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
Reversing Your Chronic Illness with Sunlight & Ancestral Nutrition: Kaitlin Menere interviews Dr Max Gulhane
Are you still focused on diet while ignoring the most foundational aspect of health? Dr. Max Gulhane reveals why sunlight and circadian biology might be more important than what's on your plate in this interview with Kaitlyn Menere of She Said What?! Podcast.
Dr. Gulhane shares his personal journey of transforming his health after conventional medicine failed to address his adult-onset acne. What began as an exploration into low-carb and carnivore nutrition expanded into something far more profound—understanding how our ancient cellular machinery depends on natural light signals to function properly.
The conversation ventures into territory rarely covered in medical school: how mitochondria—the energy-producing organelles in our cells—evolved over billions of years to respond to natural light wavelengths. When these tiny powerhouses don't function optimally due to disrupted light environments, disease follows. As Dr. Gulhane explains, "Genetics loads the gun, but your environment and lifestyle pull the trigger."
Perhaps most fascinating is the research showing that sun avoidance carries mortality risks comparable to smoking—directly challenging Australia's decades-long "slip, slop, slap" campaign. While ultraviolet light can damage DNA, our bodies have evolved sophisticated repair mechanisms triggered by the very same sunlight exposure. This explains why those who get more sun exposure live longer despite potentially higher skin cancer diagnoses.
For listeners struggling with chronic conditions like inflammatory bowel disease, autoimmune disorders, or metabolic issues, Dr. Gulhane offers a holistic framework that goes beyond simply removing problem foods. By addressing light exposure, grounding, EMF reduction, and circadian alignment, many patients have reduced or eliminated their dependence on medications.
The episode concludes with details about the upcoming Regenerate Summit in Sydney and Melbourne, where health pioneers will share cutting-edge perspectives on ancestral health practices and regenerative approaches to wellness.
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BYRON HINTERLAND RETREAT - Circadian Living by Regenerative Health Retreats
Join us July 17-20, 2024 in Byron Bay Hinterland, Northern NSW.
Only 6 tickets remaining. Secure yours here.
Welcome back to. She Said what the podcast? Today I am here with Dr Max Goulhane. Welcome to actually welcome to your own backyard because we're on. We're in the Byron hinterlands right now.
Speaker 2:Thank you, caitlin. It's a pleasure to sit down with you.
Speaker 1:I'm so excited for this. If you are just listening and you're not actually watching this, to set the scene, we are on some really cool chairs. We're in the back of this beautiful rainforest up in Byron, so this is a really cool special episode. For those who do not know you, who are you and what do you do?
Speaker 2:Yes, so I'm a GP registrar, so I'm a clinical doctor. I see patients, but I also have a very deep interest in preventative health, preventative health care and disease prevention and longevity optimization. Preventative health care and disease prevention and longevity optimisation essentially how to keep people well and prevent them from getting sick. And that is, I think, what I arrived at after seeing that the focus of mainstream medicine, as I was taught and other doctors are taught, is effective in addressing the sick people. But really that's at the end of a very long process, a disease process where people could have been helped decades prior and potentially avoided or averted some myriad of chronic diseases, from cancer, autoimmune diseases, diabetes and these various other problems that are essentially making people incapacitated and ill before their time.
Speaker 1:Okay, cool. So did you study to be a doctor first and then, throughout, I guess, your client or your patients, you saw that everyone was sicker than you realised.
Speaker 2:So mine was a bit of a unique personal story as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:So I was studying medicine down in Melbourne, yeah, and along this period and going through a science degree before that, I developed acne. And I developed it in my early 20s, kind of after everyone had been and done that in their teen years. So it was inconvenient, it wasn't nice and I went through a standard medical approach to that acne treatment. And you can think about acne in many ways like a chronic disease and there's essentially just ladders. There's a ladder step in medicine to prescribe different doses and strengths and medications with different routes for this treatment. If one doesn't work, you simply step up to the next step and that's the same whether it's a high blood pressure, whether it's diabetes or whether it's acne. So I was on this ladder of topical treatments, of oral antibiotics, and then finally, you know, the acne sledgehammer which many people know is Roaccutane, which is known as isotretinoin, and you know I was seeing a dermatologist and no one mentioned. Hey, you know there's a lifestyle component to this condition. No one said that to me.
Speaker 2:So I got to the stage of being on this very, very heavy drug and it's actually a vitamin A analogue and we could talk about how it works and how that ties into holistic health. But essentially I became quite depressed, stopped it, had enough insight to stop it myself and then started looking about what else was going on here. Part of that journey was discovering that low-carb, and later carnivore, nutrition was a really helpful lever in essentially stopping the symptoms at their root. And so going through medical school and having this personal patient experience, that was instructive. And then it made me think well, if we're not telling people how to reverse and prevent their acne, what else are we not telling people to prevent and reverse? So I guess I did my medical studies and I'm continuing to almost finish them with my GP training. But along the way I've been doing private and personal investigation into how can we address the root causes of this Crohn's disease epidemic right at a fundamental level.
Speaker 1:That's really similar to my journey. I have Crohn's disease and went through the whole Western medical system and then no one addressed my lifestyle. No one was like you need to stop partying, you need to stop drinking alcohol. It was just like here's some biologic medication, here's some like we're going to just operate and that's all it is. It's crazy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's sad because I feel like people deserve this information and they deserve to say no to the option to change their lifestyle. But they should at least have been informed that, hey, if you build up your vitamin D level through natural, healthy, progressive sun exposure, then this influences the gut barrier function. This could potentially improve gut symptoms in inflammatory bowel disease, and there's enough evidence out there. It's not like this scientific evidence doesn't exist. Pubmed is filled with the references to justify these type of healthy behaviours, but it's simply not reflected in what a gastroenterologist is taught to tell you.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And really their tools are pharmaceutical and sure they do work, but again they're not getting to the root cause of why that disease arose and therefore how to effectively prevent it right at its root.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. So, coming back to your story with acne, and then the things that pulled the lever, you mentioned carnivore. Can you tell us a little bit about that and the other things that you did with your acne?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely so. At the time I was living in Melbourne and not getting a lot of sun exposure at all.
Speaker 2:And later found out that, you know, my vitamin D level was quite low For me at that point I was especially when the acne was was its worst. I was eating a lot of grains, a lot of fruit, legumes. This was in a period where and I'm sure other people can relate to this and I believe that eating a more plant-based diet was the best thing for my health, for the, for the environment, for the planet and and so on and so forth, which later I discovered is not true. On all those, those metrics, yeah, but and eating that, that type of diet and and the critical point wrong was that this wasn't compatible with my local area. It's it was July, august, in in Melbourne. This I shouldn't have been eating tropical fruits, I shouldn't have been eating, you know, grains harvested maybe a thousand, 2000 kilometers away.
Speaker 2:And that was, you know, part, large part, of the reason why my, my, why my acne was flaring.
Speaker 2:And the acne was a physical or cutaneous, a skin manifestation of essentially a broken gut lining and a dysfunctional gut barrier, and that can manifest in different people in different ways.
Speaker 2:Like for you it was Crohn's disease, for other people it's psoriasis, but it's very individual. But cutting out those grains and cutting out those plant foods and fruit and all this kind of thing unseasonally was the first step to fixing that gut barrier, and the way I think about it now was removing one of the stimuluses for provoking an immune response that was really reflective of acne, but it wasn't, and carnivore as well simply the next step, but it wasn't doing anything to necessarily strengthen that gut barrier and that's where the sunlight stuff comes in. But for that period of my life it worked extremely well and low carb and then carnivore no acne anymore. And in addition to that, a whole bunch of really other non-specific symptoms that I didn't know were a problem also went away, and maybe you can relate to this too yeah so, uh, you know, upper spiritual tract infections, like colds that you thought are normal, didn't get them anymore.
Speaker 2:Yeah, um, more energy, better mood, feeling more stable and and less anxious All these things, these random symptoms that I think we are conditioned to think are normal.
Speaker 2:They disappeared when I made those more strict dietary changes. And then, you know, fast forward a couple of years and again, just exploring more of these topics and hearing the work of Dr Jack Cruz, who is a pretty iconic figure in health optimization and really is talking about the sunlight, mitochondria, more circadian biology, and I realized too that that is possibly even more of an umbrella fix or solution. Not to denigrate the importance of diet. It's absolutely important, but there's other facets at play. So it's been very much a personal journey that's informed my medical and kind of intellectual explorations and applying this in clinic and giving these tools to patients, finding that it's also helped with their symptoms, whether it be obesity, weight loss, metabolic syndrome, reversing chronic fatigue. These fundamental principles work no matter what the condition is, and I guess we can talk more about why that is the case, but it's exciting. It's exciting to be able to give someone, a patient, something other than just a larger dose or another pharmaceutical agent of their medication regime.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I love that. This started from your own story as well, and I feel like a lot of people in this industry. It starts with them and that's what gives them not only the experience but the passion to actually want to change, because there's one thing to learn about this stuff in a book or you're watching YouTube or you're doing a course, but to actually experience it and I know this for myself with my clients I'm like, fuck, I know what you've been through, I get it and I feel like that would be the same with your clients and sorry patients. And then to be able to see that difference when they're coming in with like obesity or whatever it is, and to be able to reverse it, not via medication, but by like, go and watch the sunrise.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and it actually does have to be a lived experience for a practitioner. I firmly have that belief. And you know we can talk to colleagues about the amazing effects of carbohydrate restriction, you know, for metabolic syndrome. Our medical colleagues and their eyes just glaze over because they haven't been through it themselves.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so there does need to be a't been through it themselves. Yeah, yeah, so there does need to be a lived experience? I think yeah, because otherwise people don't give it, they just don't believe it and in that situation they're so much easier to just default to what the guidelines say. And they're changing slowly, but you know for patients they're not changing quick enough.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. So you went through your acne journey, you started reversing, you started like clearing up your gut. How did you get onto Jack Cruz and how did you find, like I guess, the circadian sunlight, I guess pathway that you're on now?
Speaker 2:So Cruz is one of these figures where he puts out such a dense tweet or interview. He says so much packed into a small amount of time. It's almost like a. It's like a cryptic puzzle, and if you're a curious person and you're trying to always understand the world better, it might as well be like a massive prize. It's like a pinata that you need to hit, and that's what it is for me. I need to keep asking and understanding.
Speaker 2:So it was just like sitting there inviting me to understand more, and the way he presents his information is really in that way. It's a challenge. He's not going to spoon feed you this. This is what it is and how he's presenting his interpretation of disease with a lens of circadian and quantum biology. And it's up to you to understand and implement. And implementation is often where most people need to stop, because they do everything correctly. They block artificial light, they see the sunrise, they build up a solar, build up a solar callus and they find a tremendous benefit and that's fine. They don't necessarily need to understand, you know, the mitochondrial membrane potential or how near-infrared light's interacting with components in the mitochondria. It doesn't matter, because they're finding benefit.
Speaker 2:But for me as a clinician and, I guess, a scientist, researcher, then that was the entry point for me to start exploring these topics and the emphasis of my work lately and for the past two years it really pivoted from a dietary focused perspective to the sunlight and circadian rhythms because and after I talked to Cruz on my podcast and you know he said you know, we've got enough food gurus, it's time we need more light gurus. The point being, there's a lot of people speaking about the roles of low-carbon carnivore diets very, very effectively, like Dr Anthony Chafee, who's going to be speaking at our upcoming Regenerate Summit. He's one of them but there seem to be less people speaking about how critical light is for health, and disproportionately so with the degree that it's so important for health. But there was so few people speaking that, yeah, I felt called to make that a subject of my work and, yeah, it's been very interesting to explore all these and talk to so many interesting people about it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, do you think that's because it's more I don't want to say taboo, but like to say light's more important than food, or like one of the biggest levers in health and one of the biggest things that affects us. It's a bit more like oh, don't say that. Like everyone knows that food can contribute to disease, but to say light can fix disease, it's a bit more like crazy.
Speaker 2:It is. And the analogy is like the fish, the two fish swimming in the water, in the ocean. And you know, the old fish comes by and is like you know, look at all the water. He makes a comment about water and the two young fish say you know what is water? I love that.
Speaker 2:So the point is, light is so ubiquitous it's everywhere all the time that it's difficult for people to appreciate its effect on health. And changing our light environment and its effect on health can be subtle and it can take a bit longer than to immediately say fast or to immediately cut out X, y and Z food. So it's important. I think that's one of the main reasons why people don't think about it as much, because it's everywhere. But when you delve into how light is interacting with our bodies, with your body, how it's regulating our bodily functions, then some of this crazy stuff like standing in your underwear facing the morning sunrise with your feet in the ground, it starts to make more sense when you understand that disease is related to essentially the bioenergetic state of your mitochondrial colony.
Speaker 1:And these ancient.
Speaker 2:You know, they were once bacteria and they became incorporated into our cells. They evolved in this billion-year process to be highly dependent on natural light wavelengths to function optimally. So you know, there's all other aspects of this story, including the vitamin D side of the interaction with ultraviolet light and production of this vitamin D, actually a hormone, this ancient system of non-visual photoreceptors that actually can signal to the body in response to different light wavelengths. So the biology again exists, the literature exists, but it's not being taught, it's not being emphasized in health practice. And that's really been the innovation of Dr Cruz, which is to take what is siloed science and translate that into actionable things that normal people can do every day.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that. Okay, cool. So the light plays a huge part in it, and you mentioned disease, right. Can you talk us through about, especially like cancers, all those things in regards to the light environment?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so there was a guy, a scientist, researcher, called Dr Doug Wallace and he is a biomedical researcher in the US at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and he has done research on mitochondria and mitochondrial genetics. So to back up a little bit, as I alluded to, the mitochondria are these tiny little organelles and they're once bacteria and they live inside all your cells and what they do is they transform energy. So they take inputs in the form of electrons from food substrates, of what you're eating, and they take other inputs like light and they respond to things like temperature and in response to that they make ATP. But they also make energy they make.
Speaker 2:ATP, but they also make energy. When they're operating properly the cell does its job properly, so the heart cell can contract efficiently. The cells in the pancreas can make insulin properly. The gut cells in the gut lining can make the mucins properly to maintain a really healthy gut barrier. The neurons can fire off their signals properly, so everything works. But when the mitochondria stop working and it's really a gradient, it's like a brownout then the cell can't do its job properly, and when the cell can't do its job the heart stops pumping properly. The gut lining can't make a really solid mucus barrier, so bacteria start contacting it and perhaps something like Crohn's or IBD can result. So the priority when it comes to disease and chronic disease is to make sure those mitochondria of ours are healthy, and disease today is overwhelmingly a result of this mitochondrial inefficiency or lack of a mitochondrial being healthy. And that was the innovation of Dr Wallace's work, which is only a tiny fraction. Probably less than 10% or even less than 5% of diseases are related to nuclear genetic problems.
Speaker 2:So, meaning that mitochondrial problems, and therefore environmental choices, are the most important thing for whether we get sick or not.
Speaker 2:And another way of thinking about this is what I tell my patients is genetics loads the gun, but your environment and your lifestyle pulls the trigger and determines whether or not you're going to get sick. So that's empowering, because it means that, no matter what your family history is, if you make the right choices with respect to the light you see, with respect to the food you eat, with respect to where you live and the water you drink, then you can move the needle. It's not a foregone conclusion that you're going to get diabetes, that you're going to get heart disease. So that was the innovation of Dr Wallace and that's how I think about disease, because we need to keep these mitochondria happy, and the things that make mitochondria unhappy are related to innovations in technology in our modern environment, whether they are indoor artificial lighting, whether they're non-native electromagnetic fields being emitted by devices of convenience like smartphones or Wi-Fi routers, whether it's food of convenience which is refined grains that have contaminated with glyphosate residue or coconuts shipped in from the equator down in Tassie and Melbourne.
Speaker 2:So all these environmental choices are going to influence whether or not our mitochondria are happy and therefore how sick or not we get. So the way that sunlight really plugs into this story is that it regulates the circadian rhythm, which is the body's response to the light-dark cycle. The light-dark cycle which is what all life on earth evolved over these billion years. And if we respect it then the mitochondrial colony recovers overnight. And it recovers overnight because this very important hormone called melatonin gets made in the brain, in the pineal gland, but it only gets made if there's no light in our environment.
Speaker 2:The lost sunlight also stimulates this melatonin hormone on site in the mitochondria during the day, in response to near-infrared light which gets reflected from the greenery around us, because natural sunlight is so rich in near-infrared photons.
Speaker 2:So the role of mitochondria in optimal health, of sunlight in optimal health, is to provide us with this yin and yang situation that if we respect we become optimally healthy and if we disrespect we get sick.
Speaker 2:So another way to think about the yin and yang is the light and the dark is perfectly balanced and that reflects the equal importance of both full spectrum sunlight during the day and complete darkness or just moonlight during the night. So we can mess with our circadian health in a couple of ways. One, if we get inadequate full-spectrum sunlight during the day and or if we get too much artificial light at night. So you can be doing sure you light outside during the day, but if you also have your nighttime lit up with computer monitors and overhead LED lighting, then you're not going to make melatonin, you're not going to allow that mitochondria to repair themselves properly. And similarly, if you go to sleep on time you don't have a lot of artificial light but you're indoors all day, you're going to become vitamin D deficient, you're going to become near infrared light deficient and again, you're not going to make those really important hormones and photo products so at a high level. That is how I think about sunlight and its effect on disease.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so it's really at the centre for everything, for disease.
Speaker 2:It is. I think it's the foundational approach and again it does sound controversial, but maybe this is another way of thinking about it. The cell's response to light predated the development, the evolution of a digestive system. So cells were responding to sunlight and the absence of light with the non-visual photoreceptor system, with ancestral circadian rhythms prior to the formation of our food system, our digestive system. Again, not to say that diet is unimportant it absolutely is important and proportionally becomes more important if we aren't able to control those light aspects in our health. And that's why I think a lot of people might have to maintain a strict carnivore diet and they fall off the wagon if they deviate even slightly, because perhaps they haven't addressed their circadian rhythm and the yin-yang of night, of daytime sunlight and nighttime darkness as well as they possibly could.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so in terms of health, if we look at it from like, if we have dominoes lining up, light would be like one of the first dominoes, right?
Speaker 2:I think so, yeah, and so once you get that in place and your circadian rhythm in place and all of that, it's like you know it hits everything else. Yeah, and and not to say that you can't address them both at the same time, and but it's just, it becomes, uh.
Speaker 2:I think it's it's helpful to just try and make these basic light habits, uh, an essential part of your day and make that a routine, and if you have to travel and you eat, you know, some food that you otherwise wouldn't have at least if you get out and get your light signals right, you're going to be doing better for your health.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. And do you think because I'm just like thinking about this now in terms of growing up in Australia slip, slop, slap, like protecting us from the sun, stay out of the UV. You have to put a hat on, you have to put sunscreen on, you have to get in the shade Do you think that that's actually contributing to a lot of disease in Australia that we have now?
Speaker 2:I think it is, and that in itself is a controversial statement.
Speaker 1:I just free-balled that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I'll break it down for everyone. So what we've learnt over the past probably 10 years particularly so is that, from a variety of different angles is that people who get more sunlight live longer. There were two pivotal studies that really displayed this. One of them was in. The first one was in Sweden, and they took a cohort of about 25,000 Swedish women in Sweden and they asked them questions about their sunlight exposure. So they asked them do you sunbathe in summer, do you sunbathe in winter, do you use tanning beds, and do you travel overseas to tan holidays, sunbathing holidays and they followed them up over two decades, two and a half decades sunbathing holidays, and they followed them up over two decades, two and a half decades.
Speaker 2:And what they did is they looked at how quickly people were dying and their hypothesis because it was called the melanoma in southern Sweden study was that the women that sunbathed the most, that went to the tanning salons the most, would get more melanoma and die more frequently.
Speaker 2:So they were actually correct on the first part, but not on the second. What they found was that the women who got the most sun exposure, they actually died the least. Their risk of death of all-cause mortality was the lowest and there was a dose response, meaning the women who got an intermediate amount of sun exposure died a little bit more often and those that avoided the sun had the greatest risk of death. And they had a way of quantifying this in a very interesting way, because they also discussed smoking habits and the analysis of the data showed that the women who avoided the sun and didn't smoke so had the same mortality as those that got in the sun and didn't smoke, so had the same mortality as those that got in the sun and smoked. So that implied, or it demonstrated, that smoking was a risk factor. Sun avoidance was a risk factor for all-cause death on par with smoking in this Swedish cohort Right.
Speaker 1:Okay continue.
Speaker 2:So the question there and the common and again sorry to make a bit more clear the reasons why they found that people were living longer was because they were dying less of the really big killers in society. The biggest killers in society are heart disease and stroke. Yeah, so these are vascular problems, these are problems of blood clotting and they kill more people, no matter what country in the world, than skin cancers. And if you plot death by years of potential life loss, that's one of the metrics we use in epidemiology to quantify the effect of a disease on society Years of potential life loss. So it's a function of how old someone is when they die and how prevalent that disease is in the population. And if you look at the curve for Australia, the conditions that are responsible for the most life lost are, by a long way, ischemic heart disease, heart attack, and then you go down. You've got, you know, you've got stroke, cerebrovascular, not necessarily in this order, but roughly. You've got stroke. You've got, you know, neurodegenerative diseases like dementias. You've got lung cancers. You've got breast, colon cancers, you've got prostate cancers, and I'm excluding traffic accidents and traumatic illness because that's not relevant. But all the way down at something like number 13 is skin cancers, including malignant melanoma. So what I'm trying to convey is that there's an order of concern that we should have on a population level of what diseases are killing people, population level of what diseases are killing people and if we can change our lifestyles to prevent certain deaths. Then we should be looking at the biggest pictures and the biggest fish to address.
Speaker 2:And what Peli Lindquist and his team found in Sweden, and that was later backed up by a dermatologist called Richard Weller in a UK analysis, was that sunlight exposure and the more people got, the less they were dying of these bigger ticker causes. So it wasn't to say that skin cancer wasn't a problem. Like I mentioned, the women that got more sunlight in the Sweden study did get more melanoma, but they were protected from death, even in the ones that get more melanoma. But they were protected from death even in the ones that got the melanoma, and the mortality of the women who got skin cancers was significantly lower in the ones that got more sunlight. So, even conditional upon getting skin cancer, you were still protected if you got more sunlight exposure compared to if you avoided sunlight exposure. Interesting, if you got more sunlight exposure compared to if you avoided sunlight exposure.
Speaker 2:Interesting. So there's more nuance here, and a common rebuttal to this is like okay, this is a European cohort, this isn't representative of an Australian population.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And the conditions are different. In Sweden their maximum ultraviolet light index is a six. Uv index explains the magnitude of UV light that's present. So in the middle of summer it only gets up to a six and it's there for about 10 days a year. Half the year there's no UVB light at all. So you know the comment the rebuttal might be this is a unique population. Perhaps it's not applicable to us in Australia. Well, when I talked to Professor Weller he said that you guys in Australia you do have less all-cause mortality compared to England at the high latitude with a similar population of Anglo-Saxon, you know, northern Atlantic origin. So I think it holds, I think it's relevant for Australians. But it adds an extra layer of nuance of us in Australia, which is we have UV indexes that hit 13.
Speaker 1:We have.
Speaker 2:UV indexes up here in Queensland and Northern New South Wales that don't fall below, you know, four, five all year round. So the magnitude of ultraviolet light exposure is so much greater here in Australia and that needs to be taken into account in advice about sun exposure. It doesn't mean we need to avoid it, but we just need to be smart and we need to titrate our UV exposure to our skin type and if you're paler, then you just need to time your. And we need to titrate our UV exposure to our skin type and if you're paler, then you just need to time your exposure in a more smart way.
Speaker 1:How does UV tie into it then?
Speaker 2:So ultraviolet light is this very small part of the solar spectrum, but it plays a really essential role. So ultraviolet light, changes in the environment and increase in ultraviolet light was thought to trigger one of the developments of complex life. So the Cambrian explosion I think it was about 300, 600, maybe 600 million years ago was thought to be triggered by an increase in amount of this really high energy photons into the environment, and life evolved to make use of this energy. So ultraviolet light is a double-edged sword because it both provides energy to help biochemical reactions that are key to life happen.
Speaker 2:The most common one that people will know about is the conversion of cholesterol into vitamin D. One that people will know about is the conversion of cholesterol into vitamin D. We need a photon of, or photons of, ultraviolet B light to hit that cholesterol ring, to break it open, to therefore catalyze the production of vitamin D. But the UV light also can damage the DNA and it is mutagenic because it is so high energy. So, interestingly, the body has evolved amazing a number of methods to deal with this double-edged sword that is ultraviolet light. So it's both necessary, but we also need to uh mitigate its, its damaging effects in certain ways.
Speaker 1:We can talk about those, those ways, if you, if you, yeah, yeah because I feel like there's a lot of there is nuance to it, right, which we were speaking about before we started recording, because on one hand, you have the centralized system that's like uv is so bad and on the other hand, you have the decentralized system and some people like uv, there's nothing bad. So I feel like you're feeling, you're sitting into this middle part.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I'll explain about it a little bit. So UVB light is the most high-energy light that essentially we're exposed to here on Earth and it penetrates through the atmosphere when the sun angle is at a certain degree in the sky. That's why, if you're living in a low latitude in Tassie or up in Sweden, the sun angle never climbs above a certain level, so you never get UVB light at certain parts of the year. I didn't know that that's so cool. So I mean talking to an astrophysicist. He is suggesting that there's ways that ultraviolet B can scatter and be present at high latitudes in winter, but that's a different discussion. Scatter and be present at high latitudes in winter, but that's a different discussion. So what that basically means is that it's only there for part of the time, but it's depending on the time of day and the season.
Speaker 2:So what happens when ultraviolet light strikes the skin? Well, ultraviolet B light, it gets absorbed, and it gets absorbed by DNA itself. Dna actually is a chromophore for ultraviolet light. So again pointing to if it were all bad, why has nature been programmed us to essentially absorb it? But UVB light can cause what are called CPDs or psychobutampyridine dimers.
Speaker 2:Anyway, they cause defects in the DNA UVA light, which is a more longer form of UV light and that helps us to relax the blood vessels and keep all blood flow occurring properly. That can cause DNA damage to what we call oxidative stress. But and this is the big but, and this is where what I call the half-truth of the slip slop, slap son of oil's message stops. They get that right, but they don't tell you that what the skin has evolved is all these mechanisms to repair the DNA damage done by the ultraviolet B light, and one of those is the vitamin D system. So when UVB strikes the skin, it makes vitamin D. Vitamin D becomes activated in a range of steps, but what it does is it upregulates enzymes that chop out the defects in DNA Cool. It repairs the DNA defects based on this system.
Speaker 1:So it's like I'm going to damage your DNA, but here's the way to fix it.
Speaker 2:Exactly Mother Nature's built in a program to fix the damage that the ultraviolet B light's done.
Speaker 2:Turns out that if you continue to get UVB light exposure, then you can't overdose on vitamin D, because the body makes a bunch of these other cousins of vitamin D. They're called secosteroids. I think of them, these other cousins of vitamin D, they're called secosteroids. I think of them as chemical cousins of vitamin D. They have very similar effects. So they increase what we call DNA repair, basic excision repair. They reduce proliferation and they regulate proliferation of the skin cells so they don't start replicating out of control like as a cancer of the skin cells, so they don't start replicating out of control like as a cancer. They reduce oxidative stress and they reduce essentially tumor growth because they upregulate these compounds, a really key one called P53, which is known as the guardian of the genome.
Speaker 2:So these vitamin D and its active forms and its chemical cousins are one of the ways that the body has evolved to deal with the oxidative stress and the DNA damage that ultraviolet light has. So what does that mean? It means that if you're getting sunlight in an ancestrally appropriate way, by starting in the morning gradually building up, then what you're going to be doing is you're going to be preparing the skin, building up. Then what you're going to be doing is you're going to be preparing the skin You're going to be generating melanin, and melanin is one of the body's most powerful antioxidants.
Speaker 2:So I just told you that UVA light induces oxidative stress and can damage DNA. Well, if you have melanin because you've been slowly building up your exposure in a smart and consistent way, then this melanin is going to help deal with the oxidative stress that's been caused by this UV light. How else can you dampen oxidative stress down? Well, when you're walking barefoot on the ground, your body is uptaking electrons. That grounding effect also reduces oxidative stress. Neuron for red light, which is, by proportion, more than 50% of the photons, induces melatonin in the mitochondria again, which reduces oxidative stress. So these are all the different ways and that's only scratching the surface of the mechanisms by which, if we get ultraviolet light in an ancestrally appropriate way in the context of full-spectrum sunlight, then Mother Nature's got our back.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's almost like she designed this for this purpose. That's so cool. And then have you. I'm sure you have read I'm reading at the moment the Invisible Rainbow, and it speaks all about electricity and the introduction of that and how that's actually really contributed to the disease. And I guess that that would tie into this story as well with, like, non-native EMFs and electricity.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's fascinating and to context, that, based on what we've been talking about, life evolved this really narrow spectrum of electromagnetic radiation.
Speaker 2:So, not to get too technical, but electromagnetic radiation is on this scale and the photons, based on their wavelength and their frequency, have different properties. So we talked about UV light. That's on the really short end of the spectrum. We can't even see it. And then we're in this really narrow range between around 400 and 700 nanometers which is visible light, and then if we go further than that, then we're in the infrared and then, if we keep going further beyond that, we get into radio frequencies and other kinds of frequencies.
Speaker 2:So what humans have done is that we have developed technologies like like radio, like bluetooth, like wi-fi, cellular communication technologies that make use of a range of electromagnetic frequencies that life and humans never evolved exposure to yeah, so it's a novel thing in our environment only for the past 100, past 100 years. Late 1800s is when electricity was invented.
Speaker 2:So, the question and the point that Furstenberg makes in the Invisible Rainbow is that if our mitochondrial colony have evolved with a really strict amount of certain wavelengths, including visible light, including near infrared, including the human resonance, including some very long wavelengths, ultra-low frequency wavelengths, yet suddenly we're introducing all these novel sources, then what is that having on our mitochondrial colony? And if we understand that there's quantum biological processes at play in the mitochondria to help make up energy in the way that we were discussing earlier, they're going to be so sensitive to even tiny perturbations in that EMF exposure that that's going to affect the way that they produce energy and therefore influence disease. Now it's not an area of active research. It's very much a niche, decentralized area of research. But I and others I mean Tristan Scott is a really great spokesman for the effect of EMF on health. I think it's incredibly under-emphasized for how significant it is.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, because I'm reading this and I'm like holy fuck, like it makes me want to just yeet my phone into the ocean and never look at it again. Do you see it a lot, or like I guess you would see it a lot with your patients again? Do you see it a lot, or like I guess you would see it a lot with your patients, but do you speak to them a lot?
Speaker 2:And there are a lot of people like well, this is actually affecting my health a lot more than I realize, because it's so ubiquitous and so difficult to get away from. It's hard for certain people, for a lot of people to, unless they're by a very diligent process of exclusion, attribute their symptoms to that. Yeah, but I encourage people to avoid EMF exposure close to the body as part of a holistic protocol.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And you know that might involve turning off your Wi-Fi at night. It might involve not sitting next to the Wi-Fi router during a workday. It might involve unplugging the plugs near the power cord where your baby's cot is. You know all these things. It's more of a protocol that I think is based on good enough science, like we don't need a high onus of research to know that it's something that we should be doing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's blowing my mind and I think that this is a bit of like a rabbit hole as well. When you start and you get onto Jack Cruz this is how it happened to me I'm like I got sent his podcast with Rick Rubin and Huberman and I was listening to it and I was like this guy's a jerk. I love him so much because he just absolutely schools Huberman is a jerk. I love him so much because he just absolutely schools Huberman. And then it's like okay, now I'm looking into Jack Cruz's work, now I'm understanding mitochondria, now I'm understanding like the sun, and it's just this fucking rabbit hole. Right, where did how did that? I guess? Where are you at in it? Are you kind of sitting in the middle of like okay, I want to still learn more and I'm really exploring things? Or are you you like cool, I'm good and I want to just take it to another level.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it is a rabbit hole. I think that's a great way to describe it. I am nowhere near the bottom of the rabbit hole, nowhere near, and at the moment I've focused a lot on circadian biology. More recently, I've been talking to some quantum biologists Cool. Recently I've been talking to some quantum biologists Cool and they're based in the UK, the Guy Foundation. They're funding a lot of quantum biological research to really understand what is going on in the mitochondria at the level of electrons, photons, protons, all this kind of thing, and they're doing some really exciting research and they're getting on some very cutting-edge researchers people like Nick Lane, people like Michael Levin who's doing work with bioelectricity so they're at the cutting edge of health. I think this is the cutting edge of health and biology and they came to this topic because they were investigating. They did work in cannabinoids and GW Pharmaceuticals, which is Professor Jeffrey Guy's company, was investigating how they were the first to bring a pharmaceutical-grade cannabinoid onto the pharmaceutical market to treat intractable epilepsy.
Speaker 1:Sorry for those who do not know what that is. Can you just clarify?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so for children who have really severe epilepsy, they go into seizures almost constantly.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:It's extremely damaging, and brain injuries from lack of oxygen, all this kind of thing. So what they discovered is that compounds in cannabis and weed could have a therapeutic benefit. So what they did was isolate some of these compounds, which people take a lot these days.
Speaker 2:They were the first more than a decade ago and released a pharmaceutical product In the goal or sorry. In the process of understanding the science, they realised that these cannabinoid compounds were interacting with mitochondria Cool, and that was how they were having effects. And they realised that biochemistry was inadequate to explain how these processes were happening and they needed to go deeper. And that's how they started arriving at quantum biology, because the biochemical model of the world wasn't enough to explain what was really happening.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so holistic health. I guess on this cutting edge is really about quantum biology as well, like it's all quite connected.
Speaker 2:It is absolutely connected but thankfully the practical day-to-day which has a quantum biological explanation doesn't need to be technical. Yeah, and people simply just doing things that I and others talk about, like watching the sunrise, like getting a barefoot on the ground, like eating local foods. They do have quantum biological explanations. Again, we as scientists are just starting to explain, but it's not necessary in order to implement them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, so you don't actually need to understand the quantum mechanics behind grounding to get the benefits, Exactly. Yeah, I love that. Can you actually because you mentioned briefly when we touched on grounding, or like getting your bare feet on the earth electrons?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean electricity is a passage of of electrons, like when you flick your switch. Yeah, in in your house the copper wire is is conductive of electrons and they they carries a charge and that's how you're able to operate electrolyte appliances. The the body is operating in in a similar way we. There's a, a DC electric current that runs the body and the proteins in the body. They're bathed in water and that changes the way that they conduct electricity and the whole function of the body is because we have a bioelectric foundation.
Speaker 2:So the corollary or the Next point of that is we can do things that respect and understand that that is the case From a clinical point of view. Doctors know that when they do an ECG electrocardiogram, if someone comes into the emergency department with chest pain, we take a measurement, we measure the change in electrical potential of the heart and we actually graph it and we use it for diagnosis. Neurologists, if people have a seizure, they'll do an EEG, an electroencephalogram, and look at the waveform of the electrical potential that the brain is doing. And clinically we know that that's happening, but we as doctors haven't taken the next step to understand what those implications are for health and disease.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Isn't that interesting? Because I feel like it's almost like I don't know if I want to say this, let me word it properly but it's almost like the medical industry is outdated in a way, and what people are getting taught in universities and things are not actually at the cutting edge of what's actually happening and what's helping people, even though it's not really new at the same time, because we're living ancestrally Does that make sense?
Speaker 2:It does and the emphasis is misguided. I think that maybe is the most basic way for people to understand.
Speaker 2:Is that the emphasis of a mainstream, centralized medicine. Okay, if you come in with a subdural hemorrhage because someone fell over and hit their head, absolutely you get rushed to the operating theatre and you have a part of your skull removed and you decompress the brain and that's extremely useful and extremely effective. Other forms of interventions, people who are right at that dying point of view, trauma surgery Like broken bones, orthopedics and look some of the late, more recently the immunotherapies for melanoma, like they've been really effective. So, antibiotic therapy in severe sepsis sure, these are not degrading the value and benefit. I see it every day, but from a preventative health point of view the emphasis simply isn't there.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I was thinking about this earlier, and it's really the doctors aren't. We don't have, we're not being taught a good model of what normal, optimal health is. People are so sick, and people are so metabolically sick that collectively they don't understand what normal was and therefore they're really unable to guide people back to that. And you can't get there through medications. You need to get there through these optimal lifestyle choices.
Speaker 1:Well, isn't it that, like all the normal blood ranges and all the things are based off averages, not actually healthy people, so it's like the average of whatever is in your area yeah, so I mean, these reference ranges for a bunch of blood tests can be determined by an unhealthy population?
Speaker 2:yeah, so if you, if you measure the average of an unhealthy population, then, yeah, you're going to get a wrong yardstick, by which? You're measuring what is optimal.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. So it's like you don't actually want to be normal, right, because normal is unhealthy at this day and age. So you're a little eyes light up, you're like, yes, do you see that a lot?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean there's a whole bunch of tests that are done that normal is different from optimal Serum.
Speaker 2:Vitamin D is a test that your doctor can do and it measures for a storage form of vitamin D, and researchers have been looking more into this because they realized that a vitamin D level is not only important for the absorption of calcium and therefore bone health, but vitamin D is touching all other aspects of health. It's touching, most importantly probably, immunity, and immune cell function is going to determine one if you can get rid of infectious diseases like pathogens effectively like viruses. Infectious diseases like pathogens effectively like viruses too, if you're going to to a certain degree, because it's the innate and the adaptive immune system, but to a certain degree, how amped up your body is with respect to autoimmune disease. And thirdly, it will also influence, via vitamin D and non-vitamin D pathways, how well your immune cells recognize cancerous premalignant cells and kill them. So what that essentially means is that if you have a robust vitamin D level, it's actually a proxy for your sunlight exposure and it's a rough idea about how well, potentially your bioelectric battery has been charged up by natural sunlight.
Speaker 2:The relevance, I guess perhaps for you with suffering from Crohn's disease is that inflammatory bowel diseases and celiac disease, and also irritable bowel syndrome. The spectrum of gut symptoms show association with low vitamin D, Interesting Meaning that people with those diseases are more likely. Association with low vitamin.
Speaker 1:D Interesting.
Speaker 2:Meaning that people with those diseases are more likely to have low vitamin D compared to people without those diseases, and that doesn't necessarily mean that taking the pill will help their condition. The evidence is a bit mixed.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But what it tells me from a decentralized medical point of view is that those people with gut diseases have not been in the sun, they've got a sunlight deficiency. We can also look at it on multiple other levels. So the gut is loaded with vitamin D receptors and it's an incredibly dense part of the body that has immune cells. So when you don't have enough natural sunlight exposure, you're not making vitamin d from ultraviolet b light, then perhaps your gut immune cells might be hyperactive and crohn's disease and for the listeners um ulcerative colitis, these inflammatory bowel diseases. They're fundamentally a problem of of the gut lining and the barrier function of these cells in the colon. And how it works is that in the middle you've got all the poo and the bacteria and the food breakdown products and then you have a mucus layer. The mucus layer has to be maintained by the intestinal epithelial cells in the colon and the small intestine throughout the whole gastrointestinal tract. So, as we alluded to earlier, if they're healthy, then they're going to make those mucus glycoproteins in a really effective way so that your gut barrier is going to be rock solid and you're not going to get contact of the gut barrier from the bacteria In Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis.
Speaker 2:That process breaks down in a whole number of different ways and you get these patchy areas. It's like a broken wall. You know, if you see photos of the Great Wall of China where some parts of it are broken and destroyed, that's what happens in Crohn's and ulcerative colitis. What we can do is, when we optimize our vitamin D level but we're optimizing our sunlight exposure, then we are helping build that wall back up and ensure that the gut cells are operating properly. And it's also about the circadian rhythm, because circadian function dictates the health and the turnover of your gut cells. So these are supposed to essentially shed and get replaced every 24 to 48 hours. But to do that properly they need to have a regulated circadian rhythm. The function and the barrier to which, the degree to which they stick together is also dependent on having a dialed in circadian rhythm. So if you are partying till 1am, if you have circadian disrupted, then by definition your gut cells aren't going to be operating properly and you're going to get some degree of of intestinal barrier dysfunction.
Speaker 2:Whether that manifests as acne or as crohn's disease again depends on on the on the individual. But, um, improving or keeping a really robust vitamin D level by exposing, ideally, the abdomen to natural sunlight and UVB containing sunlight, I think that's one of the key things that anyone with a gut condition, whether it's irritable bowel syndrome or Crohn's and ulcerative colitis, needs to be doing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. When you just said the party and the circadian disruption before I was diagnosed with Crohn's, I was like such a big party animal, Like I was up until like probably like three, 4am, like on the bags on the alcohol. And now I think about it I'm like, yeah, no fucking wonder. Like no wonder you got Crohn's disease or no wonder something happened, Cause I was diagnosed with celiac disease maybe 10 years before that. And now I'm like, oh, I wonder if it was like misdiagnosed Crohn's or how it developed, because apparently you can't have both.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, it sounds like a canary in the coal mine for just gut immune system dysfunction. And, as you said, you were partying till 3am. And then what do people eat at 3am after a night out?
Speaker 1:Maccas.
Speaker 2:You go to McDonald's, you go to the kebab store, you get the fries that are deep fried in canola oil, all those really highly oxidative, you know, breakdown products of linoleic acid in the seed oils. Perhaps you're having the shake or the other processed foods with these emulsifiers that have also been shown to impact negatively the gut function, create this dysbiosis or bad bacteria. So it's all these insults adding together that lead to people being diagnosed with inflammatory bowel disease, which was a condition that was basically unheard of, you know, in pre-industrial times and pre-modern times.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, which is what. I don't know who the author is. But coming back to the Invisible Rainbow, how he speaks about that, like anxiety, diabetes, all of that started around the electrical revolution, and that's the same as like gut issues and all these diseases. Right, it's because of our lifestyle changing and now I don't know if I'm going to wear this right, but like our system hasn't evolved to our modern life, does that make sense?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it won't because the changes have outpaced any evolutionary timescale that it possibly can.
Speaker 2:So, to tie this back into quantum biology. The Guy Foundation have been doing a report on space, and what they have been studying is the human changes that occur in space. And, just to cut a long story short, there's a list of problems by existing in the space environment A lack of magnetic field, lack of gravity, lack of near-infrared light, circadian rhythm disruption and they all combine to make space incredibly inhospitable to humans, so much so that these really fit people, these astronauts, are coming back insulin resistant and they're basically saying that this is space travel, and existing in the space station is what's called an accelerated aging phenotype, meaning that you're going to prematurely age if you spend time in space. It's a really elegant proof of what happens when we get all the environmental inputs wrong.
Speaker 2:And what you're talking about and Arthur Furstenberg talked about in his book the Invisible Rainbow, is we can essentially mimic some of those space environments on Earth when we sit next to our Wi-Fi router, when we are up till 3am partying or gaming or whatever else people are doing, and it's similarly maybe not as extreme as inhospitable to our mitochondrial colony, but in a different way it's harmful. So, tying this back into gut health and Crohn's particularly, I think the message for people with gut problems is that you can start with circadian biology. You can start by getting sunlight on your abdomen, building a tan in that area. It sounds so unorthodox and it's heresy to the gastroenterology specialty. Yeah, like we talked off camera. They're in disbelief or just they'll laugh at you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, my gastroenterologist literally laughed at me, Even when I said I've been doing breath work. He was like righto.
Speaker 2:And it's because their paradigm doesn't include this frame of thought.
Speaker 2:It's so foreign to their paradigm, which exclusively relies on drug therapy, that it might as well be Chinese to them, it's Greek to them, it doesn't make sense to them, but it works. And it works when, especially and if people are interested, they can understand the circadian biology to understand it. But a lot don't hand. Build up your natural vitamin D level through UVB light exposure and exclude some of these processed food products and plants as well in the initial healing phase, because when your gut barrier is so compromised, you can't tolerate wheat, you can't tolerate vegetables without provoking inflammation. So what you're doing and we talked about your vitamin D level and dietary practices they're obviously working for you because you've been in remission for three years.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And you're one of many. Yeah, it's not an uncommon story to hear of people discarding, you know not filling their biologic scripts. You know no longer needing the injection of their immunomodulator because, they don't have their symptoms anymore and, like I said, it's heresy to the centralized specialists, but it's working and you're proof of that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think that's part of me sharing my story as well, because it took me so long to share it because I was like, oh no, but what if it didn't actually work? And what if I've just made it up in my head, right? But there are so many people out there that are healing through getting sunlight exposure, grounding, turning off their wifi, carnivore diets or just removing process through stopping alcohol. All of these things add up, it's like that death by a thousand cuts, where it's like it's not just going to be a little bit of daily sun, it's like you have to hit all the different boxes and it's that overall health and I guess that's like holistic in a way, absolutely, and it's consistency, yeah.
Speaker 2:And whatever condition you're trying to improve, you're always going to see the benefits with consistency, and how much effort people put into this lifestyle change is always going to be dictated by how much their current situation sucks. Yeah, and that's what I explain to people as patients. I'm not there to tell anyone what to do. I just share what works for other people, what I know, to have an evidence base and give people an option.
Speaker 2:I don't judge them if they want to take medications. But I say that if you do want to take this option, then be consistent. Do a little bit every day. Stack all the lifestyle changes on top of each other and you will heal, because you're putting your body, you're putting your cells, you're putting your mitochondria back into the ancestral evolution environment that they essentially evolved, that they're expecting, and health is simply a natural byproduct of correcting those environmental inputs.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love what you said, though, because I feel like I get asked all the time like how do you just eat meat, isn't it boring? It's like if you knew what was on the other side of this. Like I had like golf full size abscesses on my body. I was told I would never swim in the ocean again because I had like tubes coming out of my body. So, yeah, I'm going to eat steak every day. Like you have no idea what's on the other side of it, and I think having something to come from and understanding how much life can suck and how good it gets to be through all these lifestyle changes, like you just don't understand it until you've been through it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's an individual value decision that people make. Yeah, I've seen people you know with with ibd and I'll take the prednisolone, thanks, because they like eating the comfort foods. Yeah, and and, like I said, I'm not there to judge them, I don't know what's happened in their life, but, um, it's the.
Speaker 1:it's an individual position, so yeah each to their own yeah, coming to because we've dropped in a few times Regenerate Can you tell us more about Regenerate Summit? Yeah.
Speaker 2:So Regenerate is a health summit that I founded with good friend Simon Lewis of how To Carnival, provide education and information about these health practices and lifestyle-based health practices to people in a way that's direct, and it came from a personal opinion and through personal experience of perhaps discussing this with other doctors or clinicians and really hitting a brick wall, that it's a more useful use of time to promote a bottom-up diffusion of these ideas rather than a top-down, and I think now that the top-down will change after enough people like you, enough patients say to their gastroenterologist I didn't need any of these expensive fancy drugs because I got X, Y and Z correct.
Speaker 2:And if enough people do that with their different conditions, then we'll get changed. But essentially, regenerate brings together speakers on these health topics. So in our upcoming summit, which is on March next weekend March 22nd in Sydney and March 23rd in Melbourne We've got Natalie West, who's a carnivore psychotherapist a good friend of yours, I believe.
Speaker 1:Yes, and jump back a few episodes. It's one of the first episodes and you'll see Dr Natalie West in there if you want to listen to her ep.
Speaker 2:We've got Gary Fetke. Dr Gary Fetke speaking in Melbourne and he's an orthopedic surgeon who is chopping off limbs of diabetic patients and then realised, or thought, there had to be a better way and he started using low-carb diets to amazing effect. And his story is very interesting because he got the establishment nutrition establishment offside and actually was persecuted through a medical board and it turned out that food companies were behind this attack on him. He subsequently got exonerated and has really paved the way for doctors like me and dr anthony chafee, who I'm who's also speaking, to discuss diet without fear of uh, you know the same, but he's a very interesting guy and his wife, belinda, who's's speaking in Sydney. She did the deep dive into this I guess you could say shadow attack on her husband and revealed the extent to which the Seventh-day Adventist church and religious ideology and food companies that they're affiliated with was attacking her husband. So she's going to be speaking. That's very, very interesting. That sounds so interesting.
Speaker 2:And then we have Dr Anthony Chaffee, who many of you will know as one of the real stalwarts in educating about the carnivore diet. And we've got a regenerative farmer, because part of this movement, the pillars of regenerate quantum and circadian biology, ancestral nutrition and regenerative farming, and the thought there is that if I, as a clinician, and others are recommending people eat a large amount of animal meat, then this has to be ethical animal meat. This has to be animal meat that is improving the commons through regenerative agricultural processes and not full of antibiotics, hormones in a feedlot. So regenerative agriculture is a key pillar of this as well, and we've got Rachel Ward, who is a British actress turned regenerative farmer, who will also be speaking, and then I'll be speaking on a couple of the topics that Caitlin we've touched on today, including what is the evidence for sunlight exposure and cancer? What is the nuance between sunlight exposure and skin cancer? How can we get sunlight in an appropriate way to reduce our risk of all-cause death, which the evidence suggests is a real thing?
Speaker 2:you know in a way that's sensible for our skin type and where we live. So it's going to be a great event. People can come to either or both Sydney and Melbourne, and we also run a live stream, so if you're in state or overseas you can tune in as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, cool. I feel like if you're listening to this, then you'll probably be keen on it. Like if you are interested in holistic health, you're interested in the decentralized way. Come and learn from the experts. Yeah, Thank you so much. This has been so nice. If people want to connect with you a little bit more, where can they find you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I have a Instagram profile, MarkSchoolHainMD, where I post lots of content I host called Regenerative Health Podcast, which is on YouTube. It's on all the podcast streaming services and also running some retreats so regenerative health retreats coming up in some pretty special locations and that's where I walk people through the lived experience of how to implement optimal circadian health and circadian biology. So for all that information, head to my website, which is drmaxgulhanecom.
Speaker 1:Amazing, and you can get tickets to Regenerate through your Instagram as well.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, follow the links in bio and Instagram if you want to come to Regenerate. And yeah, I'll be looking forward to meeting you all there.
Speaker 1:Yay, thank you so much.
Speaker 2:Thank you, caitlin, really appreciate the discussion.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for listening, If you love this episode.
