythms. And not to say that food isn't playing a role in this story, it absolutely is. But truly, the way I think about it is that the food is exacerbating, and particularly food that we're eating, food that's either highly refined or not grown in our location, is exacerbating an underlying problem that starts with confused circadian biology and confused gut clocks and confused clocks in our metabolic organs, as you mentioned adipose tissue, the pancreas, the liver, the muscle that is therefore initiating metabolic dysfunction.
Speaker 1:So I also want to relate that to a routine, and you mentioned we recently finished up our circadian retreat on the weekend, giving people an idea of the circadian living. And we obviously got up, we saw the sunrise and we ate breakfast soon after rising, after getting that natural first light in the eye, and then we only ate again at 2 pm and that was obviously a very substantial meal of animal meat and fat and obviously hyperlocal. But people didn't eat again until the following morning and no one was getting hungry. So it just goes to show that getting things right, both from a nutrient content point of view, but obviously so people are satisfied and that involves, as I mentioned, protein and fat, but also getting the timing correct makes so much difference to people's appetite, satiety and the way that the food is having an effect on their body yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:And we also know that exposure to uv light, which impact the production of pomcey and result in the production of alpha mch, but mch, gamma mch which played an absolutely major role in regulating appetite, and there's a lot of research showing that obesity and weight gain is linked with lack of alpha-mCH production. Also, chronic exposure to blue light increases ghrelin, the hunger hormone, especially when it's not balanced out with other frequencies and with the lack of UV light inside when we are in an indoor environment, all of which causes people to crave more food. And, given the relationship of how blue light impacts cortisol and how cortisol interacts with blood glucose, those continuous spike in our blood glucose level without us eating a single bite, caused by artificial lighting, is continuously causing people to have a lot more carbs and sugar cravings, and that results in that continuous need for snacking all the time. So I found that by simply controlling my light environment and by fixing my light issues, my appetite became a lot better and I no longer had to exercise a torturing amount of willpower to stop myself from eating this and that amount of willpower to stop myself from eating this and that, and it wasn't so much a theme on my head anymore, because I do remember previously that was so much of a theme of feeling a lot of guilt and shame after engaging with eating behaviors that I wasn't proud of. But essentially all of this dissolved simply by fixing my light problem, getting exposure to more light during the day and avoiding artificial lights at night.
Speaker 2:And I think also, given the fact that all of our organs are primed to be a lot more effective in the first half of the day, this tells us something about why we are meant to be eating when the sun is up. In fact, the pancreas is probably two to three times more effective releasing insulin in the first half of the day. Also, the gut releases acid juices that help us to digest better in the first half of the day compared to the second half, and I think there was some research showing that if you eat the apple in the first half of the day compared to the second half of the day, you probably need a lot more energy and time to digest that same apple. So it's not a question of what is it that you're eating, it's a question. It's a question of when are you eating and how is your life environment as you are eating?
Speaker 1:yeah, great, great points.
Speaker 1:I.
Speaker 1:I think there's so many people suffering unnecessarily and, and, as you say, having to exert superhuman willpower to fight food cravings and avoid certain foods, and they're really making it hard for themselves unknowingly by existing in this modern, artificially lit, blue-lit light environment and as if nothing else.
Speaker 1:These circadian signals, when delivered correctly, make it so much easier to maintain a natural, whole foods diet because you're simply not giving yourself the stimulus for what we call in medicine hyperphagia or excessive eating, which you do get if you have the wrong light signals. Anyone who's done a night shift would be able to tell you that empirically as their lived experience, and I know that's been the case for me. If you have poor sleep, if you have disrupted sleep, then the first food that you feel like the next day in the morning is sugar and carbs. Yes, I mean, people know that, but they don't make the link between their disrupted sleep or their artificial light exposure and that metabolic process, but they're absolutely linked and they're linked, as you mentioned, by these melanocortin, um hormone, peptide hormones and and this the whole uh hormonal system that governs satiety, which is regulated by light signals.
Speaker 2:Yes, absolutely. In fact, I had a friend who came to visit me and, by the way, max, you probably know, but I do live a circadian lifestyle on a day-to-day basis. This is the way I operate. Lifestyle on a day-to-day basis. This is the way I operate. And sometimes people say, oh wow, you're so lucky. And I say, oh, wait until you hear how I was living seven years ago. None of that is luck.
Speaker 2:All of this has been created through hard work and through making the right choices and decisions.
Speaker 2:Essentially, this friend who came to visit me decisions, but essentially this friend who came to visit me after four days of being here and naturally sinking into my way of living, and that meant that now he's forced himself to wake up, at least for the first day, to go for a run with me around sunrise.
Speaker 2:We went for a swim, we went surfing, we spent tremendous amount of time outdoors and in fact, I also. While he was here, I set him up with an office outside, so he was getting a lot more natural light during the day, and after four days he came back to me and he said oh wow, rudy, like I noticed, I'm no longer getting intense cravings throughout the day and, according to him, in a given day he was struggling so much with focus so at any given point he would be sitting down to do some any form of deep work and he's continuously finding in his mind that intense urge and desire to stand up, open the fridge and go munch on food. And what he noticed? That for the four days he was here he never had even to think about it and he did not snack once, which is phenomenal To me. It's fascinating to see somebody who's like really struggling with that and to be able to like overcome this and not even think about it once in a matter of four days. That is phenomenal.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's incredible and that type of anecdotes I think are so valuable and important and they're very difficult to capture in a scientific paper.
Speaker 1:And really we're moving into a new era where I think and this is coming from an MD doctor who has done bench side research, who's done public health research, who's inculcated into the school of thought of evidence-based medicine and I think that we need to move past this idea of randomized control, trial evidence before doing anything, because it's that lived experience and the N equals one, the anecdote that is so powerful in instructing how we should live from an optimal health point of view, with circadian biology in mind.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, I mean that is the message and I say to to my patients, like, if, if you have, you know, two food rules, it would, it would be uh source as locally as possible and eat during the daytime only. And if you only use those two rules, then for the vast majority of people, that will solve the diet side of the, the uh, the equation. So maybe, maybe we could talk now about what we can do. And you, obviously you mentioned that you're, you're living circadian lifestyle and that's something that you've crafted for yourself, uh, in in mexico. What? What can we do if the light signals are suboptimal.
Speaker 2:Yet we still have to work in that, that situation, and maybe you can explain um your, the company that you've built, and the role of of blue light blocking glasses in in this circadian lifestyle that that we're running yeah, after after five or after seven years so far of continuous focus on solving the light problem and asking myself whether there's a way to live in the modern world, I can confidently tell you that there is a way to live in the modern world of artificial lighting, but we must live with intention. Live with intention, and what this means is we really need to be making sure that we're taking specific steps throughout the day to harness the power of light and, equally, to harness the power of darkness. And I think, thinking about these steps, I could distill them into probably like seven steps that anybody could do, no matter where they are. And, by the way, for anybody who's thinking, oh Rudy is in Mexico, that's so easy for him. Just bringing you back to my story, my actual embodiment of circadian lifestyle did not happen in Mexico. It happened in British Columbia and in Quebec, up northern Canada, and it actually happened throughout all seasons. So it wasn't something that I was able to harness in the summer and I lost in the winter. In fact, I did feel the most exalted during the wintertime, when I allowed my body to tap into the physical forces around me. That helped my body understand that the winter time is coming and helped my biology to shift forward into a winter metabolism. And if you even look back into some of my Instagram posts four or five years ago, you'll see a lot of the posts happened in Canada in the snow and I was truly living a circadian lifestyle Canada in the snow and I was truly living a circadian lifestyle and I was harnessing the same benefits that I am harnessing today in Mexico. So, thinking back towards those steps, step number one is very easy Wake up first thing in the morning, instead of looking at your phone or getting distracted with social media and turning on artificial lights around you, or getting distracted with social media and turning on artificial lights around you, go outside and watch the sunrise.
Speaker 2:And what I want the listeners to know is naturally, when we wake up, as the sun is rising, also the core body temperature is tempted to rise. So anything that we could do during that time to raise that core body temperature will have tremendous positive impact, not only on our circadian biology, but also on our alertness, our focus and our mood, and that could be in a form of exercising, for instance, and also when I'm in a country where there's lack of sunlight, say in Canada during the winter, I wake up and it's still dark outside. What I like to do is I like to raise my core body temperature using exercise, and I always like to start slow, to wake up my senses and slowly wake up my joints and muscles, and then I could ramp up that intensity. But anything that you could do to increase your core body temperature first thing in the morning, such as exercise, cold plunging, even eating a big breakfast, will act in accordance to your natural rhythm and will help you to feel more focused, more energized, and it will enhance your mood. And it will enhance your mood. Step number two depending on the season and where you are on earth, about an hour after sunrise, uva arises, and I'd highly recommend the app from Sarah Kleiner or Circadian Lifestyle. Both are amazing apps that will take your geographical location and will tell you when the sun is rising, when UVA is rising, et cetera.
Speaker 2:But that's an absolutely essential window of time that we need to expose ourselves to, and today you'll hear a lot of experts talking about getting 10 minutes of morning sunlight first thing in the morning and avoiding screens one hour before bed. This is really not enough and it doesn't really work, and that's because our mitochondria is awaiting a specific sequence of light information coming from nature, and it's like the key that opens the door to waking up, feeling rested, energized and focused every single morning and getting that deep, restful night's sleep. At night, and when we first wake up, the light is still warm and soft and rich in the oranges and reds, and then slowly, as the day goes on, the blue and green light start increasing and then the UV light is added to this blend, and this light, again, is information that every part of our system is awaiting for to activate the different enzymes and neurotransmitters. So simply getting 10 minutes of morning sunlight is really not enough. I would suggest that and even argue that step number two, getting UVA light, is even more important than getting that morning sunlight. And if I had to pick one of those two steps, I would always go for getting UVA light, and what I often like to do is it's golden if you combine step number one with step number two by extending your time outside so that you're getting that morning sunlight and you're being present when UVA and UVB is arising in your environment. And simple ways to do this is by exercising outside instead of going to the gym, even for parents who are driving their kids to school. One easy thing to do is you could park your car 15 minutes away from school and walk with your kids to school, and this 15 to 30 minutes with your kids is literally golden, and it will help them to have better mood. If they're struggling with behavior issues or ADHD or whatever that may be, this simple step alone could be an extremely powerful step to reattune them and recenter them. And it's easy, it's simple and it's free.
Speaker 2:Step number three making sure to be outside also and exposing yourself to sunlight periodically throughout the day. So sunlight is not a pill that you would take one time first thing in the morning and you're all set, just like you're being sold this or that supplement to take one, one, one, one time in the morning and you're all set. There's no such a thing like this in nature. It's, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a built-up effect and again, we have all these different frequencies that show up at different times of the day and it's absolutely necessary to continue to stay in tune with those frequencies. So I invite people to periodically go outside as often as possible, and if you're working inside, let's say two hours of focused work, the simple act of taking a break after two hours and stopping your thinking and being outside, taking fresh air and fresh sunlight will literally improve your productivity by at least 10 times. And I'm talking from experience On the days when I am the most productive. Those are the days when I'm taking my time to be outside in the sun and in between I could get things done.
Speaker 2:Step number four when I am inside and when I'm exposed to any form of artificial lighting during the day, then I'm continuously wearing my Viva Race Circadian light harmonizing lenses. Now there's a tremendous difference between those lenses and other blue blockers that are sold for daytime hours. One of the main differences most of the blue blockers that are sold for daytime. They are designed to block a hundred percent of blue light at 455 nanometers, which could be a useful to eliminate eye strain, headaches and agitation. But what I did notice is eliminating that blue will start making you feel tired and low on energy at the wrong time of the day, because your brain is relying on the presence of blue lights so that your clock knows it's daytime and optimize your energy levels. So instead of being reductionist and eliminating that blue, we thought about a better way to harmonize this blue by decreasing its sharpness and spreading it out across the spectrum. So we're getting more of the yellow, green, orange and red light to balance out the presence of blue light without eliminating it. Orange and red light to balance out the presence of blue light without eliminating it.
Speaker 2:Step number five when the day ends, going outside and witnessing the sunset, directly or indirectly, and the reason so is, again, light is in formation and this signals your nervous system and to your clocks that the day is ending, so that you can start winding down and your body, without you needing to do anything, will start making the space and preparing for a restful night's sleep. Step number six when you come back to your house, making sure that you turn off overhead lightings and I'm a big fan of candlelight and Himalayan salt lamps. Also, the fact that you're putting the Himalayan salt lamps down at a floor level is a big advantage, because it turns out that overhead light is more likely to stimulate melanopsin ganglion cells in the eye and disrupt your circadian rhythm. Step number seven cells in the eye and disrupt your circadian rhythm. Step number seven anytime the sun sets, there's a mechanism signaling in my brain to put the evening lenses, and those are specifically designed to filter out 100% of the blue and the green up to 520 nanometer, and we tune them to mimic the exact color temperature of the bonfire at 1700 kelvins, so that we tell the nervous system that the day is ending. And about an hour before bed I like to switch to the nighttime one which filter out 100 of the blue, 100 of the green and decrease the brightness by 10 times, which is an absolutely necessary thing, also Because it turns out that bright light as well negatively impact our circadian rhythm and shift our clocks in the wrong direction.
Speaker 2:So I think these are the seven steps. They're pretty much free. I think anybody could do them anywhere in the world, and I've shared those steps with thousands of people so far and in so many different conferences, to the audiences of many doctors and functional medicine practitioners, and I continuously continue to receive a phenomenal feedback and everybody who's committed to practicing those steps have seen beautiful results. So I think it's very easy to implement and anybody could do them. That's the beauty of them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love the statement that you made, which is light, isn't a pill that you can just take in the morning and be done with it, and really, and especially for the doctors in the audience, it's more like an infusion.
Speaker 1:It's more like a continuous IV infusion that requires slightly different drugs or ingredients in the bag depending on what time of day it is. And the natural infusion, again, is the analogy of natural sunlight in the eye. And to sample the different times of day is to get your different light needs met and therefore, circling all the way back to the beginning of the conversation is to to get optimized timing and optimizing the fidelity of the signal, the message from the sun to your body about the exact time of day. So so all your clocks can not only orchestrate, so they can orchestrate the cells and all the cellular processes with as much fidelity as possible. And really it's a complete change of frame, which implies that there's no second best here. There's no. You know, tina, there is no alternative to natural sunlight and we're just trying to do our best with these mitigating measures, especially like the blue blockers that we're discussing, to kind of get closer to what that natural light spectrum looks like.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. I love the infusion analogy, definitely going to borrow that and share it as I talk about this. I think it's brilliant and it's also worth mentioning, max, that the circadian lifestyle not only helped me to optimize my health and my well-being, but it literally helped me optimize every aspect of my life and the way I show up in my business, the way I show up in my relationships in my business, the way I show up in my relationships, and one of the reasons I found I was able to tap into this is because for most of my life, after the sunset, I was continuously exposed to a tremendous amount of chaos and noise and light entering my eyes that kept me wired, anxious and stimulated, and one of the fundamental things that I've never paid attention to is oftentimes that led me to go to bed in a state of desperation, where I'm going literally to bed and I'm thinking about all the bad stuff that happened throughout the day. I'm thinking about all these intense social media videos about the tragedies that are happening in the world. I'm going to bed and I'm thinking about all the bombs that are being thrown on this country or that country, and it wasn't until I was controlling my light environment that I actually realized that I was continuously poisoning myself by allowing myself to fall asleep in a state of complete desperation and misery.
Speaker 2:And there's something so powerful about the state in which we fall asleep, and I have found from experience that the state in which I fall asleep is the state that is going to be dominant in my day the next day, and it will create literally the circumstances and the conditions and the interactions that I'm going to have in my day.
Speaker 2:And I've seen this over and over again, to the point that today I never allow myself, max, to fall asleep at night without literally shifting my state and tapping into the divine intelligence that I am. And what this means is, before going to bed, when I am applying these steps and cancelling out all the junklets from entering my eyes, I find that I have a much better opportunity to really calm down my nervous system and be able to find stillness within myself. And from that stillness, naturally, what I find emerging is a natural state of aliveness, joy and celebration for the spirit of life, whereas in the past, I've never been able to tap into this and I've allowed myself to be poisoned by all the different type of stimulating information and the negativity around me and I will fall asleep into that state and I will wake up and the first thought that start the day is always connected to that last thought that you've been thinking before you fall asleep.
Speaker 1:And that makes so much sense to me from an evolutionary behavioral point of view, which is if you were being stalked by a tiger in our ancestral environment is going to wake you up with the thought of this tiger unresolved stress, unresolved acute stress is still out there going to try and get us.
Speaker 1:So it speaks to the importance of a wind down routine, and that wind down routine should be commensurate with the light signals that we're sending.
Speaker 1:And, as you mentioned, we're putting lights, ideally with very low lux, so low total brightness, but also a very warm spectrum, and either ideally close to the ground with red or candlelight or say a salt lamp that's a great suggestion.
Speaker 1:And wearing something like a pair of blue light blockers, such that you guys make, and pairing that with a practice whether that's complete, strict avoidance of any information, maybe I tell people to stop any kind of work, ideally at 7 pm and two hours an hour before you try and sleep, and then I personally like to do a very short guided meditation in that low light environment.
Speaker 1:So I'm not only telling my body it's time to go to sleep from a light point of view, but also from a behavioral, physiological, cognitive and emotional point of view as well, and this is no different, and I told this to people at my retreat over the weekend. People don't find it surprising when they have a strict routine to put their infant to sleep, and if you disrupt the infant's routine or you shine bright light on the infant or you forget to maybe read your baby a book, then the routine is disrupted and the sleep quality is impacted. I would posit that, as adults, we have the same needs to have that calming nighttime wind down routine as we did when we were 10 months, 8 months old, but that's something that most people aren't doing today and, yes, I really echo your statements about the wind down environment.
Speaker 2:Yes, absolutely, and it's so looked down, when we speak about rest or when we speak about sleep or when we speak about stillness. And in fact, one thing I came to realize in the past years is that in this existence we're dealing with two main things. We're either in rest or we're either in motion and our senses only react to motion. They can never react to stillness or rest and therefore our senses continuously will deceive us into thinking that there is power in motion. But the true power marks guess where it is it's in rest.
Speaker 2:And I could easily demonstrate this by asking you to think about a seesaw. And if you see a seesaw moving, what will your senses react to? They will react to the motion of the lever and your senses will deceive you by telling you the energy is in the lever. But in fact, if you ask yourself the question, where is the power extended from? The levers are extending their power from the zero point, the fulcrum point of stillness.
Speaker 2:So if we bring this back to our day-to-day life, we're either in rest or in motion and the power of motion extends from rest and we are as powerful in our action as we could borrow from those moments of rest. And that's why, for me, this period of time when I'm really moving away from motion and going into rest, it becomes an unnegotiable time for me to, because I do understand that the power of my motion in the second day is really in alignment with how well I'm rested and how well I could extend motion from that rest yes, and it speaks again to emphasize the key uh importance of sleep and rest and darkness, and that is I often invoke the image of the of the yin and yang, with with a clock markings over it to, yes, to really emphasize this, this concept of circadian biology.
Speaker 1:But the equal and opposite requirement of your body is complete darkness, natural darkness at night, just as it is full spectrum sunlight during the day. So it's such a well and important message that we need this wind down period, we need this rest, we need this darkness and just as much as we need bright natural light during the day. So I honestly think it's a missing piece in so many people's health issues and health conditions that I see myself in the clinic psychiatric illness, weight loss. If you're trying to lose weight and you have disrupted sleep or you're waking up multiple times in the night, good luck. You're not going to have success and there's deep physiological reasons behind that.
Speaker 1:From an energy production and energy mitochondrial efficiency point of view, good luck having a joyful disposition and an optimistic outlook and a good mood throughout the day. If you're having disrupted light signals to the brain, I mean you're just battling uphill. So you know the message is so well taken and I think people are going to really, really enjoy this episode because it just and thank you for sharing your personal story, because it's extremely beneficial to have that explained in such a relatable way. So, rudy, maybe tell us where people can connect with you. Obviously, vibra Rays are a very, very high quality pair of glasses, so you can actually get your pair of Vibraze with the discount code DRMAX and you'll get a discount on your pair of Vibraze. But explain to people where they can follow you, follow your work, and perhaps get themselves a pair of these blue blockers.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely so. Vivarazecom V-I-V-A-R-A-Y-Scom. Also on Instagram, we share a lot of educational content about light and different health topics, and every Thursday, we do share our newsletter by writing a blog, depending on what the community want to learn on light and different health topics. Also, it's worth mentioning Max.
Speaker 2:I think we didn't mention this, but for people who wear prescription glasses, we came up with a new concept called the UV transmitting lenses, which come in four in one instead of three in one, and that essentially solves the problem of prescription lenses blocking 100% of UVA, uvb and blue-purple light.
Speaker 2:So we came up with a technology for base frames that allow 100% of blue-purple light and 50 to 60% more UVA and UVB, and people will wear these glasses when they are outside, if they're doing any task that requires vision, they don't need to think about it and they're subconsciously taking that good lighting in their eyes, and then, when they are exposed to artificial lighting, they'll have three different clips for daytime, evening and nighttime. So that's a technology that is worth mentioning for anybody who wears prescription glasses technology that is worth mentioning for anybody who wears prescription glasses. And other than this. Yeah, if you have any questions or any topics that you'd like us to write about. Feel free to reach out to us, and we're continuously receiving feedback and writing different blogs depending on what people want to learn about.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a great point. Different blocks, depending on what people want to learn about. Yeah, that that's a great point and, I think, quite a transformative or innovative technology. Which is so many people wearing eyeglasses for um to correct, uh, a, an impairment, myopia or or whatever else, and they the the lenses that they're currently using are blocking u light.
Speaker 1:And what we know is that there's this incredibly fine-tuned neuroendocrine feedback loop that extends from the eyes, the brain, to the skin as well, and to the whole body's physiology, via the hypothalamus and the pituitary gland, which relies on the reception of UV light through the eye and that being a congruent signal to UV light on the skin. So depriving our bodies of UV light. Essentially, you're not going to be making those melanocortin peptide hormones like alpha-MSH, and I really suspect that that is one of the key unappreciated drivers of obesity and overeating, which is, if you're not making alpha-MSH from POMC in response to UV light into the eye and skin, then you're going to be hungrier than you should be and you're going to crave eating food. So I think we're at the cutting edge of decentralized ophthalmology in the understanding of the role of UV light in eye health, and it's obviously been much maligned in centralized ophthalmology with its, I guess, blanket attribution to the causation of things like cataract and pterygium.
Speaker 1:I think the message is much more nuanced than that, which we're not going to go into at this point, but suffice to say that they sound like a great pair of modular lenses to allow you to still get some degree of natural UV light while still being able to do your daily life. So maybe, rudy, you can leave us with any parting messages or advice for someone who's listened to this podcast and they. They sound okay, this sounds good like. This sounds like it's important. What would you give any advice for someone starting out on their circadian living journey?
Speaker 2:yeah, that's a good question. I think none of that really matters and none of what we discussed is essentially important in any way, and it will stay as information recorded upon your brain until you distill it and you find a way to burn it into your own consciousness by embodying it and by making it a way of life, and only then it becomes true knowledge by embodying it and by making it a way of life, and only then it becomes true knowledge. And I see people often, again and again, in different experiences, where we're having a conversation and the moment we start talking about the circadian concepts, people jump in and they say, oh yeah, I know. And then I get really curious and I ask oh, how do you know? Oh, I, I listened to this on a podcast.
Speaker 2:But then, sure enough, as we're talking, I realized that they're not implementing any of that and it's only staying as an intellectual concept that they've memorized and they're really good at repeating, but they're not really good at embodying. So, for anybody listening, all of the things that we've discussed are utterly simple, like super simple and very simple to the fact that we miss them in our day to day life. So I just want to invite people to really start thinking about how can I implement this in my day-to-day life and if you only start with two steps, if you're really starting, start with getting morning sunlight first thing in the morning and blocking artificial light at a consistent time every day after the sunset.
Speaker 1:Great, amazing. That's very good advice, so I think people are really going to love this episode. Thank you for your time, rudy, and yeah, be sure to check out Vibrator Run. And yeah, thanks for your time and we'll talk again.
