Lighten Up! (Part 1) With Dr. Roger Seheult

Adiel Gorel joins Dr. Roger Seheult, distinguished global expert on the power of sunlight on our circadian rhythm and overall health, to discuss the many implications of our sunlight deprived society. After years of demonizing the sun, new research is showing the importance of sunlight, even indirect unfiltered sunlight, on our mitochondria, and overall health. who knew something as simple as free sun exposure could be so transformative and powerful for our wellness. This 2-part podcast is certainly enLIGHTening!

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Lighten Up! (Part 1) With Dr. Roger Seheult

Why Sunlight Deprivation Is A Cause Of Poor Health, And How You Can Benefit From The Sun Safely

I’m especially excited. We have Dr. Roger Seheult with us. Roger, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much. It’s a pleasure to be here.

The Core Of Health: Why Light And Darkness Are Essential

I’ve been watching your materials. I watched you on podcasts, and you are a Renaissance Man in the field of health. We could be here for seven hours talking about everything that you talk about. Of course, we are not going to do that. I know about the point that you have, but I would like to focus, and probably that’s what most people do when they talk to you, on the sunlight, darkness at night, artificial lights, the mitochondria, and near infrared. I think that’ll give us enough meat on the bone.

I agree with you. There’s a lot there.

When it comes to all of that stuff, and in general, maybe you can give us a little background.

I have looked into this primarily because of what has happened in the last few years in terms of our sudden interest in health. I’ve come at it as well from a healthcare provider standpoint, not only taking care of patients in the intensive care unit, but also what I do on the outpatient side, which is sleep medicine and circadian rhythm, where sunlight and darkness and sleep meet circadian rhythm, all of this is integrative.

To start, as human beings, we are designed to have light when it’s time to have light, which is in the day, and to have darkness when it is time to have darkness. We see this quite a bit, these two extremes that are both beneficial for human beings. It’s all a matter of timing, just like everything else. Exercise is important, but so is rest. Light is important, but so is darkness. How that all fits in is very complicated, but it’s easily able to be worked out. Here’s the good news. There are some very simple, actionable, low-cost, very inexpensive, dare I say, free ways of implementing some of these things that can have a tremendous benefit on people’s lives.

Unlocking The Power Of Morning Light: Circadian Rhythms And Mood

I completely agree. That’s the gist of why I have this show. I love to bring the message down and make it simple because sometimes, I talk to people who are in a very refined place, and they talk in that way. I bring them down to earth. What can we do? I love to hear that you speak like this. Also, what could be useful to people? This is a big topic because every day that goes by, the situation worldwide gets worse. I would almost say it gets worse exponentially. If you can tell us, why do we need the morning light? Why do we need the light in the day? What does it do to us?

We’re going to stick to sunlight. From there, we can deviate and talk about why some of the things other than sunlight may not be as beneficial. Let’s talk about sunlight. There are two major threads as to why this is helpful and beneficial. There is the sunlight that goes into your eyes and interacts with your retina. There’s the sunlight that doesn’t do that. We have great data now that shows that sunlight passes through your body and can be measured on the other side. That sounds incredible, but we have hard data that shows this is the case.

We could probably start with the thing that makes the most sense for most people. That is light that goes into the eyes. What is it, and why is this important? Let’s back up and let’s talk about circadian rhythm. I have a friend who worked at Disneyland for many years, but he worked at night. When he worked at night, that park in Disneyland here in Southern California is a completely different park than you would possibly imagine if you were to visit there during the day.

Engineers are shutting down the rides and testing them. Gardeners are weeding the gardens. There are people who are cleaning out the cash registers, restocking the gift shops. These are all things that cannot happen during the day when you go to Disneyland, because it’s going to ruin the experience. Disneyland is not going to be the park that the owners want it to be during the day, but to have it that way requires something else to happen at night. Can you imagine if the engineer showed up during the day and shut down Space Mountain, for instance? That would take away from the effect of visiting that park during the day. The list goes on and on. I think you get the idea.

Our bodies are far more complicated than Disneyland, and yet, that very simple thing needs to happen. There are numerous complicated things that we could get into the weeds, but let me say this. Many processes are occurring at night, some of which we understand, some of which we don’t understand yet, that are imperative in making sure that when you get up in the morning, you are as pristine, as clean and as ready for the day as the Disneyland Park is at 8:00 in the morning when they let their first visitors in.

You can already see there how important it is for the circadian rhythm to be on track and making sure that things that are happening during the day are happening, to the flip side of that, to make sure that things at night are not happening. The things that are happening during the day are ruled by light. The body has grown accustomed and is hardwired in that if it sees light, it’s going to be doing the things that it normally does during the day.

The lack of light is darkness. If it “sees” darkness or is in darkness, then that’s going to allow all of those things that are supposed to happen at night to happen. You can already see there’s an issue where if we are starting to do bright lights, lights in general at night, that’s going to be a problem. If we have darker days that do not tell our body that it is daytime, we’re going to have a problem there.

There was a paper that was published in 2024, and the paper was titled Dark Days and Bright Nights. This was an incredible study where they gave watches to individuals with light sensors on them. They were sensing visible light, and they were able to granularly measure the amount of light that people were getting by the hour. They were able to measure this for weeks or two. They were able to extrapolate over years and follow these people to see what happened to them. Many subjects in this study.

What they found was very interesting. They were able to plot out, by the hour, what happened to the people who received 90% of the light. In other words, which people received the most amount of light throughout the day and the night? They could see what would happen was very amazing. People who had the most amount of light exposure during the day had reduced mortality rates. In other words, their mortality rates were significantly reduced.

Right about 10:00, 11:00, 12:00 at night is when these granular bars by the hour suddenly flipped and went over 1.0. Meaning that now, light was no longer a benefit. It was a liability. Now, these people started to die more likely than they would’ve if they did not have this bright light. Think about that. That’s a huge endpoint where we’re talking about the effect of simply light can affect not just how you feel, not just depression, not just sickness. We’re talking death. You can imagine how powerful this effect is.

Why is it important? Your first question is, why is it important for people to get bright sunlight in the morning? That bright sunlight, first of all, is the brightest thing around at that time of day. It’s brighter than the light in your room. It’s brighter than watching television or opening up your iPad. The sun that you get in the morning is the brightest thing that’s available to you.

Brightness matters because it tells your circadian rhythm that it’s daytime, and it needs to start getting ready for the day and processing it. You get higher cortisol levels, you shift the circadian rhythm a little bit earlier, so that you can feel sleepier and go to bed earlier. There are a number of reasons why. There’s a second reason why, and that is another pathway in the eye that goes back to the brain to the master clock. There’s another one in addition to that one.

When you get bright light exposure into your eyes, it goes to that area of the brain that reduces the chances of depression, specifically seasonal affective disorder. This is a disorder that’s more common, especially in areas that have very high latitudes in the Northern hemisphere or very Southern latitudes in the Southern hemisphere. In other words, closer to the poles, where in the wintertime you can go for weeks, potentially, depending on what time you wake up, without seeing the sun.

In this type of situation, they have something called sad lamps that have been shown that if you put people on these sad lamps that give out about 10,000 lux of light. As a comparison, the sun on a bright sunny day is about 100,000 lux. This is 1/10th of that. Yet still looking at that for about 20 minutes, about 11 to 16 inches from your head, that’s about 45 centimeters or so, that can reduce the incidence of depression.

To summarize the question and the answer, why is it important to expose your eyes to bright light in the morning? Number one, it solidifies and stabilizes your circadian rhythm, telling your body that this is the morning, and it’s time to start doing all those things that are best for the morning. That’s number one. Number two is that it reduces the incidence of mood disorders such as depression.

It sets the stage for later on at night when you go to bed. It already starts right there. We talk about that a lot more as we go. We had Martin Moore-Ede here. I’m sure you know him. They discovered the central clock. He said something interesting. He said that our natural rhythm is a little bit off the 24-hour cycle. When we re-sync it in the morning, you are well synced, so to speak. The way I look at it, not only do we have trillions of cells, but we also have many mitochondria in most of our cells, except the red blood cells. Those trillions do their thing. They don’t do it randomly. You can think we have trillions of clocks. When you are reset, like Disneyland, it starts you off in a good way.

The Invisible Healers: Near-Infrared Light & Mitochondrial Health

If you don’t mind, let’s go a little bit deeper into the light of the sun. We know we have the spectrum. We have the visible light and then the non-visible light on both sides. In the morning, when you go out, UVA and UVB are still not present, but you get a fair amount of red. The other side of the visible light, which is non-visible, is near infrared, and of course, the far infrared and blue. You get blue. We know that technically, blue is also a signal to your brain that it’s daytime. You need to be up, you need to be alert. That will cause damage later on at night, which we’ll talk about. In the morning, you have an abundance of red and infrared, and blue, let’s say. What do those things do now that we go into those wavelengths a little more?

That was the second aspect of light. We talked about what interacts with the eyes and the mitochondria and the eyes and the visual pathways. Let’s talk about the light that can penetrate your body, not where the eyes are, but into the cells of your body. Dr. Glen Jeffery, who is a professor in the Department of Ophthalmology at University College London, published a study in Nature Scientific Reports.

A very elegant study where he was able to show that taking subjects outside at high noon, the sun was able to pass through, and specifically the longer wavelengths that we’re talking about here. That type of light was not only able to penetrate through the clothing of these people, although in the first part of the study, he did it without shirts on.

It was able to penetrate through 30 centimeters of the thorax. They were able to measure a measurable amount of light coming out the other side that had with it the same pattern as the sun in the longer wavelengths. What he was able to show was that not only does this infrared light pass through the body, but it’s also absorbed in large amounts because a very small amount came out the other side. Very large amounts of this are being absorbed in the body.

Why would he do this? The reason why he would do this is because there’s ample evidence, not only by his lab, but also by Scott Zimmerman, Russell Reiter. These are scientists who have also published in the Journal of Melatonin Research, which shows that this type of infrared light, this long wavelength light that you cannot see, interacts with the mitochondria in the cells and produces a number of factors, of which they believe melatonin is one of those. It upregulates the amount of outputs of ATP, which is the currency of energy in the cell, and makes the cells more efficient. They’re able to metabolize more.

They were able to detect this in another paper by Glenn Jeffery, where he did this on subjects with light on their back. He was able to show that not only was the glucose reduced after a glucose tolerance test, showing that, in fact, the mitochondria were revving up, but the byproduct of all of this, which is carbon dioxide, was also increased and exhaled breath in these very subjects. To get back to your question then, what’s going on with these wavelengths, these invisible wavelengths things that are very specific to the sun, is that it has a tremendous impact, not only in our body, but by the way, also in the light that goes into the eye, especially at the back of the retina.

Infrared Light’s Deep Dive: Penetration and Mitochondrial Benefits

One thing you said now was new to me, because normally, when you and other scientists talk about the penetration of near infrared into the body, you talk about 8 centimeters. You said that Glen Jeffery showed 30 centimeters. Thirty centimeters is your entire torso. It goes in and out.

The initial data on that was from 2019 by Scott Zimmerman and Russell Reiter. They published a paper called Melatonin, the Optics of the Human Body. It was published in that paper in 2019, that 8 centimeters was what they measured. This is a brand-new paper that showed that 30 centimeters is what this can penetrate through.

For the readers, we go through the spectrum of light. We have the visible light, you know the colors, it’s the colors of the rainbow, where red would be the longest length of the waves. At the shorter end, right below the visible spectrum, we have UVA, and then shorter than that even is UVB. There’s also UVC, which, by the way, turns out to have something to do with what happens inside of us. We are going to leave it alone for now because it doesn’t reach the Earth. You have UVB, the shortest one that reaches us, UVA, and then you have the visible spectrum, red, and then comes the invisible infrared spectrum. Most of the benefits that you talk about relate to the mitochondria and have to do with near-infrared light. Is that correct?

Yes.

What’s the wavelength?

It’s interesting because Glen Jeffery has tested both 670 nanometers, which is right in the visible spectrum, and is red, and it has worked there in terms of reducing glucose. In this most recent paper in Nature Scientific Reports, he used 850 nanometers and was able to show an improvement in vision, even though the beam was not going over that part of the body.

There are so many questions here. I don’t even know where to go. I’ll randomly say the first one that comes into my mind. If you go to a library, not that libraries exist as much as they used to, but if you go to a library, you’ll see there’s a whole shelf on red light therapy. Many of those books will be on red light and near infrared light. Indeed, people are very enterprising. There are many red and infrared panels. Some of those panels were used in some of those experiments.

However, a very basic question that I have, never mind that you have to navigate which panel to use and the risks associated with EMFs, maybe it wasn’t well built. Assuming you found a panel that is built very well, people would say, or we would say here, it’s beneficial to have a panel that brings out red and infrared light. My question is, why do we need a panel when all we need to do is open the door and step outside, and we have a much better panel, not 670, but 671 and 672? Why do we need a panel when we have the sun?

I 100% agree with you. It must be a characteristic of human behavior that we try to take what is good for us and try to make it into something artificial. I don’t know the answer to that. I think the question is, are these panels simply replacing what we would normally get from the sun? I believe the answer is yes. There is some data on this.

There was a paper that was looking at this, and they were in this environment where they were surrounded by LED lights inside an office building. In other words, in an area that’s not bathed in infrared light that you would get outside, what they noticed was this. When they introduced these types of panels at their desk, so that they would get infrared light and red light, like we’re talking about now, they noticed that it didn’t have the same effect in the summertime as it did in the wintertime.

Why would that be? People are much more likely when they go outside after work, after they’re not working that environment in the summertime, to get some of that infrared light from the sun, and less likely in the wintertime, because the sun gets up late and goes back down early. To me, those findings imply that these red lights, these red panels, are simply a poor substitution for a very overall damaging problem with what we have, which is infrared light deficiency.

Think about it this way. Imagine you’re on a British ship 300 years ago. This is when scurvy was at its height of the thing. Imagine that you’re passing out these lemons to people, and the scurvy is going away. Their gums are no longer bleeding. They’re able to do very well. It’s a miracle. You realize that a few of these people may have had a little bit of lemon juice on the side previously. A tiny, small amount, so that they’re able to have a mild scurvy or maybe not scurvy at all.

Do you think the lemons are going to help those people on the ship from the mild or no scurvy that they might have? The answer is no, it’s not going to do that because it’s not replacing a deficiency that they have. They don’t have a deficiency. What all of this means, I think if we boil it down here, is that I believe that red light panels in general are beneficial only because of the 21st-century scurvy that we have now, which is lack of getting outside, lack of sunlight, and these sorts of things.

I believe that if we were to take these red panels and go back 50, 60, 100 years ago, I don’t believe that they would have the same benefits. I can never prove that. If we go to other cultures of the world, cultures that have plenty of sunlight, good question. Would these panels work on that population? I’m not sure. I would be very interested to see if they do.

That being said, in my profession, certainly, there are patients who are in the intensive care unit for whom it’s risky for them to get outside. They’re hooked up to oxygen, to ventilators, to drips. To get these people packed up and mobile to get them outside is a noble cause. Sometimes the risks outweigh the benefits because they’re so unstable. Do I think that there’s no role for these panels? No. I think there is a role, especially for people who can’t get out into the sun, but if you could get out into the sun, that’s your best bet.

Melatonin: More Than Just Sleep – An Antioxidant Powerhouse

It makes so much sense, especially since even when we talk about the panels, we assume a perfect panel, and maybe they’re not perfect. Maybe some of them are not made well. The sun is made pretty well. We can count on that. If we go on the trajectory of the infrared light, in the majority of the cells in the body, we have a number of mitochondria. The mitochondria create ATP through the electron transport chain. There’s a whole process. How does infrared light, which we know can penetrate deep enough to hit every cell in mitochondria in the organelle, how does it stimulate? What does it do to our mitochondria?

That’s a very good question. That’s the million-dollar question. We don’t know the exact mechanism, although we have some clues. We see that melatonin for sure is being actively made in the mitochondria. We know that its levels rise when it is exposed to this type of light. We know that there are certain proteins in the electron transport chain that have receptors for light. One of them is called cytochrome IV oxidase. That chrome portion of its name implies that it has color to it, which means it’s absorbing light.

There are a number of factors. We know that nitric oxide is produced in the presence of infrared light. There are a number of areas that scientists are working on. What we can do is, we can say this, that based on randomized controlled trials produced at UCL, University College London specifically, it has shown that the presence of infrared light not only reduces the fuel, in other words, it increases fuel consumption, increases metabolism, and it also increases carbon dioxide. All of those are things that happen at the mitochondrial level.

Where the details may still be being worked out, the concepts are there with very good evidence. If you look at oxidative stress, which is the heat in the engine that has to be dealt with, oxidative stress is the product of oxygen, which we breathe into our lungs and is converted into water. That happens in the mitochondria at the electron transport chain.

When that doesn’t happen perfectly, there are chemicals that are produced that lead to oxidative stress. Things like superoxide, hydrogen peroxide hydroxy radicals. All of these things can be mopped up very efficiently with the most powerful antioxidants that we know of. Even more powerful than glutathione which is melatonin.

This is a very important point for everybody who is reading this. The conception or the concept of melatonin is that it’s the sleep thing. It’s produced in the pineal gland. You’re saying Zimmerman and Reiter showed yes, but it’s also made right there in the mitochondria. I think you used the wonderful analogy. You say you have a car engine that runs and runs, and it gets heated. That’s the reactive oxygen species and all the other things that you mentioned. If you let the engine work and don’t cool it off, it’s going to blow.

You’re saying, we can almost use an analogy that melatonin serves as the coolant to the engine that is the mitochondria that makes the energy. It’s made in the mitochondria, which means everywhere except the red blood cells. Everywhere in our body, we make melatonin all day long, not just at night or anything like that. That’s a huge statement.

The reason why we’re now finding out about it is because it’s not detectable, per se, in the blood like we would see with circadian rhythm melatonin production in the brain, the pineal gland. Instead, this is made not only inside of a cell, it’s inside of an organelle inside of a cell. It’s difficult to get down to that level and measure it, but there are some ways of doing it.

It does leak out sometimes into the cell and the sweat, for instance. There are sweat monitors that can pick up melatonin. What they’re finding is that even though pineal melatonin production is essentially zero during the day because light is coming into the eye. It shuts it down completely, as it should. We’re able to measure melatonin spikes on these sweat sensors that people wear, which are looking at this from a research standpoint.

Decoding Carbon Dioxide: The Natural Byproduct Of Life

I want to clarify something for our readers. You mentioned that the emission of carbon dioxide is a measure of a positive effect, but people are associating those words with something negative. Can you talk about it a little bit?

We make carbon dioxide as a byproduct. If you think about carbon, we’re carbon-based individuals, and the carbon that we consume has to be high-energy carbon. What are high-energy carbons? It’s carbons that are connected to things on the left side of the periodic table, so Hydrogens. That’s why hydrocarbons like fuel, gasoline, diesel, sugars that we eat, fats that we eat, this is where energy is. Whether you’re talking about animals, whether you’re talking about engines, the energy that comes from running those things has to come from high-energy carbons.

What happens in the process of extracting that energy is that these carbon atoms eventually are connected to things with very low energy, and that would be oxygen. The lowest oxygen that goes into the body combines with carbon, and the product is carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide comes out of engines, and carbon dioxide comes out of humans. It is a natural product of animal or human metabolism.

The good news is that trees take this and they reenergize these carbons with light from the sun in a process called photosynthesis, releasing the oxygen once again to be used and storing the carbon inside of its plant, fruit, or whatever product the plant makes. It’s the other half of this cycle of what humans do and what things that photosynthesize do.

Green Spaces: Nature’s Secret To Health And Longevity

When we talk about trees, trees usually have green or greenish leaves, which says something about the color green and its absorption. You also say that trees and greenery reflect near-infrared light. It can be shown in cameras.

Absolutely. Let’s start from the 30,000-foot level, literally. The way that we can measure the size of a forest and keep an eye on things like deforestation or reforestation is simply by measuring the amount of infrared light that reflects back into space. We have satellites that measure infrared light and can very accurately measure the amount of foliage and green spaces from space.

You don’t need to launch a satellite to see that. You can simply take an infrared photograph of trees and leaves, and things of that nature. You can see that they light up like a Christmas tree. They’re very bright in the situation, and they reflect a lot of that light back to you. You can get much more infrared light if you’re in a green space. That’s important because they’ve done some research on this.

We’ve known for decades. You could go to your AI engine or Google and type in do people who live in green spaces have reduced incidences of diabetes? The answer is yes. Do people who live in green spaces have a reduction in cardiovascular mortality? The answer is yes. Do people who live in green spaces have a reduction in all-cause mortality? The answer, again, is yes.

The reason for this, I believe, is that people who live in green spaces are getting more of this infrared light than we do now. Maybe not more now than we used to get 100 years ago, but certainly more than we get now. I think the most impressive evidence of this was published in 2024. The premise was or the explanation was that people who live in green spaces have a lower mortality. They have a lower all-cause mortality, a lower cardiovascular mortality, and a lower rate of diabetes. Why is that? It’s because the people they said who tend to live in these places have more money. They’re able to be more upwardly mobile, and they exercise more. It’s the population that we’re dealing with. That’s the reason why there’s so much better.

There’s something called the Green Hearts Study that was done in Louisville, Kentucky. What they did was they measured something called the highly sensitive CRP levels. This is a measurement of inflammation in the body, and it’s a surrogate for what your chances are of getting a stroke or a heart attack. You don’t want a high number. You want a low number.

They went around and measured about 700 people in a 4-square-mile area of South Louisville, Kentucky. It’s kind of urban, not a lot of trees, a lot of buildings, things of that nature. They measured it, and then what they did was something extraordinary. They got and delivered, dug a hole, and planted 8,000 mature trees. That means with leaves on them. We’re talking about leaves specifically here and how they reflect infrared light.

They went about 2 to 3 years later, and they measured everybody’s highly sensitive CRP levels, and they saw something amazing. There was anywhere between a 13% and 20% drop in the same people that they measured, even though there was no increased incidence of exercise; they didn’t give out money to increase their social mobility. This was just planting trees in an area of urban sprawl. They were able to reduce the h the HSCRP levels by that much, which translated into about a 15% reduction in stroke.

That is completely fascinating, because it also shows a secondary point that you don’t need to be in the midst of the green. In this case, the green was in the neighborhood. You’d say, “I want to go out in my garden. Shall I go and hug my tree? Shall I be so close to the green?” At least from this experiment, no. Just be in the general vicinity.

We had somebody on this show a couple of years ago from the University of Nippon in Tokyo, who is also a researcher at Stanford, and he talked about forest bathing. He talked about all the facets, the smell. There’s a specific tree that you can distill the smell from, and they measure everything all the time. Even the visual, they put people in a hotel room with pictures of trees, and they could already measure.

It was the Hinoki Cypress forests in Japan.

Exactly. The infrared wasn’t mentioned explicitly, but I’m sure this is a major part of it.

Absolutely. In those studies, what they were looking at were natural killer cells and the granzymes and things that were inside those natural killer cells. They showed that they increased not only when they took them up and had them walk around in the forest, but also when they infused that essential oil, the hinoki cypress oil, in the hotel rooms in downtown Tokyo.

Interestingly, though, as I recall from that study that he did, there was a number of studies that he did. The cortisol levels in the urine were lower in those who were in the forest compared to those who were in the hotel room. There are a few things that you can replicate, but I would say again that fresh air or the air that you breathe in the forest not only is made up of these phytoncides, as they call them, these things that are found in the trees, the Hinoki Cypress, multiple chemicals that are beneficial for our immune system and can last up to a week, even a month in some cases, as they found in that study.

There are also bacteria and beneficial bacteria. We all know about the gut microflora that’s beneficial. We’re starting to understand that more. There’s a respiratory, if you will, an air microflora that has shown some benefit. I used to believe that fresh air and the best type of air was air that was completely clean and had nothing but nitrogen and oxygen. My thinking is coming around to this. The complex systems that we have in nature are designed for our benefit.

People have always naturally gravitated to green. I understand the argument about the money. Anybody who has money and builds a fancy home, one of the fancy things will be a garden and trees. Even people at any socioeconomic level will get a plant and will plant flowers. There’s always been a human tendency to seek that. Probably the infrared, not that people necessarily know what it is, but it feels good.

It does. There is some data that I’ve gotten from Bob Fosbury that I need to process and put out there. He may be getting ready to publish it himself, I’m not sure. He’s taken a number of photographs of this fern that he has. Bob Fosbury, by the way, for those who don’t know, is an astrophysicist. He’s collaborated with Glen Jeffery on a number of these projects. He’s also in the Department of Ophthalmology at UCL.

It’s amazing on the histogram of the spectrum of light that, for instance, underneath a fern tree in a corner tucked away where it’s dark, the visible light is at a minimum, but there’s quite a lot of infrared light. This is very hopeful for me, especially for people who are concerned about getting skin damage from ultraviolet rays. There’s a debate about whether or not ultraviolet light in the setting of the sun can cause damage when you’re only out there for a short period of time. For those people who are concerned, there are things that you can do to mitigate a lot of that visible ultraviolet spectrum and still get plenty of infrared light, especially if you are in and around a garden.

Unveiling UVB’s Secrets: Beyond Vitamin D And Skin Deep

Now I’m going to jump all the way to the other end of the spectrum from the near infrared, and I’m going to go straight into what you mentioned. The UVB. Shorter one there. We know that UVB, when it hits your skin, stimulates the production of Vitamin D. It’s beneficial. However, many would say, if you go to a lot of dermatologists, although now there are many dermatologists that are starting to come around, the standard will still be that no tan is a good tan, don’t be in the sun. UV will damage your skin.

If we look even at the shortest wavelength, which means the highest intensity light, that could maybe cause the most damage. UVB, we do know about the positive things. It creates Vitamin D. People could say, “You can supplement,” but we also know about the POMC, which cleaves into nine different products, including endorphins.

Somebody, I don’t know who it was, maybe Jack Cruz, said we were designed to be addicted to the sun because UVB on our skin creates endorphins when the POMC cleaves, and many other beneficial products. I think this is a place where there is a lot of tension these days. I want to suggest something, and I want to see what you think about it.

Important Links

• Dr. Roger Seheult
• Dr. Roger Seheult on LinkedIn
• What’s Your Light Diet? With Martin Moore-Ede
• Adiel Gorel on LinkedIn

About Dr. Roger Seheult, MD

Dr. Seheult is currently an Associate Clinical Professor at the University of California, Riverside School of Medicine, and an Assistant Clinical Professor at the School of Medicine and Allied Health at Loma Linda University.

Dr. Seheult is quadruple board-certified in Internal Medicine, Pulmonary Diseases, Critical Care Medicine, and Sleep Medicine through the American Board of Internal Medicine.

Roger’s current practice is in Beaumont, California where he is a critical care physician, pulmonologist, and sleep physician at Optum California. He lectures routinely across the country at conferences and for medical, PA, and RT societies, is the director of a sleep lab, and is the Medical Director for the Crafton Hills College Respiratory Care Program.

In 2012 he and Kyle Allred founded MedCram L.L.C., a medical education company with CME-accredited videos that are utilized by hospitals, medical schools, and hundreds of thousands of medical professionals from all over the world (and over 1 million YouTube Subscribers). His passion is promoting healthy lifestyles and regularly lectures to schools, hospitals, and media outlets. Dr. Seheult was the recipient of the 2021 San Bernardino County Medical Society’s William L. Cover MD Award for Outstanding Contribution to Medicine and the 2022 United Health Group’s The Sages of Clinical Service Award. In 2022, both Roger Seheult and Kyle Allred received the HRH Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa Medical Merit Medal from the Kingdom of Bahrain for their contribution to health policy in the Kingdom of Bahrain.