Light, Hunger & Mitochondria: Non-Image Forming Effects of Sunlight | Alexis Cowan | Episode 287

[Music] whether food, drugs, or ideas, what you consume influences who you become. On the Mind and Matter podcast, we learned together from the best scientists and thinkers alive today about how your mind body reacts to what you feed it. Before starting Mind and Matter, I spent 10 years in academia doing scientific research. I got a PhD in neuroscience where I focused on neuroendocronology and the neurobiology of behavior, and before that I specialized in molecular, developmental, and evolutionary genetics. I used my scientific background to help parse and translate the information that guests share on the podcast. In addition to the podcast, I write long form written content inspired by the show where I integrate what I've learned across episodes. I also have a free weekly newsletter where I provide you with upcoming guests, share links, and provide commentary on scientific studies and research that I'm reading and more. Visit Mind and Matter. substac.com to find all of my content. 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A link to that page is in the episode description or you can search for it on the substac page itself. The support page has an up-to-date list of my affiliate partners. These are companies I work with, and if you buy those products through those links or using the discount codes provided, those will get you a great deal on a variety of products related to optimizing physical, metabolic, or mental health and vitality. These are all products I use myself, and some of them are directly related to podcast episodes or formulated by Mind and Matter guests. For example, there's a great product called Keto Citra, formulated by a kidney biologist who is on episode number 186. It contains the ketone body BHB, together with several minerals in a precise ratio formulated with kidney health in mind. There are also links to products like physical, technology devices, to track your metabolic health, digital applications to help you find and learn about food and consumer products, and more. One product I use every day is the Aqua True water filter. I recommend this to everyone because it gets everything out of your drinking water. Heavy metals, microbes, endocrine disruptors, microplastics, you name it. Other charcoal or gravity-based filters that a lot of people use don't get everything out. They just get some of the stuff out. So I really like the Aqua True product. You can look for a link to my affiliate partners on my support page, or directly in the episode description to this episode, or you can go to mindandmatter.substac.com to find it there. All right, Dr. Alexis Cowan. Thank you very much for joining me. Thanks so much for having me on. I heard Jack on your pod many moons ago at this point, and it was a great combo, and I'm excited that we can chat now and dive a little deeper on some of the topics that you reached out about, which I think are highly relevant to a lot of people, so we should have a good chat. Do you want to start off by just giving everyone a little bit about your background as a scientist? Sure, yeah, I'd love to. So I did my bachelor's at Moravian College, which is now Moravian University. It's a very small school in the Lehigh Valley in PA. I studied biochemistry and math when I was there. I then took a gap year and worked in industry for a bit. So I was at Bristol Meyer Squibb for about a year, and then I worked at a chemical company called BASF for a few more months. I had also interned there when I was in undergrad. And so from there, I transitioned back into academia where I did my PhD at Princeton in the molecular biology department. My lab was an affiliate to the department. So although my degree is in molecular biology, my lab is, it was the Rubinoid lab, which is one of the top metabolic research labs in the world. So we didn't really study molecular biology at all. Frankly, I was studying the metabolic effects of fasting and ketogenic diet, as well as exercise in different contexts. And the lab went on to study a lot about ketogenic diet and fasting in certain cancer contexts and infection and other models. So that was my PhD. I graduated in December 2021 after which I started my business. At the time, I was very focused on the microbiome and gut health as like the cornerstone to vibrant and like widespread health. At the time, I hadn't fallen down the rabbit hole on light in quantum circadian biology and Jack's work. Jack Cruz for anybody who isn't like up on that specific Jack that we're talking about, they'll definitely check out his work if you haven't already. So I during 2022 built out my business, making protocols, educating people on science, lay people, doctors, etc. I went back for a postdoc at UPEN in 2023 in Christoff Tyson's lab, who is now at Stanford. And I was working on building out a platform for multi-omic screening of different clinical samples, preclinical model samples as well. And during that year is when I fell down the rabbit hole of Dr. Cruz's work and really just kind of flipped the script on everything I thought was true and had to kind of re-evaluate my preconceptions and my belief systems around health and what creates it. And so from that point, I really dedicated myself to studying the state of the science, you know, historically up through modern day as it relates to light circadian quantum biology and then kind of pivoted my whole practice overnight to really start after integrating and information, educating people on it why it's important on social media as well as through coursework and one-on-one work as well. And so that's kind of how I got to where I am today. Yeah, and I want to talk to you today basically about non-image forming functions of light. So it's becoming more appreciated, but you know, most people think about light in the normal way. Like we use light to see. Light comes into our eyeball and our brain uses it to construct images, but there's lots of things through the eye and through other organs that light does that have little or nothing to do with image formation. And so I want to start in the eye talking about non-image forming cells and the use of light for things other than image formation through the eye. And there's an interesting biological molecule called melanopsin. And what is melanopsin? Let's just start there. What is melanopsin and what is it doing in some of the cells in our eyes that express it? Yeah, so I mean people can think about melanopsin as this protein receptor that is specifically conditioned or evolved to interact with blue light and interface with that blue light detected in the environment and then basically create a cascade of events that creates certain outputs. As it relates to the eye, the back of the eye and the retina is full of melanopsin and they're the back of the eye is directly connected to the hypothalamus within the brain via the retino hypothalamic tract. And that melanopsin, when stimulated, essentially sends a relay back to the hypothalamus to help specifically anchor in the circadian rhythm in the body via this blue light exposure at the level of the SCN or the superchiasmatic nucleus, which is part of the hypothalamus. And it's like a cluster of 10,000 cells. And funnily enough, actually, the SCN was only discovered in humans. I believe in the 80s. It was previously believed that humans didn't have this. And I had the researcher who discovered the SCN in humans on my podcast like sometime last year. But it was essentially a technical error that prevented it from being discovered, which was kind of interesting, because essentially the way it worked is when they were sectioning human brains. They were only taking like every 10th section, I believe, something like this, assuming that they wouldn't lose anything in that process and turns out because the SCN is so small, they essentially missed an entire structure. And I just like mentioning that story because it's a perfect cautionary tale of hubris and science. And like the unknown unknowns are things that we can't account for, but we can at least have the humility to recognize that there is a ton that we don't understand. And part of that can be due to technical limitations and part of that can be due to cognitive biases and other things. But anyways, so the SCN is this master clock in the body that essentially is integrating light information from the environment and then sending cues to the periphery through to the cells in the body through mechanisms that basically can work via the endocrine system, for example, and others. Meltonin is one example of this. And essentially can help to integrate that timing signal and coordinate timing at a whole body level so that all the cells are essentially on the same page with regards to what time of day it is. And why that matters is that at certain times of day certain biological functions are imperative. For example, during sleep, we want to have restoration recovery, want to simulate autophagy, promote cellular turnover, things like this, in contrast during the In the daytime, we want our bodies and our physical. physiology is wired to support cognitive stimulation, physical activity, you know, hunting, foraging, things like this. So there are different paradigms that need to be activated and they get activated by differential light and dark cues. So the input of blue light through the eye is the signal that sends the signal to the SCN telling you your body that it's the daytime and we need to be alert. We need to be stimulated. We need to suppress melatonin production at the level of the pineal gland. We need to be alert awake and able to do the things we need to do during the day. In contrast, when blue light is absent from the environment, which is supposed to be in the evening time when the sun goes down, that is the signal that allows the brakes to be taken off of melatonin production, that melatonin level to rise, systemically via pineal production. And we can talk about melatonin in another context as well because the melatonin produced by the pineal gland is only a small fraction of the melatonin in the entire body and it plays very, very important roles in other contexts as well. So I guess, so one thing people should understand is, right, the eye in the retina is hooked up to multiple paths that go back into the brain. The classic sort of visual path is, you know, cells of your retina that detect light for image formation purposes like your rods and cones, they're hooked up to the visual pathway. There's part of the thalamus they go to in the visual cortex and that's all of the pathway involved in generating your visual perception. But there are other pathways, the one that you're talking about, these melanopsin cells are hooked up to the hypothalamus to a part of the hypothalamus called the SCN, which is the master circadian clock, which is synchronizing circadian rhythms in all over the body ultimately. And you're saying these melanopsin cells are basically keeping track of what time of day it is and they're doing that predominantly through sensing how much blue light is coming into the retina. Yeah, and I actually, so to add even more nuance to this, I really like to think about light as like, so we think about Morse code as a binary code of dots and dashes. I really like to think about light in a similar way except it's not a binary code because there's more than two wavelength options that our body is interpreting. So we can look at light in this way as like a complex signal that is sending information and codes information. And when we think about it in that way, if we compare it, let's say light at sunrise to light at midday, the light at sunrise has way more of this red and infrared dominance with some blue as well. So in nature, blue is always balanced with long wavelength light. And in the morning, we're still having some of that shorter wavelength blue light present, but the red and infrared predominates. As the sun approaches high noon, the path that the light from the sun travels through through our atmosphere becomes shorter and so more of that short wavelength blue, but also more UVA and UVB can penetrate through the atmosphere and reach us on the surface of the planet. And so that high noon sun, which integrates still an abundance of red and infrared over 50%, but now a higher fraction of blue up to 25% as well as UV up to 8% depending on where you are now enters the picture. And that combinatorial message is encoding information, telling the body that it's midday, maximal stimulation. Also, from an energy production standpoint, I definitely want to get into the UV light story with you as well. And UV light also plays an important circadian role too. There's another receptor similar to melanopsin, but it's called Neuropsin, which is specifically a UVA light detector. So in the same way that blue light tickles melanopsin receptors, UVA light tickles Neuropsin receptors and Neuropsin plays an important role in anchoring in the local circadian rhythms within a variety of different tissues in the body, including the eye, but also the skin, also the testes. There's actually like a lot of really interesting tissues that express Neuropsin that you wouldn't necessarily expect. And I think the sex organs aren't interesting one because one might make the argument that you'll see people online talking about like sunning your balls or whatever, and like, "Ha ha, funny, no evidence, blah, blah, blah." But then if you actually look at the gene expression levels in the testes, for example, they clearly express Neuropsin, which is specifically a UVA light detector. So, you know, does nature make mistakes? I don't think so. Obviously, we don't come out of the womb wearing clothing. We're meant to have all of our bodies exposed to sunlight because that's the only light that's present in nature and abundance. And so that's just, you know, an example, but there are multiple ways the body can kind of integrate light information to anchor in the circadian rhythm, both at a systemic and a local level. And ideally, those signals should be converging and telling the body the same information versus being divergent. For example, being indoors at night, blasting yourself with blue light enriched computer screens, phones, TVs, et cetera, that's sending discordant information to the system. So, multiple cell types in the eye and they're all detecting different wavelengths of light. So, these melanops and cells, these non-image forming cells in the retina that are hooked up to the master circadian clock in the brain, in the hypothalamus, the key track of what time of day it is, and relay that information to the different parts of our brain and body. They're using blue light to tell what time of day is. And so I suppose blue light is a good thing to listen to for these neurons because, as you said, under natural conditions, we're talking about sunlight outside, blue light is relatively low at the beginning of the day, and then it gets relatively high at midday, and then it goes back down again. So the amount of blue light in the full mix of wavelengths of sunlight out in the natural world is a really good indicator of, is it morning, is it midday, is it evening? Yes, and then it's also not going to have the same intensity of fluctuation as UV would seasonally speaking, which would be an issue, right? Because let's say you live in Scandinavia, and you actually lose not only UVB, but even UVA for like a short period of time in the winter, if your circadian system relied on only UV light to anchor itself, it would kind of be SOL, because now that signal is missing. Blue light accounts for that latitude difference in light intensity and short wavelength light abundance without, like, with still having a diurnal variation and a variation throughout the day, but in a way that is not going to be limited by seasonality. Yeah, yeah. So basically to compress a lot of that one more time, high blue light, relatively speaking, means it's midday, it's daytime, your brain should be in daytime mode, low, but present blue light would mean, you know, it's morning or it's evening, you know, wake up or get ready for bed, basically if you're a diurnal animal, and then ultra low blue light would be it's nighttime. Exactly. Got it. And so what if that's sort of the natural rhythm throughout a normal day outside in sunlight is, you know, blue light peaks at midday and then it goes back down and it's going to do that every single day, what starts to happen when the retina is exposed to artificial blue light from other sources such as our computer screens, our phones, and our other things? In other words, what happens when blue light is not peeking at midday, but it's high at times of day when it would naturally be lower such as the evening or the middle of the night? Yeah, so I mentioned briefly earlier that you can kind of think of blue light as being the brakes on melatonin production in the pineal gland. So the brakes have to be on in order for that melatonin to be suppressed. So if you're exposed to blue light during the day, naturally from the sun, that breaks, you know, being pushed down. Similarly, if we're on screens in the evening, that break is still being pushed down even if we wouldn't want it to be or it shouldn't be because we're now basically using modern technology to kind of interfere with the very foundational way our body yolks itself to its environment, let's say. So just, you know, at a high level, number one would be your inhibiting melatonin production, which is going to increase sleep latency. It's going to be harder to fall asleep. It's going to be worse quality sleep when you do get to sleep. Melatonin circulating is also an antioxidant and there are certain disease states shown to be corresponding essentially to lower levels of circulating melatonin. Of course, you know, I alluded to earlier as well. There's another deep of melatonin in the body within the mitochondria, the place of very important role as well, that's stimulated by near infrared light exposure. So whenever you're outside, even if you're in the shade, if you're around green plants, they're reflecting a ton of near infrared light. And so your body's being bathed in those frequencies, whether you're in direct sun or in the shade out in some natural environment. And so that melatonin is being produced essentially all the time all day long. And that melatonin plays a very important role in maintaining mitochondrial quality control, so making sure that the, well, we'll talk about this later probably, but essentially the mutational burden or the heteroplasmia within mitochondria is being kept at a lower level or, you know, optimal. And that mitochondria biogenesis is also being, you know, optimized at the rate of which it's occurring. But anyways, back to, you know, melatonin and blue light at night, the blue light at night is not only impacting our melatonin or sleep and, you know, our ability for mitochondria to maintain their health, but it's also directly poisoning mitochondria as well. So we have, you know, very clear data at this point showing that blue light exposure in isolation when it's exposed to your skin or your eyes or proximal brain regions that actually directly poisoned essentially mitochondrial function. And this should kind of make sense to a certain extent because we know that red and infrared light is supportive to mitochondrial function. It stimulates mitochondrial function. That's why, you know, people like to use red light panels, but you can get the same effect by going in the sun, especially its unrized because it's very enriched in those frequencies. In contrast, shorter wavelength light has opposing effects on mitochondria. And that's actually adaptive as well. Think about it as a gas pedal. and breaks. So our long wavelength light is the gas pedal on mitochondrial function. The blue and UVA wavelengths of light are the breaks. And so naturally when we're exposed to full spectrum sunlight, let's say midday, we're getting all of them at once. So it's like this titration of gas and breaks. If we're only exposed to our blue light isolation from our our tech, our phones, computers, and TVs, etc. Then we're getting this just the breaks essentially without the gas. Because all of this technology is optimized for energy efficiency, quote, unquote, which means that essentially they're removing any infrared component from the equation because infrared is also known as heat and heat tends to break down electronics more quickly. And the energy efficiency essentially you're off-gassing energy into your environment. The problem with the whole energy efficiency story, which is also relevant to our LED bulbs, our fluorescent bulbs, and all of our devices is that it ignores the bioenergetic requirements of biology. And so by focusing on energy efficiency and technology, we're actually creating an energy crisis in biological systems because this long wavelength infrared light is actually you should consider it as an essential nutrient for ourselves. Our bodies are meant to be bathed in it all day long. When you're missing that, you're essentially getting all of these breaks without the the commensurate gas pedal being used and over time that leads to a breakdown in our energy systems in our mitochondrial function, which are serving as not only this massive production site for ATP, which a lot of people will know about mitochondria as like the powerhouse of the cell, but our mitochondria also making deuterium depleted metabolic water, which is a very special type of water that helps to continue mitochondrial function at a high level. And also mitochondria are a major source of bio photons within the system. So our endogenous light production, which I'm sure we'll talk about, these bio photons produced in the mitochondria are very, very important as well as signaling molecules and likely helping to coordinate cellular activities as per the light being produced because you can kind of think of the light being produced as a sign for how well the mitochondria working in some way. And so it can be a signal to other parts of the cell that okay, we have plenty of energy on board, even if we don't see the ATP, we can see the bio photons and that can lead to not only kind of let's say an integration of the energetic state of the cell, but it can also directly help to activate certain enzymes, let's say, because if you look at the work of Fritz Pop, he will tell you and he's like the one of the fathers of bio photon research, he will tell you if you listen to some of his interviews and read his works, that the enzymes and molecules within cells don't actually, they can't be metabolized and they can't metabolize efficiently unless they are actually absorbing photons of a specific wavelength of light within their absorption spectra. So the story goes very deep, it's very fundamental and when you start messing with environments at the level of the light that's being, you know, given to the body from the outside, which then directly influenced the light being produced on the inside, you're fundamentally changing the way that biology runs in a way that is really hard to adjust for because it's unprecedented, evolutionarily speaking. So one of the things you're saying is there's many different wavelengths of light and they affect our mitochondria, they affect the cells in our retinitis, what time of day it is and things like this, they affect, you know, other cells and tissues that we might talk about, but you know, a lot of the enzymes and proteins in our bodies are functionally modulated by different types of light. So maybe an analogy here for people would be, when we think about nutrition and we talk about like vitamins, a lot of vitamins are cofactors for enzymes. So the presence or absence of certain cofactors will affect how efficient an enzyme is in whatever chemical reaction it's facilitating. Similarly, a lot of those same enzymes are going to also be functionally modulated by the mixture of light that your body is exposed to. So in that sense, you know, there is an analogy between what we normally call like food or nutrition that we swallow in our mouth and light coming into our body either directly, like hitting the surface of our skin or our retina or indirectly because it's, you know, maybe light stimulating, say the surface of the skin or the eye and then that's leading to changes downstream, but light is influencing how enzymes are working in the body just like a cofactor like a vitamin or what in a sense. Yeah, I totally agree and I like to think about things as it relates to light nutrition and because I think it's something that people can relate to because we're so conditioned to think about, you know, the diet as it relates to nutrition and certain nutrient inputs, creating certain health effects or disease effects in some cases. And so I think it's helpful to think about light in the same exact way because then we can very clearly diagnose when somebody is overdosing on certain frequencies of light and one they're deficient in others. Yeah, yeah, and so like just like when we think about food, right, what we would call like a natural or traditional food, it's going to be certain combinations of calories and macronutrients and micronutrients and processed foods oftentimes have combinations that, you know, our bodies were just never exposed to in evolutionary history. And there's again, analogy there with light, you know, as you said earlier, during the daytime, there's always some combination of longer wavelength, red and near infrared light together with shorter wavelength, blue and UV light. And our cells are sort of expecting, you know, a certain range of combinations. And they're really not built to function or at least function well if they start to get exposed to combinations that they were never exposed to in history. Exactly. And I think we can actually take the analogy a step further where it's no longer even analogy we're talking literally. And that is that you can think about food as a barcode for the light environment in which it was grown. So literally food is just it's a signal to your body about the local environment because certain foods only grow at certain times of year, right? Like we get a lot of plant foods growing, let's say mid spring through mid fall. Those foods can only grow when light intensity reaches a certain peak. And so those foods are actually carrying the photonic information of the local environment to your body. This is also where the issue comes in of in our global economy where you can eat avocados in the middle of winter in New England. Like what information are we actually sending to the system because that food cannot grow in that environment. And so it's again, some level of discord there. And so when we think about food, we really need to take it all the way to the level of like the biophysics and the photonics because focusing at simply just the biochemical level leads to us thinking that we can engineer foods in a lab and it's going to give the same benefit. And it's not because one of the issues with processed foods outside of just the kind of being a combination of nutrients that maybe wouldn't necessarily be found together in nature or they're devoid of certain nutrients, for example. Outside of that, they're also being produced in a photonic environment that is completely alien essentially to our biology. These foods aren't being processed under sunlight. They're being processed under fluorescent lights, typically or perhaps LEDs, which are again highly enriched in blue light, no near and red and red light much being represented there. And so the food that the light that our food is exposed to is influencing the photonics of the food. Like for example, amino acids like triptophane, phenylalanine, tyrosine, all absorbed strongly in the UV. And so if we have a protein rich food that is highly enriched in the aromatic amino acids, but there was no UV light in the environment that that thing was grown in, are we getting the same benefits from these nutrients? Is part of the benefit of the nutrition actually the light information that's coming along for the ride? These are kind of questions that aren't really being asked within like, let's say the ivory tower of academia. And it's one of the reasons why it's just kind of frustrating when you start jumping down the light rabbit hole. And like how many low hanging fruit questions there are that aren't even being asked just because there's either a misunderstanding about the topic or a lack of funding to research the topic or just, you know, incentive structures that aren't aligned to ask really good questions. There's a lot of issues with that area, but I really think it's important to think about food in that way because when you do, it becomes really clear why you would want to source your food locally and like support your local farmers, not only from a socioeconomic perspective and like supporting your regional economy perspective, but from a biological perspective as well. Yeah. So going back to these melanops and cells, non-image forming cells in the retina and how or eye can sort of keep track of and our brain can keep track of what time of day it is using blue light. What starts to happen when we disrupt those signals? So the two main ones that come to mind are, you know, you can imagine obviously at night we're sort of tricking our brain into thinking it's daytime because we're exposing ourselves to a lot of blue light and our body is basically expecting blue light to only be around at midday. But now, you know, you can look at your phone, you can look at your computer, and you're exposing yourself to that blue light at nighttime. And then the other scenario would be what about when it's midday and people are blocking out a lot of that blue light is supposed to be at a maximum. So let's take those one at a time a little bit. And let's just let's just talk about the nighttime disruption that we've already discussed a little bit. So what are some of the other than like melatonin suppression? What are some of the other things that start to go wrong and how actually how big is the effect of say looking at your phone in the evening at home? Because right, the sun is way brighter than my iPhone. So is it really having that big of an effect if I'm inside at night looking at a screen? Or is it is it a small effect and what is the effect? - So all sources of electromagnetic radiation, which light, a visible light is a part of that electromagnetic spectrum, follows what's called the inverse square law, which basically states the closer you are to a source of that radiation, the stronger the dose you receive. The sun is very far away. Obviously it still provides a ton of lucks on a bright sunny day. You're looking at 100,000 lucks or maybe even more. Our device screens are relatively low in contrast. However, the proximity to our eyeballs, for example, in the case of a phone screen or even a laptop or a TV, is very close. The dose that our body's receiving is still relatively high. And especially because, as we mentioned, the short wavelength light has this direct poisoning effect, let's say, on mitochondrial function and isolation, that's not exactly something we would want to do, especially in our eyes and our proximal brain regions that are directly focusing that light and interfacing with it. So damage to eyes is one of them. So like myopia is highly associated with tech abuse. And global myopia rates are projected to reach over 50% by the year 2050. Obviously, when you have myopia, you're then encouraged to wear glasses and contacts, which most of the time will block UV light. And so the higher our myopia rates climb, the more people are missing the signal coming into the eye, which is critical for reasons that we will get into. So, just to be clear, you're saying that there are benefits to allowing some amount of UV light to hit the eye unfiltered by glasses or anything else. It's absolutely essential. We need a coordinated exposure for our skin and our eyes for our light environment. Because I mean, if you think about it, before the past 100 years, whenever we're exposed to sunlight or light in our environments, our skin are exposed equally. It's not like one is getting one spectrum and the other is getting something else. We need that coordinated response to UV light, in particular, especially UVB light. Because we're going to, I'm sure, get into the topic of melanin and probeomalonic cord and pomsy, which is this complex prohormone that's produced in the hypothalamus in response to UVB light. It's also produced in the skin. In response to UVB light, and it's cleaved into all of these really, really important peptide hormones, essentially, that play very important roles in everything from melanin production, to appetite regulation, to energy expenditure, modulation, to immune function, to mood, propensity for anxiety, depression, levels of dopamine at baseline. So, there's many, many implications to the UVB light story that is very important. That's completely independent of vitamin D. And most people think about UVB light. They think about vitamin D. But really, when we think about vitamin D, it should only be in the context of as a biomarker for your UVB light exposure, which should be reflective of your total sun exposure habits, especially midday. If we think about vitamin D as the standalone marker that's important in and of itself, that leads to the paradigm where we think we can supplement with it, get away with that, and repel the benefits. And that's just not the case. And we have very strong data at this point, showing that vitamin D supplementation has very, very lackluster or no outcomes with that. Right. Do you get any health outcomes? Right. So that's important. I want to dwell on that for just a second for people, because I live in Seattle. And I haven't been to a doctor in several years. But one of the first times I went when I was in Seattle after I moved here, I heard what apparently everyone gets told here. It's like, the doctor literally told me, we don't even need to measure your vitamin D because you're going to be low, and you should supplement. And so what you're saying is, this is really important, because this is very robust in the literature. A lot of people are vitamin D deficient, a lot, a lot of them. And almost all of the literature says that vitamin D supplementation doesn't seem to help with anything, even though it does increase your vitamin D. What you're saying is that vitamin D is basically a biomarker of your light exposure. So it's not just about vitamin D and isolation. You have to think about it in the context of the light environment, especially. Yeah, absolutely. And that becomes very obvious when we learn that UVB light, in addition to stimulating vitamin D production, stimulates pomsy, propolymal anacorn. And I guess I'll just dive into what the peptides do or the hormones I get cleaved from it, because it's just so important and people need to know about this, especially as we're all waiting through all the prop baganda around the harms of UV light and how you need to avoid it at all costs, and like slip-slop-slop the sunscreen, where your sunglasses, like you will die if you get exposed to UVB light essentially. Yeah, let's do this. But yeah, let's just start really basic people. So I go outside at midday, summertime, there's UV light, in particular UVB light, it hits my skin. Can you walk us through the basic steps going from UVB to vitamin D and what's happening sort of before and after it's produced? Yeah, essentially, their cholesterol is within the skin cells, within the membranes and maybe like the intercellular space as well. These cholesterol molecules can be non-ensimatically converted into a pre-vitamin D in response to UVB light exposure. So essentially, the pre-vitamin D can then diffuse into the bloodstream where undergoes further processing in the liver and the kidneys to produce 25 hydroxyvitamin D, which is the storage form, which is found in the blood. And that's what you get tested for typically when you get a vitamin D blood test. And the last step of conversion creates 125 dihydroxyvitamin D, which is the final form that has all of these effects on like gene expression and mitochondrial function as well. And so that's kind of the subject for vitamin D. Obviously, like I mentioned, the one that gets tested is a 250H form, which has a longer half of life, essentially, and it's found in more abundance in the bloodstream. So the amount of 25 hydroxyvitamin D in your bloodstream in a natural setting would be proportional to the amount of sun that you're exposed to, in particular, the UVB light, so midday sun. In a way that's also integrating the amount of melanin in your skin. And what I mean by that is melanin absorbs strongly throughout the electromagnetic spectrum and we will get into it, including UV light. So when you have more melanin in your skin, you need more UV light to overcome that absorption barrier in order to reach the cholesterol, create the pre vitamin D, and dot, dot, dot, and get all those effects. So for people who have darker skin that live at higher latitudes, it can be very difficult to get enough UVB light midday in order to optimize their vitamin D status. Obviously, there's another issue on top of like what you said. People will go to the doctor and told they're a fit deficient. Frank deficiency is only considered to be less than 20 nanograms per milliliter. However, optimal levels of vitamin D are at least over 45, but ideally, between 60 and 80 nanograms per mill is where you're really in a sweet spot that's protective against most chronic neolithic diseases, let's say, because vitamin D deficiency is highly associated with essentially the entire, you know, between diabetes, obesity, neuro-generation, autoimmune diseases, cancers. There's this association that's present. Obviously, we mentioned that if you just supplement with vitamin D and we look at the outcomes, we don't really get benefits on these, you know, for these diseases, but that's again, because we're getting these direct benefits of not only UV light, but whenever we're getting UVB light, we're always getting an abundance of red and infrared. We're getting exposed to bright light from the sun and the brightness is very important, which we need to circle back to with regards to the questions that you had initially asked. - Yeah, yeah. So basically just to repeat something that's important. So vitamin D levels relate to your UVB exposure and your overall sunlight exposure. So the reason that vitamin D deficiency doesn't seem to be corrected by vitamin D supplementation because we don't see better outcomes, is because the whole story isn't just vitamin D by itself, it's the full context of the light environment that produces the vitamin D, and it produces the vitamin D in addition to doing other things. And the supplementation doesn't come with all of those other things. - Exactly, exactly. Yes, and that's why we need to think of that as a biomarker because then it becomes clear that we actually need to get the light in order to reap all of the many benefits that we will receive from an optimal vitamin D status. And as I mentioned earlier, POMC is one of those really, really important things that is produced in response to UVB light, independent of vitamin D. So POMC is produced in multiple cells within the body, it's produced in the skin, it's produced in the immune cells, it's produced in the hypothalamus, it's produced in the anterior pituitary gland among other places. And depending on what stimuli the brain is receiving and the body is receiving, it's gonna dictate how that POMC is, let's say, expressed. So as I mentioned earlier, POMC is this complex prohormone, it can be cleaved into a maximum of, there's 10 different peptide hormones that can be produced from POMC. You can think of POMC as just like this, I don't know, maybe like a train with a bunch of cargo cars and those cargo cars can be separated out and can have their own functions. And so if you are making POMC in your skin and in your hypothalamus from UVB light exposure, you get to unlock all of those cargo cars, you get to unlock all of those peptide hormones that have a diverse array of functions. So number one, that's really important is alpha-MSH or alpha-molana site stimulating hormone. As the name implies, this factor helps to stimulate melanocytes to make new melanin. So that's a great question. That's how you make new melanin in response to sun. That's how you get tan. There can be up to like a three day delay in new melanin production. So whenever you see an acute tanning effect from laying out in the sun, that is mostly UVA light working on the melanin granules that are already existing within the skin and pulling them towards the surface. That's an acute tanning effect, but you're not making new melanin from UVA light. You can only make new melanin from UVB light, which can be delayed someone. So people might notice if they go to the beach or whatever, they might see that they're getting a little bit more tan as the days move on and that's why. Got it. So palm sea is stimulated by UV light. Palm sea is pro-opium lana-courtness. So this is a peptide, basically a small protein, and it's made in response to UV light exposure, but then that peptide can be chopped up into different things that do other stuff. Yes, and the reason I mentioned that is because depending on where the palm sea is made, it gets chopped up differently. And depending on what light you're exposed to, the palm sea gets produced in different parts of the body. So UVB light, skin and hypothalamus, blue light, you make palm sea in your anterior pituitary gland. However, that palm sea does not get to be fully unlocked into the full repertoire of peptides when it is produced there. And interestingly, so I just mentioned alpha-MSH, which is not only important for making new melanin and stimulating new melanin production, it also plays a absolutely critical role in regulating appetite and also modulating energy expenditure. So when alpha-MSH is produced, it inhibits appetite and increases energy expenditure. Alpha-MSH has long been associated with obesity. I don't know why nobody connected the dots, and at least in the mainstream, between palm sea production via UVB light, and maybe it just got suppressed, I don't know. The information is all in the corpus of literature. It's been there for a long time. You can look this up. But alpha-MSH gets unlocked from UVB light exposure. So when you're out in midday sun, exposing your eyes and your skin to UVB light, you're naturally going to have less of an appetite, and your metabolism is going to be increased. Funnily enough, ozemic, which we will get into as well, also works on this pathway. It also stimulates palm sea production in the hypothalamus, and in doing so, stimulates alpha-MSH, which leads to appetite reduction and energy expenditure increase. But let me circle back to the pituitary gland really quick, because when you make palm sea in the anterior pituitary, you don't get alpha-MSH. You only get one step before alpha-MSH, which is ACTH. ACTH is what stimulates cortisol production in the adrenal glands. So ACTH can be its own entity, which stimulates cortisol, or it can get chopped up, and you can make alpha-MSH from it. So I really like to think about this pathway, and it's kind of interesting to think about in that-- you can think about how you're either cortisol dominant, and you can be cortisol dominant from being exposed to blue light through your eyes via this pathway where we make palm sea in the anterior pituitary, and then leads to the production of ACTH. Or you can be alpha-MSH dominant, which is what you get from UVB light exposure, but you're not going to really get both. And if you look at people who struggle with obesity, with metabolic syndrome, these people are generally living very, very indoor lifestyles, completely devoid of UVB light. And obviously, that's reflected at the level of their vitamin D status, but it goes deeper than that. It's a direct reflection of light programming, their biochemistry and their biophysics to operate certain programs and not others. Right, right. If I'm hearing you correctly, if you're exposed to predominantly blue light in the absence of other wavelengths, as you would be, if you're spending a lot of time indoors using blue light dominant technology, that would tend to favor a higher level of cortisol relative to alpha-MSH and these other things. So it's putting you in sort of a different hormonal state, depending on the cocktail of light that you are exposed to, and the pattern of that throughout the day. Exactly. And by the way, cortisol people love to demonize it. It's very, very important. It's responsible for helping get your body online, your metabolism kind of revved up in the morning. And that actually should make pretty good sense, because let's say you go out for sunrise to help anchor in your circadian rhythm, there's no UV light present, right? We're getting a lot of red and infrared, and we're getting some blue. So that blue helps to turn on that cortisol production, right? Via this anterior pituitary, and that case is actually good. The blue light's not an isolation, but relative to UV light, it is, right? And so we're getting the cortisol production which helps to optimize our morning cortisol spike, which should be happening in the morning. And it's yoked that light environment. Cortisol is a circadian biosensor in the same way that melatonin is. But cortisol is a sensor of light, and melatonin is the sensor of dark, and they kind of go hand in hand, and their curves are like inverse to one another. Cortisol peaks when you have light peaking, and melatonin peaks when you have dark, dark darkness. That has to be fully dark in order to optimize that. And so, yes, when it comes to pom-c, we have this differential effect, depending on which tissue it's being expressed in. But in the hypothalamus and the skin, we're getting this full repertoire, and I want to circle back to some of the other things produced when we get that UV light induced pom-c because they're extremely important. So one of the other factors that we make is beta endorphin. Beta endorphin is an endogenous opioid molecule. It naturally helps you feel good. It reduces anxiety and depression, improves overall critical thinking as well, because we're basically getting a hit of dopamine when we make beta endorphin. But if we're spending our days outside, we're constantly getting this kind of trickle of dopamine that makes us just feel good at a baseline, which means that we're gonna have less compulsive behavior. We're gonna feel less compelled to reach for quick hits of dopamine, which could be anything from drugs, alcohol, social media, pornography, like pick your poison. People are constantly on this dopamine rollercoaster when they live indoor lifestyles because they're completely devoid of the natural drugs essentially that our bodies supposed to make in response to UV light. And I actually really like to think about, you know, the body's a drug factory. Obviously, all of our pharmaceutical drugs and our recreational drugs, the only reason they work is because there's receptors already built into our bodies to receive those molecules and respond to them. And so because of that, we naturally have molecules we make within our system that stimulate those receptors as well. And in order to actually make that happen, we need to be exposed to the right environment in order to induce their expression. And it turns out UV B light in particular is one of the most important exposures to tickle these receptors that help make us feel really good at a baseline and make better decisions as well. - Got it. So UV B exposure is connected to palm seed production in the skin and elsewhere, like in the middle of the brain and we'll get to that. Palm seed is a peptide, a small protein, and it gets chopped up into different chunks. And those chunks include, it includes things like alpha MSH, which we mentioned and we'll talk about, when we talk about hunger and satiety regulation by the brain and the hypothalamus. And it also gets chopped up and turned into beta endorphins, our natural endogenous opioids. So light hits your skin, palm seed gets made, palm seed gets chopped up depending on the conditions. One of the things that's produced is an endogenous opioid. - Yep, that's right. And the way that I interpret that is nature is telling us that we need this thing. It's trying to addict us to feeling good to going out in the sun because it helps to co-regulate our biology and run our biology for us. And this whole story about ATP being the main source of energy in the body, it's like, yes, but also our body runs on other sources of energy as well. Like for example, we know that far infrared light helps with structuring water within the system and when we structure the water within our bodies and charge separate it, it essentially can act as a battery. And I remember in undergrad when I was learning about ATP and quote unquote free energy, like it never really sat right with me 'cause like what is free energy? This sounds so nebulous, it does not make sense. But I feel like it always just kind of was like hand wavy and like not really addressed in a meaningful way. But when I started learning about water structuring and this charge separation to create essentially what is a battery that then when the water within a cell is structured, it can help to power enzymatic reactions through this charge separation, which is creating potential energy. And that yes, the ATP serves a role, but what the ATP is essentially doing is by adding the phosphoryl group onto an enzyme, let's say, it's changing the structure of the enzyme to allow the structured water to go places where it couldn't go before. And that's what's actually catalyzing the reaction. It's not the ATP per se. And so I felt very lied to when I learned that I'm not gonna lie. But it's very, very interesting. And it completely changes the paradigm with regards to what environment actually creates health in a bioenergetics sense and in general. It completely flips the script on what inputs we need in order to be healthy. - So I wanna go back to the skin and talk about melanin production. So the standard story one would hear about UV exposure to your skin and about melanin and tanning and that stuff that you would hear say from a dermatologist. Most of them is UVB is high energy light. It's mutagenic. If I go outside at midday with no sunscreen and no shirt on and I expose my, for those who can't see me, very light skin to UV, it's going to mutate my DNA. It's going to induce oxidative stress and promote aging. And a dermatologist would say the whole point that I'm gonna produce extra melanin and maybe get a little bit darker if I start going to the beach in the summer. is because the melanin is my natural sunscreen and it's trying to block all of the bad effects of the UV light that are coming in. So it's all about just mitigating what are entirely the bad effects of UV light. You seem to be telling us that there are lots of good things that UV light is doing. So how would you sort of tell some of the story of what UV is doing to our skin and why we're producing melanin and you know, is it all good? Is it all bad? And how do you think about sort of like presumably you don't go out, you wouldn't go out at the equator and sit in the sun all day long. But how do you think about sort of the balance of too much and too little UV exposure and the balance of what you would say are some of the benefits of UV exposure with some of the risks that come from the high energy nature of these photons. Ah, such a loaded topic and I have so so so many things to say. So when I was in El Salvador staying with Jack, I did indeed sit outside all day and my skin is actually pretty well adapted to that. So for those not watching, I'm mixed like half black half white. But when you say you sit outside all day, were you in the shade part of the time, were you directly in the sunlight for six hours were with no shade? No, we were doing some things. I didn't burn it all though, but I was laying out for at least, you know, two, three hours, let's say in the mid day and it wasn't an issue for me. But that's an aside. Let me tell you a little bit more about what I'm thinking here and then we can talk about how burning is kind of optional as long as you're doing things a certain way. Right. So the way that I think about this melanin story is kind of sociological or even sociopolitical a little bit and from a couple different angles. So the way that I see the demonization of melanin and UV light is like really colonialist programming in action that stems back essentially to kind of like puritanical northern European ways of thinking and ways of viewing the world whereby darker skinned individuals were seen as like dirty and poorer basically. And that that was a bad thing and that the lighter your skin, the more, you know, essentially noble you were in a way and you see this persisting in so many cultures this day, especially in East Asia and Latin America. Like I have many friends from a couple of friends from Colombia and my one friend tells me all about, you know, she's all into the life story now. But her grandma is like very traditionally minded. Obviously Latin America was heavily colonialized and you know, the imperialists kind of went through like crazy. And so they have this mindset of like, no, you don't want to get darker skin. That means that it's that you're like poor or that you're bad or something. And it's just that the program you're on is crazy. But anyways, let's talk about the science because I think that's where the most compelling story lies. And I could actually probably make the argument that keeping people out of UV light and keeping them from cultivating their melanin is a way by which to make people more easily programmed and manipulated. And we will get there. So melanin, I mentioned as new melanin is producer response to UV light, some people are born with a lot of melanin. Those individuals are more adapted to an equatorial environment. Some people are born with the very little melanin and I'm talking specifically on our surfaces. All of us have melanin deep in our brains and our immune cells and a lot of different parts of the body have melanin. But as it relates to our surfaces, the amount of melanation varies depending on your ancestry essentially. Obviously dark skin is adapted to more equatorial environment. If we look at some of the darkest skin on the planet, we're talking like Nairobi Kenya, which is not only equatorial, but also very high altitude. And as you go up and altitude, essentially the light has less atmosphere to pass through. So UV content is also higher as a result of that. So we have these individuals with like super, super dark skin that is not simply just to protect the body from UV. This is like the programming that I'm alluding to is that, oh, the melanin is produced as a way to protect the body from these dangerous rays that cause harm. No, my argument is that, and this is also substantiated within data across multiple different species as well, that the purpose of melanin is not to protect from UV, but it's to harness UV. How silly would it be for the body to produce this pigment that can absorb UV and not do anything with it? It would be such a waste of these high energy photons, right, that are coming from the environment. And I think the perfect example to kind of highlight this is the mushrooms from Chernobyl. So there were these fungi that were discovered in Chernobyl in the 90s that basically scientists went in and they found all of these like pitch black mushrooms growing in this nuclear fallout. And they're like, what the heck is this? And then they end up studying them and they end up finding, oh, wow, this pigment, this black pigment is melanin and turns out there, these mushrooms are using the melanin as a way to harness the high energy nuclear fallout, these essentially gamma rays from this nuclear fallout as the way to actually make energy. So they were using this melanin productively as a source of energy in their environment. Also interestingly, maybe people don't know, but evolutionarily speaking, mushrooms are more closely related to animals than the art of plants. So we have a lot in common with all forms of life, but mushrooms even more so than plants. Then you can kind of fast forward to the work more recently. I have Dr. Arturo Solis Herrera who is studying this human photosynthesis hypothesis, which basically his thesis that he's been studying for quite some time now is that yes, melanin is not just this protective pigment. It's actually harnessing high energy photons from UV light in the environment and using it productively as a source of energy. And if we think about it from a first principle standpoint, it actually makes really good sense because what happens when you go in UVB light in particular as we talked about your appetite decreases and your energy expenditure increases. Now, what does that information tell us about that environmental signal? Well, it implies that when you're getting UVB light, you don't need to eat it as much and your body has access to more energy. That's what the implication. That's what the response implies. And that same signal pathway is also engaged in response to leptin. So leptin is produced in the subcutaneous fat is essentially a way for the brain to the hypothalamus in particular to determine how much energy is on board. Leptin, there's something called the leptin melana-cortin pathway. Also stimulates the production of alpha MSH in the brain and hypothalamus as a way to tune energy intake, appetite and food consumption to energy expenditure and basically trying to balance the scales. So UVB light does this independent of leptin, does this independent of the food that you're consuming, which in my first principle's way of thinking implies that okay, we must be accessing some level of energy from this UV light. And that's something like I said is being explored by Dr. Herrera and is something that I would love to explore more in the future. I don't think that we can subsist entirely on UV light, like entirely photosynthetically. I'm not saying that. But what I'm saying is it does seem to provide some level of energetic input that is taking away some of the food requirement. And that's actually important because when we think about food, food in order to be processed into energy requires the mitochondria to actually grind the gears, those engines to turn to make the ATP, to make the photons in the metabolic water and all the things that help to support the bioenergetics of the system. But if we're running, let's say primarily or somewhat more so on structured water from far and far light and UVB light via some interesting yet still unknown mechanisms, that takes a lot of the load off the mitochondria, right? In the same way that if you're driving a fancy car, sports car, if you constantly are putting the pedal to the metal and like just running your engine into the ground, it's going to burn out more quickly essentially. And so the way that I see either mitochondria for using this engine analogy, obviously it's not a perfect analogy because we're not just machines and they're kind of living entities in and of themselves, especially if you think about like the endosymbiote theory, which basically states that mitochondria came from bacteria at some point. But independent of that, if we think about this engine kind of analogy, we can see that anytime we can give our bodies an input that helps to take some of the demand or load off of the mitochondria, that that would actually be beneficial for us and our mitochondrial function, especially when we think about mitochondria as the organelles of longevity. When we think about heteroplasmiburdin, which is mutational burden in our mitochondrial DNA, as the quintessential biomarker for aging, that tracks perfectly. We increase heteroplasmib roughly 10% per decade. There are ways to reverse heteroplasmib through optimizing our mitochondrial quality control mechanisms. So through that, we can essentially age in reverse, which should be like the holy grail for everybody in the longevity space. And yet everybody's just focused on the wrong things. They're focused on the peptides, they're focused on the biohacking, the sun avoidance when they should literally be doing the opposite. So if we think about someone going to the beach, say on a sunny day in the summer, let's say they go there and they're not wearing sunscreen, they're going to be more naturally inclined to intermittently use the shade if you're at the beach for three hours. Say like if I go to the beach for three hours, I'm not going to sit in the midday sun for the whole three hours. I'll go sit under my umbrella or under some trees or whatever and I'll go in and out right because I can, you know, it's just your natural inclination. If I have, say sunscreen on, I might be able to then go sit in the sun for three hours and lay on my towel and not get burned because I've got the sunscreen on. Talk a little bit about what that is doing in terms of our actual light exposure. So if I've got sunscreen on the surface of my skin and I'm at the beach on that sunny day, what is getting filtered out and what is still passing through in terms of light? And how is that going to sort of influence the underlying biology differently than if I was getting unprotected so to speak, sun exposure with no sunscreen, but intermittently using the shade? Mm-hmm. Yeah, I love to think of shade as nature sunscreen and I always encourage folks to use that, especially if you're, let's say, a latitude mismatch for where you're currently at. Like if you're somebody who has Fitzpatrick once again from Ireland and you're living in Central America, yeah, you're going to need to really prioritize shade and pulse your midday sun exposure. And we're going to definitely get into how to build your quote unquote solar callus as Jack would say and how to gradually build up your tolerance to staying out in the sun more and more. But anyway, for now, let's talk about your hypothetical situation. So depending on the sunscreen you're using, you could, if you're using a mineral sunscreen, you're going to be blocking UVA, UVB definitely, some UVA and some blue as well. If you're using a chemical sunscreen, I believe they have a bit more of an affinity for UV over, let's say, the longer wavelength blue light, for example. The problem that I inherently see with sunscreen is that if we think about light as being, and the specific light that you're exposed to as a barcode for your environment, let's say, like a barcode for the time of day, by putting on sunscreen and preferentially reducing certain wavelengths ability to interact with your system. You're sending a different signal to the body. Like we talked about earlier, the ratios of red and infrared to blue to UVA, UVB is providing timing information, temporal information to the system to help it regulate itself. And so if we're using sunscreen, we're now changing those ratios and sending new information to the system that could be harmful. I mean, especially if we're also now wearing sunglasses on top of that, maybe you could argue that's more of a coherent signal if you're wearing both sunglasses and sunscreen, but I would say that it's just kind of a double whammy instead because sunglasses will undoubtedly increase your propensity for burning as well. Because now we're not making the alpha MSH and the beta and gamma MSH, all those melanocytes stimulating hormones from POMC centrally. If we're not making them centrally, we're limiting our ability to produce melanin at some level. And so if you're not making melanin, you're going to be burning ultimately. And so that's actually limiting your ability to adapt to tolerating more midday sun. So yeah, I like to think about the issue with sunscreen as primarily being an issue with timekeeping and an issue of like coherence with your environment because you're unnaturally modulating the wavelengths that are reaching the system. Versus if you're leveraging shade, shade is something that you can, you know, you don't need technology to access shade. And when you're in the shade, you're still receiving, you know, reflected wavelengths from your environment that are ambient that are still providing you with some benefits. So that's kind of the way that I think about it. Well, let's ask a slightly different question. I know a lot of people who like to go to the beach during the summer that are light skinned and they want to tan. They want to get darker, but they don't want to get sunburn. What would be like some of the principles you would give them for how to think about the timing and the dosing of their light exposure if they actually wanted to maximize melanin production in the skin or salient or the flip side of that would be, you know, what are, what are things that people are probably doing that are getting in the way of that? Yes, great question. So this goes back to Jack's concept of building your solar callus, which is essentially building up your base melanin so that you can tolerate more and more midday sun without burning. There are so many environmental inputs and dietary inputs that influence this ability. So let's, let's talk about them. So number one, the light and, and that includes both visible and non visible light that your skin is exposed to is going to affect your ability to make melanin. Our melanocytes have mitochondria. They need those mitochondria in order to make new melanin. And so anything that is assaulting your, your, your skin layer and inhibiting mitochondrial function is going to blunt melanin production as well. That would include our artificial blue light, right? Because we said blue light and isolation from our, our tech devices without the balancing effects of red and infrared are directly poisoning and impairing mitochondrial function on our surfaces. So that's a big one with regards to impairment of melanin production is that people are abusing technology indoors in particular, which is going to inhibit mitochondrial function on your surface, which is going to blunt melanin production as well. That would also include non native MFs. So that would include our 5G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth dot dot, which are known mitochondrial poisons that change how calcium moves within cells, which also likely directly poisons mitochondria at a biophysical level. All of the non native MFs that we are exposed to in modern life are, they wouldn't necessarily be as bad as they are except for the fact that they're all modulated in the ELF or extreme low frequency range. So this goes back to the work of Dr. Schroberdo Becker and Dr. Alan Fry back in the 50s through the 70s and beyond. So they were essentially studying the harms of non native MFs and essentially how those harms are being conveyed or influencing biological function. And when it comes to our power grid, when it comes to our cell phone cell service, cell signal, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, they're all modulated in what is called the ELF range or the extreme low frequency range. And it turns out in nature, we only get ELFs from something called the Schuman Resonance. This is really the predominant ELF in the natural environment. And it essentially, it resonates at 7.83 hertz, which is very, very low. Hertz is like per second, unit of per second. So it's a very, very low frequency, extreme low frequency. And the Schuman Resonance is produced in response to essentially lightning strikes, which happens at a very, very high rate every second throughout the Earth. And essentially, when lightning strikes, it creates this resonance within the cavity between the surface of the Earth and the ionosphere at 7.83 hertz. And this 7.83 hertz Schuman Resonance is very important for syncing the bio cycles of the body. So Becker did a lot of work on this, essentially showing that when you block individuals or animals from receiving the Schuman Resonance, like let's say you put them in a Faraday cage for a period of time, that their bio cycles get all screwed up. There's what was once a 24 hour cycle circadian rhythm gets super stretched out. They start to develop mental health issues, cognitive impairment, proprioceptive issues. And so these ELFs, this Schuman Resonance in our environment, extremely important when it comes to regulating our biolgemic fundamental level. Now, even in the modern world, we're getting access to the Schuman Resonance, however, the problem is, I don't know if you can hear those sirens, my apologies if you can. The problem is that we're now muddying the water so extensively with the non-native ELFs from our power grid and cell signal and Bluetooth Wi-Fi, etc. And so now our bodies are like essentially trying to figure out which signal is which and we're not getting this kind of reliable signal, I guess, is the best way of putting it from our environments to help our bodies sync up those bio cycles that are really important for timing in every cell of the body and at a systemic level as well. And so these ELFs, these exposures are a big issue as it relates to mitochondrial function throughout the system, but including the skin as well. So turning off your Wi-Fi when your sleeping is a really easy way to kind of mitigate this, you're not going to be using it anyway, you're asleep, so you could put your Wi-Fi router on a timer, for example, or better yet, like just use Ethernet whenever you can, you're going to have a faster internet that way and you get to avoid this issue of Wi-Fi altogether. And again, when it comes to EMFs, the inverse square-law reign supreme. So that means that whenever you have a source that's close to you, it's going to give you the highest dose. So not using your laptop on your lap, not putting your cell phone in your pocket, not spending time in a room with a Wi-Fi router or using Ethernet instead. These would all be simple ways to help mitigate EMF exposure in your office space or your home space. In addition to that, we can also talk about circadian timing as well. So when you get out and see sun rise and help you help to anchor in that blue light exposure from sun rise and get that SC on on board and help turn everything on. At the same time, you're getting that stimulating effect of the red and infrared light on my decondry, you're getting the blue light optimizing the cortisol response, you're getting this circadian optimization effect, essentially, from seeing sun rise and also getting dark, darkness at night. So when you do those two things, you're helping to sink your skin cells with the entire system as a whole, which will help to produce new melanin. And that also goes for meal timing as well. So there's research actually showing that when you eat late at night, you're more prone to burning and that turns out it's because your skin, your lungs and your gut are all barrier tissues, right? And so all of the barrier tissues of the body are are very yoked to one another. They're in constant communication. And that's why oftentimes, let's say, for like, C-section babies or formula fed babies, we often see issues with what? IBS, XMA, asthma. They travel together. And it's because all of these barrier tissues are, you can kind of think of them as one and the same. They're just like different fractals or reflections of one another. And so when you eat late at night, it tells your gut clocks that it's not night, that it's actually in fact daytime, which then confuses your skin cells. And your skin cells, like, okay, is it nighttime? Is daytime, I don't know, which means that if the daytime program is not running in your skin, when you're exposed to UV light, you're gonna be more prone to burning and not being able to make new melanin because melanin production is supposed to be yoked to daytime activities. - Right, right. - With the long sights. - So basically what you're saying is, right, there's circadian clocks throughout our body. Certain things happen at certain times. Even though my skin might look the same to my eye right now, as it does in the middle of the night or the middle of the day, there's different stuff happening under the hood, depending on what time of day my skin cells think it is. And if they're wrong about what time they think it is, this could make me more prone to burning or less able to produce new melanin, those types of things. So in other words, something that anyone could do to sort of optimize their ability to produce melanin in response to mid-day sun, is actually just kind of keep their circadian timing in general the way it's supposed to be and not be disrupting their sleep by, you know, having blue light exposure and other things happening in the evening and so on and so forth. - Absolutely, that's like one of the, I would say the most impactful changes that somebody can make to improve their health overall in addition to supporting their melanin production and being able to tan effectively. We could talk about meal composition as well. So I, you know, can't even count the number of times people have said, you know, I stopped eating processed foods and seed oils and now I'm not burning when I go out in the sun. And the way that I like to conceptualize this is that the skin isn't very high turnover tissue. And so actually in my lab at Princeton, we were doing some work to show that the dietary fat intake is directly influencing the cell membrane fat composition and especially in high turnover tissues. And so in the skin, we have this high turnover tissue that is going to be influenced by your dietary fat intake. If you're consuming a lot of polyunsaturated fats in the form of processed food, seed oils, linoleic acid, essentially from corn, soy, canola, et cetera, that these polyunsaturated fats make it to the skin. And what they can actually do is change the cell membrane dynamics in the skin. And this is something that is just such an easy thing to study and I don't know if anybody is doing it. But again, I like to think in a first principles way. So the way I think about it is polyunsaturated fats have a low melting tone because of their kinked structure, do the double bonds. They have lower electrostatic interactions between molecules. And we're actually-- we talked about this in a lesson in my course. I'm basically teaching like a condensed undergraduate science degree right now to a bunch of people. And it's been really fun. But I was teaching them about how when we have polyunsaturated fats that have these double bonds and the molecules don't interact as tightly or as strongly with one another, that it leads to a low melting tone. So that's why canola oil is liquid at room temp and beeftell. It was not. Beeftell was solid at room temp because it's steric acid rich. It's saturated fat rich. Saturated fats love to stack on top of one another. They have very strong electrostatic interactions, which basically means they just like to stack on top of each other. And they like to sit in that kind of confirmation. With the polyunsaturated fats because of their low melting temp, they're going to change the membrane dynamics of cells that they get incorporated into, for example, skin cells. And so the way that I conceptualize this is that when you have a higher LA diet, like linoleic acid diet, and you get more of those fatty acids into the skin membranes, then essentially, we are going to have more fragile skin cell membranes that are less robust to environmental inputs, such as like heat, for example, or UV light. Yeah. And this has been done. I have an article on my substack of people on a read about a dietary fat affects sunburn propensity. And as Alexis is saying, I mean, in the cosmetics and like dermatology world of research, they've put linoleic acid and cholesterol and other things right on the skin. And if you put linoleic acid right on the skin, the skin cells undergo-- they have more oxidative stress in response to UV light exposure. So that means just what you're saying, right? The fatty acid composition of the cells and membranes is going to affect how they interact with all of these exogenous stimuli. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So that's another thing that people can do. It's just try to-- and this goes back to what we talked about earlier with the light food being a light barcode-- just trying to eat a seasonal local diet, as best you can, doesn't have to be perfect. But in nature, you can never consume enough linoleic acid to actually get these issues. The problem is when we're consuming processed foods made with canola, soy, corn, oil, whatever, think about it this way. If you eat corn, corn is not a fatty food. Think about the process and the sheer volume of corn required to make corn oil. And the amount of organic solvents needed to strip the fatty acids out of the membranes of the corn cells. And then all the processing needs to occur to actually make this a purified oil. It's just astronomical. The amount of corn you would have to eat in order to get this linoleic acid is obscene. You would never-- you would never be able to. And so it's just not really feasible outside of a world with our industrialization of the food supply, essentially. So just simplifying things and trying to eat a more whole foods-based diet that is if you live somewhere more high latitude, will be more fat and meat-based in the winter, and will be more diverse with more diverse plant foods in the spring through the fall. Is a pretty safe bet to help also support your skin health and overall health, but also pern propensity, helping to reduce your burn risk. OK, one more thing about skin I want to talk about before we switch to the brain and central regulation of hunger and satiety. What about skin cancer? I mean, UV exposure sunlight, that drives skin cancer, and isn't there like a clear dose-dependent relationship between more unprotected sun exposure and higher rate of skin cancer? This is another kind of worms. OK, so when we're talking about skin cancer, we have to talk about multiple different kinds of cancer, right? So you can have your squamous cell carcinomas, your basal cell carcinomas, and your melanomas. Now, the one that everybody should be the most, let's say, wary of or cognizant of, should be melanomas because melanomas are the most lethal. SCCs and BCCs are like very, very rarely will kill somebody. Usually, you get them cut off. They're very quiescent. Skin cancer, you've got carcinomas, you've got melanomas. Carcinomas, more common, not very deadly at all. Melanomas less common and quite deadly. Yes, exactly. And so once we make that kind of distinction, then when we interrogate the melanomas in particular and look at the dermatology literature, the actual published dermatology literature, people would be shocked to see what they find. Because when you actually read their own literature, you will very clearly see that there are a few associations and clinical observations that kind of turn the whole paradigm on its head. So first of all, having a low level of vitamin D in your bloodstream is associated with melanoma incidence and severity. In other words, having low vitamin D means that you're more likely to get a melanoma. And then if you do, it's going to be more severe. So that's the first thing that's like, OK, that's a bit weird because a few BVL is causing melanomas. Why would vitamin D be inversely associated? Right. It should be the other way around. If you have high vitamin D, it should then be a higher risk of melanomas, but that's not the case. Additionally, we can also see that individuals who work indoor jobs are actually more susceptible to being diagnosed with melanomas than outdoor workers, which that's another crazy one, because again, it should be the opposite. And if you actually look and do like Sonics Bozer questionnaires, the data on that within the dermatology literature shows that people who get regular daily sun exposure are less likely to get melanomas than people who practice no sun exposure or have intermittent sun exposure. Intermittent sun exposure would be the example of, let's say somebody works an office job. And every summer, they travel to the Caribbean for a week and blast themselves. And then they go back to their office job. In that case, it's not really the sun that calls the issue. It's the fact that, first of all, they didn't give their body a chance to adapt and respond effectively to the level of sun that they're receiving. So you're going to, of course, be more likely to burn in that context, especially if you're living an indoor lifestyle, typically, because if you have low sun exposure habits, by definition, that means you're living an indoor lifestyle. And the indoor lifestyle comes along with a whole slew of other things, the non-NATVMFs, the artificial blue light, perhaps the processed food consumption, perhaps the sedentary lifestyle. So there's a lot that goes along for the ride with that kind of a classification, let's say. So those are kind of like the three major highlights within the dermatology literature as it relates to melanomas that essentially tells us the opposite. It tells us that if we get regular daily sun exposure, if we're gradually adapting and allowing our bodies to respond to sun daily versus never getting it and blasting it out, so just never getting it period, we are going to be less likely to be diagnosed with melanomas, which are, of course, the most steadily. And if we were to get diagnosed with melanomas, they're going to be less severe. And I guess the last thing I'll say on this is that melanomas are oftentimes diagnosed and found on parts of the body that I've lowest sun exposure. exposure versus maybe a BCC could be more likely to be on a high sun exposure part of the body. However, even with the carcinomas, one could make the argument that if you're building your solar callus and not burning, that they would be completely unassociated with sun exposure as well, that it's just simply like a mismatch between a body that's not expecting to receive a lot of sun and getting blasted, essentially. So if we turn now to thinking about hunger and satiety and central regulation of hunger and satiety by the brain, we're going to be talking about the hypothalamus. One thing that people often find kind of funny is, you know, we talked about melanin, we talked about pom C and the skin, we find these things in the brain as well, deep in the brain in a variety of cells. Can you just kind of at a high level, you know, people normally think of melanin as the skin pigment thing and it's all about the surface layer and the exposure to the sun from our external surface. Why would things like melanin and pom C and all these things also be found deep within the brain where none of that light is actually penetrating? Yeah, I mean, that is a great question that I would encourage everybody to ponder and like meditate on. So I really like to focus in particular on melanin within the substantiant niagra, so it's literally called substantiant niagra because it is black to the color. If you were to cut somebody's brain open up around that structure, you would just see this inky black kind of flex within the brain and it was discovered that this part of the brain that's chock full of melanin is extremely important as it relates to dopamine production and human movement and essentially regulation of dopamine movement and asymmetry within the brain. And the reason I bring that up is because it is the primary part of the brain that is affected in Parkinson's disease and so much to say. The one thing I want to highlight about Parkinson's, which is obviously a neurological disorder, it's a neurodegeneration and it results in tremors. Basically people lose the ability to move over time and eventually it can affect like basically all the motor neurons and can eventually lead to issues with swallowing and ultimately even issues with breathing if it gets like very, very advanced. Dopamine is not only really important for critical thinking and managing compulsive behaviors and things like this and the reward part of the body but also it's really critical for movement and you can kind of think about movement like every time you take a step forward, your brain gets like a micro-award because let's say you set this very micro goal of I'm going to take a step forward, then the body where basically is rewarding itself saying good job you did it now let's do it again and it's like these little micro-awards that involve dopamine within, in particular, this part of the brain to allow you to engage in like standard locomotion and just human movement. As this melanin breaks down and by the way in in advanced Parkinson's disease, loss of melanin within the substantial niagra is very apparent and so dopamine and melanin share the same precursor, tyrosine, that's an aromatic amino acid that absorbs in the UV. Dopamine can actually be made from melanin so you can break down melanin to make dopamine if you have to and that seems like what is happening in the case of Parkinson's disease in the advanced state is that that melanin is being broken down and lost in order to try to buffer the loss of dopamine production and the most interesting epidemiologic observation around this is that black people do not get melanin, black people do not get Parkinson's disease and that should really start making people question. What do you mean they just have it at a much lower rate? They don't yeah there's essentially there's no no Parkinson's in people of African descent. Like none. Like none. And this goes back to something that Jack talks about quite a bit and that is that melanocytes have the same developmental origin as skin cells, brain cells, and immune cells so it's neuroectaderm and neuroectadermal derivative cells they maintain you know what he likes to kind of say is metastasis but basically the ability to move around. And so the thesis is that when you have a ton of melanin on your skin if the oxidative burden let's say of your environment internally is so strong that it starts to break down melanin and dopamine production at the level of the brain, the substantial niagra, that your body could actually pull melanin from its surface to help buffer that. And I think that's really interesting and I think that's also something he focuses on a lot as it relates to Vidaligo being assigned a very deep issues because melanin which we didn't talk about yet but melanin actually serves as a really important free radical scavenger. It also key lates heavy metals. It also absorbs all wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation except for a very narrow range within the near infrared. And what that means is that if you have a nice solar callus a nice tan built that it's actually an incredibly important buffer against non native MFs because the melanin could essentially absorb those frequencies and prevent them from interfacing with other parts, deeper parts of your system. And so melanin serves a lot of really important roles and one of them is to prevent and buffer oxidative stress. And so if melanin starts getting broken down due to a high oxidative burden the plasticity and the ability of either melanocytes or melanin intact somehow being transported throughout the system is I think is a really interesting area of study that needs to be probed more. But it would show very strong, let's say the evidence that that people with dark skin essentially don't get Parkinson's disease like the literature on this is really strong is a really good point of evidence stating that okay this melanin story is really interesting and this plasticity of melanin between different surfaces and different areas of the body may actually be the case and needs to be studied more but I think it's a very very interesting area of study and again vitamin D levels are highly associated with Parkinson's disease as well so low vitamin D is a risk factor and getting people out in the sun presumably I mean we need to have to develop protocols on this I actually have an uncle that has Parkinson's and some of the things that you can do to help buffer this is like you need to get your melanin maxed so you need to be ideally seeing sunrise and building that solar callus and building up your melanin on your surface but you can also build melanin internally through cold exposure so like cold plunging especially if you couple that with midday sun exposure is a really powerful way because essentially the cold can optimize the semiconductor systems of your body and then if you lay out in the sun afterwards your body your your those semiconductors now have the ability to absorb more of that photonic energy than they would have before that the cold stimulates the mitochondria within the system to make more endogenous biophotons which happen to be in the UV range and not only just any part of the UV range but actually in the UV CE part of the light spectrum which isn't even present you know from the outside only UVB light reaches the surface of the earth UVC light gets reflected back into space so the UVC biophotons that ourselves make and our mitochondria make is actually stronger than the light of the sun and so it can be a very potent way to help buffer the decline of melanin internally and mitochondrial dysfunction in general as well so it's a really good thing to kind of couple the cold with the sun exposure and most of the time when I'm doing cold exposure it's like spring through fall I don't I will just go in like winter walks during the winter but the cold plunging I primarily do in the warmer months and a couple it with sun exposure and it's really really powerful so earlier we talked about how UVB can drive palm seed production palm seed can get cleaved into various things including the beta endorphins that we talked about there's also alpha MSH which we talked about a little bit so when we think about hunger and satiety regulation in the brain a lot of people will think about the hypothalamus because the hypothalamus is a critical part of the brain for regulating energy expenditure food intake feeding behavior and so on and so forth there's a part of the brain called the arqueous nucleus of the hypothalamus it's basically in the middle at the bottom of the brain and it's got hunger promoting neurons called agirp neurons and it's also got palm seed neurons so these are neurons that we normally think of as satiety neurons because they promote satiety and they're characterized they're named after the fact that express palm seed so can you talk a little bit about the endogenous control of hunger and satiety by the hypothalamus and then from there we'll get into you know how the azimpyx and the gilp1 drugs are working and how maybe light ties into the story and light regulates the central control of hunger and satiety yeah so I mentioned leptin earlier as this factor that's produced in subcutaneous fat turns out the amount of leptin produced in subcutaneous fat so the name subcutaneous means below the skin so it's the fat that's directly below the skin which is typically the fat that like people want to lose and they think it you know whatever it's unsightly but it's actually you know it's not unhealthy to have subcutaneous fat the most unhealthy fat is visceral fat visceral fat being the fat that's stored around your organs that's more associated with insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome essentially that's not below the skin it's actually behind like the abdominal wall and so So that's like, no. of that classic beer belly, like hard gut, kind of fat versus subcutaneous fats kind of squishing right there. So why would nature put subcutaneous fat right under the skin? Well, we can think about it this way. The light that works for our environment is going to be able to directly reach that fat at some level. And so this was kind of solidified by some research done. I believe in 2018 it was published in cell, I believe, showing that melanopsin simulation in subcutaneous fat is absolutely essential for leptin production within subcutaneous fat. Why does that matter? Leptin, when it's produced in the subcue fat, can send signals into the brain, into the hypothalamus, and essentially tell the body that, you know, there's enough energy on board. And leptin will naturally actually has a circadian rhythmicity to it as well that also kind of tends to travel along with food intake. So if you're consuming a lot of food, your leptin levels get buffered and or increased. And so that helps to inhibit appetite through this pomsimekinism and alpha-MSH production, which again increases appetite, increases energy expenditure and decreases appetite. Conversely, when you're fasting or you're on a caloric restriction diet, leptin gradually decreases over time. And that creates that rebound effect where when you stop dieting, you just want to eat everything and then you gain the weight back. That is like kind of the standard yo-yo that a lot of people get on, that yo-yo kind of dieting. That is leptin driven predominantly. Because leptin is trying to restore some level of homeostasis. The body will select some level of fat that it deems safe and optimal, which in my opinion is likely dictated by the, it's the body's ability to sense safety and abundance within its environment. Because again, if we think about UVB light, not only is it stimulating pomsiproduction, increasing energy expenditure, decreasing appetite, but it's also a signal of abundance environmentally speaking. It's a signal of summer. UVB light is at its peak in the summer. When plant foods are abundant, there's lots of fertility, animals are reproducing. There's just abundance of nutrients and energy in the environment. And so that is also a signal of that. So if we're living in an eternal winter, which basically means that we're never exposed to UV light because low UV light is a signal of winter, the body is constantly going to cling onto everything it has for dear life because it's sensing scarcity. UV light is the signal of abundance. Lack of UV light is the signal of scarcity. But at least in nature when it's winter, we kind of can counterbalance the lack of UV with cold. Because as I mentioned before, cold stimulates internal UV production and infrared as well. So that's how our bodies stay warm. We're endotherm, so we make our own body heat in the form of infrared light. And that's why you can see somebody on an infrared camera. If you get one, you can see people or animals walking around. We are essentially like light beings. We can produce our own and we can harvest it from the outside as well. But in the winter, we need that cold in order to buffer the lack of IR and UV from the environment. It's a natural homeostatic mechanism, but the problem is in the eternal winter that modern humans are living in, there's no cold. It's 73 degrees year-round. There's no UV and there's also no near infrared either because all of our window glass blocks near infrared. None of our energy efficient devices or light bulbs contain near infrared because it's seen as thermal and a waste product. And so we're living in like an eternal alien dystopian winter that our bodies have no idea how to interface with. And it's naturally going to create this state of every time any sort of nutrition comes in. We're going to hold on to it for dear life because we have no idea what's going on in this environment and there's signals of scarcity essentially coming in. And so that's how I kind of like to integrate it at a high level. But Lepton is a very important part of this pathway. As I mentioned, the Lepton Molana-Corton pathway directly ties into this poem "See Story" and helps to produce poem "See". Insulin also activates this kind of Lepton Molana-Corton pathway as well. And of course, you could kind of see why there might be an issue with insulin resistance and leptin resistance because as the names imply, essentially what leptin and insulin resistance are is when your body's producing insulin or producing leptin, but the receptors aren't sending the correct signal into the cellular environment that says, hey, leptin's high or hey, insulin's high, which means, you know, what does that mean? We're not getting the outputs that would then be associated with a higher level of insulin or leptin. And the body essentially thinks it's starving and then needs to double down even more on holding on to what it's got. So it becomes this vicious, vicious feed-forward cycle that can be intercepted by simply optimizing and creating a more evolutionarily or an excessively consistent environment in which to live, which basically just means get your butt outside, get your beer feed on the earth, collect the sun, pull shade as needed, eat a seasonal diet, and like your body will essentially take care of the rest. Is there any indication that if people just increase their UV light exposure or sunlight exposure that it helps them lose weight and become less metabolically dysfunctional? I can certainly say from a metabolic dysfunction standpoint, and I might have conjured dysfunction standpoint. Yes, I don't know if there's been any studies on like increasing midday sun and obesity. I would guess probably not because I feel like the mainstream medical system is really kind of hamstrung and like you kind of open the podcast with in Canada and in the US as well. Like people won't even have their vitamin D levels measured. The doctors can't even run through insurance anymore. And I think that was really since there was one big trial. The name is escaping me right now. They came out a couple of years ago that basically showed when you supplement vitamin D, there's not really many benefits. And so instead of recommending some exposure, which would have been the logical thing to do, they now just say, oh, don't even measure it because what can we do? We can't tell you what the sun, we can't like we've already like doubled and tripled down on set and you can't be in the sun. So, you know, we're just going to avoid the issue altogether. So when it comes to metabolic function, I really love highlighting Dr. Glenn Jeffries study from a couple of years ago. He showed, and this wasn't even with the sun, this was with just a red light panel that even just 15 minutes of deep red light exposure on the upper back was able to reduce the glucose response to an ore glucose tolerance test by 30%. So that is a very dramatic effect. And you can kind of relate that to eating a high carbohydrate meal. Essentially the glucose response was significantly less. And now imagine, you know, if you literally they shine red light onto someone's back. Yep. 670 nanometer deep red light for 15 minutes onto their backs. And then 45 minutes later, they gave them an oral glucose tolerance test. And the total area under the curve was 30% less in the group that was exposed to the light. And that was just with like 670 nanometer light. Obviously, when you're out in the sun, you're getting the full broad range of red and infrared near infrared that is helping to stimulate mitochondrial function and clear any excess nutrients from the bloodstream and help to maintain metabolic homeostasis. So yes, we do have evidence that both like a more granular level and a more like a sociational level as well showing that the light in your environment is directly impacting your metabolic status. Conversely, if you put somebody in front of screens in an indoor environment, it naturally raises blood sugar and insulin levels as well. So the body has to work harder to clear glucose. And it also makes more glucose via this cortisol mechanism that we talked about earlier, which directly stimulates glucose production. So gluconeogenesis or glycogenolysis within the liver, but then also kind of creates a bit of peripheral insulin resistance because when cortisol is acting, essentially wants to preserve glucose for the brain and less so elsewhere. And so having a cortisol dominant state, which is created from an indoor, blue lit environment, is essentially, you know, you're fomenting insulin resistance a bit every day in this environment. And especially when you're sleeping and there was research published a few years ago showing that even low levels of light in the sleeping environment dramatically increase insulin resistance and fasting insulin glucose levels the next morning. So imagine, you know, people sleeping with TVs on or, you know, small lights on in their room. They're literally creating a state of metabolic dysfunction every day and over time that, you know, it manifests into a chronic disease state essentially. Yeah, yeah. One other thing I wanted to ask you about are the effects of light exposure, filtered light exposure because we often filter light through things like glass. And one thing, there's this thing that's shared all the time online that I see and it's a picture of an old man and he was apparently a truck driver. And so the idea is he spent his whole life, you know, driving this truck. And so the left side of his face was frequently exposed to sun coming through the window of the truck and the other side of his face, the right side was not. So different, different level of exposure to sunlight, but, but critically, the sunlight is coming through the glass. And the left side of this guy's face is clearly, clearly looks worse. It's more wrinkly, it looks older, you know, he's essentially just older on that side of his face compared to the less light exposed right side of his face. And how would you interpret that? So one natural interpretation is, well, the left side of his face was exposed to more sunlight, more sunlight, more oxidative stress, more UV induced damage. Of course, it aged more. How would you interpret that picture, assuming, assuming it's true, assuming we're talking about, the guy who's got two sides of his face, very different levels of age. basically. And one side was getting this filtered light through the glass. How does the light getting filtered through the glass maybe play into this and help you think about it? Yeah, so I always kind of chuckle when people tell me that they have good natural light in their homes because the implication is that the light coming through the glass is natural and it is not as you alluded to. So glass blocks almost all UVB light about 30% of UVA light and almost all near and for a light as well. This will be like the standard window glass that we're talking here in cars and homes. So you're getting almost no UVB, you're getting much less UVA and also not getting the longer wavelengths like red near and for red light. Exactly. So you're going to stuff in the middle, the more like visible wavelengths? Yep. And so you can kind of think about it as you're still getting like 70% of the UVA which people would generally consider as like more burning rays I guess because they penetrate more deeply. But that is coupled with the fact that you're reducing the exposure to the near infrared component which is extremely important for helping to condition your tissues to be able to receive UV light effectively. Near infrared light penetrates the most deeply out of all the wavelengths of light that we're exposed to in nature in general. And if you're standing outside even on a cloudy day near infrared is able to penetrate through bone so it can reach to your brain. Essentially you can think about the body and I really like Scott Zimmerman's work on this. If you think about the body as a cylinder he basically studies human optics and optics in general that the light because it's coming in from every angle is penetrating through every crevice and nook of the system where it can directly stimulate and support mitochondrial function and bathe those tissues in deuterium depleted metabolic water as a result of that. So it's hydrating tissues. It's helping to again support and buffer mitochondrial functions so that if you're exposed to shorter wavelength light there is this counterbalance in place. If you're removing that near infrared component again now you're exposed to this alien set of frequencies that is not being is not interfacing with the system in a productive way and can create harm which could include accelerated aging and in particular tissue dehydration which is what you're really seeing when you're seeing extremely wrinkled and like age skin. Got it. So the light that you're exposed to through glass whether it's in your car or most glass in most homes like through a window that is filtering out light on the high end and the low end of the wavelength spectrum. You're filtering out the near infrared light you're also filtering out most but not all of the UV light and so it's a very unnatural non-physiological cocktail of wavelengths that you're then exposing yourself to. Exactly. So roll your windows down when you're in the car if you can and if you're going to be having you know let's say you're driving into the sun and it's if it's midday it's going to be pretty high so like you don't necessarily have to worry about that but you can always you know put your visor down if you're concerned about I don't know what people are concerned about these days but I guess if you wanted to wear sunscreen you could wear in that context but yeah circling back to blue light exposure in the evening which is just right commonplace now you're at home the sun has gone down but probably most of the lights in most people's homes are blue light emitting LEDs we've got our phones we've got our devices how how do you mitigate against that how well do things like the blue light blocking glasses work and to the extent of the so to what extent do they actually work and what is their benefit in terms of helping you fall asleep helping anything else that might come to mind okay yeah so the light coming in through the eye is what's tuning the breaks on or the gas on melatonin and so what the blue light blocking glasses can do is help to reduce the amount that blue light is impairing melatonin production in the evening however they're always a last resort in my opinion so whenever you can actually modulate and optimize the light in your environment that's what would be my first choice so what that means is like using red and kandasin bulbs in your home at evening or candlelight that would be optimal or if you you know want to go to bed when the sun goes down you could also do that depending on what time of year it is that may be more less feasible the second choice would be like red LEDs slightly less optimal than red in kandasins just because they have a very isolated sharp peak of red light and they don't have like the broad spectrum red and infrared that you get with an in kandasin bulb the third choice would be let's say you're going somewhere in the evening and you can't control the lights there that's when you would want to pop on a good pair of blue blockers the key thing about the blue blocking glasses is that for the evening time you want to make sure that they have a dark orange or red tinted lens otherwise they're not going to sufficiently block the wavelengths that you are looking to block at that time of day so yellow tinted lenses are okay for daytime if you're going to be on unfiltered screens or indoors without any sort of you know windows or anything that you can like open up to get the natural spectrum in the yellow glasses will block about 30 percent of blue light so like 400 to 500 and of course you want some blue light during the day you don't want to block all of it but in the evening time the dark orange and red lenses should block everything from 400 to 550 so 400 being the short wavelength blue all the way up through blue green which is 550 those are the wavelengths that are going to be the most disruptive to melatonin production in the brain in the pineal and so those are the glasses that you would want to opt for in the evening in order to protect your melatonin production and your circadian readmissity in that way the reason that it's not like my first line of defense is that again if we go back to the beginning of our conversation when we talked about how we want to have matching signals coming in through the eyes and the skin the way to achieve that is to directly modulate the light in our environment and not selectively block the eyes from exposure to something but also still assaulting the skin to that artificial blue light for example so that's kind of like why I have the hierarchy of modulating your light environment and if you can't do that then you opt for the glasses. Yeah yeah um is there anything that you want to reiterate from our discussion today or any final thoughts you want to leave people with about light in general? Yeah I mean I would just say at a high level that although this research and the science can get quite intricate and nuanced and detailed that really at the end of the day the take homes are very high level and simple and furthermore they're free for the most part so just literally trying to get outside in the morning get that natural ideally sunrise light but whenever you get up get that natural light from the sun into your eyes and onto your skin for a period of time the sicker you are the more morning light you're going to want to get to help rehabilitate your circadian system and your mitochondria as well then midday sun you're going to want to tune it depending on your skin tone and the latitude and season and so that you're going to have to like potentially pull shade with midday sun in order to you know get enough sun for you and again if we're using vitamin D as a biomarker if you're optimizing between 16 18 kilograms per mil through sun exposure alone you can feel pretty good that you're getting enough sun midday for you for your specific body in your location and seasonally is there anything else I want to say there yeah just that a lot of times a lot of the the wellness and health and biohacking spaces requires buying fancy gadgets supplements dot dot dot but really this is just a return to the bear basics and it honestly will give you the most return on the very small investments that you need to make if you want to buy glasses or get like filters for your computer screens like iris or efflux or you can also use native filters on your phone and your computer and your TV as well to make the more amber or red in the evening but very very small investments to get very very huge returns on your health and also your ability to think well because once you restore a healthy light environment and restore your relationship with nature your ability to think well will dramatically increase and that will then apply to every other aspect of your life you're going to start interrogating your professional your your work your relationships your friendships like everything will start to become more clear and my personal experience has been that my connection with like my intuition and my ability to act on that knowledge has skyrocketed since I fell down this rabbit hole in my entire life has changed in the past two years since I've found this work so it's just very very powerful don't underestimate something just because it's free or cheap it doesn't mean that it's not going to have a huge return I always just tell people try for yourself give it a few days and if you don't feel a dramatic difference I haven't had one person come back to me and tell me they didn't notice something very very dramatic happening in their life so I always just say give it a try and you might find yourself surprised all right with doctor Alexis Colin thank you very much for your time thank you so much for having me this was fun I don't even know how long we went hey great great support my efforts is to visit my support page at mind and matter dot substack.com a link to that page is in the episode description or you can search for it on the substack page itself the support page has an up to date list of my affiliate partners these are companies I work with and if you buy those products through those links or using the discount codes provided those will get you a great deal on a variety of products related to optimizing physical metabolic or mental health and vitality these are all products I use myself and some of them are directly related to podcast episodes or formulated by mind and matter guests for example there's a great product called keto citra formulated by a kidney biologist who is on episode number 186. 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