Sun Light: Nature’s Abundant & Free-Flowing Wellness Powerhouse With Scott Zimmerman Pt. 2

January 27, 2026 Adiel Gorel

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Sun Light: Nature’s Abundant & Free-Flowing Wellness Powerhouse With Scott Zimmerman Pt. 2

Our Secondary Source Of Melatonin

Scott, I want to go to the question of melatonin. You said several times you are working with Reiter, who is the number one expert on melatonin in the world. I believe you are one of the people in the world that knows the most about melatonin. I would like to clarify. Most people think that melatonin is created here in the pineal gland and melatonin is associated in knee jerk reaction with nighttime and falling sleep. Some people even take melatonin supplements you know and you’re going to tell us how melatonin is made down in the cells. The production of melatonin starts right in the morning. Maybe you can tell us about that.

I’ll tell you what I know. What I did is we were looking at the optics of the body. It became clear that there was a need for an antioxidant in the outer part of the skin because of the optics and how many photons were coming in. There has been some work done by some people saying that melatonin is produced in every cell. I started looking around at ways we could see whether that was true. There was a paper by Thern several years back where he was looking at melatonin. He hooked people up to a catheter and was constantly sampling.

Again, sampling it 15-20 minutes intervals, but at least sampling it better in shorter intervals. He put the people on a treadmill. This was 9:00 in the morning when melatonin should be being suppressed big time. What happened was that within ten minutes, he doubled the test subjects. He doubled their melatonin level and it eventually went up and plateaued. They were doing intensive exercise on the stair stepper then it stayed all the way along. This is 9:00 in the morning. How’s the pineal gland generating any of this stuff going on?

What it appears based on the work is that there’s a very close connection between the blood system and muscles. This was measuring blood plasma, melatonin in the blood. What happens is that the muscles are generating a huge amount of melatonin, depending on how much harder you’re exercising. As you proceed in that area, you figure out or you come to the conclusion that the cells in the muscles are generating melatonin and only when they get to the point that they have an excess. Remember, melatonin is a consumable.

Melatonin is an antioxidant when it does. It then falls down to FMK and AMF. All these other metabolites that are oxidized and they are antioxidants as well. One melatonin is equivalent to ten antioxidants like glutathione. It also regulates glutathione. It was pretty obvious from the experiments that there’s no way the pineal gland was generating sufficient amounts. If you look at the levels that were being generated like 200 picograms per milliliter compared to 60 at night time or under at night time. It was pretty clear that there was a secondary source of melatonin.

Again, it’s hard to measure only in transient response. I’m a transient guy as far as how I look at things. When you start having transient changes, then you see these spikes in melatonin that can only be coming from the local cell area from all ourselves. That seems to be jiving with all the sweat data we’re getting now. There was a study where they went and looked at the relationship between melatonin and cortisol during exercise. More and more data is coming out showing that melatonin is produced in the pineal gland.

You think about it from a logic standpoint. If melatonin and other ATP and all that is being produced in quantities during the day, then you start going into the night. That cellular activity drops, then you need some supplemental melatonin. The brain is still running at 80% of its essential capacity generating all kinds of reactive oxidant species. The argument is that the pineal gland is there to supplement or to deal with the brain and provide excess into the blood so that any of those cells that are running a little bit low can kick and suck up a little bit of the extra melatonin to get it to do what it wants.

That will become more clear as we do more of these sweat studies. Again, as I say it’s hard because you have to measure things. Things are happening. This is the sweat I’m measuring. In less than ten minutes, an event like eating or whatever is changing that sweat systemically. Which I think is fascinating how quickly everything is responding to these changes. I don’t know if that answers your question.

It does. I want to run a model by you, which I’ve heard uses a simplistic model that once again, we go down into the cells. We have the mitochondria, which is the so-called power plant of the cell. It generates ATP via the electron transport chain. Depending on the jumps and the energy that it absorbed. We’ll talk about that maybe too. It generates reactive oxygen species or ROS. Those have their benefits but they are also oxidants.

Melatonin is an antioxidant. I’ve heard the analogy and I want to see what you think about that. You have the engine running. The engine is running and as it runs, it gets hot. In a car, you cool the engine. You cool it with liquids and water. In our cells, in our body, you cool it with melatonin. Is this a good analogy?

I think so. It’s like the extra photons that we’re talking about. It’s like the oil going into the engine. It doesn’t take much oil to make the engine run much more efficiently. If it runs much more efficiently, it doesn’t generate as many reactive oxygen species. That’s where melatonin is a great player. If you think about just from a logical standpoint, you have some issues. Whatever it is, somewhere on your body. If you’re always depending on a systemic response to that, you’re never going to get there. Locally, it’s very clear that all we need to survive and tell the system.

From a logical standpoint, we all have issues somewhere on the body. Share on X

If I do something on a systemic level, it may not be the right thing for that particular locale, versus something for the general body. It’s more apparent. The skin basically has all the different pieces to even generate its own vitamin D if it needs it. Vitamin D is an antioxidant as well. There’s all these different abilities that we’ve underestimated, especially in the skin. The idea of melatonin, we’re seeing it in all the different locations. If you try and do a transient response, it’s very hard to believe that the pineal gland is being turned on in order to generate these huge amounts. We’ll talk about massive amounts of melatonin that’s being generated during the day when everything is supposed to be shut down.

Does it get triggered by the light of day? This generation of melatonin that’s not from the pineal gland or does it get triggered by activity? We get up and start moving around.

It’s probably a little bit of both. Bear in mind that there was a paper by Professor Peter Light, of all people. Where he took and measured the cellular response on a single cell that changed in voltage potential. He changed the lighting. He went through this spectrum of light, the visible spectrum. It perfectly mapped out melanopsin as far as its response. These were in fat cells in the skin.

His conclusion was that 10% of all the fat cells in your skin contain melanopsin, which probably predates the formation of eyes. Our skin was responding to sunlight because it needed to know. Eventually, we developed or evolved to have eyes that could give us an advantage and other things. Most of the melanopsin in the body is not in the retina. It’s in the skin.

Maintaining Sunlight Exposure During Wintertime

We talked about you being in New Jersey. As they say on one of the TV shows that we may have seen late at night, “Winter is coming.” Winter is coming and your skin has a lot of receptors for the spectrum of the sun. You’re saying, “I’m sorry. It’s 25 degrees outside. I’m not exposing my skin to the sun. I’m going out now to drift.” You could argue the long wavelength of the infrared will penetrate through your clothing deep into your body or through your clothing.

You might say, “I can go outside, dress nicely and be warm and yet still get at least the infrared component of the sunlight because it penetrates deep.” True. That’s where maybe people use those panels. They say, “I’m staying home in the warmth of my nice, cozy home.” I’m using an infrared and red panel. Maybe that’s one way that they should be used.

I don’t like to pufo other people’s approaches other than to say I don’t think the science is there. From that standpoint, we are never exposed to that situation in nature.

In other words, the narrow band. The red at 650 exactly.

The more you make that narrow or the narrower that spectrum is, the higher the peak for a given number of watts. As I say, my big concern is I’ve seen people that burn themselves on some of those panels. I’m not sure what it does to your eyes. As I say, you look at the panel that’s big then we’ve got one the size of a room. We’re doing $200,000 or more for a table that puts it on. You can get an effect. I can get an effect by hitting you with a stick. I just don’t know if it’s a good effect.

Glen Jeffery did his very famous experiment of people who ate a glucose rich meal after being exposed to red light. I believe it did use a panel, didn’t he?

He used a 670 nanometer panel and he had about 28 kilojoules. Bear in mind, sunlight is on the order of 30 megajoules for the day if you’re outside. Again, it’s possible to alter and it could be beneficial to the state of the body by that change. If you also notice in the data, though. By the time you get out to about 30 or 40 minutes, it’s going back down. There’s a time constant transient response in that as well. It’s a great experiment, especially the CO2. I think it’s even better because it gave you an idea that it was ATP that was the mitochondria that was doing it more than anything else.

Going back to Glen Jeffery’s experiment. One would say, “Have your meal outside.” If it’s the summertime, you could say it’s even better. You could sit in the shade. It’s okay. You can have your meal outside with no shirt on. Now, you’re doing even better. If it’s in the winter time in Jersey, and you’re saying I’m getting dressed. No. The infrared may penetrate your clothing but the red, it’s 670. It may not.

Even then, the body’s adapted. I would turn it around and I would say that my point would be that every cause of mortality increases in the winter in Northern and Southern latitudes. Every one of them. To say that it’s a good thing to be in the North is not always a good thing to say because you can’t get out. I would argue that a lot of that is associated with the lack of solar exposure. The same thing with flu season. The same thing with COVID.

COVID was extremely seasonal when we first got into it before they started generating all the vaccines. If you look at it, there was a very interesting thing that I found with the data. While there was a spike in the winter, when we had the first like most flu seasons. There’s a spike, but if you looked at it at those states down in the South. They had a summer spike in COVID deaths. If you looked at the same place, part of the same time frame for Italy, they didn’t.

If you think about it, 90% of the air conditioning in the world is in those Southern states of the US. We coessentially brought people into doors and saw a secondary spike in COVID deaths. I turned around and said my wife and I made it a point to change our lighting. We make a point to go out and sit in the sun in our little cubicle. It could be 20 out and it will be 80 inside that little pup and you got to open it up if there’s sunlight out. By doing that, I believe that we avoided a lot of our bad issues. Is it perfect? It’s not perfect, but it doesn’t take much effort to get 15 to 20 minutes of sunlight even in a cold environment. It’s protective in a lot of ways.

You said something that was very meaningful to me. The general knowledge or opinion is, the further South you go in the Northern hemisphere, the farthest South you go towards the equator, the better overall health you’re going to experience in general relative to yourself, the more South you go. You raised a very important point. Moving to Costa Rica is not enough. You moved to Costa Rica and you’re indoors all day with conditioning. That’s not the same.

It all comes back to this guy when I had the show with cruise. I told him, “I don’t think you want everybody to move to Costa Rica. I don’t think you’ll be very happy in El Salvador,” where he’s at. Not everybody can move, especially within hospitals. That’s one of the things that Roger is focused on. He wants to bring this into hospitals because if it’s a positive or even if you turn around. It’s pretty easy to say that the LEDs they get in most hospitals are negative.

The fact that they have all of the new design and are all glass windows. Once there was a professor down in Princeton and it had to be one of the buildings that was all glass. What did he do? He brought it in a space heater. Put it underneath his desk because he was always cold. He was never getting the infrared component through those windows. There’s a multiple Titanic that is not very happy about what we’re saying. The glass manufacturers don’t like what we’re talking about. The LED manufacturers don’t like what we’re talking about. It’s hard.

It’s almost excruciating to go back to the beginning of our conversation and think that 110 years ago, more than a century ago, hospitals had open windows, terraces and you were wheeled out to spend a lot of time out in the sun. They call it a sanatorium. Maybe not even a hospital so much. Now, here we are. It was 100 years ago that people knew that and now they don’t.

When I did the models, we did the COVID half-life characteristics under darkness because NIAID had done some original experiments. They showed that the COVID droplet could essentially have a half-life of greater than an hour or maybe two hours. The minute you introduced an equivalent of sunlight into the environment, which DHS did. They dropped it down to eighteen seconds to half-life. We did a series of computational fluid dynamic models that showed that if you’re six feet away from somebody, it took less than a second for that droplet to transfer to you.

If you think about all those things together, it becomes very clear that the effect of being outdoors is not just that we suppress the half-life of the virus. The other thing that we showed was, as I told you earlier, once morning comes up, you generate an amount of hydrogen peroxide and ozone in the atmosphere. That’s what occurs every day. What we were able to show was that the transmission or the flight as the droplet goes through that environment is essentially collecting molecules of hydrogen peroxide and ozone to indicate that it deactivates in a matter of eighteen seconds.

By going outdoors, we suppress the half-life of the virus. Share on X

What it also showed was that the only way we could be getting the results that we’re getting from an epidemiological standpoint, was that the body was enhanced in its ability to reject the virus by whatever means. Whether breathing in the air or by forming a barrier to the virus. It’s very clear from the models that we are essentially much more able to resist back virus transfer or disease transfer if we’re in sunlight. It’s what it looks like.

Understanding The Effects Of Infrared Sauna On The Body

While talking about infrared light. We can spend an hour and a half just on the benefits that infrared light comforts on our body, how we get infrared light even just by being in a forest near the trees. They are basically getting it and expelling it so that we get it just by being near the trees, the leaves and the greenery. People are talking about infrared so much. It’s a good source of infrared light. Once again, I asked the question, being out in the sun a better way or being in the forest with all the leaves and the trees or the forest and the sun. Isn’t that better than being in an infrared sauna?

The sun is great, but I look at it in two different ways. Sunlight is coming down. From a spectrum standpoint sunlight is coming down into the longer wavelengths. It’s about 6,000. As you move up in the temperature of the sauna it depends on what sauna you’ve got. If you’ve got one that has an infrared heat source, then it’s bouncing around some longer wavelengths but it’s like the temperature of your body. You raise the temperature of your body and it creates and changes the velocity of the molecules inside the skin. The body makes them more likely to be able to fight off infection and do that stuff.

In a sauna, you’d come up and you are getting into some of the bands that are pretty good, but you’re not going to live in a sauna. You’re going to be in there for a while and it’s going to have some benefit. It’s like the red light panel. It’s going to have some benefit to you and all that stuff, but it is probably a little bit more important that you spend more time outdoors getting the full spectrum and the exercise associated with being outdoors.

One of the things that’s hard to do is quantify harm versus help from the standpoint of how big a deal is it. That’s why it’s so important. What we’re trying to do now with quantifying the using electron volt and measurements and see if we can put some relative comparison between how bad it is. The industry wants it to be that we add a little bit here and everybody’s happy. I personally think that you need to eliminate LEDs from your environment because they are forcing a very high reactive oxygen state. Every one of them is trying to pump cortisol. Pumping cortisol in kids is a bad idea. It’s one thing to do it. With some exercise, it’s like you can almost over exercise. Saunas are just another tool.

Eliminate LEDs from your environment. They are forcing a very high reactive oxygen state that pumps cortisol in the body. Share on X

Even if you talk about saunas. There are two camps even within the infrared sauna world. One swears by near infrared and once wears by far infrared. Some people try to have both and then the infrared saunas don’t get very hot. They get to 145-150. Some people say, “Get the regular ones with the stones that are heated,” then you can get to 200 and 210. What do you think of that?

Where are you getting the infrared? You’re getting some infrared from the surrounding, from wood and all that other stuff. The main source of the infrared is coming from the heater wherever how that is positioned to. Is this filling the area with the infrared, or is it hidden back underneath something else? Roger just put one in and he got a stone one, but it’s a great thing. It’s like all these other things, though. You start using it then you don’t use it. You miss a week. Why not create an environment that’s optimized for your own development that you don’t have to think about so much?

Create an optimized environment for your own development that you do not have to think about so much. Share on X

Visiting it one last time. It occurred to me just as you were saying it. I got a stone one too. When the stones heat, what is heat? Right there, you get the infrared radiation.

I think Roger measured for 430 or something on his stones. He did the black body calculation. There’s some level of infrared going out into those longer wavelengths but it also is kicking your sweat up like crazy. Which is then changing the optics. One of the things that falls out that is going to be very interesting is, if you look at it from the standpoint of Marcus theory, it was called the reorganization energy.

There are two things that work well, add a photon and increase the amount of humidity in the room. If your skin is well hydrated, it gives you more optimum driving characteristics for the mitochondria. All these people that are in these rooms in the winter are getting 20% humidity, if they’re lucky. It’s degrading if you believe the Marcus theory that it’s degrading the mitochondria efficiency slightly.

Is There UVC Reception Inside The Body?

Now, I want to visit something that you talked about a lot. We didn’t mention much but we mentioned it a little bit. Going to the short end of the spectrum, the higher energy, UVB and UVA. UVC doesn’t hit us very much. Although, from my understanding, there is some UVC reception inside the body. Is that true?

What I would say is what’s going on is, as I said, the UVC is strongly absorbed in the body and it is converted into hydrogen peroxide and ozone. Therefore, it is indirect. One of the things that’s so beautiful about the design is that when you look at it, when light comes into the atmosphere, you see a blue sky. What is happening? That is called scatter associated with a reduction in polarization. When photons are coming in, they are randomly polarized. When they hit a molecule in the atmosphere, they lose some of the polarization, and it scatters them.

It’s very efficient, but it scatters it. The entire sky lights up as this beautiful blue. If you look in the UV, it’s lit up with UV. Now you think about that from the standpoint of delivery into the biosphere. The fact that we have this not just direct light coming in, but we have this scattered hemisphere of UV and blue. It allows it to go down underneath the canopy. It’s coming in from all angles. That’s the first step that light gets.

It’s to be distributed out almost evenly throughout in the blue and the UV based on Rayleigh scatter. It’s an amazing optics from the standpoint of how it efficiently gets UV down into all of the different places. If it didn’t have that effect, sunlight would come through highly collimated because of the geometry between the sun and the earth. You would essentially just get shadows everywhere.

Some people say, “If you are at a certain latitude, you’re not going to get enough UVB in the winter time between this month and that month to make vitamin D when it hits the layers of your skin.” If I’m not mistaken, I believe it was Bob Fosbury who said, “No, because of the scatter, you can.” The reason you’re not making vitamin D in the winter is because you’re covered with short wavelengths. They don’t penetrate any clothing or whatsoever. I believe I heard him say if you walk around nude in the winter land, you’ll make vitamin D.

Again, the problem is, it’s a matter of measurement or how you measured the process. Most people will go and they’ll say look at the solar spectrum by measuring ASTM 1.5-G. It ignores basically all the other stuff, the scatter that surrounds us, which is predominantly blue and UV. You get this impression that from the data, how you measured it, there’s not very much UV in the winter. The minute you take into account all the scatter over a whole hemisphere then all of a sudden, you see there’s a lot of UV still available.

Effects Of UVC And UVA To The Skin Layer

Going back. UVB creates what we call vitamin D and also 9 or 10 other things at the same time that are very beneficial to us. UVB is very essential to our health and UVA also creates nitric oxide and other effects. Now, these two have been so thoroughly vilified. I listened to the show with you in the Australian doctor. He’s a very nice guy. I forget his name.

Are you talking about Max?

Right. In Australia, he is living the nightmare because he’s trying to show people the benefits of these wavelengths. In Australia, you can’t even talk to anyone. Even in my daily life, I talk to people about that stuff. They say, “Come on. No way. It’s going to ruin my skin. It’s not going to be good for my skin.” What do you say to all of that knowing the very clear effects that UVB and UVA have when they interact with our skin layer?

One of the things that I found, probably the worst thing you can do is put sunscreen on. If you don’t burn, what you do is you increase the amount of time people spend outside under sunlight without protection because they essentially lost the indicator. You get a sunburn because it’s time to go in, stupid. That’s what you’re getting. Hopefully, you can get there before. My wife is a redhead and I am in Kansas. What do you think she had to deal with? A lot, but I don’t think it’s a matter of using a bunch of sunscreen.

I did this paper for the cosmetic journal that they wanted me to write. What it showed is we did the model of skin. What happens is that when you put sunscreen on, you increase the amount of time you spend outdoors. What you’re also doing is that all the sunscreens, in order to be politically correct, in the UV, they don’t affect your skin other than maybe a little golden tone or whatever. That means that you’re getting more blue photons. Half the photons generated in the skin are in the visible and half our reactive oxygen species are in the visible and half of them are in the UV.

There’s no doubt that these UV photons can generate melanoma if you’re being irresponsible not wearing a hat and doing those kinds of things or wearing light clothing. If you do, wear sunscreen and it makes you stay out more. That means you’re getting a lot more absorption of blue. If you do the model, you see that the blue mainly localizes in the basal layer of the skin, which then jacks up the basal cell carcinoma levels. Which is well documented that men in particular are increasing levels of basal cell carcinoma.

It’s a tricky little game because the right way to do it is exactly the way that the aborigines do it. Put on the blackface. They happen to have theirs naturally, but there was a company down in Australia that tried to sell tone darker. He shut down big time because nobody wants to be walking around with black face on. Yet we know that the aborigines have no problem with melanoma. In fact, all the people have higher melanin oil.

What’s amazing is that we measured and in fact, we’re the only ones that ever did. We measured the difference in transmission through a person with white skin and a person with darker skin but very black skin, the gentleman I knew from Ghana. There’s a difference in the visible but the minute we get up into the infrared, the difference vanishes. We’re all exactly the same. We’re all black and white hair.

It’s almost like a political statement in some ways. The bottom line is, in that region, in the infrared, we’re all behaving the same way because the intent is to collect all those photons that we can in that region because they’re beneficial to the electron transport chain. It’s not just the electron transport chain. There’s clear indication that the T-cell velocities go up. The dynamics of the mitochondria in the cell increase, fusion and fission.

There’s tons of different data out there, especially in some of these things like Nanolive, where they do real-time measurements of living cells. You can see things accelerate. If you put blue or cyan on there, the mitochondria slow down and eventually stop moving. The mentality, you should be thinking of the infrared as being essentially the protector of what we need visible in the UV. It gets a beautiful arrangement if you look at the skin. The outer 50 microns is where most of the action occurs for making vitamin D or oxidizing cholesterol and all the other steroid hormones.

In that region, if you just look at the graph of melanin. You’ll see that by the time you get up into that same region, melanin is absorbing like gangbusters. There’s a paper where yakiimo showed in the skin that the melanin appeared to be oxidized. There’s like a ten volt drop in the absorption at 280 nanometers relative to unoxidized. It appears that the font and its very hard to photo bleach melanin, but it’s very easy to photochemically bleach melanin. What appears to happen and this is what Hudson showed.

The infrared is generating levels of reactive oxygen species, in particular hydrogen peroxide. It increased by six-fold, if photo bleaches. Since it’s all the same skin, in that same 50 microns, we’re generating the hydrogen peroxide necessary. You can see that. There’s a particular people from Senegal. If you look at the pictures of them, you’ll see that their skin looks blue. It appears that is essentially a photochemically bleached response that allows more of the photons to get into that upper 50 microns and not be absorbed lower than. It gives them an advantage as far as I can tell.

The old straw hat transmits a lot of infrared through it, especially with a slight open weave. Share on X

It’s just so many beautiful things that happen optically. To your very first thing about what I bring to the table, the optic stands to show you a direction that the body has taken. You go to the biologists and the other people, the astronomers and astrophysicists. They take that and they turn it into something. They find the mechanism but the body is amazingly at depth at generating everything. We’re now starting to look at the nano structures that’s generating in the body and to localize various things. Optics almost always tells you something about what the body traded off to get there.

Once again, for the readers who were cringing at you saying not to use sunscreen. I remind you we’ve already visited it earlier in this talk. We said, “Use nature’s sunscreen, the shade.” Put on a hat. By the way, sunglasses. Seemingly, we also absorb not just through the skin but the retina absorbs a lot. Sunglasses also filter out only a partial range of the spectrum. Would you say that it’s more beneficial to walk around with a hat to shade our eyes rather than with sunglasses?

I would say yes and I agree with you. I would never tell anybody to do anything that puts them in danger. Be a little bit smarter about what is the solution like wearing a hat, especially a straw hat. I did a spectrum on the straw hat. It’s pretty amazing. The old straw hat is pretty doggone good. It transmits a lot of the infrared through it, especially with a slight open weave. It’s amazing how sometimes the old is smarter than the new. In general, everything is being driven by comfort. Not by science.

Scott, there’s no doubt in my mind we could talk to you for about 7 or 8 more hours, but I want to thank you so much for taking the time and being so generous with your knowledge. I very much hope that our viewers and readers will benefit from me. Thank you so much. I hope to see you soon.

Thank you.

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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