Regenerative Health with Max Gulhane, MD
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Regenerative Health with Max Gulhane, MD
86. Cold Exposure for Optimal Testosterone & Mitochondrial Health | Thomas Seager, PhD
We discuss the amazing finding that exercise post cold exposure dramatically raises serum testosterone levels & implications for medicine, how cold boosts mitochondrial function, the use of green light to mitigate migraine headache and more.
Thomas P. Seager, PhD is an engineer and Associate Professor in the School of Sustainable Engineering at Arizona State University. He is the expert in cold water therapy and the founder of ice bath manufacturer Morozko Forge and migraine-phototherapy company MyGreenLamp.
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Okay, thomas Seeger, I'm extremely happy to have you back on the Regenerative Health Podcast and, for those who haven't heard our first episode, which was a deep dive into all things cold and cold exposure and the health benefits of cold exposure, please check that out first. But, thomas, thanks for coming on.
Speaker 2:It's my pleasure, it's nice to see you again. It's my pleasure.
Speaker 1:It's nice to see you again. So it's probably been a year since we last talked and I'd like to get some updates from you on, I guess, the practicalities of cold exposure and the data, the anecdotes, maybe the unofficial case series of people and experiences of using cold, maybe through your Morosco baths or other forms. So, yeah, what can you update us with?
Speaker 2:There are two things that are going on, and one is pretty rock solid. That's testosterone, and I've learned a few things. We've gotten a lot more case studies published, some new articles, and I'm going to compile these in what I'm calling a mini book. It will be called Uncommon Testosterone. It will be on Audible. This one will be on Kindle instead of the I mean the big book, the Uncommon Cold. This is only available at Morosco. This is the you know, 500 scientific citations bigger than my dissertation. I've gone a little past that when it comes to testosterone, and so I'm going to go to a bigger market with that.
Speaker 2:Then the other one is biophotons, and it's something I've been wanting to talk with you about, because this is a more speculative area about the relationship between vitamin D, autoimmune disorders and the cold. Now I see you've got your red light going on and almost everybody knows what that is. So I thought you know it's almost Christmas. Maybe I should have my green light. We should talk about that. So I guess this is the third thing and we can just do a podcast in our Christmas colors and talk about the different wavelengths of light.
Speaker 2:But the thing I just put this post out after talking with Alexis Cowan and it got my thoughts going on biophotons, vitamin D and autoimmune. This is more hypothetical, speculative, and I think running it past you would be a good idea. I don't know if the audience is really going to be interested in speculation, because the internet loves people who are so certain and convinced that they're right in their opinions. But if there are any sort of citizen scientists out there who want to hear about the hypotheses and the social creativity and the people who are sharing ideas even though they're not afraid, I guess, to be wrong or corrected, then we'll do some of that on this podcast.
Speaker 1:Excellent. Yeah, those sound like three very apt topics and very interesting topics to talk about. So I mean, let's, let's start with testosterone and I'll pretty briefly summarize them. What it seems like you have experienced, and others have experienced, is that sequential cold exposure, followed by exercise, resistance, training, and seems to have amazing effects on boosting endogenous production of testosterone in both men and women, and so much so that urologists have accused you and others of being juiced, so to speak, or taking exogenous hormones. So, yeah, talk a little bit about this and what you're noticing and what specific protocol that people have to follow if they want to get these benefits.
Speaker 2:Last time we talked I summarized my story. I had this prostate-specific antigen scare. Here I am a sedentary college professor. This was when I was in my early 50s and my PSA came out over seven. I didn't want to do the biopsy, I didn't want to do a prostatectomy, so I did ketosis and ice baths and I did it every day. I'm here in Phoenix, arizona, and so I had to have my Morosco to be able to do it every day. I was scared out of my mind, but it worked. My PSA came down below two and at the same time I was getting my testosterone checked because that's the male health panel standard lab test here and my testosterone was at around 750 when my PSA was elevated. By the time my PSA came down, my testosterone had jumped to 1180. And it was because I was doing the ice baths every day, not for working out, not for exercise recovery, but just to work on that inflammation in my prostate. And then I would come out and I'd be cold. So I'd have to do my steel mace or I'd have to do jumping jacks or push-ups or pull-ups and then I would walk into campus. Turns out it doesn't take a lot of exercise, it's just enough exercise to restore the circulation to the limbs. The original 1991 Sakamoto study did cold stimulation and then 20 minutes on an exercise bike and they noticed an increase in testosterone and an increase in luteinizing hormone in their young male subjects. So you don't have to lift heavy to get the testosterone boost. So we talked about that.
Speaker 2:I wrote this article. It was great that nobody read until Joe Rogan read it and he read it out to David Goggins. He's like you know there's this guy and he didn't name me or anything, but he showed the Instagram post about the article and he quoted it to Goggins. And people found me. You know they were searching and they're like I think, I think this is the guy, this must be the post, the picture looks right. And they started messaging me and they said I want to try this, I've got low T or I've got mid T and I want to get up to high. All of these messages coming in. People are like, look, I added 250 points, I added 400 points. They were great sort of anecdotal examples of people getting similar results to me. So I interviewed four men in depth, got their before and their after labs and some of these guys were down in the their doctors put them on hormone replacement therapy or testosterone replacement therapy and that got them up into the when they started doing ice baths and then exercise. When they started doing ice baths and then exercise 1,300, 1,500, like super normal, and I asked them aren't you going to? You know you can go off the HRT now and they said no. No, I mean I probably could, but I felt so crappy when I was down low. I don't ever want to go back to that time in my life.
Speaker 2:Well, not everybody told exactly that story. There was a firefighter whom I met in Central Valley, california. He works in Visalia or Tulare either one. He injured a testicle on the job. So we did this really in-depth interview. The injured testicle resulted in low testosterone, which you could probably imagine. His physicians put him on HRT, got his T levels up, but he didn't like it. Part of him sort of his not his ethical sense, but his values where he wanted to be natural and part of him felt like he was experiencing negative side effects, especially in his personality. It was coming at a difficult time in his life. He was separating from his wife and he thought maybe the testosterone was messing up his relationship. Well, he quit the HRT, got divorced, read the Sakamoto study, started doing ice baths and then exercise. He got himself up into the 800s. He's got one testicle Remarkable story.
Speaker 2:But there were these two other guys who wrote in to me and I interviewed them and they said I'm not getting any boost at all. And it bothered me a little bit because I love you know a hundred percent success. You can draw a straight line through all the dots and make a conclusion. And when I ran it past AJK I'm like well, what do you think is going on? She said are they on any other meds? I don't know why I didn't think to ask this. So I wrote to him and I said you know, are you taking anything else? Sure enough, they were both taking medications that interfere with testosterone production, and so the ice bath and then exercise is not a cure-all if you're doing other things that might interfere or suppress your testosterone. But it's worked really well for these three men in particular in-depth case studies. And then Max, the women started to write.
Speaker 2:Pamela Butler, I can say her name, I've written about her, I've interviewed her. She said you know, I saw your article and I thought, huh, could this work for me? She is 60 years old, which would be be postmenopausal, you know, because of her age. But she's also had a hysterectomy and she's had her ovaries removed. Well, you think that the ovaries might be the source of testosterone in a woman's body. It makes sense. It's the analogy to the gonads in a man right, and it's true. The ovaries are responsible for maybe 25% of a woman's production. The rest comes from skin, fat and adrenal glands. So Pamela was on hormone replacement therapy.
Speaker 2:In the United States there are no FDA approved protocols for treating women for low T, so any clinician who wants to prescribe has to adapt a male protocol and figure it out. She got her total T up to maybe 16 nanograms per deciliter, if I'm remembering this right. I'm probably not getting the number right, but for a woman they're like okay, you're doing fine. She started doing the ice baths, she did some exercise, but it turns out women don't have to. She got well up over 100. It was almost a 10x increase in her testosterone. Her clinician was shocked, said we must discontinue the TRT immediately. You're doing great. I don't know what you're doing. I'm not sure I even want to know what you're doing, but I am going to deprescribe you for TRT. Well, at a level that is around 150, 160 in a woman. A lot of women get self-conscious. I asked Pamela, do you have any regrets? No, I said. But Pamela, aren't you growing a beard? And she laughs and she's like no.
Speaker 2:Posterone is the dominant sex hormone in women and a lot of women aren't told this. We worry about their female hormones estrogen or progesterone, whatever you want to call it. They don't think that they need testosterone. And yet a healthy woman will have three to four times more testosterone coursing through her bloodstream than she will estrogen. Pamela got up to 160, but that's nowhere near male levels of healthy testosterone. So there are these misconceptions that if a woman were to elevate her testosterone to levels that are heavy or healthy, she might somehow be masculinized. But we are not talking the East German swim team from the 90s or something. We're talking about what your body can make for itself, getting the mitochondria in your body to make its own testosterone.
Speaker 2:Well, a young woman in the United Kingdom, 32 years old, healthy, biohacker, extraordinaire. She saw the Pamela Butler article and she said I want to do this, I want to test this, I'm going to see what happens. She did this for three months and she kept track of her blood serum testosterone levels with fastidious precision. Three days after her cycle, same time every year, she sent me her labs and she said, professor Zeger, I didn't really see a big boost, only a 0.5 increase. Now that's disturbing. I'm like 0.5, I guess maybe it's in the right direction, but that's not a lot. Max, in the United Kingdom they measure testosterone in molar units and not in nanograms. So the 0.5 was really disappointing. Until I said send me the labs. And when I did the unit conversion she went from 0.6 in molar units to 1.1. She almost doubled her testosterone over the winter, when usually testosterone levels are seasonal, especially in men, and over the winter they typically go down. They're associated with vitamin D, but she sort of fought that seasonality by bringing in the cold and almost doubled her T. Well, this collection now of case studies four men, two women, two negative case studies, which I think is due to the interfering medication this creates a more robust data set, especially because it's well-documented, both quantitatively with the lab reports and qualitatively in the interviews.
Speaker 2:We now have to look for a mechanism because a sort of black box association is insufficient. We have to understand how testosterone, not just where, but how it is synthesized in the body. So let me explain. It's the mitochondria Max. They take cholesterol and then they synthesize a steroid which is a precursor to all the other sex hormones. And so if your mitochondria are damaged and there's lots of different ways in Western developed society that they can be damaged they're unable to do the job of synthesizing sufficient testosterone. Your body might be having a hard enough time keeping up with sort of normal cell turnover or wound repair or powering the immune system or even powering the brain, which is the most demanding metabolic organ in the body. Damaged mitochondria will lead to low testosterone in men and in women, because it is the mitochondria that synthesize these steroidal precursors. Now we understand the mechanism.
Speaker 2:Now we understand why cold, which is one of the most wonderful things you can do to rejuvenate your mitochondria, would lead to improved metabolic health, improved mitochondrial quality and higher testosterone levels in those people who are, I'm going to say, suppressed, because the idea that 600 nanograms per deciliter in a man is normal is ridiculous.
Speaker 2:I don't want to be normal. Normal for a man in you know sort of Western society right now is sick. There's no reason that your testosterone levels should decline at my age of 58. The only reason they decline is because you're accumulating mitochondrial damage. We call it aging. We don't have to age metabolically in this way. So we should be up at healthy levels 800, 900, over a thousand. And I suspect that if we leave Western society we will find those kinds of testosterone levels in people that don't have heated leather seats in their SUVs, you know, that don't have all the comforts and the seed oils and the dysfunctional light environment that is keeping us sick. So that's been a lot of progress on the testosterone research and that's why I've got to assemble it in a book. You know, for people who don't want to buy the whole thing, they can just zero in on the testosterone, male or female, come to understand it better and then they can manage their own testosterone levels without necessarily getting a prescription for it.
Speaker 1:Well, there is so much there and that's such exciting news. I want to make a couple of points, starting from some accounts that I've had as well from my members who have been using cold. One lady, similarly to the women that you've discussed, she had ovaries removed and she was living in the UK and what she noticed subjectively was that her self-confidence, which took this massive hit after potentially losing these ovarian hormones, was remediated or recovered after getting regular cold exposure. I didn't see any lab results, but this was a profound subjective response. And she also mentioned she had the warmest winter that she'd ever had, despite the fact she'd been exposed to the most amount of cold. And really that speaks to the human body's ability to upregulate its thyroid hormones, its brown and beige fat, in response to a cold exposure. And if we're living in a simulated semi-tropical temperate region all year round, then you're not giving the body at 22 degrees indoor environment, you're not giving the body reason to generate any hormetic response to therefore develop a cold resistance.
Speaker 1:And a couple of points about the era of potentially using cold as a treatment in something like prostate cancer. I see patients and the patients are coming in and some of them are on androgen deprivation therapy, and what that is for the listeners is it's a method of treating adjunctive method of treating prostate cancer that involves essentially turning off the male hormonal axis in an effort to prevent growth of testosterone-sensitive prostate, potentially prostate malignant cells. The issue here is that this essentially induces menopause-like symptoms in men, with the hot flushes and all this kind of thing. That's instructive for a number of reasons. One, it's potentially suggesting that menopause in women is a testosterone deficient deficiency process and two, it it suggests that well, I think it's like bludgeoning it with a with a hammer, and if we could have a way, more careful and physiological process that could potentially reduce the psa, reduce the proliferation of malignant cells and keep the testosterone high, then that would be amazing there are two responses.
Speaker 2:The first one is prostate cancer is a disease of men and because I'm such a conspiracy theorist, I think that there's this idea that if we somehow feminize the men, that will help treat the male disease. Now, that's not a medical opinion, that's a cultural critique. Part of low testosterone is the culture of toxic masculinity and these ideas that characteristically male traits, those traits of what we call it aggression or assertiveness or whatever, are somehow toxic and undesirable and they should be suppressed. And I think some of that thinking might be leaking into treatment of prostate cancer, this misandric kind of attitude. And I'm going to set that aside entirely because now we're going to talk about the data and the science. The hypothesis is that because testosterone is anabolic, that it might promote the growth of these malignant cancer cells, because it promotes growth generally. And so some physician has it in his head that we need to suppress testosterone and that will somehow slow down the growth of prostate cancer tumor. And this is dead wrong. It's Abraham Morgenthaler who is a physician and researcher in the United States and he examined the data. So these are large epidemiological and clinical studies and he says high testosterone is not associated with increased risk of prostate. High testosterone protects against prostate cancer. It is exactly the opposite.
Speaker 2:One of the friends that I talked to when I had my high PSA because I called a bunch of guys and I said it wasn't easy. I'm like you know, I just got these labs back. Have you ever had your PSA checked? Everybody had their PSA checked and everybody told me a different story. One of them was he had a prostatectomy. He will suffer erectile dysfunction the rest of his life. He's resigned to this and he had a super sensitive scan that showed cells that might be maybe cancerous, that maybe didn't get removed and as a precautionary measure, his high-tech physician put him on testosterone blockers and he felt terrible. He gained weight. Of course his metabolism was wrecked, his muscle tone was wrecked, but in his mind, just like I was when I got my elevated PSA, he felt terrible. He gained weight. Of course his metabolism was wrecked, his muscle tone was wrecked, but in his mind, just like I was when I got my elevated PSA, he was scared and he said I got to do this for my family. I got to do everything I can do to try and stay alive. But his physician was harming him because the guy didn't know. The physician hasn't read the research. He's doing whatever they taught him in medical school without updating that based upon the real data.
Speaker 2:And you can download Abraham Morgenthaler's papers on this. I've cited them, I put it up on our website. I cite them in my book. You can listen to Brigham Bueller on this. He was really good at explaining the research, and Morgenthaler himself, I think, is on Instagram and trying to get the word out that testosterone suppression is hurting men's prostate health rather than helping it. What you just did was make this really clever inference about women, especially those women who seem to exhibit what I would call early menopause. Like it seems, menopause is coming sooner than it should in a lot of women's lives, and you're speculating that might be because their testosterone levels are already too low, and so some of the symptoms of perimenopause or menopause are showing up in women who are in their late thirties who, I think, if they were metabolically healthy, should still be fertile. That's an incredible hypothesis, max, and I'm wondering how would you put that to the test?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm not exactly sure, but just to continue to harp on that point and this ties into the mitochondria and is the site of hormone synthesis is that people like Sarah Kleiner and Kerry Bennett have seen massive improvements in fertility in premenopausal women struggling to conceive when introducing cold exposure, and that's obviously strategic.
Speaker 1:It's not necessarily used in every part of the menstrual cycle, but what it speaks to me is that there is a tuning that's occurring when the body is exposed to cold and that has an amazing benefit for hormonal health, and using it, no matter what the menopausal status of the woman is, could potentially make sure that the body is synthesizing the exact appropriate amount of hormones at the right time of the cycle to make the menstruation and the ovulatory cycle as smooth as possible and then smooth that transition into menopause which is essentially to use the word ovarian failure, but it's physiological ovarian failure into menopause.
Speaker 1:So it seems to me that medicine needs to start understanding or implementing this technique for women and men in various stages of medical care.
Speaker 1:I talked about the sun and sunlight being the best tool of primary and secondary prevention of cardiovascular disease, and that's a topic for a complete another time that I've talked about at length, but it sounds to me that urologists and the field of urology needs to start implementing cold as its firstline treatment for the prevention of prostate cancer and high PSA, because at the moment it's really fraught, and especially asymptomatic testing of PSA screening of PSA for prostate cancer in asymptomatic men is an absolute minefield and that's something that you it's irresponsible, yeah, that you've come across, and what it sounds like and you previewed it at the beginning is that we've got this situation where everyone is so many people are metabolically unhealthy, they are hormonally disrupted through their artificial light at night, through their sedentary activity, sedentary behavior and their processed foods, and that is essentially playing havoc or failing to give the body this sufficient stimulus to make appropriate levels of testosterone. That totally makes sense to me that a healthy testosterone level would be inversely associated with prostate cancer and not the other way around.
Speaker 2:It makes sense to me too. How could it be otherwise? There is a group of researchers, I think in the Netherlands they coined this phrase intermittent living. All of your listeners, they understand intermittent fasting. Right, but you can broaden this to other topics. So this intermittent living says you need exercise and you need rest, you need feast and you need fasting. You need light, you need dark, you need feast and you need fasting. You need light, you need dark, you need heat, you need cold. And they took it another step further. They said you need brief periods of dehydration. They were saying it's everything in your life.
Speaker 2:The human body is designed for variability. It responds to those hormetic stressors and as long as it doesn't kill you, like Nietzsche said, and it comes back in this adaptive way. When the human body experiences constancy, it will change, but those changes are maladaptive. So by the time a woman gets to be I'm going to choose an arbitrary age 35. I don't really know what it is in Australia, united States, but some cut off Her OBGYN will say that's a geriatric pregnancy. What the heck kind of a term is that? Max, you know she's a 35-year-old young woman and they're using geriatric as an adjective because typically she's already so metabolically dysregulated that she is vulnerable to disorders during the pregnancy. That could be preeclampsia or it could be gestational diabetes, because pregnancy is a condition of physiological insulin resistance. There's so much growth hormone coursing through the pregnant woman's body that it interferes with the action of insulin. If you are somewhat lacking in your insulin sensitivity going into a pregnancy by the time you hit the beginning of that third trimester, you are at serious risk for metabolic dysfunction. So, not physiological insulin resistance, but going over the top to either gestational diabetes or preeclampsia. Cold is one of the best metabolic therapies that a woman or a man can engage in. Not only will it reduce the inflammation, you get some good vasoconstriction, you get some good circulatory benefits. But what you mentioned about recruiting new brown fat, beiging the white fat, rejuvenating the mitochondria, is how you improve your insulin sensitivity and you can interrupt the progression of the insulin resistance that happens during pregnancy, before it winds, before it manifests as preeclampsia or something else that would cause a premature birth or a medical intervention like a C-section because the woman is metabolically no longer able to support the fetus.
Speaker 2:I wish we could get this message out there that life is the flow of energy. There is no such thing, you know, thermodynamically called life, if it is not resisting this sort of inexorable increase in entropy. I know Jack Cruz talks about this a little bit, but I did my engineering doctoral dissertation on entropy and thermodynamic measures of the environment. I had to do a really deep dive because entropy is one of these confusing sort of voodoo type terms that even the engineers struggle to understand.
Speaker 2:The point is that we are the flow of energy through our corpus. The only difference between a living creature and a dead creature at the moment of death is the failure of that energy flow. It is mitochondria that regulate that energy. When we care for our mitochondria, we are caring for our lives. So we have to go back now for a second to the intermittent living. Everything that we're talking about is a mitochondrial booster, and it's not light alone. It's light and then dark. It's not exercise alone, it's exercise and then rest. It's not fasting alone, it's fasting, and it's this toggling back and forth, the variability that we're built for, is what keeps our mitochondria healthy and our bodies alive.
Speaker 1:That is extremely well said and it reminds me of my recent episode with Professor Jeffrey Guy who, through the Guy Foundation, wrote a space health report and they analyzed the health effects of space and if anyone's interested, go back and check out my episode on that, the health effects of space, and if anyone's interested go back and check out my episode on that.
Speaker 1:The long story short is that space is providing an unending, non-intermittent source of mitochondrial stress in the form of completely disrupted light cycles, complete absence of near-infrared light and loss of magnetic fields and loss of gravity and obviously exposure to electromagnetic radiation and other kind of particles emitted from the sun.
Speaker 1:So the point here and the conclusion of the study is that humans are not going to be able to thrive in space because it is so removed from our evolutionary niche. But the biggest takeaway for me was to concrete in this idea of hormetic stress and intermittent living, as you so eloquently put it, and that speaks to the need of the temporality of these exposures. We need temporary, but then we need that period of recovery, and whether it's three minutes of cold exposure followed by the rest of the day at ambient air temperature, whether it's a minute of hard sprinting followed by ambulant walking for the rest of the day, and all of these are temporary and the benefit is in the recovery and the benefit happens when we sleep. So I think and that's obviously mediated through the mitochondria. So if people can yeah, I mean, take away one big point from this conversation already, it's like start living intermittently, Start giving your mitochondria intermittent stresses and then giving them the high quality sleep to recover. Can you quickly speak to the safety profile of cold exposure in pregnancy before we move on?
Speaker 2:There is a woman who's a Wim Hof certified instructor in Germany. I think she was probably the first woman to become Wim Hof certified and at the time she didn't have any children. But she watched her sister conceive and her sister continued to do cold plunge throughout her pregnancy. Now this woman, josephine Worsak she's on Instagram. She's got a PhD in microbiology. She has a scientific mind. She's got a PhD in microbiology. She has a scientific mind and when she and her husband were ready to start a family she discontinued her cold exposure. Very briefly, she said cold will activate the immune system. And in her mind she said a fertilized egg must implant in the lining of the womb and the immune system, if it's overactive, can interfere with that implantation. Especially for her first trimester she discontinued her cold. She also discontinued her Wim Hof breathing. She said look, don't do that if you're trying to conceive or if you're pregnant. And she said don't do Sona. Pregnancy is a contraindication for Sona. I'm not sure if I can put it more clearly. Just don't heat yourself up, because the epidemiological outcomes are poor if you're getting too hot when you're pregnant. And then she worked cold plunge back in and she was doing straight up ice bath. She's got some good pictures on Instagram of her in the tub, outdoors in the snow with the ice in it and her belly. Of course she's in her because she sort of brought it back for the second half of her pregnancy. Course she's in her because she sort of brought it back for the second half of her pregnancy. I think that her informed experience and the way she has interpreted that experience with her scientific mind is a wonderful example to follow. She continued to do cold plunge while she was breastfeeding.
Speaker 2:A lot of women will say but won't it interfere with my milk production? And josephine says that's not what happened to me. As a matter of fact, I have a collection. This is three or four women who've done the same thing and they say nope, I've never had a problem with milk production either. However, after birth you can reintroduce Sona. The Sona will not interfere with milk production. So if you think that that sort of helps your milk come in, then go ahead and bring the heat back.
Speaker 2:So I think her informed experience is instructive and I've been in touch with two other women in particular who I've watched very closely doing their cold plunge just a few minutes, very cold, but maybe three minutes. Both of them got the approval of their physicians ahead of time and they got the reassurance from their OBGYN. My goodness, the baby is insulated with multiple layers of protection. You are not going to, you know, freeze your baby. You're not even going to affect the core temperature, right? But you can't blame these women for being cautious, for asking the question, and their physician said yeah, you can go all the way in, you can go up to your neck, it's just not going to be a problem. And what we do is the same protocol that I do Very cold, maybe one or two degrees C, four degrees C is fine, and stay in there for two to four minutes.
Speaker 2:If you are just starting out, if you're naive to cold exposure and a pregnant woman is listening to this and she's like well, I'm in the middle of my second trimester, I'm in the middle of my second trimester, I guess maybe I should try this you don't have to go down to two or four degrees C, you can start at any temperature that you feel the gas reflex. So if you draw a bath I know it's summertime down under, you know, but here it's winter If you happen to draw a bath and maybe the temperature of the water is 15 degrees C, but you step in and you feel that gas reflex. It's cold enough. Stay in long enough until you feel a little bit of urge to shiver, and that is your indication that you've activated your body's genic response. Your thermoregulatory response to the cold is now active. Your body will adapt to that stimulation. You're doing great.
Speaker 2:Do this for 10 to 14 days in a row and you will have repeated the experimental procedure that has been demonstrated to improve insulin sensitivity in human beings Recruit brown fat. It might be less. Nobody really knows what the minimum effective dose is in pregnant women, but we do know that in type 2 diabetic middle-aged to elderly Germans, 10 days of cold exposure consecutively improved their insulin sensitivity, in some cases by 80%. We're not talking about a little. It is a dramatic improvement. I'm not the kind of guy who's ever going to publish a book called Protocols Other people do that but I'm more like what matters is what works for you. There is no single best temperature. There's no single best time or single best procedure that works for everybody. It's kind of like weight training the amount of weight that you should use and the amount of weight that I should use. They're going to be different because we're different people with different bodies and we're trained to different extents. Cold is the same way. So this rule of thumb is more important to me Go cold enough to gasp, long enough to shiver.
Speaker 2:When you're just starting out, after you've done a couple of weeks and you know you've recruited brown fat and you're strengthening that smooth muscle tissue that is responsible for vasoconstriction and your thermoregulatory defenses are improved, you probably don't even have to shiver. I only shiver when I'm really anxious about something. I don't shiver for thermogenic reasons. I shiver for reasons, psychological reasons of you know, anxiety and stress and things like that, and the shivering can be really helpful in that case. But when you become experienced three, four minutes, you don't even have to do it every day. I do it every day because I kind of need it for my own mental health. I need that win, but a couple or three times a week. Susanna Soberg is probably right. We don't know the minimum effective dose, but her measurements show that an average of 11 minutes a week of acute, brief cold exposure, no matter how you split it up, is pretty effective for maintaining metabolic health.
Speaker 1:Yeah, very interesting.
Speaker 1:And I want to make a comment about pregnancy quickly, which is let's reason this from first principles If we've noted that cold exposure improves the hormonal profile of men and women, if we've noted that cold exposure can smooth, say, postmenopausal symptoms and help improve women to actually conceive, then it doesn't actually rationally make sense that something that would help a woman conceive through hormonal optimization would suddenly be harmful when pregnancy happens.
Speaker 1:That just doesn't make sense at all to me. I agree so in terms of and then we think from an evolutionary point of view and the migration of humans into the northern latitudes was such an important shaping factor on our evolutionary biology that we made these key mitochondrial mutations to induce thermogenesis through things like the uncoupling proteins and these essential leaky mitochondrial membranes that helped us generate heat. I think that if and this is most people in Australia from a Northern European ancestry is that cold would have, of course, was part of their history, because reproduction happened above the 50th latitude, those women would have been cold, they would have fallen pregnant cold, they would have carried their baby cold.
Speaker 2:When we think about this what else do you have to do when there's 23 hours of darkness? You cuddle up with your loved one and it's nine months later, right, and nine months later, right.
Speaker 1:And then we're thinking about today's day and age and the kind of experimentation that is, and I'm going to be pretty you're going to confer. What I'm saying is that all things have been advised for women during the third trimester of pregnancy, particularly in the last four years, and to say that that's okay, but potentially having some environmental temperature exposure in cold is not appropriate. I think we need to really think critically about that. The point about heat is well taken, however, and we do know that there's an association with neural tube defects that is potentially something that should be avoided during the first trimester. That makes sense to me. But yeah, cold seems interesting and potentially appropriate for metabolic health reasons, but perhaps other reasons too.
Speaker 1:I wanted to ask you about this evolutionary, what your thoughts are on the evolutionary role of the sequence of exercise followed by cold and the fact that if we do our exercise first in men, we're not seeing these benefits. I was talking to a friend about it and it's something like if you fall into a cold river and then you wrestle a grizzly bear, you get a big squirt of testosterone. But if you fight the grizzly bear and then you fall into the river. Your body's like sorry mate, game over. What's your thought on this?
Speaker 2:I don't have an explanation for it and it's not exhibited in women. That is, women will get an immediate testosterone boost, at least according to the one saliva study that has measured this from cold stimulation. And it doesn't even have to be whole body, you just do the cold presser test, so you take the non-dominant hand and you put it in a bowl of ice water and the women get an immediate testosterone boost and it's probably coming from the adrenal glands. But men, the opposite can happen. And I've kind of dreamed on this, because sometimes I give my brain problems to think about before I go to bed. That's a grad school thing, probably nobody else does that, but I was struggling at that time when I figured that out, and then in the morning I wake up with an answer. The testes are supposed to be cooler than the rest of the body. This is why they exist outside the body. But that doesn't mean they're supposed to be frozen. Max, you know, it may be that you need the exercise, that the man needs the exercise, not a lot of exercise, but some exercise to stimulate that luteinizing hormone production, to stimulate that testosterone production, for purely like thermochemical reasons. I'm not a biochemist or an organic chemist. I'm a physical chemist because my chemistry is the environment and particularly water chemistry, and you have a much better understanding of what's going on inside the body Because I'm an engineer. I build the machines that create the environment for the body and I think you give us a couple of years of conversations like this and working together and we're going to make a lot of progress on why is the order so important for men? But right now I don't have a good reason. I just have a lot of data that says it makes a big difference.
Speaker 2:Everybody online who hasn't already heard of Craig Heller's studies on heat extraction during exercise at Stanford, where he gets this huge performance boost, a peak muscle power output goes up, endurance goes up. Anybody who's read the literature on pre-cooling those people. They're up to speed and they understand that mitochondria shut down when they get too hot and this is to protect them from the damage of reactive oxygen species. Fatigue happens in your body to prevent mitochondrial damage. This is a wonderful sort of self-defense and everyone except David Goggins this is a wonderful self-protective mechanism. It's much easier to sustain physical exercise in the cold weather than it is in the hot weather because you don't have to worry about the heat buildup so much. But everybody online who hasn't read that, who hasn't come up to speed and says cold plunge ice bath doesn't do you any good. You know it doesn't help recovery, they're right. But they're talking about doing it right after your run or doing it right after your weightlifting session. When you pre-cool, not only do you get better performance during exercise, but you get better recovery after the exercise.
Speaker 2:There are so many things just like the idea that testosterone could somehow cause prostate cancer was wrong. There are so many things that we think are right that turn out to be wrong, and one of them is that you should use ice baths to soak your knees or your elbow or whatever when you're done with your game. No, use the ice bath before your game. The people who really understand this are the Canadian hockey players. You know, when I talk to pro athletes and I talk to the football players in the NFL Mitch Wisnowski, he's in Australia Now. He's punting for the 49ers. The football players have never heard of pre-cooling until we talked about it. But the hockey guys are all like oh yeah, I love being cold because they're in a winter sport. They've experienced this and if they're doing roller hockey during the summer. Very different experience for them than ice hockey when they're out in the cold.
Speaker 1:It's been my personal observation, again anecdotally, that girls and women seem more averse to getting cold than men. There's a local bathhouse that I go to, near me and there's a cold pool. It's not even that cold, maybe it's around eight degrees. It's, maybe it's not even that cold, maybe it's around eight degrees. And the men will be sitting in there, you know, with a pretty serene, calm look on their face and you know the girls will will dip a toe and just walk the other way or get in and they'll be in for 20 seconds and then about okay, I'm, I'm done, what? What's your comment on this? And maybe it's in my, in my thought it's. Sometimes it feeds into this idea that maybe it's a misconception that women shouldn't get cold or women can't benefit from cold, and what are your thoughts?
Speaker 2:That is a misconception. You're really setting me up for accusations of sexism here, max, and I'm going to do it anyway. Stacey Sims she's an American who studied, I think, in New Zealand, but maybe it was Australia. She went on the Huberman Lab podcast and Stacey Sims is famous for training female ultra athletes. You know you want to do a triple triathlon or whatever they're called. I don't know, it's not my field. Stacey Sims is the right person to talk to for women because she's out on that extreme performance edge.
Speaker 2:She correctly pointed out that women are more sensitive to cold than men are. She also, at least in some of her writing, points out that women respond to cold training faster than men, and so because we know women are more sensitive than men, we might jump to some conclusion that, oh, there's some genetic underlying, you know, sex-associated predisposition. But when we see them respond to training faster than men, that contradicts the idea that there are really these strong genetic differences and it suggests that maybe men are just getting more cold. In general, women are less tolerant of the cold because they don't routinely get as much cold exposure, whether that is having an outdoor job. There are fewer women fishermen. There are fewer women garbage collectors. There are fewer women lumberjacks. Men work outdoors more, or maybe it's because, I don't know, men are going outside on Thanksgiving and playing touch football in the backyard, or whatever it is we do in the United States. It may be an artifact of behaviors that are associated with these typical gender roles, and I'm saying that because the women will respond to cold training or to cold exposure with faster adaptations than the men will. So the idea that women and girls shouldn't get cold is a misconception, and I want to draw, maybe, on your personal experience.
Speaker 2:I don't know if you have a daughter, but I have two sons and a daughter. When they're young, when they're prepubescent especially, but really they could be teenagers and they're running around. My kids want to go in the ocean. They don't care if it's May and the ocean is freezing. They want to play on the beach. They want to go out in the winter and they want to make snowballs and snow forts and stuff. I never saw my daughter come in and say I can't keep up with my brothers because it's too cold. There are no differences at that age, and so this is why I think some of this stuff is trained later, when your date is in dress and heels, you know you're not going to take her on a long walk after dinner or something. But men don't think twice about you know, let's head outside. Compared to women, and it's possible, by the time they get into their mid or late knees, that these sort of different levels of exposure have created population level or statistical differences that don't really apply to individuals.
Speaker 1:And any comments on perhaps starting cold exposure for women in the follicular versus the luteal phase of the menstrual cycle, of the ovarian cycle.
Speaker 2:I wish I could say it was my area of expertise. I have no personal experience, you know. However, when a woman is tracking her cycle and she thinks, yeah, I'm ovulating, if she want to take a break in that moment. Take a break. If what Josephine Warsack said about when you're conceiving and you want that egg to implant in the womb, maybe that's not the time to really stir up your immune system. That intuition makes great sense to me, and if a woman has the same intuition that she says you know, I'm trying to conceive, I want to take these three or four days off, I applaud her. Your brown fat is not going to disappear in three or four days. Your insulin sensitivity is not going to decay in the three or four days that your brain and your body is focused on conception. So take that time off. There's another 24 days in your cycle that you can get cold.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and really what I say to my members is be cognizant and mindful of how many hormetic stresses that you're trying to derive benefit from in your lifestyle at that moment hormetic stresses that you're trying to derive benefit from in your lifestyle at that moment. And if you're stacking cold exposure onto some, you know a more extreme time-restricted feeding window, and you're stressed and you've got emotional stress and you've got work stress, it's just let's pare it back so you are really going to need your sleep.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so really encouraging people to be mindful of what else is going on in their life and maybe keep it to one thing at a time if they're trying to get a hormetic benefit Because, as we have talked about earlier, hormesis has that benefit if you don't overdo it, which Nassim Taleb called anti-fragile and I really, really recommend Nassim Taleb's work because essentially it is a U-shaped curve. There's a sweet spot of hormesis, but if you push it too far, Typically upside down U not enough.
Speaker 2:I mean, if health were on the Y-axis, poor health would be associated with two low doses, optimum dose and then overdose. So this is the way I learned it in toxicology. And Taleb takes it a little bit further than hormesis. I wrote about this in one of my articles in the book and it's probably not a distinction that really needs to get made. But it's not just about tolerance for toxins as an adaptive response, sort of a stress-inoculating response. It is about health. And that's where Taleb is really good.
Speaker 2:He talks about the Mediterranean diet, nina Teicholz she wrote Big Fat Surprise and I might be mispronouncing her last name. She just finished her PhD and she talks about the history of the Mediterranean diet and she says it is bullshit. That's not a direct quote, you know that's I'm paraphrasing. The Mediterranean diet was a made-up marketing scheme. But Taleb points out that around the Mediterranean are conservative or maybe the right word is orthodox religions and if you look at their calendar there's like 181 days out of the year where they're fasting from something. The benefit of the Mediterranean diet is not so much in what you eat, like fish and olive oil, it's that you don't eat, it's that you skip eating, or at least you skip meat on Fridays, or whatever it is. You introduce the variability based upon the religious calendar, it's not based upon the geography of the Mediterranean, and this, I thought, was Taleb's genius example to represent how anti-fragile the human body really is.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's multidimensional thinking, and so many people, and even who are supposed to be intelligent, are lacking the ability to think in multidimensions and they think that it's the content of the diet. But what Taleb pointed out was it wasn't necessarily the content. Maybe that was playing a role, but it was the fact that there were so many fasting days in the Orthodoxodox christian calendar that was having these. I love that you know that that that was something that stuck for you, because that definitely stuck for me when I reread, when I read and reread his work. So, yeah, that's amazing. Let's quickly talk about a bit about what's going on in these mitochondrion, and you mentioned biophoton release. This is some cutting edge stuff and this is also why I think that the question about health optimization transcends so far past just diet is because it appears that the mitochondria are specifically releasing light and they're using that different light release wavelengths to help the cell communicate and potentially reproduce. So, yeah, tell us about your thoughts currently.
Speaker 2:I want to put it a little more strongly it not just appears, it happens. Appears kind of says well, we're maybe not social. No, mitochondria produce biophotons and those biophotons are mechanism of communicating. People don't realize that the mitochondria, these organelles inside your cells, they operate way differently than the DNA in the nucleus does. Mitochondria will bind together, they will cooperate, they will separate, they reproduce, separate of the cell. That is, mitochondria have kind of their own life cycle and their own DNA, as if they were separate organisms living inside us. So this part is remarkable. They must have mechanisms of signaling one another and they produce bio photons. That are one of those mechanisms. That's not really what got me interested. I haven't finished all the books that Jack Cruz says I'm supposed to read on Twitter, you know. So I'm going to get a F on my homework from Jack on this, and part of the reason I haven't finished all those books is because I couldn't get an idea out of my head.
Speaker 2:My son is type 1 diabetic. He was diagnosed when he was six years old and as a dad I felt so ashamed. I didn't know what to do. I didn't know why he was sick. I thought he had the flu. I was giving him orange juice because you know that's the way I was raised. What a terrible thing to give a child that isn't making insulin anymore. So I was making it worse for him. After he was diagnosed and he was released from the pediatric ICU and we come home and I've got the vials of insulin and I've got the blood glucose meter and I've got the insulin needles and and I've got the insulin needles and I've got to figure all this stuff out about metabolism. I thought, thank goodness I'm an engineer, I have a problem to work on. And it was shortly thereafter that the results of a longitudinal Finnish study were released and it said the rates of juvenile diabetes so this is type 1 diabetes go way up when the mother is not taking vitamin D supplements In Finland these are all Finnish populations in late into pregnancy or while she's breastfeeding and the infant is vitamin D insufficient or deficient. And this opened up like a window of realization, because we don't necessarily know what causes this autoimmune disorder called type 1 diabetes. But now we know what sort of moves the risk needle on it and it is a deficiency of vitamin D.
Speaker 2:There is a relationship between vitamin D and the development of the immune system because a newborn baby doesn't have an immune system. It takes time for that to come online. The newborn baby is relying upon the antibodies in the mother's milk for its immune system. Great. Then COVID happened, Max, and your country locked down, my country locked down and it was all bullshit. And by this time I'd already been through 20 years of sorting out the lies from the American Diabetic Association and sorting out the misconceptions that the endocrinologists harbor, and so I was already kind of skeptical. I knew about vitamin D in the immune system. I started looking this up and I'm like. It looks like COVID is associated with metabolic dysfunction. It looks like a weak immune system is associated with a vitamin D deficiency, and I was canceled. I lost a lot of faculty friends, journalists came after me, other people were calling up Arizona State and trying to get me fired for spreading heresy about critique of the lockdowns, and it stuck.
Speaker 2:The association between vitamin D and the development of the immune system is not exclusive to type 1 diabetes. It also shows up in multiple sclerosis. It also shows up in rheumatoid arthritis. It also shows up in Parkinson's. It also shows up in fibromyalgia. It shows up in Hashimoto's and other thyroid disorders Every single autoimmune disorder that I've looked at has its origins in vitamin D irregularities early in life.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of clinical trials and epidemiological studies will say, oh no. I looked at all these Parkinson's patients, you know, shortly after their onset we drew blood. They don't have a vitamin D deficiency, but that's not when their immune system developed. You have to go, like the Finns did, all the way back to the earliest years or months of childhood when the immune system is developing and it will develop along this aberrant pathway if you don't have enough vitamin D. All this stuff we know. I'm not even speculating yet. But, max, how the hell do the Inuit live in Greenland? How the hell do you have people living in the Arctic Circle where there's no sunshine, there's no vitamin D? That was really bothering me.
Speaker 2:Mitochondria in the cold make biophotons. Some of those biophotons are in the wavelength range that UV about 309, a little bit more 312 nanometers that, when it strikes the right cholesterol a catalyze might not be the right word will stimulate synthesis of vitamin D. So this is the speculative part. So biophoton strikes the cholesterol, creates the pre-vitamin D that is later converted into vitamin D, and it all happens inside the cell where the light is made where the cholesterol is present and it doesn't require any enzymatic sort of modulation. This is just a physical reaction the light and the cholesterol.
Speaker 2:Will that vitamin D that is created inside the cell ever show up on a blood serum?
Speaker 2:Vitamin D, you know, 25-o-h-d or whatever the heck it is test and I'm speculating. No, the cold can compensate for a blood serum vitamin D insufficiency and you might be healthy, that is, without any of the symptoms of low vitamin D, because your cells have the vitamin D insufficiency. And you might be healthy, that is, without any of the symptoms of low vitamin D, because your cells have the vitamin D they need, even if your blood serum is low because that vitamin D was synthesized inside the cell. That's a hypothesis that I'm not sure I know how to test yet, but I don't know. Maybe my friend Jada Bhattacharya will be, you know, director of the NIH in the United States and I'll submit a proposal and they won't shoot it down right away because it's not about, I don't know. I'm going to keep thinking this through and one of the ways I do that is to ask you, max, what's your reaction to this idea that cold can stimulate vitamin D synthesis inside the cell that never shows up in the blood.
Speaker 1:Yeah, very, very interesting question. I'll take a step back and have a thought that Professor Bob Flosbury gave to me, who's an astrophysicist and astronomer, and he suggested that there was reason to believe that UVB light was actually able to scatter and therefore be available above the sun angle which would directly be exposed, possibly into the winter. So he was of the opinion that people might be able to generate cutaneous vitamin D if they had no clothes on out on the ice in the northern latitudes. That's an interesting question, but we'll remain to see where that goes. To answer your question specifically, I think a little bit about vitamin D physiology.
Speaker 1:As you mentioned, the process of vitamin D formation is this photoreaction, which essentially changes the conformation of 7D hydrocholesterol into pre-vitamin D, and then the thermal effect of the body at 37 degrees isomerizes that into vitamin D and then obviously, the conformational change of the cholesterol ejects it from the cell membrane and then it transforms and then it mostly gets bound to a vitamin D binding protein and then essentially transported around the body. The other interesting point to note and a smaller proportion is attached to the lipoprotein fraction, which is LDL and HDL. So people that are supplementing seem to have most of that supplemental vitamin D going into the LDL fraction rather than in a vitamin D binding protein, which is less specific. The other interesting point that needs to be said is that there's an enzymatic transformation of vitamin D occurring both first in the liver and then in the kidneys, to activate it from vitamin D to 25-hydroxyvitamin D, then to 1-25-1-25-dihydroxyvitamin D. This is also occurring locally, and it occurs locally in the skin, where the enzymes are present to transform the vitamin D into active form, and that seems to play a role in preventing skin cancer, preventing the proliferation of malignant skin cells and melanocytes in response to UV exposure.
Speaker 1:But how that's relevant to what you're proposing and I really like it is that we could be producing really local vitamin D that could therefore be converted to its active form at the site internally. And, yes, I 100% agree that it would not show up as a circulating 25-hydroxy blood test because it's potentially tuned amount that's only being synthesized to meet the needs, just like it appears that melatonin is being secreted and synthesized on-site in the mitochondria in response to near-infrared light. The other point that I think is interesting is that the darkness that occurs at high latitude, living in winter, means that there'd be much more melatonin produced and it appears as if there's analogous signaling pathways with the melatonin receptor and melatonin signaling that potentially could be overtaking some of the functions that would occur with vitamin D signaling. So yeah, those are my points, but I really liked the idea. I think that definitely has some legs.
Speaker 2:Well, I wrote an article and I put it on Twitter to see what people would think, and I think it was mostly people like you that were reading it, because there was a lot of excitement about the idea and some of the usual criticism that, oh, this is only a hypothesis. Some of the usual criticism that, oh, this is only a hypothesis, only Only a hypothesis Like let's get more hypotheses. We should be putting the hypotheses out there instead of diminishing them because they are hypothetical. We should be thinking about ways to falsify them, to disprove them. Hypotheses are the funnest, most creative part of science and that's why we share them are the funnest, most creative part of science and that's why we share them.
Speaker 1:The other point I'll quickly make and I agree with you completely is that the people living at high latitudes had an abundant source of preformed vitamin D in the form of fatty fish and marine foods and potentially animal fat. So they were potentially getting vitamin D needs met orally and they potentially had also had stores accumulated from the summer. And this is the idea if you've got a fair Fitzpatrick 1 or 2 skin type and you're fully exposed during summer and the UV index is only climbing to say, a 6 in Sweden at maximum, but potentially you're storing away that vitamin D in the adipose, in the fat tissue, and then that's potentially released throughout the winter. But I think your idea really, really has legs Because if we go back to this biophoton idea, it seems like the and I want to make a quick distinction between biophoton release and bioluminescence so biophoton release is actually photons of light being emitted from the cell endogenous or the mitochondrion endogenously, and that seems to be as a result of biochemical reactions.
Speaker 1:So this paper there's a paper by Rhys Moult and Alistair Nunn is one of the co-authors. These are researchers through the Guy Foundation and it's called Ultra Weak Photon Emission a brief review. But what they say is that it occurs during essential metabolic reactions where molecules are moving from higher to lower energy states, releasing photons and electronically excited products. Such pathways include the mitochondrial respiratory chain, lipid peroxidation, peroxisome and catecholamine biochemistry. Again, what gets upregulated in cold is catecholamine biochemistry and mitochondrial respiratory the chain. So it sounds like these photons between 200 and 800 nanometers are being emitted and obviously potentially cold is stimulating that process, and bioluminescence seems to be the release of light that was previously absorbed. That's the distinction between bioluminescence and biophoton release.
Speaker 2:This is great. Now I've got some more homework.
Speaker 1:I really respect the fact that you're delving into these topics, thomas, and asking these questions and posing these scientific hypotheses, because it's so common and I think in clinical medicine, especially when clinicians have their paycheck replacing knees or putting stents in hearts, there's zero financial incentive to intellectually speculate at all. So I really respect the fact that you're asking these questions and yeah, it's.
Speaker 2:Is that an opportunity then? Can we come back to green light, because nowhere near enough people are talking about this thing. Yeah, please give us an overview. I started looking at papers on light. I'm getting curious vitamin D, light, environment, that kind of thing and I think probably Google figured it out that this guy is curious about this or something. In any case, a paper showed up that I didn't ask for, but Google, scholar alert or something sent it to me and it was on green light and headaches. Maybe they were listening to my phone, because this has happened to me before. I'm having a conversation with the AJK and we say something. She says it in Spanish and I start getting cat food commercials in Spanish language because Google listens to my phone and I haven't shut that thing off. So maybe it was because I'm talking about migraine headaches. She suffers from them. This paper shows up Green light relieves the pain of migraines.
Speaker 2:There was a study at Harvard University in these active migraineurs and it was on photosensitivity. They wanted at Harvard University in these active migraineurs and it was on photosensitivity. They wanted to understand why the people with migraine headaches are so sensitive to light and they tested all the individual wavelengths in the visible spectrum. Every single one of them made the pain worse and they thought probably some. You know wavelengths are worse than others, except green, which cut the pain, which is a self-reported subjective score. But these migraineurs are sort of subjecting themselves in the interest of science, to these painful wavelengths. Green came on. They said wait a second, that feels good. University of Arizona did a follow-up study using like practically green Christmas lights. You know, they just bought these lights online. They were LEDs. They measured the wavelengths and they said here's what we want you to do to the human subjects Lock yourself in a dark closet, plug in your Christmas lights and just sit there for an hour and then keep a headache diary. Tell us how it goes. They got a significant reduction I'm talking like 60% to 80% in the frequency and severity of migraine headaches. They published like three papers on this.
Speaker 2:So this paper comes into me and I call up a buddy who's in the red light business and I say can you make me a green light? You know just the same thing as your little red light, but I want green LEDs in there. He goes I think I could. Yeah, you know, we'll see what prototype comes in. And he calls me up. He says, tom, this is garbage, it's way too bright. And you can see me up. He says, tom, this is garbage, it's way too bright, and you can see. You know, when I turn this on, you're like nobody would want to stare at this thing. It's probably going to give you a headache. He says I don't know what we're going to do. Those guys, you know, make my red lights. They're all about the power.
Speaker 2:And I asked him to tone it down. I said it's okay, me and AJ will be right out there. I got to see this for myself and I agreed with him. I'm like this is crap. But AJ says let me see that thing. She takes it out of my hand and she puts it right up against her face with her eyes closed. Max, all the laboratory studies had been, with the eyes open, asking the subjects to allow the green light to come in through their eyes and strike their retina. But this one's so bright and AJ, you know, when she has a migraine she doesn't want to open her eyes anyway. So she closes her eyes, puts it right up here and she goes. This feels really good.
Speaker 2:This has taken my headache from a six down to about a two. I ordered a hundred of them right away. I'm like let's get these into the hands of other people. And since then I've collected dozens of testimonies. These are sort of like product reviews. 80% of them sound like this this is amazing. I can't believe it. I've been searching for this for my whole life. It's a miracle. I don't need my headache pain meds anymore, and that's not an exaggeration. This is coming from a chiropractor in Utah is using it with his patients and these people are desperate for relief. Whether it is a post-concussion headache or a stress headache or a sinus headache or a migraine headache, they are getting relief. But 20% of the reports sound like this At a certain time in my cycle I get a headache.
Speaker 2:It's a migraine. It just won't quit. Green light cannot touch a high estrogen headache and I didn't know this until people told me that the other one is. There's a type of migraine called vestibular and I haven't had a lot of success with vestibular migraines. All the other headaches, the green light is taking the pain away. It won't necessarily take away the visual aura or the loss of proprioception or some other symptoms that migraineurs often have, but the pain goes away and that's why it feels like a miracle.
Speaker 2:So I put that up. You know, I read a couple articles and people. Everybody wants to know what are the mechanisms? I have no idea. Rami Bernstein at Harvard has no idea. The scientists at University of Arizona have no idea. Rami Bernstein at Harvard has no idea. The scientists at the University of Arizona have no idea.
Speaker 2:All I have is sort of this evolutionary hypothesis, because if you go around the world measuring the dominant wavelengths of light in the shady forests, it doesn't matter what forest you could be in, the Dominican Republic or Vermont or China. It's dominated by two wavelengths green, which should be no surprise to anybody, and near infrared. These are the two things that happen in the forest. Well, where would our ancient ancestors go when they're anxious? We know that one of the deepest, most visceral fears that comes out in people's nightmares is falling, and I've always thought that was because we were up in the trees. I've always thought that the worst thing that can happen to us, from this sort of brainstem point of view, is falling out of the tree while we're asleep. When we're anxious, we go straight into the forest.
Speaker 2:And this is just a story. This isn't even a scientific hypothesis. There is something about green and those forest wavelengths of light that reduce pain, reduce stress, reduce anxiety. I don't even get headaches, but the days are short right now. So I get up in the morning, I use my green lantern, I turn it on right next to you know, I'm going to use my computer in dark mode and I'm waking up and it's okay to have a little blue light, it's okay to have a little green, but I'm getting the green into my eyes because I don't know, otherwise I might be a bundle full of stress. What are your thoughts?
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, this is incredibly interesting and you mentioned that near infrared and green are the predominant wavelengths in a forest and that is because of the physiology of the leaves, which is the photosynthesizing leaf uses red and blue, visible mostly and it reflects massive amounts of green. That's why the leaf appears green and it reflects a massive amount of near infrared. So that makes sense to me. I'm fascinated and intrigued about the possibility of light as a drug replacement therapy. I mean fascinated and intrigued about the possibility of light as a drug replacement therapy. I mean, I think that is the promise of photobiology and this idea of light as medicine, that all the way from UV up to past near infrared. So to hear that you've discovered and have now implemented a product based on that discovery is amazing to me. So well done. What exact wavelengths is this device emitting?
Speaker 2:This is a little bit random. At Harvard they used 320 nanometers and then they couldn't get that exact wavelength at U of A. I think they were a little shorter.
Speaker 1:Did you say 520 or 320?
Speaker 2:No, no, no 320.
Speaker 1:320 is in the UVA range.
Speaker 2:You are correct. I'm sorry, it must be 520. I'm pulling it up right now. What I put into my light is 530 and 545. And you are correct, the Harvard study was in the 500s, like 520. And then the University of Arizona was close, but it wasn't the exact same. When I looked at the spectrophotometer data from the forests I noticed that the peak is higher than that. It's not a 520 where they first discovered the result, but they never tested 550. They never tested 540. So I put two into this device the 530 and the 545.
Speaker 2:So far people have not reported a distinction. They haven't said I want four different wavelengths and I want them on sliders and I put them into ski goggles so that the patient could experiment with four different wavelengths at these changing intensities. We had to work out the flicker so that we were pretty careful on that. We didn't want to create a problem when we're trying to solve one, and so the less expensive model, which is imported from China, is just two wavelengths, four intensities in those, and we seem to be getting good results. But the research tool are these goggles that would allow people to fool around with the sliders and see if there's an optimum wavelength. It might not be the 545 to 550 that dominates the shady forest, it might be a little lower than that for reasons that I don't really understand.
Speaker 2:But the one time that I tested the red light and infrared on the back of a subject's head and the green in the front, I got a really good sort of subjective response from the subject and then I said now let's do it in the ice bath, you know, because I'm going to add some stress and this guy was it was his second ice bath ever so pretty naive to cold. He got in there and I set up my red on the back of his head and he held the green on the front. Six minutes go by no shivering the front. Six minutes go by no shivering, no urge to shiver Like.
Speaker 2:What he reported was that the usual experience in the ice bath was different for him because the panic didn't set in. The usual shivering, which would seem like it's very healthy, right Cold thermogenesis didn't feel the urge. Now it's activated by the nervous system. It's possible that this combo was doing something to him that kept him relaxed in a way that he wouldn't otherwise have been. And now I want to write up an experimental protocol and see if other people report similar things.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the idea of combining a device of green and near infrared to me sounds fascinating and potentially a possible option. The other thing that springs to mind is these transcranial photobiomodulation devices, and they're mostly in the red and the infrared and they've been using for anything everything from autism to traumatic brain injury to Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. Really it's Professor Mike Hamblin is the kind of lead researcher in this point of view, so I imagine if you made a device that was a transcranial helmet or a cap, potentially what that would look like. But I guess that the wavelengths are shorter, so the green light is shorter wavelength, so it probably wouldn't penetrate anywhere near as deeply. You are correct.
Speaker 2:Just like the short wavelengths of UV are so easily attenuated, whereas the long wavelengths will penetrate deeper into the body. Green is between the blue and the red and it will penetrate more than blue, more than uv, but less than red. So it might not be able to reach the brain when you're going through the hair and the skull, but that optic nerve is a shortcut straight into the middle of the brain and it's not like the light is traveling along the nerve. There is something happening in the back of the eye that is sending signals to the brain that subtract out the pain. I don't know if it's mitochondrial related and I've always kind of doubted it. I do know that the retina is packed with mitochondria. Conversion of visible light into the signals you know, the sort of psychological interpretation of that light must be an incredibly energy intensive process, because otherwise the retina cells wouldn't have so many mitochondria in them.
Speaker 1:Many mitochondria in them. Yeah, exactly, and that's Glenn Jeffrey's work at UCL in London and he's shown how mitochondrially packed the retina is and how beneficial 660 nanometers in the deep red can have for mitochondrial health. There's devices that are specifically using that. So I'm so glad to talk to you, thomas, and to hear how you're innovating and doing this citizen science research, but from such a way in that you're actually executing solutions and not just sitting in an academic chair kind of postulating and conjecturing but not doing anything about it. So I really respect that.
Speaker 1:I mean, imagine this in emergency departments People come into the ED and they have such severe migraine headache and they end up getting all kinds of IV medications and otherwise to kind of attenuate the migraine symptoms. If we had a couple of these devices in the emergency, you could give them to a patient at the same time as maybe some other drug treatments. You could probably discharge them so much quicker so they don't take up a bed in the short stay unit for the next 12 hours and hopefully prevent them from even coming in if they had one of their own. So I'm just so optimistic about the role of expansion of panels, of light panels in various wavelengths, for so many different treatment options to really replace drug therapies. I think this is the promise of lightest medicine.
Speaker 1:So thank you, thank you for your work in this field. It's my pleasure. This has been great, cool. Well, we should definitely do another episode sooner than a year to go over the green light stuff again in depth. Yeah, maybe you can share even more results and stories, and I really hope that this is an area of research that gets funded under a decentralized health and medicine science push, because this is the type of research that I think can change people's lives and does not involve expensive drug patents and trials. It could be very cheaply to research this.
Speaker 2:In the United States, the NIH so this is the National Institute of Health is the most important funding agency for medical research and it's highly competitive and it's institutional and it's bureaucratic. However, there is another program called ARPA-H. So the ARPA programs in the US are the Advanced Research Projects, defense, something or other this is the Defense Department research. Darpa was essential in the formation of the internet, as an example, and the ARPA programs typically have room for more, higher risk, potentially entrepreneurial, innovative, transformative things. Arpa-h has a program with an open solicitation that allows people with these sort of crazy health ideas to ask for funding to investigate them, to see how crazy they really are, and maybe that's the pipeline for me as an academic now, and maybe that's the pipeline for me as an academic.
Speaker 1:Now, yeah, yeah, amazing. And I know for a fact that Professor Mike Hamblin's transcranial photobiomodulation research was funded by the Department of Defense because they were interested in helping basically war fighters who'd come back from the war theater Afghanistan with traumatic brain injury. So absolutely that could be a good avenue, amazing. So where can people find you online and please tell us how they can connect and learn more from you.
Speaker 2:You can read just about everything that I've written on cold plunge therapy and its science on morozcoforgecom O-R-O-Z-K-O forgecom Click on the science tab and it's written in a blog format and, because that doesn't work for some people, you can buy the book. You can only get it at morozcoforgecom. I'll ship it to Australia. It's not cheap but it's available. If you're the kind of person who likes sticky notes and you wanna write in the margins that kind of thing, you can find me on Instagram. I'm SeegerTP. I'm not very popular but I'm there. And if you want to read about all the stuff that gets me in trouble with my dean, then go to Twitter and you can find me as SeegerTP there. I'm going to be, I don't know, called into the provost office for half the stuff I tweet. It feels like because I got a big mouth on Twitter.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think science and society advances when people speak their truth and even if that's inconvenient to the status quo. So let it be. Keep it up. So absolute pleasure speaking, thomas, and yeah, we'll be in touch. I'm looking forward to it, thank you.
