Sun Light: Nature’s Abundant & Free-Flowing Wellness Powerhouse With Scott Zimmerman

Adiel Gorel and renowned light expert, Scott Zimmerman, deep dive into the many ways that sunlight is critical for your wellness and longevity, despite years of the medical industryz making sunlight a villain. In this two-part series, Adiel and Scott cover an enormous body of ground and explore the findings from Scott’s research and participation in the emerging circadian wellness movement. Don’t miss this powerful conversation to uncover how exposing yourself to more sunlight, in the right way and appropriate doses, can supercharge your health – just in time for spring!

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Sun Light: Nature’s Abundant & Free-Flowing Wellness Powerhouse With Scott Zimmerman

I’m very excited to have somebody who can truly make a difference in our lives and has great information that we should all know, Scott Zimmerman. Scott, welcome to the show.

Thank you. I appreciate it.

Scott, I’ve read a lot of your work. I heard a lot of your work and I truly do believe what I said that the knowledge that you can share can make a difference in all of our lives. I don’t even know exactly where to start because there’s so many points of reference to go to. I’m going to let you lead by taking the road. Probably when you get on interviews, people describe the route that brought you here. I’m going to say the same thing.

Scott’s 40-Year Experience In Optics And Displays

I have many years of experience in optics and displays. I have 86 issued patents in the area. I basically was looking around for some new ideas. Particularly, I started out with talking to Hamlin about near infrared because I was interested in sunlight. I had been looking at sunlight in this totality. For people who don’t know, sunlight is 280 nanometers out to almost 6,000 nanometers. We have a warped sense of what that is, and we can talk about that later. Most people see a curve that looks like it peaks up then visible and goes down to nothing in the near infrared.

When you get into it, it’s a lot more complicated than that. I was looking around and I thought about it. I had some ideas around how to make light sources that were closer matched to sunlight. Along the way, my granddaughter ended up with neuroblastoma and I got very interested. My wife and I got very interested in trying to understand the effect of sunlight. Not to fix anything or get rid of chemo, but to essentially enhance the effectiveness of chemo. That’s still a focus of the company, even though we’re selling light bulbs at this point. It’s a small to person company for when the wife is in.

I like to say that we’re the only incandescent or the only light bulb manufacturer, bass light bulb manufacturer producing in the United States. Which is a true statement, but it doesn’t mean that much. Along the way, I’ve been lucky in this process and this has been a several year process. It has been to work with some amazing people like Russell Reiter. Russ and I got together on a couple of three different publications.

Russ is the grandfather of melatonin and a world expert. He has 100,000 citations in it. In talking to him, I was bringing a different side of the equation, the optic side versus the biology side or the hormone side. We did a couple of papers there and then I was lucky enough to team up with Glen Jeffery, Bob Fosbury and Roger Seheult, and we’re still working together. We’re getting ready to put out a publication that will hopefully change people’s view.

In general, I’d say most of my career has been finding people who are the world’s experts in a particular area working with them. I’m more of a generalist. They are experts in a particular field but I’m looking at it maybe with a broader view. It’s been amazing to work with some of these people. Hopefully, we’ll go further down the road here soon and start changing how people view things.

That’s basically how I got to where I’m at. As I say, I do believe that one part of your statement is not just about me but in general. We’re coming into a time where we’re beginning to understand the effect of sunlight on the body and how we can maybe use it. You’re seeing more cases where all of you are exposed to this particular wavelength range then it has an effect on getting out of the hospital sooner or if you’re near the window. These are all things that have been out there for a lot of years. People inherently even sense it. You feel better in the summer than you do in the winter. You get sicker in the fall or whatever.

What’s happened is most people don’t understand that the largest energy input into the body is from sunlight, or at least it used to be. The body over millions and millions of years has adapted to sunlight in ways. Whereas certain biological functions are now starting to be shown to align with certain wavelengths of light for optimum performance. In general, trying to get people to move away from what they see with their eyes and start looking at the entire solar spectrum and not be afraid of it. Unfortunately, there was a big push back in the 1900s light and going to a sanitarium where there’s high altitude in the sun. That was the norm.

Why LED Lighting Is Actually Toxic

When antibiotics came along, there was a concerted effort to essentially pufo that technology or that science. Now, we’re swinging back around and I would make the statement at this point. We pretty well can say that LEDs are toxic to most people, especially children. We are also beginning to understand why from an optic standpoint and a biology standpoint. It’s unfortunate but we’re up against competing. I got the Titanic coming down on me with all this energy savings and lumens per watt and all this other stuff.

In reality, all that is costing us much more in the way of energy because people are getting sick. That’s where I may have changed. When I first started doing this, I was looking at how you can maybe enhance or make people healthier or things like that and all this other work. Now, it’s coming down that we understand why LED lighting is making people sick and it’s harmful. That doesn’t go over well with a lot of the lighting companies. They’re going to try very hard to do a little but not too much so that they can still use what they’re doing now.

It’s unfortunate because everybody pretty well accepts that chronic disease, particularly metabolic diseases, are on the rise. Especially within children and young adults. It’s no longer an old people thing. It’s getting to be something where younger people are having issues earlier. They need to understand that a good portion of that is associated with the light environment that they’re in. As I said, it’s interesting when I started working with Glen. Glen’s probably one of the most ethical guys I’ve ever met in my life, but he was working.

What he noticed, at least in LED form, was causing all these problems. He immediately quit using blue light in people experiments then he started looking at 650 then he looked at 850. Now we’re up to the point that all of us probably in the group would say that nature is broadband. There are no such things as narrow band emitters. Incandescent, campfire, sunlight, and moonlight all have spectral content over the entire 280 or 250 to 6,000 nanometers. If you don’t provide that, you are making it more difficult for the body to operate at its peak efficiency.

It is amazing to me how people will spend so much money on all their food and additives and yet going outside is considered a bad thing. That’s what’s exciting. I won’t go into too much detail but what we’re finding is, Bob’s the astrophysicist, I’m the optical engineer, Glen’s the neurobiologist and Roger has got four board certifications under his belt and is extremely pragmatic about, “I just want patients to live longer.”

It’s interesting. Those usually are siloed up into very different areas. What we’re doing now is looking at the infrared. To astronomers, they have known for centuries or decades at least, that the infrared, when I talk about infrared, you have 250 or 280 to 400 UV. You have 400 to 700 that’s visible. Seven hundred on is infrared. People can play games with near infrared or whatever. The bottom line is infrared starts about 700. It’s where your eyes stop being able to see and all these longer wavelengths. Which makes up the vast majority of the photons that we are exposed to.

Now what we’re learning is, because of the astronomers, we’re learning that if you put this in the same unit of measure that the biologist uses, which is electron volts. It’s a little piece of energy, 1.6 to 10 minus 19 joules. If you start thinking in those terms, then all of a sudden, you find out that all the different biological processes have activation barriers that have exactly the same electron volt as certain portions of the infrared. What you also find based on working with astrophysicists. There are the peak transmission windows through the atmosphere that are in the infrared. They’re not visible if you take into account transmission and scatter.

The astronomers knew this because what were they doing? They were trying to look out into space. What they found is these ten windows that I, J, K, H, L, M, N, O and Q are aligned with transmission windows through the atmosphere. What they would do is they get a filter and go to the H band. They put the little filter there and they’d be able to see the stars much better than they could see at any other wavelength. The same goes with the eye and the J. You looked at it in reverse rather than looking at how much light goes through. What we are exposed to is for our entire evolutionary period. We have been exposed to these series of bands of wavelengths.

Each one of the bands is as wide or wider than the visible band. What’s the problem? The problem was that other than astronomers, we didn’t have the tools to measure it. You can buy a little spectrometer that lets you measure the spectral range out to say 900 or maybe 1,000. The majority of the action is going on from 1,000 out to 6,000. That takes extremely sophisticated measurement capability. It hasn’t been investigated the same way.

Now, we’ve bridged this gap where we put sunlight in terms of electron volt and biology in terms of electron volt. They have the same unit measure. Lo and behold, everything starts to line up. The reason that you have, a particular complex one in your electron transport chain. That is literally because sunlight has been providing those photons the same energy to provide and assist, a photon assists in the thing.

We are built around the idea of sunlight. What we have been ignoring is that we threw everything out. Even the stuff where they’re doing now where they’re adding some 850 or 900 or whatever into it. They’re missing the vote. We are literally designed to operate. You take advantage of 1,000 to 6,000 nanometers. Lo and behold, what are the sources that do that? A campfire, incandescent bulb, sunlight, and moonlight. Those are what’s going on and we’ve been ignoring it. It’s cool.

It’s going to change how we view things. You have to learn a little bit about some of the physics and a little bit about the biology. Believe me, biology is the Wild West as far as I’m concerned. Not understanding what’s going on there but optically, it makes a lot of sense that things work the way they do. It’s just beautiful the way they all line up once you get everything in the same units of measure and scale.

How To Change People’s Mindset About Getting Sunlight

I am very inspired by the role that you are taking in this conglomerate of knowledge that is being accumulated because I’m an engineer, first of all. I’m an electrical engineer. Right there, I have an affinity but people are talking about the light spectrum of the sun. By the way, just for our readers. When Scott says 900 to 1,000 or 6,000, it means nanometers. That’s the wavelength. To have an optics engineer in the midst of this group is extremely valuable to me.

I can see and I hear that discussion with Bob. We had Roger on our show. It was a very good interview, but in some ways, you’re very central to this and very necessary glued coming from the optics viewpoint. One thing that I’ve been experiencing is when I talk to people, very intelligent people, friends, smart people.

The level of skepticism that I encounter when I talk about being more exposed to sunlight or maybe being exposed to the morning sunlight with more red and infrared. You talk about the UV part, which has its own story which we will get into and the level of pooh-poohing and skepticism on the part of very intelligent everyday people. It’s almost like I’m talking to a wall.

The more the effort goes forward, the more knowledge is put forward because you’re talking about objective terms. You’re not making stuff up. This is all measurable. I don’t even know where to start to go to the next point, but when you talk about the department of energy in the criteria. If we have a light at home, if we only consider the visible light so we can see better and everything else is superfluous and even wasteful. The infrared component is clearly the first one to go because it generates heat.

Heat is wasteful and we don’t see it. Let’s get rid of it. I know that your company is involved in making very smart bulbs that do follow the rules of the DOE and yet managed to introduce the infrared component. Although, with the new more stringent rules, I don’t know how far you folks can stretch it.

It’s hard because when Biden came in at the last minute and put that rule change in for 120. We put in a petition to basically override that with the government but it’s very difficult. I had high expectations for RFK Jr. that he would get involved in this area. Unfortunately, he’s got his hands full doing what he’s doing with the red dyes and things of that nature. I wish that we could get people to believe and understand that sunlight represents the largest energy input. You can track exactly the change in spectrum against all these different diseases.

Glen is showing beyond the shadow of a doubt that incandescent versus LED is always superior and its effect on everything from your eyes sensitivity, your color and contrast. Bob and I are working very hard to show the mechanism behind that but it’s frustrating. The reality is that a large portion of the chronic metabolic diseases, especially in children, don’t go outside and play like they used to. They are kept inside. They are warned that the sun is bad.

You can be stupid. You can walk out and sit there and bake yourself for a week on the beach or you can wear a hat. I keep on saying my grandpa, who is a dairy farmer. He had a long cotton sleeve, a straw hat and overalls. When it was time for lunch, he’d go sit under a shade tree. It was not that complicated.

It’s like Alexis Cowan who I had here as well. She says, “Why don’t you use nature’s sunscreen? It’s called shade.”

My frustration is literally. Look at the astronauts coming back after being six months up around LEDs. What we did, I did a lot of work trying to show the benefits of sunlight on COVID transmission. Ninety-nine percent of all the COVID transmissions occurred in doors. They didn’t occur outdoors because, number one, you had sunshine. We have the data. That’s the thing that’s so frustrating about this stuff. We know how much sunlight affects the half-life of COVID virus in various droplet forms.

We know that the body is essentially enhanced. Our ability to fight off transmission is enhanced significantly by being out in the sunlight. It is crazy that we can’t get people to understand what’s going on. Instead, we cram everybody into a building, into a small space and let them breathe the same air and deplete all the reactive oxygen species generated by sunlight. That’s one of the things that I found was so beautiful about the whole system and how it works.

Literally every day, UVC is generated on the surface of the earth and an enhanced amount or small amount of hydrogen peroxide and ozone at germicidal levels. It goes up until about 1:00 in the afternoon, then drops back down. In the night, the microbes that absorb the sunshine convert into nitric oxide, which is also germicidal and we’re breathing it. Roger did an X on with this amazing kid that had lost a lung due to a fungus infection. He was fighting leukemia. His immune system was depleted.

They asked and told them he had two days to live. They asked him what he wanted to do. He said, “Can I just go outside?” He went outside. Within a matter of days, he turned the corner having all these benefits. What was he doing? He was benefiting from sunlight. He was benefiting from what sunlight generated and the fungus dropped off to nothing and repaired itself within weeks.

There’s all kinds of those great stories. Glen’s work with children with mitochondrial disease and how light affects them. We can debate whether or not you can get away with using some narrow band red or near infrared or whatever people want to do. Getting out in sunlight and getting the entire spectrum is what nature designed us to do.

Why You Do Not Need Red Light Panels

This is a question that I have a lot of. There’s so many companies selling red lights. Usually 650 nanometers or so in a panel. Many companies are selling infrared, usually at 850. Many companies are generating panels or lights that include both, the visible 650 and the non-visible 850. I live in California and I’m not saying it’s like living in the Equator area, but we have a decent amount of sun. If I can open my door and go outside. Why do I need a panel generating narrow bands 650, 850, red, and infrared when I’m getting it from the sun, including 651, 652, 653, 6,000 and 4,000? Why do I need the panel? Please, maybe you can tell me.

This is what I ran into when I was interviewing Hamlin. I came to the conclusion that he was talking about a certain level, watt and milliwatt per centimeter square at 650 or 670. I said, “If you calculate an incandescent ball in a well-lit incandescent room with 500 lakhs.” You look at it. You don’t have the same peak but you have this broad band that’s larger than what you’re generating with that 650. There is a big concern or we should have a concern.

I come from an old world where the laser jocks usually only had one eye because they were staring down the barrel of an infrared laser or bouncing it off. Some didn’t know what happened and that’s an extreme. It’s not like if the headlight comes towards you at night or you see the sun go through the clouds. You have a glance away from the response. In the infrared, you don’t have a glance away response.

You can’t see it.

Americans especially. If a little is good, a lot more is better. Toasting this and burning fat. Everything indicates to me that you don’t want to hike to the peak. PBM is accelerating a process that will occur naturally if you just get out in the sun. That’s what I look at it as. Maybe for some people they want to accelerate that particular thing but the body is simultaneously doing a thousand different processes or more. If you take one of them and you pump it up like they’re trying to find cytochrome C or something like that. t That’s their argument, then you get things out of whack. If you look at the electron transport chain, the inner electron transfers.

They occur in very small increments. If you get one of them going too fast or the electron is going too, they generate reactive oxygen species or this one becomes a blockage. At the end of the day, the little spinning gyro for ATP synthesis can only go so fast. If you try to pump things up too much, it’s harmful. That’s the beautiful thing about what we’re working on now. This amazing guy named Marcus, he’s 102. He’s the oldest Nobel Prize laureate still left alive. We’re hopefully going to be having some talks with him or talking with him.

He came up with this idea or this theory that forms the basis of most of the electron transfers in biology and it’s simple. There’s like a barrier and you have to provide enough energy to pop over that barrier. Why do you need that? You need that because if there were these barriers that were controlling the reaction rates, everything would just happen at once. In biology, we have all these barriers. With a very specific amount of energy, it will allow you to jump over it and go on to the next barrier and jump over it.

Stages if you will.

As Bob likes to say, it’s like going to the old locks. You have a lock here and you have to get the water level up before you can swing open the doors. At the end of the day, it’s a quantum thing. The bottom line is, it’s a series of locks and the amount of energy. If you give too much energy, it creates problems. You give too little energy, it doesn’t do what you want, but that’s the purpose of it is what I would say.

For the sake of some of our viewers and readers, when Scott is talking about the ATP production and the stages. We’re talking about the mitochondria that we have in our cells that is involved in production of energy via something that is referred to as the electron transport chain. That happens in these stages of energy leaps that we are discussing here creating the energy that we need to be here now, talk and walk around and all of that stuff.

By the way, I will say this on the side. When I try to talk to people, again sometimes very intelligent people. Some of them say, “Mito what?” It’s like I’ve never felt more like fighting windmills, so to speak, than in the past. Not only is there unbelievable resistance to sunlight and we will get there soon, the UVB and the dangers from the higher energy parts of the sun spectrum and to not even knowing what mitochondria is.

Maintaining Light Hygiene From Sunset To Sunrise

There is also a two-part discussion. We are talking here so that people make a better life and a healthier life choice. If we look at the large picture now, in terms of our lifestyle, it divides into two parts. The day part, and the night part. One of the ways I try to talk to people, I say, is to think about what it was like 200 years ago. 200 years ago, we didn’t even have electricity. People would wake up and most people would spend most of the day outdoors working on something. Maybe agriculture. Who knows what?

They get exposure to the sun very naturally without thinking about it. That’s part one. That’s the day. They get all of this exposure that you know is so useful and so beneficial. You can break it down into every part of the spectrum and what it does to us, but they didn’t know it. They just got it, then comes the night. It’s 200 years ago. We don’t have electricity. We all have cell phones. What do we do? Maybe we will light a fire. Maybe there’s a candle and pretty soon, we go to bed.

That, from the standpoint of a light diet, is an ideal life. Now, here we come to the 21st Century and as you said so well, we lock ourselves in buildings and homes. Even when we think we are next to the window. The window glass is tempered to block out various parts of the spectrum so we get a strange spectrum that’s coming in. That’s not what we want but that’s the daytime. It’s easier to say, “During the daytime, try to watch the sunrise if you can. Try to go and take breaks. Walk outside if you can.”

You’re in Jersey. Now, it’s starting to get very cold. People will say, “I don’t want to.” I’m in California and it’s starting to get colder but it’s not that kind of cold. I can say, “I will take breaks during the day. I will walk around. If I don’t like the sun, I’ll be in the shade but I’ll be outside.” Handling the daytime is very doable.

Nowadays, the real challenge comes right after the sun sets. When it gets dark, what do we want to do these days? We want to go on this. We want to text. We want to go on social media. The television is right there. We want to watch movies, series and Netflix and we go on the computer and the central light that pumps out is blue light. To me, a bigger challenge nowadays is the light hygiene from sunset to morning than what you do in the daytime because going outside is not that hard.

It is difficult. I would make one comment. One of the things that and in fact, we just did. We have one of those little sports igloos with a clear plastic. My wife has always had trouble with winter. She is not a winter person. What I found that was amazing is to take this little thing. This has thin little clear plastic on four sides. It folds up and folds out to make a little place so that the rocking chair can go there. We’ll both go out there and we’ll just sit. It can be 20 degrees outside but with the sun shining through, you get this amazing boost associated with it.

I bring that to the point that during the day there’s so many opportunities and this is why the architects are starting to move in this particular area. There’s so many places that what if we had a little conservatory or a nursing home so that the residents could be wheeled out on a clear glass thing. This is a little separate area. It’s different. Don’t worry about the lumens or the energy consumption. It’s there for a purpose. They roll out there and they spend 15 minutes or 20 minutes or maybe 30 minutes, have a nice conversation or maybe even eat their lunch out there. Come back in and try and have at least some level of broadband in your lighting.

One of the biggest things is that glazing on glass is a problem, in my opinion. Glen’s been showing some pictures of that lately. To your point about night, I agree. The problem is, the circadian is struggling to figure out what it is. I know that everybody has this view that cortisol is high in the morning and melatonin is low or drops. In the evening, melatonin goes up and cortisol goes down. Under very controlled conditions, DLMO, where they lay the patient out in darkness and get them to relax. You can see that diurnal change.

The minute you start to measure or do anything, especially exercise, eating, go out in the sunlight. All of a sudden, the cortisol and melatonin levels are fluctuating. I did a paper on this stuff awhile back. It was showing that the problem is you need to be able to sample at a high enough frequency to see what the body is doing. We’ve been doing some more work with these sweat monitors and what you find is at 9:00 AM, I can make melatonin go straight up to the roof and drop back down and cortisol at the same rate.

What’s going on is that there is a wish list of having this gentle thing going on. It only occurs if you don’t do anything. The minute you do something. All these hormones are shifting in twenty-minute intervals or less. I went out with my wife to a Mexican restaurant. We were sitting there eating and I had one of the sweat monitors on. You literally could see cortisol. I kept saying, “There’s the appetizer. There’s the main course.” It’s going on up to then, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, melatonin spiked. It came and drove the cortisol level down and the melatonin went back down to baseline.

Why do you think that happened?

It’s because the body has to respond on a transient rate. There’s a transient response as well as a diurnal response. In other words, it had to do something. Cortisol was going up too high because I was eating. Everybody knows the cortisol will ramp during eating. Something had to bring it back because cortisol is okay and hi, for a while. It’s how we do our escape for our flight response. You don’t want it to stay up very long. You can see the melatonin is being used. What it does is it suppresses ACTH but then it suppresses cortisol.

In a matter of minutes, you had these downward spikes. A very similar effect happens in exercise. At 9:00 in the morning, if you get on a treadmill and you start doing exercise. Your melatonin level will go up. It will stay up until you quit exercising and then it will drop down back to baseline. What they’ve done with circadian is it created these test conditions where you can see this nice well-behaved effect.

As I said, the minute you do anything, it goes into a transient response or serious spikes. You were talking about TV. We were in a hotel and it was dark. I was watching a game or something. I forgot what I was watching, but I had the sweat monitor on. What you saw was a series of spikes, a cortisol of 10 lakhs from a TV.

The point being is, the circadian is missing a huge portion of what goes on in the body. I then stayed up at the light at night intentionally and what happened, the melatonin level dropped off. That you normally see from diurnal, and you got a series of cortisol spikes until I went back to sleep then the melatonin came back up.

Blocking Blue Light From Television

Let’s roll back to where you started watching TV. Let’s assume that the driving light that came out at you was this blue light from the television. What if you were to wear effective blue light filtering glasses? I don’t know exactly what the frequency is. Maybe it’s in the 400s. You block the exact right frequency. You wear those blue lights. Now, you’re watching television. Have you done something beneficial?

You’ve given the intensity level of the blue green and it’s not just blue. It’s blue and green, because melanopsin responds just as big a response in the green as it does in the blue. If you take into account the sunlight solar spectrum. You’ve got this filter that’s melanopsin and how it responds. If you expose it to sunlight or to broadband, it will respond to green. Green is higher in value in sunlight. Therefore, it has just about as big of a response as blue does.

Honestly, I’m not a very big fan of picking on blue. I know that some people swear up and down by it and they wear their blockers. They even have red lights at night. My reasoning is that if you look at the sunset, which is what everybody is saying is what’s going to make us sleepy or whatever. The sunset is some beautiful reds and oranges. In all cases, if you look around, cloudy days or whatever. Blue is on your left, right and behind you. If you integrate as Bob’s done, the amount of blue, what happens is that as the sun starts to set, that may or may not give you some pretty nice reds and oranges.

I don’t know how anybody thinks that that’s doing anything, but that’s what they’re doing. What happens is, the higher angle as it approaches the atmosphere means that the majority of the stuff is getting transmitted through. There’s a big peak associated with 480 nanometers because there’s not as much ozone absorption. It hits the rest of the atmosphere and goes into a blue thing. If you calculate it at night, there is a spike at 480 that we see and that is there. Blue at night.

What melanopsin appears to be doing is allowing us to get this blue signal independently, whether it’s cloud covered or a great sunset or whatever. As it goes on past sunset, that blue signature is still going on. We’re getting some of its dropping but melanopsin appears optically to be the key for sunset and not just for sunrise. The opposite happens in the morning where you have a high altitude and it starts to kick you up.

I believe very strongly that nature doesn’t give a rip about the rules we play. It cares about what works. These are much better biomarkers or better sensor things than what people are talking about. I think the problem with what you see with the blue that we have at night is not so much melatonin suppression as it is cortisol excitation. We’re essentially stimulating cortisol all at times we shouldn’t be stimulating cortisol.

Melanopsin is telling the SCN that, “Things are starting to cattle down here. Time to go to bed or whatever,” but then, “There’s this bright light.” There might have been a lightning strike in the old days or it might have been who knows what fire coming its way. I don’t know what. The point is, circadian needs to be revisited because it’s missing a huge portion of what’s going on optically.

Going back one step, though. I hear what you say. There is a charming French movie about romantic sunsets. The name of the movie is something like the green line or something. Apparently, when you watch a perfect sunset, there is one moment when there’s a green line. If you watch it, it’s like a spare. There’s a whole movie about it. Let’s say somebody says, “I want to watch TV. I don’t want to give it up.” I understand what you’re saying that it stimulates cortisol. I don’t want to stimulate cortisol at night, so I’m going to block it. When I say blocking the blue, now you’re telling me, “You got to block the green as well.” You can’t do that, though.

My problem is that why do I have to give up something? What used to be the case is that my grandkids would come up. I’d sit down and we’d have an incandescent bulb on a lamp and I’d have a book. That book was reflecting all kinds of infrared. I would just argue that the same thing is true. There were times where there’s nice bright light and there’s blue on the page or a whale or whatever. There were also all the other wavelengths. Especially when you get into the far infrared, the longer wavelengths. There’s a great picture by Nick Spiker of his sister-in-law. It shows the H-band, what we would look like if we could see 1.5 to 1.7 microns or 1,500 to 1,700 nanometers. All of us have the same characteristics.

Black with white hair.

If you notice the picture. Her clothes were white and translucent. There’s all this and the body goes to extreme extent to absorb these longer wavelengths. Why is it over longer wavelengths? It’s because it makes the electron transfer more efficient and less reactive to auction species. That then forms the basis for us to be able to survive against UV visibility. Which are much higher energy photons that we need to be able to see what’s going on and need in order to generate vitamin D.

It does so in the context of always being exposed to an excess of infrared photons, which is setting up the entire basis of our biology. When you don’t have that, then I believe that what you don’t have with LEDs. Even the longer wavelength ones, then you got a problem. That’s what’s causing a lot of the issues associated with chronic diseases.

Creating A Hybrid Of LED And Incandescent Lights

I’m going to take a little break here in a way to ask you. I know you manufacture very cleverly designed lights that do fulfill their requirements at least so far that the government has put out in terms of the LED part. You also managed to put, as a said before, the infrared component. If you can tell us the name and how we can get those lights.

This is what the light looks like. These are LEDs and these are little filaments. If you remember in the old days when we had little filament flashlights that had the little bulbs. Those bulbs are 100% efficient at generating infrared all the way out to 6,000 nanometers but they’re lousy at generating blue and green. What we do especially if you run them at a point that they last very long. Filament bulbs’ lifetime expands rapidly when you run them at lower voltage. The more infrared, the less visible. Everybody was always trying to make an incandescent drink more efficient. It’s generating visible but it’s like called basic physics of a black body.

What we did is we added the LEDs in because LEDs are pretty efficient. They’re only about 50% efficient at generating visible light. They’re efficient enough that you can put the two of them together and still be able to see, depending on what ratio of infrared to visible. What we designed is to basically take advantage of the thermal filaments or the bulbs for the incandescent part and the LEDs for the visible part and put the two of them together. The way the bulb works is when you run a full brightness, it has both the LEDs and the filaments at full power.

As you go through the dimming process using standard dimming. It’s an analog game. What happens is the LEDs slowly drop out and eventually you’re incandescent. I don’t know about you but I like that nice warm orange, warm feeling of an incandescent being dimmed down. What it does is it gives us the dimming range that is superior to even incandescent because the LED gives you the visible portion. As it walks away, you get this long tail. You can go down to where it looks like a candlelight type thing. That’s the goal.

I would argue that everybody jumps up and down about the spectrum. That’s important, but dimming range is one of the things we gave up with LEDs. That’s been a lot of the problem. People either run it on full brightness all the time because it’s so efficient or they try to dim it maybe 10 to 1 or 100 to 1, which is essentially relevant. We’re doing over 100,000 to one dimming range. You remember the old incandescent on dimmers. They go down to a nice gentle glow and we gave up those things.

We gave up the power factor and a lot of other expenses. The complication to drive all these things. We offer not only an AC version, but we do a DC. Which is what I try to convince people to do. If I could do nothing more but convince people to put one of our DC bulbs right next to their computer or where their kids are at their night light. It has two modes as daytime, where LED and incandescent is. We reverse the polarity with a switch and then it’s just incandescent at a lower level.

The power source from the wall socket is AC. You need an AC to DC conversion of sorts.

That’s what we do. We provided the bulb as a kit. You can either buy a lamp that has everything. We have a conversion kit. We have a lamp that your wife likes so you basically can convert it into a DC with two different stages. I call it day at the campfire because that was the goal.

What’s the name of your company? How do we go to the website to get those lights?

It’s Nira Lighting.

What’s the DC light that you were talking about? Can I find it easily? Is it going to be right there for me to see?

You just go to Spotify and we have a list that you can order. As I said, we did everything we could. We went through a couple generations to do the AC because you want to get flicker down to a couple of percent. Even then, incandescent by itself has 10% to 15% flicker in it. It doesn’t seem to bother the body as much.

That’s why I personally like the DC, especially because we’re trying to get kids exposed to some. A lot of kids like a little bit of nightlight or whatever. This gives them all infrared and that’s all it’s doing. It’s switching between LED plus infrared or incandescent and incandescent. That’s all we do in that particular case.

Correct me if I’m wrong. The old incandescent lamps which, unfortunately, are going to stop being manufactured and sold in the US in 2028. I hope that’s going to change, by the way. They also have a blue and green component but not very high.

That’s the point. You always are going to have some level of UV even from any thermal source because a plank is constant or curved. We have 150 years of showing that incandescent was okay. Now, we can make these hybrids where we’ve combined LEDs and incandescent that are not only okay. In fact, they are a closer match to sunlight than an incandescent because sunlight does contain a significant amount of blue and green. You need to benefit from adding in stuff to incandescent if you truly want to match sunlight.

I’d like to get to the point that we do match. We have all the tools between the phosphorus, the LEDs and the incandescent filaments and even some UV LEDs. We had a very good match. I know that everybody’s going to run around always putting UV into these things. We’ll walk outside, it’s UV. Get over it. Quite honestly, there’s going to be more and more dermatologists. Glen was talking to Huberman and he just released that episode.

The point is, the body is designed to use that UV for very important things. If we don’t get it, then you’re going to have all these issues. There’s more and more evidence that’s the opposite of what everybody thinks. If you don’t get all the other spectrum along with UV, maybe you have a problem. If you don’t get UV then you’re basically setting the kid up for failure, in my opinion.

Before we visit the UV, which I think we should. I’m going to go back and say with the new government standards that have been put in place. Will you still be able to stretch it and generate what you’re generating now with your lights?

It’s almost impossible, to be quite honest. The 120 lumen per watt limit is going to force all the lighting companies to give you bad color quality. All for something, in my opinion, that is wasting more energy. You think about how complicated most of these driver circuits are. They are in these bulbs, how cheaply they’re made and how much they affect the environment. I say this even though I sell a combination hybrid.

You think about the environmental impact of a light class light bulb, filament light bulb. It was basically nothing. That’s why they got so cheap. They were able to build that incandescent bulb and now, what do we do? We got to farm every foster and rare earth in the world to get everything to work the way we wanted to when it used to work just fine and people were happy. I don’t know how you get around. As I said we have tried numerous times to get to RFK Jr., and say, “This is this is stupid.” I don’t know how to put it. There’s so many barriers between any of these people who can do something and people like us that don’t know what it takes.

The short sightedness of it is, you talked about the visible light. The visible light is maybe 10% of the spectrums that we get from the sun. That’s what we can see. A lot of the knee jerk reaction is what we can see, either doesn’t exist or something important. In this case, they say it’s not important so let’s get rid of it. It’s a huge cost to human health because you tell everybody how much we need the infrared part of the spectral and what it does inside their body and a million things.

Optically, the body is the most amazing thing. It absorbs strongly or puts most of the energy in the UV into the cholesterol because water has a very low absorption in that region. You go through the visible, where everything’s very low so that we can see very well then you get into the near infrared. What I call the infrared 700 and 900. You’re penetrating deep into the body doing all kinds of generating a very low photon density but you’re going all throughout the volume.

You literally can pump through a hand or pump through a body, as Glen and Bob has shown. You get into these longer wavelengths and the body is absorbing like gangbusters because that is so important for our basic biological processes. As you said, most people see the solar spectrum that is put out by ASTM 1.5-G. It’s got this peak and is visible, then you see these little bumps that mean nothing. The minute you switch that and convert it into the units of measure that biology cares about in the electron volts. You find that the peak is in 1.66 or 1,600 nanometers.

It’s broadband. Every one of these little silos are little bands of light. It’s associated with some biological process. Is it a coincidence? I don’t think so. That’s what makes it run the best. Whether you like it or not. The incandescent fills up each one of those little bands very well. Is it as good as ours? Not quite, but the point is, at this point, there is no scientific argument that incandescents aren’t better than LEDs. LEDs are inferior in every category, except how much energy they use. If you can’t turn it down, if you can dim it, then you’re probably wasting more energy than you think.

Nobody talks about the dimming. You did, but it’s not there. It’s not out there, the dimming process. It’s night. If you want to relax, you can dim it.

I had a neighbor and she had the most god-awful blue white outdoor lamp or light on her porch. She would leave it on all night at full blast. I grew up in Kansas and you look at the barn lights for each one of the farms and that was the only light that was on. Maybe a little candle or something in the house. It’s crazy because it’s not helping anything. It’s not making people safer. Every study shows it’s not making people safer, so why are we doing it?

How High Intensity Light Can Mess Up Your Sleep

Talking about that. I want to jump back to what you talked about the intensity of light. Let’s even say that the frequency is okay but the intensity. If it’s night time, does strong light deter from our sleepiness or is that more of a myth? What do you think about that?

All I know is what I did with the sweat sensors and, quite honestly, it made sense to me from an evolutionary standpoint. If there’s a flash light in the middle of the night a million years ago or 100 years or 1,000 years ago or whatever. You cared about it. The body responded. How did it respond? There was an adrenaline and cortisol spike.

“I got to get up. What’s that? Was that a lightning strike? Maybe I should move.” It’s not rocket science on the whole thing. It’s like anything that you’re doing that alerts the body. Russ was doing circadian studies. He used to tell me, “Scott, all you have to do is take a stick and hit them on the back while they’re sleeping and you’ll see everything’s fine.”

I understand. Let’s say somebody watches TV and next to the TV, they put one of your lights. They get a good spectrum as well as the TV. Is that going to help?

That’s what we do. I’m like anybody else. I’d like to watch TV. I like watching movies at night sometimes. I’m bad. I don’t do good on some things. In all cases, we have one of our lights around to provide some of the infrared content. The other thing is people need to appreciate how much light is coming off of a TV in some of these cases. It’s just overwhelming, because you got all these different and very narrow bands on a mission to get higher color contrast. You’re getting higher and higher contrast so you’re getting more modulation or flicker.

There’s no difference between the light bulb and your TV as far as flicker levels. In fact, in a lot of ways it’s worse. Putting something in there that gives you something to at least fight back. How good is it? I don’t know. That’s something people will have to run a study and see. Especially at night, high intensity bright flashes of light are going to cause your cortisol. Again, tied in with this. You don’t see it if you’re not measuring. I keep on saying it’s like all the circadian. They have a ball in their hand. They took a picture and threw it up in the air. They caught the ball and took another picture. That’s what they got.

What happened in between is being missed because these sweat sensors are running at three minute sampling intervals and blind. You don’t even know what’s going on. You’re wearing the thing like you would a constant glucose monitor. Come back and you look at the biggest problem is journaling and all the things you’re doing because almost everything that you do changes your cortisol and melatonin. What’s cool is, in one case, we may be able to show that the melatonin spikes the TNF-α, which is associated with cancer. It drops like a rock.

There’s something we can figure out here. Ultimately, that is my end goal. Light has got enough power in it if we know and understand how it’s doing. That we can at least make it so you don’t have to have as much chemo maybe or you get help with some people that are having dementia symptoms. It’s like Glen’s done with the kids with mitochondrial diseases. You don’t fix it but you sure can help it. The only way to do that is understand the mechanisms in it.

I want to take you down the path of both talking about UV and melatonin and how we don’t just come from one place like most of us think.

Important Links

• Scott Zimmerman on LinkedIn
• Nira Lighting
• Russell Reiter on LinkedIn
• Glen Jeffery on LinkedIn
• Bob Fosbury on LinkedIn
• Roger Seheult on LinkedIn
• Huberman Lab
• Lighten Up! (Part 1) With Dr. Roger Seheult – Previous Episode
• We Are All Solar Batteries: How To Charge Your Circadian Rhythm With Dr. Alexis J. Cowan – Previous Episode

About Scott Zimmerman

Scott has more than 35 years of experience in the fields of lighting and displays. His innovations and inventions have been used successfully in a wide range of military and commercial products that include night vision displays, liquid crystal display backlighting designs, and lighting fixtures.

Over the past few years, Scott has been focused on quantifying the health effects of natural sunlight. His efforts led to the development of the NIRA product line with its patent pending design that reintroduces near-infrared into our homes and offices. This research, co-authored with Professor Russel Reiter, was recently published in Melatonin Research 2, a peer reviewed medical journal, and featured in LED professional 3.

In response to the pandemic, Scott extended this work toward developing novel lighting and HVAC systems that suppress disease spread. He authored a peer reviewed paper on this topic that was published in the Journal of Infectious Disease and Epidemiology.