Lighten Up! (Part 2) 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 2) With Dr. Roger Seheult

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

Sun Exposure: The Dangers And Benefits

There is a scale where we can measure the color of our skin. The color of our skin has to do with where our mothers were born and all of that stuff, the haplotype. I don’t remember the name of that scale, but if you’re number one or the whitest of the white, you have to be careful with your exposure. I argue that even if your skin is number one on the scale or the lightest possible, you want to watch out for the sun. Won’t you benefit from staying in daylight or noon sunlight, which has UVB and UVA, for a minute?

A minute, two minutes, you build a tolerance. As Jack Cruz likes to say, “A solar callous,” so to speak. He would also argue that when you’re out in the sunrise, when UV is not present yet, and you expose your skin to the near infrared and the red, it gives it a little bit of a defense against the UVB that comes later on. What do you think about all of that?

That is true. When you get up and you’re out there, let’s just talk about the infrared light and then the ultraviolet light. In the morning, as the sun is coming up, the infrared light is starting to come up. It’s almost like a semicircle on the graph. When you hit noon, it’s at the maximum, and then as it’s going down, it’s going down like a semicircle. Think of infrared light like a semicircle.

Whereas at noontime, 10:00, 11:00, 12:00, 1:00, 2:00, you’re seeing more of a parabola going up and then coming down in terms of ultraviolet light. Yes. The best time of day for the most amount of infrared is at noontime, but the best ratio of infrared to ultraviolet light is going to be early in the morning and later in the afternoon. What does that mean? I agree 100%. If you are getting outside, or let’s say you’re going outside the whole day, it’s prepackaged into the deal.

You’re in the morning, and what’s happening is you’re getting plenty of infrared, not a lot of ultraviolet. That’s going to be causing your body to produce more melatonin and more antioxidants. It’s going to be strengthened, getting ready for the day. As that ultraviolet light comes into your body, you’ve got that antioxidant system in place. You can deal with mutations or things that occur as a result of ultraviolet, but you do need the ultraviolet.

You do need to make vitamin D. Even just for that day, your body has been getting ready for that type of onslaught, which is not much of an onslaught if you’re ready for it. If there are any damaged things that occur, if there are any covalent bonds that have been broken in addition to the cholesterol derivatives that make vitamin D, if there are bonds that are broken in the DNA, those can be fixed. Antioxidants are going to be coming once again as the sun starts to go down. Ultraviolet light is going to back off.

You’re to get more infrared light, and you’re going to be mopping up the damage that has occurred that day. The sun goes down, and then you’re ready for the next day on the other side. I think that is important. For people who have very light skin, who don’t go outside, and may hear this episode, their only chance of getting outside may be at noon. I think if they were to go out there, I would hate for them to get a sunburn and then say, “This whole thing doesn’t work for me. I’m not going to do any of it at all.”

For those people who know that they sunburn easily and sunburn, things of that nature are a product of what’s going on in the environment, the sun, and also what’s in their body that may be causing them to sunburn. It’s complicated. What we need to do is understand that people react differently, and maybe not just due to the sun but also to their genetics and maybe also due to their epigenetics. Things that they have done, not even them, but maybe their parents, that have caused them to have these epigenetic factors that go on to the third and fourth generation, that cause this thing to happen.

It’s possible that if they start getting out into the sun more and their kids start to do that in a safe way, those epigenetic things can be reversed. We don’t know this yet, but we have data where we could see that diet may influence whether or not somebody is getting a sunburn. It’s very complicated. There are a lot of factors that go into this. I think what we need to do is be cognizant of an individual who may burn more than others. We don’t want people burning. We want them to enjoy the sun. For those people covering up at first, it may be something that they need to do.

The Power Of Shade: Nature’s Sunscreen

You described it in a way that is beautiful and complete. If we go back a couple of hundred years, the daily life for most people used to be you woke up, you got out, and you spent your day pretty much outside. You go through the entire cycle that you described, the infrared in the morning, prepping you. By the way, whether you are dressed or not is immaterial because the infrared goes in, prepping you, and then the UV comes in, but you’re already prepped.

When you talk about the antioxidant, you probably meant mostly melatonin that we make inside our mitochondria as a result of the infrared. As you go outside all day long, as we used to, and then you finally go in the sunset. You get a lot of red and infrared. Also, you get the signals like “This thing is going to end, and pretty soon it’s going to be dark.” We’ll talk about that in a second, because that’s super important. You described it beautifully. We were made to be outside. Now, it’s a different time.

There’s one element that is very simple. Just like we said, the simplest thing is to open your door and step outside. That’s very simple and it’s free, as you said. Another thing that’s extremely simple is that nature provides us with a very potent sunscreen. That sunscreen is called shade. People are saying, “No, I cannot go out. I cannot have the sun.” Going to shade. We talked about the trees reflecting the near infra. Sit under a tree. Be like Newton. Start something in physics.

You might discover a law or two.

You might discover a law of physics. Shade, what is wrong? You tell me what is better to be locked inside in front of a laptop in the daytime, or to be outside completely in the shade?

Imagine you’re sitting under a tree and you’re not in direct light. Within your visual field, you can see greenery all around you that is in the sun, and it’s specially filtering out most of the ultraviolet light, if not all of it, and reflecting back at you predominantly green light, but also a very high amount of infrared light. You’re not going to get that inside. The only place you’re going to be able to get that type of infrared light is outside.

Let’s face it, when you go outside, your chances of moving and exercising go up dramatically than if you’re inside, number one. Number two, the air quality that you’re breathing, generally speaking, outside, unless there’s a forest fire or something like that, is going to be higher quality than you would be inside. Already, there are at least three benefits to simply walking out of your door and going outside.

Hats & Clothing: Protecting Yourself From The Sun

By the way, shade doesn’t have to be provided necessarily by being near a tree. Even a hat can cast shade on your face. I talked to a friend of mine about all of this. She said, “You don’t understand. I’m a woman. I cannot have any sun on my face.” Wear a hat. Look at women with big hats. That’s shade.

I often cite the Southern Sweden study, which I’m sure you know. This was the study that was done in Sweden, looking at three types of women. These are fair-skinned women living in Sweden, and there are about 30,000, I believe, and they followed them for 20 years. Those who were avidly going into the sun, those who did not go into the sun as much, and those who avoided the sun. The mortality differences between these three groups were stark. It was so stark that they found the mortality after twenty years in these women, those who sought out the sun and smoked, had the same mortality as those who avoided the sun and did not smoke.

That is powerful. That’s a very strong finding.

By the way, another paper was published by the dermatologist Richard Weller from the University of Edinburgh, who used the UK Biobank study. With ten times the number of people, both men and women, he found exactly the same thing. There was a reduction in non-skin cancer mortality. There was a slight increase in skin cancer, but no increase in deaths in terms of melanoma, I should say. This led him to write a paper that was published in the Investigative Journal of Dermatology, where he went down and listed all of the benefits of daylight.

He also showed that there have been some, even in Australia, where they have a real problem with skin cancer. The Australian societies for dermatology are now rewriting their guidelines to say, “Look, it’s not a matter of avoiding the sun like it’s a deadly laser. There is some benefit. We need to take note of that and we need to balance our recommendations, realizing that we could be saving a lot of skin cancer, but setting these patients to an early death.”

The Hidden Dangers Of Artificial Light

In the wintertime, even in high latitudes on the northern side and very low latitudes on the southern side, you’ll still get your infrared, even though you’re dressed for the cold, depending on how you’re dressed. You have an episode. You talk about what you do, you do some very useful stuff, but you talk about the type of clothing and how they block infrared. Even in the winter, and you are dressed warmly, if you go outside, you will still get that infrared light.

The Mitochondria: How Light Affects Our Cells

Yes, and that’s another aspect of this article that Glen Jeffery published in Nature Scientific Reports. What he showed was that even though the path of the sunlight or the path of the infrared light was on one part of the body, they were still able to see the beneficial effects in the mitochondria in other parts of the body that were not in the path of the light. This would answer the question. If you go outside and you’re exposing your face or your hands to the sunlight, there is still a benefit to be gained. We’re now finding it out in terms of biology that mitochondria communicate with themselves, even in different organs of the body.

It’s like Glen Jeffery’s experiment with the glucose. It goes on the shoulder. Full of system-type effects.

To nail that aspect home, I live in Southern California, but I live about a mile up. We get snow, and it gets cold. Sometimes it gets below freezing. I remember this last year, I was looking at it, it had snowed recently, and there was about 6 inches of snow on the roof. The sun was going down, and it was on this part of the roof. I could see the snow melting. It was dripping. I could see that it was actively melting. I looked at it and I said, “Yes, that’s the infrared light.”

Even when the sun is this low, right before it sets, how low can it be? That’s as low as the sun could be. Right before it sets, the infrared light is cutting through the atmosphere obliquely. It’s hitting the snow on my roof, and it’s melting it. As soon as they went down and stopped illuminating the snow on the roof, the temperature did not change, but the melting stopped immediately. As soon as the sun went down, it stopped.

That’s a demonstration to anybody concerned about “How do I get enough infrared light? I live at this very high altitude. It’s winter, it’s cold.” Rest assured that even in the winter, so long as you can see the sun, so long as you’re being illuminated by the sun, that infrared light is able to penetrate and do what it needs to do to affect those changes in your body.

By the way, I don’t know if I heard it right. I want to see what you think about it. I believe your buddy, Bob Fosbury, said that even though we like to think that at a certain latitude, we don’t get UVB, UVA in certain months. We don’t get it at all. We cannot make vitamin D in the winter. He said, “No, that is not true because of scatter.” Scatters, you get it from the cloud level, but you’re dressed up. Of course, the very short wavelengths don’t penetrate deep into your body. They stop at a millimeter or two if you are dressed warmly. I think it was him. I’m not sure.

You’re right. We’ve talked about this.

If you go out lightly dressed or maybe with your shirt off, you’ll be able to make vitamin D.

Bob and I have talked about this before. I’d love to see some data on it. It makes sense to me what he’s saying. From a physics standpoint, we know that the sky is blue because of Rayleigh scattering. That’s a scattering of short wavelengths. Of course, UVB is a short wavelength. It makes sense that the sun should be able to produce light in the ultraviolet B segments. That should be able to be scattered in the atmosphere.

The blue sky of the winter should be giving us the right kind of infrared light to produce vitamin D. On the other hand, there’s this unquestionable fact that people in the wintertime don’t make as much vitamin D. I think it’s a good explanation, one that could be tested to see if it’s because of the amount of clothes that we’re wearing, but it’s certainly a possibility.

We talked a fair amount about the benefits of certain frequencies of light. Unfortunately, this is not 200 years ago or 300 years ago. However, many years ago, electricity came on. I don’t know when fire came on. That could have been a long time ago, but even fire has a very fair amount of infrared. Obviously, it’s hot as hell, fire. We had candles and all of that, but then we got electricity.

Nowadays, it’s an exponential shift with us being locked inside. We have a small device, the size of a booklet, that we look at all day long, and the base light that powers it is a blue pump. Now we know the benefit of blue in the daytime, the blue sky is telling us, “You need to be up, court is always up, you are out and operational, and you’re running, and this is what you need to be.” Here we just saw the sunset.

We just saw the last vestiges of this beautiful red sunset, and now it’s going to be dark soon. We go inside. What do we do? I would postulate that, in light of what we talked about so far, in an ideal world. Ideally, we should just go to sleep in a completely darkened room. That is not going to happen because the sunset is at these days here where I am, Northern California, it’s about 8:30. We’re not going to go to bed at 8:30. Now we have light in the house. Not only that, we are behind glass. Anyway, glass is relevant in the daytime. We’ll talk about that in a second.

We are in the house now, and we are dying to look at our phone and see what’s going on in this country and that country and what’s the new news and everything? We look at our phone without any shield, and we probably have some shield, and what we get is blue light. I mean, our phone shows us red and yellow, and we think, “No, it’s blue light.” The blue light is telling us it’s noon time. Now it could be midnight. I believe, and please correct me if I’m wrong, that it will destroy the melatonin that we need for better sleep.

Yes. Let me put it into data. There was a study that was done that looked at how fast somebody fell asleep and what the sleep latency was. Sleep latency is the time it takes for you to fall asleep. The two arms of the study were somebody looking at a Kindle, which is a backlit electronic device where you could read in one arm. The other arm was a regular paper book that was illuminated by a soft incandescent light.

It was not even a contest. The person who was reading on a Kindle went to bed, I think it was 20 minutes versus 12 minutes. I’d have to look back at the data, and there was much more light on the spectrum when they measured the spectrum of light that was coming out. Much more light. You can reduce the amount of light and control it with a soft incandescent bulb, versus a backlit LED type of light.

I think it would be safe to say that we would be better off if we had to look at the Kindle, if we had to look at our phone, or if we had to look at the laptop. I’m looking at the laptop right now, and I’m talking to you. It’s the daytime, but I’m looking at the laptop. We would be better off wearing blue blocking glasses. Wouldn’t that be true?

That would be better than not wearing blue blocker glasses, but not better than not looking at the light at all.

That’s about the blue. However, the intensity of light is important as well. Bright lights, even if they are incandescent and have near infrared and all the stuff that our body needs, if they’re bright, not so good at night. Is that so?

That is correct. That’s why when I go to a hotel or even in my own home, I’m constantly looking around at night trying to find sources of light pollution. These radios and these devices, and these LED displays on air conditioners or on televisions. They could be very bright and disrupt the room. I mean, it’s nice that you can see around the room when the lights are off, but it’s not good for your body to have that much light going around.

The Energy Department’s Flawed Logic On Lighting

You and I both live in the United States. The Department of Energy decided something, and I can say I forked their logic. They said, “Look at the incandescent lamp. It gives you a whole lot of spectrum, but also, if you touch it after a little while, you’ll get burned. Why? It’s because it gives off infrared light, which is heat.” Wait a second. We are logical people. Of course, that’s the problem with not being interdisciplinary. They looked at one. They said, the logic says, “The infrared light is not even visible if it doesn’t help us see, and it wastes all this energy, let’s just chop it off.”

Now it’s been mandated, it may be changed, but we don’t know yet, that starting I think in 2028, we cannot buy an incandescent lamp. In San Francisco, you don’t get a building permit if you don’t use only LEDs. Now, those LEDs will not have the infrared light because it’s wasteful. The fact that our body needs it like it needs food was not discussed because they were not interdisciplinary. What do you think of all of that?

I agree 100%. When I moved into my house, which was an old construction, it was built in 1988 and therefore had sockets everywhere. The first thing I did when I moved into the house back in 2009, after that bill in Congress was signed in 2007, which formulated that, though they didn’t put it through the rules yet. I changed all the bulbs to LED bulbs, and the amount of energy used went down significantly. I found the right bulb. It was a 2,700K. It looked very similar to the incandescent bulb that I had in there.

It was a warm light, which I liked. I was very happy with it, and I went along great. There were some bulbs that I didn’t quite like, they were a little bit higher number like 3,000K. I didn’t like the way that they looked, but I thought I had done well on that. They’re still here. I still have those bulbs, and they still work. I started to read about this, and I started to understand. I started to look at these bulbs, and I realized that this issue with the bulbs, this issue with the new rule that is going to go into effect, is eliminating any infrared light that we might have inside the house.

We just said that the best thing to do is to get outside. Some people might say, “If the solution is to get outside, then what do we care about what type of lights we have in our homes?” To that, I would once again, someone who’s been looking at this question, Glen Jeffery, has a preprint out, and he wants to get this published shortly. It’s in submission where he’s taken these people who live in an LED environment. He has changed those bulbs out to incandescent, and he’s retested them, looking at their ability to perceive color.

Why would he have that as an endpoint? The reason why he would have that as an endpoint is that color perception in the retina is a cone-derived function, which requires a lot of energy that it gets from the mitochondria that surround and are in that cell. Just so you’re aware, the retina is the tissue in the body with the highest concentration of mitochondria in that tissue. This is a great way of looking at whether or not there is a benefit from switching from LED to incandescent and testing it this way.

Sure enough, in 22 subjects, there was a 25% reduction in the inability to distinguish between different types of colors in that test, where he checked for three different types of color blindness that we see in the red type of cones, then the green perceiving cones, and the blue perceiving cones. That paper is available. You can read that paper and see the data. If that is what LED lights are doing to our visual perception, then what is happening to the rest of our body that’s not getting the infrared light, which it would normally be getting inside, given the fact that we spend now in the United States 93% of our lives inside a vehicle or a home.

I understand, and you probably know much more than I. Scott Zimmerman has a company. I believe it’s called Nira Light. He is striving, and I think he’s succeeded in making a light that’s an LED light that complies with the Department of Energy’s guidelines. Yet he managed to sneak in a tungsten wire that generates infrared without exceeding the limit. Is that true?

Yes. Let’s go back to the rule. The rule in 2007 that was signed by George W. Bush is that there would be an energy standard for all that they call general service lamps. These are the types of bulbs that you put in your ceiling, generally speaking. There are a few exceptions to this, like what you might see in a decorative lamp or in a fan or something like that. Certainly, the types of bulbs in your microwave. For general service lamps, there was no standard.

In 2007, there was a bill that was passed by Congress, signed by George W. Bush, that said, “It’s now going to be 45 lumens per watt.” A lumen is a measurement of light that is biased in the yellow-green range of the spectrum. If you want to maximize the number of lumens that are coming out of a bulb, given the amount of energy that you’re putting into that bulb, which is measured as a watt, you’re going to concentrate a lot of that energy into the middle portion of that spectrum to get your best ratio.

Incandescent bulbs are anywhere from 10 to 15 lumens per watt. When the government essentially went to 45 lumens per watt, it essentially took incandescent bulbs out of the picture because there’s no way you could get that type of efficiency. The type of bulbs that we see now that you can buy at Home Depot or Lowe’s, or whatever home improvement place that you want to go to, all have the efficiency of 45 lumens per watt.

Scott Zimmerman’s bulb is no different. He’s able to produce enough light that’s visible that gets him to that 45 lumen per watt threshold and still gives out a little bit of infrared light. That’s great. The problem is that last year, the Department of Energy came up with a new rule where they are pushing to try to make these LEDs even more energy efficient than they were back in 2007. Without legislation, just by making a new rule in the Department of Energy, they raised that efficiency. Remember that an incandescent bulb is 10 to 15 lumens per watt.

These new LEDs are around 45 lumens per watt. They’re now going to raise that to about 125 lumens per watt. I’ve talked to Scott Zimmerman and a number of other people who have looked at this. It’s going to blow up the cottage industry of making LED bulbs that satisfy the current rule, but have a little bit of infrared light in them. It’s going to be very difficult to get infrared lights in these types of bulbs with this new rule that is supposed to go into effect in the middle of 2028.

Also, the effect on human health.

This is the Department of Energy that came up with this. How they came up with this is they looked at the amount of energy savings and the amount of greenhouse gases that would be eliminated by making all of this energy efficient. Because of that, they were able to calculate how much fuel would not be expended and, therefore, the particulate matter in the air, and, therefore, the cost savings in terms of health from asthma and from other respiratory diseases. Nowhere in their calculus did they consider anything about infrared light, mitochondria, and chronic diseases. It’s not even in the calculus. This was not from Health and Human Services. This is the Department of Energy, and they don’t talk to each other.

Reversing The Damage: How To Get More Infrared Light

That’s the problem. They are not interdisciplinary. What can people do who have just moved into a brand-new home? It wouldn’t even get certified if he didn’t have pure LED lights. We know that there was an experiment that you described that already showed the light, but how you distinguish lights has been degraded. You were just speculating about what he does to the rest of the body. Probably not very good.

As the years go by, people always talk about, we have more diabetes, we have more chronic disease. This is part of it. I don’t fault the Department of Energy for wanting to save you energy. That’s perfectly fine, but I’ll make one argument. I talked to a friend of mine about the LED lights at home, and my friend said, “It saves energy.” Of course, we know that it’s at the expense of health. I was trained as an engineer. When you want to make a point as an engineer, you take it to the extreme to make it very clear.

Let me give you a way that will save even more energy. It will save an enormous amount of energy. Here is what you can do. Kill everyone on the planet. That will save so much energy. It’s not so good killing and all of that. You take it to the extreme. Now you say, “We want you to use only a certain type of light that will make chronic disease higher, that will make you less healthy, but it will save energy.” It’s on the same spectrum of logic.

I understand. For people who are concerned about this and are moving into a new home, the issue is not the wavelengths from these lights. It’s the lack of the other wavelengths that should be in there. There are a couple of ways of skinning this cat, if you will, and realize that when you move into a new house and they have new light fixtures, these are not LED bulbs that you screw in, similar to an incandescent bulb.

These are designed specifically to make sure that you cannot replace these LED fixtures with incandescent fixtures. That’s the first point. You cannot switch them back. You cannot go retroactive unless you have a construction person who is willing to go up there and flip out these fixtures and put in the ones that you can screw in. The way I would go about doing this is, first of all, making sure that you’re getting outside because that’s where you’re going to get the most amount of beneficial light. That’s number one.

Secondary is trying to fix the type of light that you’re getting in your home. The way to do that would be to add light to your home that is on at the same time as these lights are on in the LED and the visible spectrum. Getting a regular lamp that you can screw in and put an incandescent bulb into there, or getting an IR bulb, an infrared bulb.

These are sorts of things that you would have on at the same time, hopefully, bathing the room with infrared lights, just like Glen Jeffery did in his randomized control trial, to improve at least the vision that we’re aware of, but maybe there are other endpoints as well. There’s something else that is coming around the corner, and I need to probably do a video on this on our channel. It’s something that’s quite amazing. There’s a company called PhosphorTech. PhosphorTech does something interesting.

Let’s get into the physics of this a little bit. Remember that these photons that are coming out of these LED bulbs that are standardized in our homes now are higher in energy than the infrared photons that we would like to see coming out as well. That’s a key understanding. The photons that are coming out are all high energy, and they’re not across the spectrum, and the type of photons that we would like to see in the infrared spectrum.

By the way, I’ll stop you right here so people can understand why. The longer the wavelength, the lower the energy. If you are going to the wavelength just of the visible light, these are shorter wavelengths. Hence, the higher energy. That’s what you mean when you say that.

Correct. What this company, PhosphorTech, is doing is they’re manufacturing this almost like a gelatinous disc. It’s squishy, and you can move it around. You can take these LED bulbs, pop off at least the A19 ones, which are the standard, put this in there, and there is a phosphorescence that occurs. It’s a light chemical reaction that occurs. When these high-energy photons in the visible spectrum go into this material, what comes out the other side is a lower-energy infrared photon. The brightness of the bulb might decrease a little bit, but now you’re using that energy to get that infrared light back. You can essentially turn any LED bulb into at least the product that you would normally see of an incandescent bulb, if that makes sense.

By the way, even incandescent light includes an amount of blue that you don’t want so much at night. Things we can do to protect ourselves. We talked about blue blocking glasses, not having the intensity of light at night be too high, going a little bit lower, and putting an extra, maybe red and infrared lights at home. By the way, you can take it one step further. You can turn off the LED lights and only leave on the extra lamps that you bought. Red and infrared. A lot of people are doing it. I’ve had people on the show, you talk to them, and their whole background is red.

The Glass Ceiling: How Windows Block Beneficial Light

I want to jump into something else, back into the daytime for a second. Some people say, “I have so much sunlight. I’m so good. My house has giant windows and I’m looking at the lake. I’m so good. I’m sitting inside all day.” We know the glass has been treated to not allow certain wavelengths, including near infrared, because it’s heat. We don’t want to heat our home. We want to save energy. Once again, in a way, when you sit and look outside of the beautiful view through your window, you’re getting an alien spectrum, so to speak, that your body doesn’t even recognize. Is that not true?

That is true. It’s called Low E-glass. You can tell if that’s what it is either by looking at the printing on the glass pane, but also if the sun is coming through that window, you should feel the warmth of that sun. If you don’t feel the warmth of that sun, which is how we interact with infrared light, then you know that glass is specifically cutting out infrared light. The reason they developed this is that it’s not going to heat the inside of your house. You’re not going to have to put the air conditioner on as much. You’ll see this, yeah.

It makes sense. I don’t fault the Department of Energy in the domain that they’re focused on. Their logic is very sound. It’s just that I wish everybody would talk to each other about health as well. Some people say that at the level of the mitochondria, they only see the byproducts of what we eat. They don’t see fat or protein. They see electrons and protons. In a way, we also get that from the visible light in the spectrum of light.

Some people would say we eat the sunlight. It’s part of our food because the food we eat in our mouth reaches the mitochondria. By the way, they talked about walking with your bare feet on the beach. The Earth has a negative charge. We have a more positive charge. We get electrons from the Earth. One could say we eat food, we eat light, and we eat the ground. I know it sounds crazy, but at the level of the mitochondria, it doesn’t sound as crazy.

It’s interesting. Scientific reductionism in this country has told us and given us a lot of assumptions that are now turning out to be incorrect. I think that this is one of them, and there are probably many, many more to be discovered. Scientific reductionism is saying that if something is good, then there must be something that, as a whole, isn’t what is doing it. There must be an active ingredient somewhere in it that we have to isolate, purify, and give high doses to get a better response. That’s not always the case.

Hot & Cold Exposure: Boosting Your Immune System

Preferably, put a patent on it. I could talk to you for nineteen hours, and I’ll still have questions, but I know we have limited time. I want to jump to something else. Some interventions that we are all talking about these days are cold exposure, sauna, and fasting. If you can talk about those things, maybe even deuterium, depleted water. I know it’s many points, but we can start, maybe with cold exposure. What do you think about it?

In looking at that, I have become very interested. Probably because of my experience in the intensive care unit with COVID, I am looking at this molecule called interferon, which is a major tool of the innate portion of our immune system. Our immune system is divided into the adaptive, which has more to do with antibodies. The innate has more to do with discovering things in our body, and invaders that shouldn’t be there, and using interferon to stop replication and attack viruses.

One of the things that has interested me is learning how to improve our own interferon naturally. There’s a study that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine. It was a randomized controlled trial, looking at interferon in patients with COVID-19, which showed a 50% drop in hospitalizations, in symptoms, and in mortality. It was a good study. We know that interferon is important. There has been a long list of studies that have looked at the effective response that people have with COVID and what their interferon response was.

When you look at the data, you see that interferon can be increased almost tenfold by simply increasing body temperature. I’ve looked at that as a potential way. Looking back historically, how people have used that, for instance, in the Spanish flu, about how to increase the temperature by using things such as hydrotherapy. A new paper that has come out shows that a lot of the regulatory enzymes that manage interferon production start to jump up at very high levels once you hit about 38 degrees Celsius, which is about 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit, which is right where we call a fever.

Generating an artificial fever can be very beneficial, and doing so for long periods of time. There was just a study that came out showing that that’s in fact the case with hot baths. The flip side of that is cooling people down. That has another effect in that it can cause demargination. That means the white blood cells that are on the inside of our blood vessels become detached. They go into the circulation. They do the thing that they’re supposed to do.

It can raise the circulation levels of interferon and things of this nature. I think it’s a tool that probably needs more research. I would love to do a randomized controlled trial with hydrotherapy in an actual setting, but we have a lot of historical data. We have some randomized controlled trial data exogenously with interferon. We have a number of studies here that show that we can get those types of levels if we were to expose the patients to an artificial fever.

You’re saying the sonar acts as an artificial fever. The cold exposure lets those white blood cells that are stuck detach, so now we have more of them.

Yes, but not only that. You spent about 20 to 30 minutes heating up the body temperature. When you come out of that, you’re peripherally vasodilated. You’re letting off a lot of that heat. That’s a normal response. What you can do is you can cause vasoconstriction of those peripheral blood vessels so that they don’t give off a lot of heat. The heat stays in the core where it’s needed, and you can cause that vasoconstriction by a short burst of cold water, not only to cause demargination, but also to cause vasoconstriction. Ironically, cold water at the end of a long period of heat can keep your core body temperature elevated for longer.

I see that, because it will constrict, the heat will stay inside. In Finland, there are millennia of going to the sauna and cold. I did hear that you should finish with cold. This is one reason why. Don’t they have studies already?

Yes. If they were to tell everybody in Finland at one moment to go inside a sauna, there would be enough room in the saunas in Finland to hold the entire population. Sauna is extremely popular there. It’s part of its culture. When they do studies in Finland on this, since there’s nobody who doesn’t do a sauna, their control group is people who do it once a week. That’s fascinating. The data coming out of there is incredible. There’s a dose-response curve. The more people, the more times per week people do this, the better the effects, lowering cardiovascular mortality and so forth. It’s incredible.

Do you want to talk about deuterium, or should we leave it to some?

I’m not that much of an expert on deuterium. I know it’s water that has hydrogens that have an extra neutron in the nucleus, but I’m not that up on it. I work full-time doing critical care medicine. The areas that I’ve tried to keep up on are a few. I’m not up on that area.

Roger, I want to thank you for your incredible generosity with your time. I know you’re super busy, but I learned a lot. I hope our audience did too. Thank you so much for being here.

Thank you so much. It was a pleasure.

Important Links

• Dr. Roger Seheult on LinkedIn
• Dr. Roger Seheult on X
• Dr. Roger Seheult on MedCram
• PhosphorTech

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.