We Are All Solar Batteries: How To Charge Your Circadian Rhythm With Dr. Alexis J. Cowan

Imagine a day where aligning with the sun’s natural rhythms could unlock profound improvements in your energy, mood, and overall health—this isn’t just theory, it’s science. In this episode, Adiel Gorel is joined by Dr. Alexis J. Cowan, who takes us on an incredible journey into our metabolism, and explains how decades of sun avoidance has in fact been contributing to all kinds of metabolic disease. Wielding a formidable body of rich new scientific research, Dr. Cowan shines a light on the many ways the sun and its various light spectrums are essential to a thriving, healthy and happy lifestyle. This is an episode you don’t want to miss, especially as we approach summer with its potent, life-giving power.

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We Are All Solar Batteries: How To Charge Your Circadian Rhythm With Dr. Alexis J. Cowan

I’m very excited to be here with you again. I’m particularly excited because we have an expert with whom I’ve already spoken before and I believe the message in the knowledge that she has to share with us is absolutely and completely life-changing. Our guest is Dr. Alexis Cowan. Welcome, Alexis.

Thank you for having me. I’m excited to chat.

Your research background is at the Princeton Metabolic Club, which is one of the best in the world and then you did your postdoc. You are very much a research person.

Dr. Cowan’s Research Journey & The Essence Of Circadian Rhythm

I would say that. I never resonated fully with the centralized academic model but a series of opportunities presented themselves and I decided to take them. In retrospect now, we’ll get into it but it was an incredible experience to be able to have one foot in the centralized world and one foot in the decentralized world to be able to synthesize the two together and create something new that is like the best of both. I would say I’m a researcher type person but disagree quite a bit with the way things are done within the standard academic environment.

I come from Silicon Valley, so there is this great logic and the creativity which is wonderful but also, if I don’t see it, I don’t believe it. Let’s get right into it because I believe your message, your knowledge can benefit a lot of people. If we can start, what is circadian rhythm? Why does it matter? Why does it matter for our health?

The Circadian rhythm is the 24-hour cycles of the body. There are other rhythms as well like ultradian rhythm. It’s every 90 minutes to three hours, for example. It’s like the swap over of the paranasal sinus and sympathetic to parasympathetic dominance. If we look at the day long cycle, the circadian cycle, that is the 24-hour long cycle and there are different zeitgebers or time givers that are responsible for keeping that clock ticking at the right frequency within the body. The primary one is the light and dark cycles.

Both light and dark are equally important from a circadian perspective to keep that clock ticking at the right beat. The clock that I’m referring to primarily lives in the hypothalamus within the brain. It’s called the Super Chiasmatic Nucleus or the SCN. This part of the brain is the master clock for the whole body. It’s directly connected to the back of the eye as well. There’s something called the retina hypothalamic tract that connects the retina directly to the SCN.

It’s taking in the light information or the absence of light information from the environment then it’s synthesizing that to understand what time of day it is, which then has all of these knock-on functions and effects on every other tissue in the body because there are certain functions that are supposed to happen at certain times of day.

For example, during the daytime. We’re focused on digestion, cognition, and movement like getting substrates mobilized for exercise and things like that. At night time, we want to switch into a regenerative process and a regenerative pathway that are allowing the tissues to turn over effectively, engage in autophagy, which is like when the cellular cleanup crews come in and take out the garbage and repurpose it. We’re focused on recovery sleep.

These types of activities are associated with the dark portion of the day. In the modern indoor milieu, where most people are living in door lifestyles. We’re both having an absence of sufficient grateful spectrum light during the day. We also have an issue getting dark darkness at night. From the daytime perspective or looking at what’s provided by nature, let’s say, which is what our bodies evolved or we’re designed to receive. We’re thinking about sunlight.

The sun comes up. There’s a certain spectrum associated with that. It’s very rare and infrared dominant. As the sun approaches midday, we have much more blue entering the frequency. Midday sun is about 50% red and infrared and about 25% blue. Worth noting here is that blue light is what’s particularly important for setting that circadian clock in the brain. The brain is looking for that blue signal in balance with the other frequency of light that are present within sunlight to understand what time of day it is. We’re meant to receive maximum blue stimulation midday.

As the day approaches near sunset, we’re repeating what we had at sunrise, more red and infrared shift. Nighttime is supposed to come and we’re supposed to get virtually no blue light in our environment. However, that just couldn’t be further from the case now. Most people, when it gets dark out, they’re putting on all of their LED or fluorescent bulbs in the house. They’re sitting on their device screens. All of these light sources are highly enriched in blue wavelengths of light, which is directly telling that master clock in the brain that it’s daytime when it’s not.

That directly suppresses the release of melatonin from the pineal gland which is required for you to go to sleep, get good quality sleep and be able to stay asleep throughout the night. That’s the issue. In the nighttime environment, people are on their TVs and phones right before bed. Maybe some people even sleep with the TV on or sleep with lights on. There’s nothing worse than you can do from metabolic health standpoint from an endocrine and a sleep quality standpoint than sleeping with lights on or being on devices right before bed.

On the flip side during the daytime, if we look at the brightness because brightness is an important quality of light. It’s helping to stimulate the neurochemistry we need to be alert, awake, and have a good mood and good cognition. Indoor environments are usually somewhere around 1,000 lakhs in brightness. If you contrast that with natural outdoor environments, we’re looking between 50,000 and 200,000 lakhs. We are in a brightness deficit. If we’re living in indoor lifestyle, that is preventing serotonin from being made effectively, which then later gets converted to melatonin at night.

Most people think, “Maybe I know I’m supposed to remove light from my environment, especially blue light at night.” People don’t realize that the bright full spectrum light that you received during daytime is equally as important if you’re looking to optimize your sleep. What I personally recommend for people and what I do myself is, on days where it’s not thunder storming. I have an outdoor office space where I’m working. I’m usually outdoors from sun up till sundown. When I come inside, then I’m using my blue blocking glasses if I have to.

If we need lights on, we’re putting on red light bulbs. We have filters on our device screens so that we’re minimizing that blue light coming into the eye so that we’re going to have better recovery, better sleep, and start the next day off on the right foot. There are major metabolic implications here, too. If people have diabetes or sleep disorders or sleep apnea and things like this, there was an incredible study that came out just a few years ago that showed that sleeping with lights, even dim lights on in the sleeping environment for a single night. In the morning, you wake up with higher fasting glucose levels, higher fasting insulin levels, and more overall insulin resistance.

Now, imagine you’re doing that every single day. You’re literally creating insulin resistance within the system and we can get into like mechanistically why that is maybe a later point in the show. For now, there’s a direct metabolic effect of these lights at night and artificial light at night or ALAN is a important feature within the medical literature. We see diseases associated with artificial light exposure at night like shift work and other things that have this exposure.

We see increased risk of breast cancer and multiple other types of cancers like diabetes, cognitive decline, and neurodegeneration. All of these diseases are potentiated or in some cases even contributed to the etiology of these diseases from your light exposure patterns in the evening. Maybe you probably have a couple questions but I’ll cut it for their for now from there then we can see wherever you want to go.

Shifting Lifestyles: Sunlight, Technology, And Kids’ Health

You’ve said a lot and there’s a lot to unpack but I’ll just say if we go back to 200 years ago or 300 years ago, we spent most of our day outside. We were working. We were farming. Whatever we were doing, we were getting all those signals from the 200,000 lakhs of the Sun in all the spectrum of the light just like on the album cover of the Pink Floyd. The whole thing. We were getting it in the daytime. Our central clock, the SCN was getting the signal right in the morning. Everything was synchronized. Our body was working like it should work then the sun went down. There were no computers. They were no light bulbs. There was nothing. There was fire but again, usually the sun went up. We went up. The sun went down. We went down.

That was an easier type of an environment. Now you could argue. Many people, especially very young people, live the opposite lifestyle. Most of the day, indoors maybe in the cubicle, some people live under the assumption that if they have a beautiful house with large windows, they get a lot of sunlight. You will tell us very soon how the windows are optimized for efficiency so they block the infrared portion of the sunlight and the UV portions.

We are sitting indoors looking at the beautiful sky outside and we are getting an alien spectrum that are body doesn’t know what to do with. I don’t even want to talk about it, especially for the young students which I have a lot of friends with kids in college and it’s amazing. I remember when we were kids in college, we were at the peak of our powers, healthy, happy, and running around. I hear from a lot of friends there are kids in college are tired all the time.

They say they have ADHD. You look at them and how they live. It’s 100% looking at the phone relaxing after hours of study at 2:00 AM. They play a game on the phone. Living the opposite and not going out in the sun, as you will tell us. We’ve been told that some of the sunlight spectrum is bad for us. I know I said a lot, but I want you to go forward with all of this.

There’s so much I could say for college-age kids, but also grade school age. I’m excited. I’m going to be giving a talk to all of the superintendents and principals in the State of New Hampshire to help them understand the harms of artificial light sources and screen technology on the kids learning process, behavior, mood, and so many different things to help them hopefully revamp some of their environments, especially since COVID.

I have a fourteen-year-old stepson and ever since COVID, they go back to school but now they all have Chromebooks that they are forced to sit on all day and having analog writing and paper. They’re now typing on screens all day long and then most of the kids come home and then they’re playing computer games with their friends or sitting on their phone. These kids are just getting blasted with not only in blue and red artificial light but also with non-native EMFs because now all the classrooms also require Wi-Fi in order to run the Chromebooks.

Before COVID, some probably had it but most probably didn’t even need it that much. We’re having some big issues here and I’m thinking back to this 2015 study that was conducted in the Middle East in Saudi that compared two schools. One school was about 100 or 200 meters away from a cell phone tower and the other school had much more distance between. There was no local cell phone tower present and they showed a significantly higher level of HbA1c or hemoglobin A1c, which is a sign of your fasting blood sugar. Your total blood sugar levels over the course of roughly like a couple months.

Also, higher incidents of type-2 diabetes diagnoses within these school kids that were next to the cell tower. This research goes way back to the ‘50s and ‘60s that got buried. Robert O. Becker who wrote The Body Electric. I highly recommend everybody check out his work, but he was a real pioneer in this space back in the ’50, ’60, and ‘70s. He was canceled for blowing the whistle on the biological harms of non-native EMFs. He worked I believe for the Navy and he was an MD but he had a lab. He was studying the effects of non-native EMFs and also the regeneration pathway.

He was interested in lemur regeneration and studied salamanders and other amphibians but also was hopeful that we would be able to make huge strides in humans as well because he work with a lot of veterans. As soon as he started doing research into the ill effects of what the military was up to with regards to their big radar towers. In this case, it was something called project sanguine, which was this giant ELF or extreme low frequency emitting tower that was allowing or facilitating the communication of troops on the land with troops in submarines like way down.

The ELF frequency is also extremely important here because there’s a natural ELF that we all experience when we’re connected to the Earth when we’re outside, especially with bare feet on the earth. That’s called the Schumann Resonance. The Schumann resonance, Becker found has major roles in regulating metabolism and the cycles within the body and that any non-native ELFs that were used by, let’s say military interfere with those signals that our body is receiving to understand how to regulate itself, essentially.

Anyway, in 1977, he blew the whistle on 60 minutes about the harms of this stuff. Within a couple days, all the funding was pulled in his entire lab and he lost his livelihood. That research had been buried since then. A lot of people, when you talk about non-native EMFs, they’ll say, “That’s like woo, or that’s not proven. There’s not enough evidence.” We have a ton of evidence. It’s just not been put under the spotlight and probably purposefully so because there has been this incessant push towards that like a technocracy state in smart cities and smart homes for the past few decades.

I’m sure it was being T-ed up even back in the ‘70s because most of this technology doesn’t get rolled out to the public until it’s been around 10 years or 15 years within the private sector or the military sector. We have a lot to go up against with regards to this, but I’m especially concerned about the kids because they are more vulnerable. Their nervous system isn’t fully myelinated. Between 28 and 39 years of age is peak myelination in the brain. Myelin is this protective covering on the central nervous system that provide some level of insulation as well.

When you’re exposed to a lot of these frequencies and your nervous system isn’t fully protected, you’re much more vulnerable to having negative effects on brain function, cognition, learning, mood and behavior. There were some interesting studies done by John Ott back in the 1980s. He wrote the book called Health and Light. He did these slow timelapse photography and he was filming school children in a classroom under fluorescent bulbs. You watch this time lapse and you see all the kids are fidgeting. They’re not paying attention. They can’t sit still. There are some specific children that had diagnosed ADHD and learning disorders.

He shows the after where after they change out those bulbs to either let natural lighting through the windows or having a full spectrum bulb put in the place of the fluorescent bulbs. Now you see the kids are able to sit, learn and focus. There were a couple kids that were very bad. They could not sit still. They were rocking back and forth the whole time. Once those lights were changed, they were able to relax and just be present. That’s just like the smallest change you can imagine. This is all very low cost.

We’re so we’re so quick to medicate kids with Adderall, Ritalin, etc., versus curating an environment that supports their biology that will then allow them to learn, focus and “behave.” Also, when we’re talking about these younger kids, they shouldn’t be forced to sit still staring forward at a board or at a screen for eight hours a day. I argue it’s highly unethical and it’s impeding their development with regards to their posture and biomechanics with regards to their ability to move well and think well. It’s also screws up the alignment and the neck and the jaw development and so many different aspects of vision, too.

We have a myopia problem. The predictions now if things keep trending the same way, we’re going to reach roughly 50% global myopia levels by the year 2050. This leads me into the conversation about why near infrared light and UV light are important with regards to mitochondrial function and energy production. If you’re wearing standard glasses or contacts, virtually every brand out there, if you just go to your eye doctor and get subscribed these lenses. They’re going to be blocking UV light and the glasses will also block a decent amount of near infrared light as well.

This is a critical point to push on. I’ll talk about UV light a little bit first because it’s the most demonized. When we think about UV-B light in particular, most people know that you need that to make vitamin D. When it interacts with your Skin, there’s a molecule called 7-Dehydrocholesterol that gets converted into private vitamin D3. It can go into the bloodstream and undergo secondary conversions and tertiary conversions in the liver in the kidneys. People don’t realize outside of vitamin D, there is a whole lot of things that UV-B light is doing.

Briefly on the vitamin D story, not only do you make vitamin D but also about a dozen other vitamin D like molecules are made in the skin and response to UV-B light. If we also look at the literature around vitamin D status and chronic illnesses, we see virtually every chronic disease state that we are facing societally is associated with a low vitamin D status. Yet, we look at studies like the vital study that showed that vitamin D supplementation doesn’t provide a benefit to reducing or ameliorating those conditions.

What that’s telling us is that vitamin D is a biomarker of your sun exposure habits. When you’re out in the sun and getting that UV-B light to make vitamin D, you’re also getting UVA light which releases nitric oxide and supports blood flow and nutrient delivery to tissues and waste removal from tissues. We’re also getting near infrared light which directly penetrates all the way into the body and stimulates the mitochondria to make energy, water, and also biophotons. We can talk about that later.

Your mitochondria make a ton of light. It’s just retained within the system so you can’t see per se. Though, there is some argument that when you’re with somebody in person, you’re sampling their biophotons to see if you get along with them or not. There’s a lot of non-verbal things going on there. That near infrared light is an absolute essential nutrient. That’s how we have to think about it. The same with UV light. We need to think about it in this way because then it shows the flip side when we’re into our environments.

As you mentioned, window glass blocks virtually 100% of near infrared light because it’s considered thermal. If you’re trying to maintain stable indoor temperatures, you don’t want that heat to come through because now it’s going to increase your energy bills. I like to say that energy efficiency in lighting, technology and windows is creating an energy crisis in the human body because we’re meant to be with near infrared light all day long, sun up to sundown.

UVB Light’s Power: Vitamin D And Palm C’s Role

If people are in indoor environments now, which Americans spend 90% of their days or more indoors. This is a huge problem. We’re highly deficient in near infrared light and it’s creating a metabolic and a mitochondrial crisis that also is reflected in the chronic disease burden. If we look at all of the primary chronic diseases, underlying them is mitochondrial dysfunction in one or more tissues. Back to the UV part of the story. UV-B light in addition to making vitamin D and all the other vitamin D analogs, also makes another important molecule in the skin and in the brain via the eyes.

This molecule is called “Pro opioid melanocortin or POMC. This is a very complex prohormone. It’s made in the brain when UV-B light comes through the eye and also in the skin, when UV-B light interacts with the skin. It’s cleaved into ten different hormonal products. One of them is beta-endorphin, which is an endogenous opioid molecule. As people know about opioids, they are one of the most abused drug types out there primarily in my opinion because people are highly UV light deficient. You’re constantly trying to reach something to get a hit of dopamine which is what the opioids give you.

Not realizing that if you curated the proper environment for your biology that you would naturally just feel good at a baseline and that’s what beta-endorphin does. It makes you feel good. It reduces anxiety and depression. It improves cognition. It modulates the immune system in positive ways and it overall boosts up your dopamine levels so that you’re cruising at altitude. If you’re constantly UV light deficient, in particular UV-B light, you are not basically getting this baseline boost, which means that you’re constantly going to be reaching for things to give you a hit of dopamine. Whether it’s social media, junk food, pornography, drugs, or alcohol. Whatever it is.

You’re on this roller coaster of dopamine because your body needs to elevate its dopamine in some way. Your brain wants that but it’s not getting the right inputs to do it the right way the way that nature intended. Instead, you end up on this roller coaster and you start engaging in compulsive or addictive behaviors. That’s the way I see addiction in general and OCD as well. I have a friend who had bad OCD that was completely ameliorated by dialing in her circadian and light health. It’s changed her life in very short periods of time.

That’s also the other major benefit of this work. People see changes quickly. When I first started incorporating these practices just getting out in the sun in the morning first thing. Getting that bright full spectrum light my eyes and spending as much time outside midday as I could with as much skin exposed as I could then blocking blue light at night. Whether it’s using red bulbs, blue blockers, etc. Immediately, I was sleeping through the night for the first time in memory. This was a few years ago.

Previously, I would fall asleep and then I would wake up in the middle night tossing and turning struggling to fall back asleep. That would result in me sleeping in because now I wasn’t able to get the full sleep period in the continuous fashion I had to sleep in to get my hours. It completely changed my efficiency like throughout my day because now I got all this time back because I wasn’t fighting with myself to get to sleep. People see immediate mood changes, too. As I mentioned, the beta-endorphins from UV light are very mood boosting and reducing anxiety.

We see benzodiazepines. It’s another drug that’s hugely abused and overprescribed that are highly addictive from a physical standpoint. Benzos are some of the hardest drugs to get off of. Alcohol and benzodiazepines are two of the ones that give your body a physical dependency the quickest. Oftentimes, we see them giving out like candy. It’s not alcohol but the benzos. It’s frustrating to see that the centralized pharma-based model is not looking for solutions for people. It’s looking for patches that then make you a customer for life essentially.

People can do a lot in their own lives just like I mentioned getting this UVB light because the other portion that people will be interested in since obesity and diabetes are such big issues, is one of the other cleavage products of POMC which is α-MSH. MSH stands for Melanocytes Stimulating Hormone. As the name implies, this factor stimulates the melanocytes to make new melanin. That’s how you get a tan in response to sunlight. That new melanin is produced and UVA light also plays a role here by helping to change the melanin granules and bring it towards the surface.

The tan that you get acutely from going out into the sun is existing melanin incoming towards the surface, but then there is the delayed myelination that happens over the course of 1 to 3 days, which is the new melanin being produced. That’s only by UVB light. In addition to stimulating the production of melanin, which I want to talk about with you because melanin is this super molecule that plays such important roles that nobody talks about in the mainstream.

This α-MSH also works in the hypothalamus and when it’s interacting with the hypothalamus, it decreases appetite and increases energy expenditure. From an obesity standpoint, what we see is appetite is dysregulated, so you want to eat more hyperphagia. You want to eat more than you need. Energy expenditures also declined, so that means you’re burning less calories at rest. When people talk about obesity in the mainstream, they’re talking about calories in and calories out. It’s such a fallacy because that equation, although true, is highly complex.

Especially the calories outside of the equation because that is entirely controlled by your brain, which is directly related to leptin and insulin or think about leptin resistance. Leptin is directly tied in with this pathway. There’s something called the leptin-melanocortin pathway. The melanocortin part of that refers to the receptors that are stimulated by α-MSH. Leptin signals the production of POMC in the brain. If leptin resistance is present in the system, when leptin binds to the receptor, there’s something that cuts that signal from being relayed to produce the POMC, which would then lead to the increase in energy expenditure and decrease in appetite.

Leptin levels can be elevated in the bloodstream but the brain is sensing that there is low energy availability because for those of people who don’t know, leptin is like the energy accountant of the system. It is a factor that’s secreted by subcutaneous fat. It’s telling the brain how many electrons are available because we look at how energy is produced from macros, let’s say. We’re thinking about electrons and protons. It’s the electrons that is allowing that energy to be made. Leptin is this electronic accountant but if the brain isn’t properly able to sense the amount of leptin that’s in the blood, even if levels are high.

It’s perceiving it as low because the signaling cascade is broken. The body thinks, “We’re going to starve. We have nothing available. We need to keep eating. We need to reduce our energy expenditure because we’re trying to conserve.” We’re in this survival mode, versus in a leptin sensitive brain. There is this sense of safety and abundance where it’s like, “We can relax. We don’t have to worry about keeping eating all day long because now we know we have plenty of energy on board. We don’t have to worry about that.”

Leptin resistance is a major issue that is exacerbated by the light in the environment. There’s a paper that came out, I believe in 2019. That showed that the light exposure onto your body directly impacts the amount of leptin release from subcutaneous fast. Remember, subcutaneous means right below the skin. This fat tissue is directly interacting with the light coming in from your environment and that would include blue light but also red infrared as well, which penetrates even more deeply. That blue light in particular, when it’s received in full spectrum at the right dose, it directly helps to stimulate leptin released from fat tissue, which then goes and tells your brain, “We don’t need to eat.”

We also boost POMC, so that means we’re increasing beta-endorphin. We’re just feeling good at a baseline. We don’t feel compelled to over consume. Our metabolic rate is elevated. That’s going to help clear up any excess substrates, so we’re talking high triglycerides and LDL cholesterol issues. These types of things is typically a sign of insulin and/or leptin resistance because they travel very closely together. Almost in all cases, leptin resistance precedes insulin resistance. This can happen decades before you get an actual diagnosis.

I like to mention this briefly because many people are not getting the proper testing, let’s say, to catch things early. I’m sure that’s by design. The insurance companies won’t cover a fasting insulin test for somebody who’s not diagnosed prediabetes or diabetes. The problem with that is your fasting insulin will be elevated up to ten years before your diagnosed with diabetes. There’s a decade long window where you could have caught this issue and insurance doesn’t care to cover it.

There’s a lot of people can do in their own lives. You can order your own tests online, for example, at Own Your Labs but in general, even if you don’t want to do lab, you can just start to work on optimizing your lifestyle. There was a study that came out in January of 2022 from Glen Jeffery, who is a light researcher. He showed that just 15 minutes of 670 nanometer deep red-light exposure followed by an oral glucose tolerance test which measures your level of insulin sensitivity resulted in a 30% lower level of total glucose or glucose tolerance test.

Simply getting enough, red infrared light in your environment and I just tell people to take their meals outside when they can, is a dramatic way to reduce your blood sugar response to meals. That is because it’s directly stimulating your mitochondria to be able to sponge up that glucose or that fat from the meal so that it’s not stagnant and sitting in your bloodstream waiting to go somewhere. That’s just like an easy thing that people can do like taking their meals outside whenever possible. It’s something that is accessible. It’s free and it’s another reason that I love working in this space. It’s because most of the recommendations are free or very low cost and will change the way you feel in a very short period of time.

Sunlight & Melanin: Simplifying Health Strategies

Talking about that, let’s bring it down now for the readers who went on a tangent with learning about POMC and the things that we can do on the simplest level to optimize our health are ridiculously simple. You said, spend more time outdoors. That doesn’t cost a penny. I heard before, it’s a good thing to be out close to sunrise and I understand why because there’s a lot of red and infrared. There’s a little bit of blue and it wakes up your clock and starts everything ticking in the right way.

When you said you spend most of the day outside, you have an umbrella. You’re in the shade. You get the ambient light. People don’t have to think that, “I have to be in the sun all day. I’m going to bake.” No, you don’t. You used an expression of which I like. You said, why don’t you use nature’s sunscreen? The shade. I have this thing that’s installed that opens up. You can sit out there, enjoy the view and enjoy the day. I’m getting ambient light. I’m not baking in the sun. If I want to walk in the sun, excellent for me but I can do it for 5 minutes or 10 minutes. What you’re saying is spend more time out in the sun. Now, if you are a worker or a student. Maybe you can just open up your window.

That’s one way to get natural light coming through because then you’re not having that window filtering the light that’s coming in. When you’re outdoors in the shade, especially if there’s any green plants around you. Green plants reflect a ton of near infrared photons. You’re still dosing your body up with this very beneficial wavelength of light that’s supporting your mitochondrial function and the hydration of your tissues even if you’re not indirect sun.

Having said that because I’m mixed. I’m half Black and half White. I have quite a bit of melanin and I’m at 40 North latitude. I’m in Jersey. When I’m working outside on my laptop, I have my umbrella up to at least cover my computer but usually, I’ve been in the sun all day long. My skin can tolerate a ton of it because I have quite a bit more melanin, especially now that I’ve been working on my solar callus, as Jack Crews would say, where you’re gradually building up your melanin over time.

What I’m trying to get out is, the more melanin and you have in your skin, the more direct sunlight you need to be healthy and the proxy for that is vitamin D. Melanin is a sponge for light. All frequencies of light. The only frequency of light that melanin doesn’t absorb too much is that near infrared range and it makes sense you would want that because it turns out that water loves to absorb near infrared light and most of the body’s water. Between 60% and 80% of most people walking around, depending on age is made of water.

That water gets charged up by near infrared light and it can, what’s called a charge separate. This is Dr. Gerald Pollack’s work. He discovered the fourth phase of water where when it’s exposed to certain frequencies, it can charge separate into positive and negative charge which serves as a battery that can then power metabolism directly independent of ATP, which is like the energy currency. That’s typically talked about in textbooks. Outside of that near infrared frequency, melanin absorbs all wavelengths of light from gamma radiation all the way up through the radio frequencies of 5G and Wi-Fi.

It’s interesting because there were some researchers at Chernobyl that found these mushrooms that are thriving there that are very dark colored. It turns out they are chock full of melanin. Furthermore, that that melanin is directly harnessing the gamma radiation in the environment to make free energy. There’s another researcher in the space on the human side of things called Dr. Arturo Solis Herrera who’s been testing this hypothesis. That indeed even in humans, we can use melanin to make free energy from the light in our environment.

It’s so called like human photosynthesis and that’s something that’s being further researched. I hope to also look into in my lab but it makes sense because if we’re saying that UV light stimulates melanin production and we’re also saying that UV light inhibits appetite. If you look at that equation, you must have less of an appetite because you need to eat less energy because you’re getting energy from somewhere else. That’s the logic.

In addition to that, melanin also plays important roles in detoxification. It’s a free radical quencher. It serves as a potent antioxidant within the body. It’s also a major heavy metal. When you have that melanin around, it’s able to pull heavy metals out of the bloodstream and sequester them away from the tissues to protect the tissues from damage. I like to point to the examples. If you compare a city pigeon with country pigeons. The city pigeons are very dark. There was a research paper published in science about a decade ago showing that the dark melanin pigment in the feathers of pigeons is cultivated to pull the heavy metals from the brake dust and all the other pollutants in the urban environment.

It’s serving a protective mechanism but the country pigeons don’t need that melanin because they’re environment is cleaner, let’s say. Melanin plays all these important roles. On the flip side of that, if you ask any centralized physician, especially dermatologists about this. They’ll say, “There’s no such thing as a healthy tan.” It’s preposterous. When we look at melanin biology, how all the incredible roles that it’s playing. To say that is just very disingenuous and not evidence-based with the most updated evidence that we have.

To circle back, because melanin is the sponge for light, what that means is that there’s less UV light, let’s say, to make vitamin D or to make POMC because it’s getting sponged up by the melanin. That’s why if you live in a more Northern latitude and you have darker skin. You need way more time in direct sunlight than somebody with light skin because you need to compensate for that presence of melanin. If we look at skin tone across the different latitudes, we will see darker skin near the equator, and especially near the equator at high altitudes because that even further increases you’d be light in the environment.

That’s an adaptation. Some people would argue that’s an adaptation to protect the body from UV light but I would argue that it’s an adaptation to harness the UV light in the environment productively. I think it’s just a perspective shift because if we’re constantly fear based perspective around UV light, we’re just going to cherry pick the evidence that supports that, versus looking at the full picture. Anyway, it just suffice to say that the more melanin you have at the higher latitudes, the more direct sun you need to compensate for that and you can use vitamin D as a proxy.

What I typically recommend to people as you’re looking for a vitamin D, a 25-hydroxy vitamin D, which is the blood storage form between 60 and 80 nanograms per milliliter. If you get there, that’s a good sign that you’re getting enough sunlight for your biology, for your amount of myelination. For me, I’m 40 North latitude. I’m basically in direct sun all day long and I haven’t burned once since I started being out there in March. I didn’t spend too much time out there in the winter because my brain doesn’t function very well if I’m cold. It starts to shut down slowly but I also do engage in direct and targeted cold exposure like cold plunging, which we can talk about a little bit later, the benefits of that.

There’s some nuance to be had there. Some people will benefit immensely from getting more direct light. Some people need way less time and lower smaller doses if there’s less melanin present in their skin. I like to add nuance that conversation because I feel like typically there is just information provided to everybody that’s focused on White people. It’s neglecting a large swath of the population have different sunlight needs and to the point where the propaganda goes so deep that there’s literally a brand of sunscreen on the market that’s called Black girl sunscreen.

When I saw this, I wanted to like scream because I’m like, “You’re missing an incredible opportunity to protect and support your biology and your metabolism.” There are many benefits of charging up that melanin with sunlight. The propaganda just runs deep. I’m doing my best to help spread this information to the Latin countries. I have some connections down there that are disseminating the information because there’s a lot of colonialist mindsets still about like lighter skin is better and you don’t want to get darker because it’s a sign of like class issues or whatever. We need to get beyond this and start being evidence-based in the actual form of evidence and not the centralized evidence, let’s say.

Sunscreen, Skin Health, And Light’s Impact

Since you talked about sunscreen, let’s talk about that. We already have established. It’s very good practice, a very simple practice for every one of us to spend more time outside. Whether we’re in the shade, indirect light or walk in the sun more time outside. Now, some people will tell you back, “No, I am a woman. You don’t understand. I can’t afford to get wrinkles. I need a lot of sunscreens.” Can you talk about that?

There’s a bit of a misconception here. A couple of things. All of the research showing harms of UV light was done with UV light isolation. If we look at midday sun, we’re talking about less than 10% of that light being UV light over 50%, being red infrared light. If you look up the literature around the interactions between UV and infrared, we see that red infrared light protects the body against any harms of UV light. There’s that piece. It’s just disingenuous to market the research around UV light and isolation as you’re getting from the sun because it’s nothing like what you’re getting from sunlight.

The other thing I’ll mention here is that outside of UV light, if we look at far infrared light, which is essentially like if you make food in the oven. You’re using far infrared light to cook the food. The sun also has far infrared light and it also plays important roles in creating that charge separated water, the power is metabolism. If you get too much of it, like if you feel your skin getting hot. That’s a sign that you’re getting too much of that far infrared light and that’s going to create changes in the collagen networks of the skin that can create more of a leathery texture.

It’s basically dehydrating the skin because it’s evaporating at all. Your skin is getting overheated. That’s a far infrared issue. That’s not even a UV light issue. In that case, I usually tell people, you can typically tell if you’re starting to burn or you’re getting overheated. That’s a sign that it’s time to take a break. You can usually catch that pretty early, too. At the first sign of like, “Something’s feeling a little tender or a little overheated.” Go in the shade and you can either put water on your skin because water can help to absorb some of that heat out.

It’s a very good sponge for heat or infrared light o just spend the time in the shade to cool down. You may decide you don’t want to go back out that day or whatever. Again, using that shade and leveraging it is beneficial because you’re still getting all of that ambient light the benefits of that but you’re not getting the direct heat and light from the sun that could push you over the edge and cause burning and things like this.

With regards to sunscreen. The major issues, there’s a couple, with sunscreen, especially on the chemical sunscreen side of things. We have the Oxybenzone and the Avobenzone that are endocrine disruptors and have been shown to cause skin cancer. What people are putting on oftentimes could be exacerbating or creating an issue they’re trying to protect from. Those are the chemical sunscreens.

I usually don’t spend much time talking about them because most people up this point know that they’re not the best choice and they could cause harm. Hormonal health issues as well. On the mineral sunscreen side of things. The issue that I have with them in general and this covers all sunscreens, is that when you put that on your body, what you’re doing is you’re selectively filtering out a portion of the sun spectrum. What you’re doing is you’re changing. I like to think about the sun spectrum of different times of day as like a morse code.

There’s different series of dots and dashes that’s conveying specific information. Depending on the light frequencies at a given time of day, you can think about that as a sequence of information that’s being interpreted by the body to understand what time it is. If you’re selectively removing a subset of the spectrum using a mineral sunscreen or a chemical sunscreen. You’re changing the information that’s being received by the body. There’s going to be some situations where maybe people need them. They’re going to be out on a boat for hours and hours and they have fair skin and they’re going to burn. Using like a mineral sunscreen might make sense in that case but that doesn’t mean you do it all the time.

There’s always going to be special cases where you can use it but I usually don’t talk about them because this isn’t the norm. This shouldn’t be something we’re normalizing. It should be used as needed only but outside of that, we should be focused on developing that solar callus, which is gradually increasing your exposure over time. You start early in the season. Maybe you start in March and you’re gradually building up your time into the summer so that you’re not burning. You’re cultivating that healthy melanin and you can further get benefits by leveraging that morning light as you mentioned. Not only from a circadian perspective are you getting the benefits of the right ratio of red and blue.

That red and rich morning light also helps to prime the skin to make it more able to make melanin, which requires good mitochondria function in the myelin sites when you’re out midday. People who are fair prepping and priming their skin with red and infrared light before and/or after the exposure is majorly beneficial. Whether you’re doing that, ideally leveraging sunrise and sunset but also if you want to use like a sauna space bulb or some form of red-light therapy before you go out as well. That could also be prudent to help protect your skin from burning.

When you’re engaging in these practices, you’ll likely find you’re not burning. You’re not going to feel the need to reach for the sunscreen on a daily basis. I want to bring a couple other things into the equation too because there are a lot of factors that influence burning. It’s not just whether or not you went into the sun. There are so many lifestyle and diet practices that people engage in that increase the risk of burning.

For example, if you’re consuming a lot of processed foods. Not only are you elevating your glucose levels but you’re also consuming a ton of these oxidized omega-6 fats. The skin turns over so quickly, the fats that you’re consuming through the diet are directly influencing the fats and the cell membranes of the skin cells. If you’re consuming a lot of these oxidized omega-6s, you’re creating membranes that are more fragile essentially. They’re going to be more prone to burning and damage from sunlight because they aren’t full of those more sturdy saturated fats, for example, that you would get from animal foods that help to make a more robust skin barrier.

In addition to that, the flip side of the omega-6 is that people aren’t getting enough omega-3s. Most people aren’t getting any omega-3, EPA and DHA in their diet. You only get those if you’re eating seafood. Lamb has some. Among the land animals, it’s the best source of DHA but shellfish and fatty fish. These are going to be your best sources of omega-3, EPA and DHA. Caviar is my personal favorite because it’s not only tasty but it’s also very enriched in the phospholipid form of EPA and DHA, which is particularly bioavailable.

It’s readily sponged up by the body in a way that eating fatty fish and as good as those things are, they’re just slightly less bioavailable, especially for the eyes and the brain. It’s something easy that you can add in your diet but the omega-3s are anti-inflammatory. That will also help to prevent burning because what is burning but skin inflammation. If you already have a baseline inflamed skin barrier, you’re going to be more likely to burn. There are also circadian aspects to this.

It turns out if you’re eating late at night, you’re going to be more likely to burn the next day because your skin clocks think that it’s daytime when it’s nighttime. Eating is one of the other inputs that can influence the circadian clock, especially of the gut and the skin. If we’re eating late at night, we’re telling our body that it’s the wrong time of day, which means that the next day, the skin clocks are a bit out of whack. They’re not going to be able to mount the melanin response as efficiently a skin that did not have to go through that same exposure pattern in the day before.

We also have to talk about our tech exposure, so the non-native EMFs, the artificial blue light from screens, TVs, phones, computers, tablets, LED lights, fluorescent lights, blue light and isolation, which is what we’re getting from all of these sources is a mitochondrial poison. It directly impairs mitochondrial function. As I mentioned earlier, the mitochondria in the skin, not only are responsible for making new melanin to help you tan in response to sunlight. They are also helping to mitigate the inflammatory environment as well.

When those mitochondrial become dysfunctional, we get this leaking of reactive oxygen and nitrogen species outside of the mitochondrial environment that foments inflammation in the skin. Again, because sunburn is already inflammation. If you have an already inflamed skin barrier, you’re going to be more likely to burn. All of these behaviors that people are engaging in dietary practices are influencing whether or not they will burn.

It’s not just a matter of you went out or not into the sun. It’s like, what is your life look like that is setting you up to burn or not? I like focusing on that too because it can just change the game. I’ve heard so many people have reached out saying, “I started eating whole foods. I removed processed food from my diet and I literally don’t burn anymore.” It’s crazy but it’s not crazy. It’s very much rooted in logic and science.

Morning Sunlight: Resynchronizing Your Body Clock

I heard you speak about your own experience that you used to consider yourself a night owl and going to bed very late at night and waking up early. I am pretty much the same when I was younger but even now. I was a guy who goes to bed at midnight and wakes up at 8:00. Now, when I started going out and especially trying to not miss the sunrise. After a few days, this is an in one type of an experiment. It’s just me.

After a few days, I became a guy who goes to bed at 10:00 PM completely naturally. I’m not trying to. I wake up at 6:00 for the sunrise and then it makes it better all the time. I can see my day somehow flows better and things get done. This is just so simple. Again, I’m almost afraid that it won’t get far and wide because nobody makes money out of going out in the sun.

I’ve heard this and of one experience from so many people. I have multiple autoimmune patients that have either come to me to get help or already filled on the rabbit hole that it reversed their conditions by primarily the thing they started doing was aligning their life with sunlight and going out for sunrise. As soon as you start catching the sunrise, you’re getting all of those hormonal benefits. That red and infrared light in the morning helps to turn on the pituitary gland and to make pregnenolone, which is the precursor to all the steroid and sex hormones.

You’re getting a huge boost in that department, which helps so much with mood and in women with cycle regulation and in women and men for feeling strong and having energy, which is what testosterone provides. Most people don’t know that women have higher levels of testosterone in their blood than estrogens. It’s a dominant hormone and both sexes. You’re getting all those incredible benefits. You’re turning on your mitochondria and getting them ready, moving and firing for the day. You’re dialing in that SCN to help tell it what time of day it is. Everything is just starting off.

When you start on the right foot, everything else starts to get easier as well. You start making better decisions. You start thinking better. You can like critically think perhaps for the first time. When I see a lot of the issues that people are facing, a lot of it comes down to these environments that we’re curating, which is literally dumbing us down. We’re not able to think well and to see reality for what it is. We’re getting hypnotized almost by our technology. We’re just completely enamored with it and it’s been designed in a lot of ways to hijack our dopamine centers and make us addicted to using it.

Tech And Light: Optimizing Your Indoor Environment

Not only the social media itself but the screen technology itself also hijacks that dopamine reward center in the brain that helps keep you on that screen for longer. Anyway, there’s a lot to unpack there about also why that’s the case because one might think that you didn’t necessarily need to make screens in this way. What most screen technology uses is blue pump LEDs. What it basically does is it’s an LED that makes blue light and then that blue light is run through filter to make the other colors of light.

If you look out on a spectroscope, you see a peak in blue relative to the other colors, so you know why that’s the case. It’s another story but there’s brands like Daylight Computer out there that are now making blue light free tablets, for example. They’re going to make computer monitors as well. Possibly a cell phone in the future that does not use blue pump LEDs at all.

What it uses like E ink technology but it has a super high refresh rate. It’s as if you’re using a regular computer but it’s not having that blue light. If you need to use it at night, you can turn on the ambient backlight. The nice thing about E ink is that when you go outside, there’s no glare. You’re using the ambient light to be able to see the screen and that means it’s very good for working outside if you’re trying to shift your lifestyle in that way.

Mine is on its way, by the way.

Good. We love ours. It’s great. Most of my friends have a too. It’s great for studying and reading books. If you want to read like an eBook on something like this, it’s great. They also have an update coming either on May or June. That’s going to allow you to connect a third-party webcam so you can even do Zoom on the tablet, too. It’s ultimately going to be able to replace the computer like the one I’m using. For people who need to use some of the blue pump technology, what you can do is start to incorporate some filters.

For the Apple devices, you can use the endogenous filter to make it more of a red or Amber hue. I keep mine on Amber all day long. There’s also software like Iris, which you can find at IrisTech.co or F.lux. Both of those allow you to basically tune up or down the amount of redness or amberness that you’re screen has depending on the time of day. Another important thing is if you know you’re going to be an indoor environment for most of the day, do what you can to not do that but if you have no choice, trying to optimize the lights that are in your environment is huge.

Now, I’m using chroma sky portal. They’re great like ring lights as well for filming but they have tunable redness and tunable brightness. You can adjust it depending on the time of day. They also provide 10,000 lakhs of light a piece, so they are very bright. Again, that’s super important. We want to get enough bright full spectrum light in our environments, especially in our office environments or wherever you’re spending a lot of time so that it’s going to be stimulating your cognition and your neurochemistry so you’re able to think well and work efficiently. Leveraging those.

You can also leverage incandescent bulbs. I highly recommend that. We’re working on like Scott Zimmerman and there’s a couple other people like Martin Moore-Ede are working on trying to reverse this incandescent ban that is set to go into effect in 2028. A lot of people think that it was already overturned with the Trump Administration coming back but it’s not the case. We have to go back and revise the 2008 Department of Energy Bill that basically stated that you need a specific amount of visible light output per energy consumed.

Again, this is going back to energy efficiency. Incandescent bulbs are seen as inefficient because they release a ton of infrared light, which is heat which is seen as not contributing to the efficacy of the bowl because it’s not contributing brightness. What it’s doing is it’s providing in essential nutrient into the environment that is interacting with our bodies and supporting our metabolic and mitochondrial health.

Removing incandescent bulbs from the marketplace, there’s even a push to make the energy consumption requirements even more stringent to the point where even warm white LEDs will be made illegal to be sold to the general public, which means that we’re going to have cool white LEDs all day and all night.

The crazy thing about this is that, although, LEDs are more efficient from an energy consumption standpoint. It ends up canceling out because people are just using way more light. Instead of having their incandescent on only later in the day into the evening. Now, people just have their LEDs on all day long. It ends up equaling out. We’re not saving energy by doing this. It’s this illusion and a facade of being mindful or I don’t know exactly.

Virtue signaling.

That’s it. It’s hollow. It’s not meaningful in any way. In fact, it’s having incredibly negative effects on our health and the health of the kids. The more we can do to help regain a healthy light environment. It supports so many things and will help people to get off meds or stay away from meds and feel better at a baseline, be able to think better, and work more efficiently. From my own experience, when I started getting out in the morning, getting morning sun and blocking blue light at night, I suddenly felt like I was much stronger connection to my intuitive knowing around things.

My Spidey senses started going off the charts. I had a very strong knowing about like, this persons for me. This person isn’t. I want to do this work and not that work. I started getting into flow much more easily and getting to know myself better. I’ve heard this from a lot of people and it also makes sense because when we’re connecting to nature, we’re a part of nature. We’re the only species that sees ourselves as separate from the whole because we have this frontal lobe that’s able to sense the contrast between self-awareness and other.

The more we connect to our roots in the form of nature, the more we’re able to tap into things within ourselves that we didn’t have access to previous to that because we’re disconnected from our life force energy. We didn’t talk about grounding but I’ll just say briefly that when you connect your feet, your hands, or even a just a smallest piece of your skin to the Earth. Whether it’s like you’re on grass or sand. Now, I’m standing on a grounding mat that has a wire that runs out the window into the backyard.

Whenever you’re connecting to that, you’re allowing your body to dissipate excess positive charge and that’s important because we need the right balance of positive charged protons to negative charged electrons to optimize our mitochondrial function. We have tons of studies conducted in humans to show that even 25 minutes of daily grounding is able to dramatically reduce the inflammatory burden within people’s bodies. It’s important to maintain a healthy grounding practices as much of the day as possible. If you think about even just 100 years ago, we were almost always grounded because all natural materials facilitate the grounding force like leather, cotton and linen.

Any natural materials will allow that to happen but since the advent of the petroleum products and the plastics and things like this, everything is synthetic. We’re not able to get the flow of charge into the body that helps to regulate the electrical aspects of our systems because as Becker describes eloquently, “We are electrical beings and we’re meant to be grounded in the same way when pre-plug into an outlet that ground helps to keep the device working well and not having electrical problems.

It’s the same for us. We’re meant to be grounded basically all day. I would argue all day. Most people aren’t ever grounding at all. The more you can incorporate even short periods of that or to start to hack your office environments or whatever it is to incorporate a grounding mat. I always tell people to try to ground directly into the Earth whenever possible. I have a highlight reel in my Instagram called Grounding Tasks. It shows you, if you want to do that, how you can run an insulated copper wire. You coil it around the probe of your mat or whatever it is you’re using.

You can run that wire out a window or out of door and bury a little coil of it into the ground so that you can directly connect to the Earth. If you can’t do that and you want to ground directly into the ground of an outlet, you basically need to get an outlet tester first to make sure that ground is stable and good quality. Otherwise, you’re going to be called causing more harm than good but grounding is a non-negotiable for me. I’m virtually grounded all day long whenever.

I’m sitting on a mat. My feet are on a mat now. One little tip for somebody who says, “I don’t have access to this. I don’t have access that.” They talk about hug a tree. You pull these pads on some leaves of a tree, you’re grounding.

That’s right. Most of the stuff is free. You don’t necessarily need the gadgets and gizmos, especially if you are working outside. Whenever I’m working outside, I’m just barefoot and I have at least one of my feet on the patio or on the grass so that I’m directly grounding. You only need the smallest sliver. I have a video on my Instagram where it proves that we’re just full chock-full of semiconductors which is something that Becker found out.

I was standing on a grounding mat. My partner was standing next to me. I’m grounded and he’s ungrounded. I put my finger tip on him and he’s grounded. You only need the smallest bit of you exposed to something that is grounded electrically to the Earth in order for you to be grounded. The other thing that I will just briefly mention and then I’ll toss the mic back to you is that whatever you can do to optimize your sleep environment is going to be the lowest hanging fruit because that’s eight hours of your day every day. It’s a third of your life.

If you can get that, if you can get a grounding mattress cover or grounding sheet that you use. Ideally, again, plugging into the Earth but if you can’t test your outlet, plugin in there. You’re grounding for eight hours. If you can turn your Wi-Fi off at night and remove your devices from the sleeping environment. You create a non-native EMF sanctuary as well. You’re getting that dark darkness like as dark as possible. Blackout curtains if you need them. If there’s artificial lights outside the window and using red bulbs in the room if you need them but turning everything off at night.

Putting electrical tape, over any indicator lights on devices that are plugged in. You want it to be pitch black. Not even see a hand in front of your face. If you get that, you’re setting yourself up for success because that’s a third of your life that is super dialed in. Whatever you can or can’t do throughout the day is another thing but creating that sleep sanctuary is crucial from a health perspective.

Blue Light Blockers: When And How To Use Them

The next thing I want to talk about a blue light blocking glasses at night. Do you wear them all the time? Should we wear them all the time? Even though our devices are a little bit on night mode, so to speak. What do they do for us? Can you talk a little bit about that?

I see blue blocking glasses as like a last resort. The reason for this is that although the light coming into the eyes is probably the most important, especially from a sleeping in a melatonin perspective because that blue light is going to directly suppress melatonin release in the brain that’s going to lie to get sleepy and fall asleep, etc. There are also what are called photo receptors or light receptors all throughout the skin, the blood vessels and deeper parts of our body.

If we’re exposed to blue and rich light in the environment and it’s going on to our skin. Even if we’re blocking into our eyes, it’s still sub-optimal. Anytime that you can optimize the light in your environment, that’s going to be the first choice, so leveraging reading incandescent bulbs or dim red LED bulbs. We didn’t talk about like flicker, which is a major issue with LEDs but anything but bright white LEDs at night is going to be a better option.

I would say the best option would be red incandescent which people can get from like HealthLighting.com. It’s where I get all my incandescent bulbs. We love them. Using the red incandescent bulbs and putting filters on your screen so that they’re red. Most TVs as well, if you go into the advanced settings. You can put it on RGB mode so you can make the screen red as well. If you’re going to watch TV at night, you can do that.

That’s going to be the first choice and whenever you’re into in an environment that you can’t change the light environment in any way, that’s when you want to pop on the blue blockers to at least protect your eyes and your brain from the blue light and the environment to help support your sleep and your circadian rhythms. Having said that, there is a spectrum of products on the market. When you’re looking for blue blockers for nighttime use, we are looking for glasses that block between 400 and 550 nanometer light at least and that’s blue through blue green.

Most blue blockers that people get from their eye doctors or if they get the coatings on their glasses blocks maybe 5% to 10% of blue light. It’s very negligible. It’s not going to do the job that we needed to do. The reason that is, if you look at blue light, you should not be able to see blue with your blue blockers on. It should look gray in fact. If you see any blue, that’s a sign that your glasses are not blocking what they need to be blocking to protect your brain and eyes in the evening time. Those good quality lenses should have a dark orange tint or red tint to them.

That’s a sign that they’re going to work well. There are also blue blockers that you can wear during the daytime. For example, if I had to go to the grocery store in the middle of the day and there’s a lot of these harsh bright white LEDs. I’ll pop on a pair of my daytime blue blockers, which have a light-yellow lens. The yellow just blocks about 50% or 60% of between 400 and 500 nanometer lights. You can still see green but some of the blue is tamped down. That helps to mitigate some of the harshness that you get from blue light in isolation.

The nighttime blue blockers are the most important when it comes to protecting the sleep and circadian rhythm. If people had to pick one pair, I would get the dark orange pair and use them whenever you have to go into environments in the evening where there’s bright white light to help protect your body and support your health.

There’s a range of products in the market. I use either VivaRays or Bon Charge. I have their daytime and their nighttime blue blockers. I also have a pair of blue blockers from Chroma as well. Those are three brands that I use and I like them. There are other products on the market where maybe they work but the frames feel cheaper or whatever. Those are the three that I typically will recommend to people.

It just occurred to me when you were talking about the glasses and we have all those receptors on our skin, which we talked at great length about being outside. I was thinking. I had this picture of somebody on vacation in Hawaii. They are out in the sun. That’s very good. Maybe they put a lot of sunscreens, but then they’re back in the room. They watch TV but there are only wearing a bathing suit because it’s Hawaii. They are almost completely naked in the room in the harsh glaring blue lights. They put on the glasses and they think that they’re doing well.

This is the problem and partially because the research on non-visual photo reception, light interacting with the body outside of the eyes. I don’t want to say it’s in its infancy but it’s just not talked about in the mainstream at all. People don’t even think about it. They’re like, “My skin can’t possibly see. I don’t have eyes on my skin. What’s the difference?” There is a big difference. Not only are you getting those receptors activated that are detecting blue light, for example. That’s sending a relay into the system that’s telling your body something about the light in the environment.

As I mentioned earlier, that artificial isolated blue light is also directly impairing mitochondrial function because there is no balance of the red and infrareds. In nature, we always receive blue with red and infrared. That’s because blue has this deleterious effect on mitochondria but red and infrared have the opposite effect. They have a supportive effect. It makes sense that in nature, we always receive blue with an abundance of red and infrared to help counterbalance that.

If we’re watching TV or an indoor environment with a lot of this harsh blue light and isolation, we’re not receiving that balance. We’re directly harming our mitochondria. There’s both the photoreception part and the mitochondria part. Both are good piece of evidence to say, anytime you can mitigate your exposure to these things. That can even look like putting on light clothing because that will also protect your skin from blue wavelength light because it’s very short wavelength.

They can’t penetrate very deeply. Bundling up, putting a blanket on, putting a sweat suit on or something like this before you’re going to watch TV, if you have to do that. Otherwise, putting a filter on the TV and wearing your blue blockers. You can do that. Know that it’s like sub-optimal if you’re just wearing the blue blockers.

Cataracts And Blue Light: A Different Perspective

Now I want to talk about two things that have to do with our eyes and glasses that maybe slightly controversial to the first time here. I’ll start with the easier one, the cataracts. The prevailing notion is cataracts are due to the horrific UV light and all of that stuff. That’s what the ophthalmologists will tell you, but I heard from very good scientists and I want to see what you say about it. That cataracts are our bodies mechanism of defending against all the artificial blue light. What do you think about that?

The way that I see cataracts is mostly an issue of blue. People will say, “Back in the day people were getting cataracts and there were no screens, etc. What’s up with that?” If we look at the demographic of people that were primarily suffering with cataracts before the tech boom. It was largely sailors. If we look at the environment, the light environment that you’re exposed to, if you’re up out at sea, let’s say. You’re getting a double dose of blue. Why is that the case?

That’s the case because water does not like blue. Water, doesn’t absorb blue. Water reflects a ton of blue. Water loves to absorb red, which is like infrared and heat but it reflects blue. That means when you’re out at sea midday, you’re not only getting the 25% blue light from the sun directly but you’re also getting a ton of blue reflected off the ocean as well. Blue will probably shake out to be the primary white light wavelength that’s increasing prevalence or susceptibility to cataracts because the eye wants to protect itself against those high energy photons.

The UV portion is so small and comparison to the 25% blue plus the double dose. It probably plays a much lesser role. If you look at the initial studies that were done on with UV light to show that it’s harmful to the eyes. It was horrific what they did. What they basically did is they took rodents. They held their eyes open and they shine UV light and isolation into their eyes.

They were like, “It’s bad. Something happened.” They got cataracts or eye damaged or whatever. This is completely irrelevant to the real world and highly disingenuous to suggest that going out into the sun without “eye protection” that you’re going to get the same effects as these rodents that were tortured with UV light isolation. This is not the same thing at all.

Correct me from wrong but looking at the real studies with the real lights, good lights, and the whole of the light. It would be more beneficial to avoid cataracts or even to do something about them to minimize blue light as we talked about at great length and to be out in the sunlight and the sunlight getting all the spectrum that we need. Now it brings me to my next a maybe controversial point, sun glasses. It’s become almost in indispensable part of the culture. “Let’s go hiking. Come on. Let’s put on the sunglasses. We’re so cool.” I started putting on a hat or visor. Once again, nature’s sunscreen, the shade. I don’t put sunglasses anymore. Can you talk a little bit about that? I know that’s going to be a little bit of a point.

I would love to. Many people just think that it’s like a fashion statement, not realizing that they’re harming their health when they’re wearing sunglasses. This ties back into the question earlier because you might remember that I told you, when you get UV light into the eye, you make POMC in the brain but you also make POMC in the skin when you get UV light exposure on the skin. When you get coordinated UV light exposure into the eyes and onto the skin, we’re doubling the dose of these myelin sites stimulating hormones that we need to make new melanin.

If you’re wearing UV blocking contacts glasses or sunglasses when you’re out in the sun, you’re removing half of the dose that you’re supposed to be producing in response to the UV light and some of the basic studies we’re going to do when I eventually start the light lab. We’re going to directly look at this because many dermatologists online will say, “There’s no evidence that sunglasses increased risk of burning.”

There is a very strong mechanistic first principles link which just nobody’s done the study because it’s stigmatized to even talk about this stuff. There is a very strong probability that you’re going to increase your risk of burning if you’re wearing sunglasses. At the very least, you’re not getting the mood boosting benefits of sun exposure into the UV light exposure into the eye. You’re not getting the metabolic benefits. There’s a lot of reasons why you wouldn’t want to wear those.

In addition, though, when you wear a sunglass, again going back to the beginning of the conversation. I told you how important it is to get right full spectrum light into your eyes from the environment during the daytime. When you wear sunglasses, you’re taking 100,000 lakhs and you’re bringing it down. That’s the last thing you want to do if you’re looking for the mood boost, the cognitive benefits, and the serotonin production benefits.

We want to sense that bright light in the environment in order to get those outputs from the brain. That’s another big issue with sunglasses. It’s become like a very casual thing to throw on a pair of sunglasses. People don’t think about it, but the light that’s coming into the eye will probably see that that’s one of the most important signals that is regulating the whole body. Only because the eye is literally designed to take in light from the environment and then interpret that into signals that is then dictating what happens internally.

We have a lot to learn in that area but from a first principal standpoint, I will never wear a pair of sunglasses again. The other thing I’ll mention here briefly is, the more you wear sunglasses and the more you avoid getting full spectrum light into your eyes, the more sensitive your eyes will be. People will be like, “My eyes are sensitive. I have to wear them.” No, you’re curating an environment that’s creating sensitivity in your eyes.

You have to gradually start to expose them to brighter light and maybe you’ll need to pull it again with shade but over time and relatively quickly, people will regain their ability to be in those environments without having the watering and the squinting. My partner has light eyes and he was very photosensitive in the past. Now he goes out and it’s not a problem. You will adjust to it over time. You just need to give your body a chance to respond.

Sunglasses: Benefits, Drawbacks, And Alternatives

Once again, nobody said you can’t wear a hat or a visor and I have to say once again N equal one, me. I used to consider myself being very sensitive to light, bright lights. It’s only being maybe a half a year that I’ve been out in the sun and going out. I’m totally not at all, nothing like that. That’s only N is equal one. Only me. Now, a corollary question. When somebody wants to wear contact lenses or they wear glasses like I do. Are their lenses that let it all through rather than block a portion of the spectrum?

I love to talk about this because if you can have naked eyes that’s going to be the best option but for when you can’t, there are a couple options. For contacts, Dailies Total1 one come in a purple and white box. Those are the best option and they happened to be the most expensive as well but they’re the most breathable. They do not have added UV blocking.

You’re going to be getting mostly full spectrum light. You may get some UV-B blocked but you’re going to be getting most of it through. From the glass’s standpoint, what you can do is you can request CR-39 lenses in your glasses. We’ve tested this on America’s Best and LensCrafters and they didn’t give us a problem. I’ve had some people reach out saying that their eye doctors were fighting them. “I’m not getting UV blocking added like the coating added,” but it seems like hit or miss. You might need to shop around a little bit.

The CR-39 lenses are way more light permeable. They let about 60% of UV light through compared to glasses with the UV coating next to know UV-B light through at all and some UVA but mostly that’s blocked as well. The CR-39 lens as long as no additional coating is added are going to be your best bet from a glass’s standpoint. I know VivaRays sells UV permeable glasses. Basically, they’re prescription lenses with CR-39 material used. If you can’t find an eye doctor that will do that, you can order the glasses from that and then you don’t worry about it.

If I’m not mistaken, VivaRays also has these magnetic adhering lenses so you have three types of lenses. One the light blue blocking for the daytime, one for the nighttime and one red.

That’s right. They have a few options. They have just the standalone daytime and nighttime ones. They all have the magnet ones so that you can just have basically the same pair you wear all day and then you can just switch out how much blocking you need. Those are all options from them. The only thing for me is because my skin is on the oily side and when you add the magnet piece on, they get heavier. For me, slime. It’s annoying.

I had to be very praised guy on my show so they insisted on sending me a pair. Cece and I bought another one and I don’t suffer from that.

That’s good. They have nice frames. I feel like they’re made very well compared to some other blue blockers on the market that are like maximum price and they’re like cheap quality. I feel like VivaRays does a good job.

There’s so much to talk about. I know we can be here for six hours without even batting an eye. Let’s talk about cold exposure and cold in general. By the way, it goes back to what you said before about being exposed to blue light indoors and wearing glasses but being exposed with your skin. If it’s a little cooler inside, you will have more tendency to cover up. Maybe that’s a double benefit, but let’s talk about a cold exposure if you can.

The Power Of Cold: Exposure And its Health Benefits

Harkening back to nature, whenever it’s cold out, that’s a time of the year where there’s low UV light availability. The winter time, for example. It makes sense, if we think about this. I mentioned or alluded at least earlier that the mitochondria make biophotons. Two of the primary wavelengths of light that mitochondria make are infrared, so that’s heat. That’s why you have body heat. When you exercise, you start sweating because your mitochondria are working. They’re making more heat, so that’s all known as infrared lights.

We’re making a ton of infrared light. You can also look at somebody on infrared camera. You can see them. That’s because we’re making a ton of light but not only infrared. We also make a bunch of UV biophotons as well within the mitochondria. We are both infrared and UV light making machines. It turns out, when you get cold, what you’re doing is you’re stimulating the mitochondria immensely to help make that body heat back so that you’re buffering your temperature against the cold. As a consequence, you’re also making a ton more UV light inside as well.

That is perfectly aligned to the idea that infrared and UV light are essential nutrients because essentially, in the winter time, when you have low sunlight yield and low UV yield, your body compensates by making its own internally in response to the cold. The best way or the most efficient way, let’s say to get cold is leveraging cold water because as I mentioned earlier, water has an immense ability to wick heat away from the body and absorb infrared light. When you go into cold water, it is going to be much more efficient at reducing your body temperature.

Typically, there will be people online talking about like in 30-degree water and there’s ice in the water. It’s like ruling experience. That’s not typically the approach I use nor the approach that Jack uses either. What I recommend is using roughly 55-degree Fahrenheit water so it’s much warmer than the 30 something degree than many people are using. The benefit of that is that you can do longer sessions without risking harm to your body or your tissues. What I’m doing now starting in March or April, is at least twice a week but up to four times a week, I’ll do 55-degree Fahrenheit water for about 25 to 45 minutes I’ll be in there.

What that does is that, if you’re in the water for a short period of time, you reduce your skin temperature but you increase your core temperature because all that blood gets pushed inside. When you’re able to stay in for a bit longer at the slightly warmer temperature, what you’re going to do is you’re gradually decreasing your core temperature as well. The benefit of that from a biophysics perspective is, going back to what I said earlier about the body being made of semiconductors. Anybody in Silicon Valley are in the chip making regions of the economy. They know that if you’re going to work with some conductors, you typically do it at cold temperatures because they work better.

The same ilk when we lower our core temperature, it helps the semi-conductors within our bodies to also work better. That includes things like melanin and proteins that are translated from our DNA or DNA itself. There’s a ton of semiconductors throughout the body collagen and appetite. Becker is the one who found out that bone is a light emitting diode and LED that’s composed of a P-type and N-type semiconductors. The P-type is collagen. The N-type is appetite and that bone emits red brown light. You just don’t see it because the light is contained within itself. It’s not being released into the environment.

Those are just some examples of semiconductors in the body. That when you get cold, they can work more efficiently and the whole system at a biophysical level works more effortlessly. There are also the anti-inflammatory benefits of cold so you’re getting lower inflammation. You’re getting better mitochondrial function, more endogenous light production, and better efficiency within the semiconductor networks. Those are all the benefits you get from cold when you’re doing intentional cold exposure.

Again, those are the benefits you get from doing longer sessions because you need enough time for the cold to get down to your core and start to reduce your core temperature as well. There’s also benefits of brown fats. Many people may not know what brown fat is but it’s a form of fat that literally looks brown because it’s very mitochondria dense. Brown fat is responsible for helping to maintain your core body temperature in the face of cold temperatures. There was a study done a few years ago that showed something like only around 10% of adults are walking around with any meaningful amount of brown fat in their systems because most people are sitting at like 70-75 degrees year-round.

Nobody is getting into the temperature extremes, especially not in cold. If you don’t use it, you lose it essentially. You can build it back but it requires intentional cold exposure to help activate and expand the brown fat that you have in your body. You can also make something called beige fat, which is when your white subcutaneous fat turns into a brown fat-like tissue instead. It’s increasing mitochondrial density. Brown fat is a huge sponge for fat and glucose. From a metabolic perspective, it’s majorly beneficial to have it.

It’s also an important endocrine organ. There’s a brown fat thyroid axis that exists. Whereby your thyroid can release inactive T4 into the bloodstream. Your brown fat can take up that T4 and spit out T3, which is the active thyroid hormone. For people with hypothyroidism, ironically or paradoxically, they tend to be the most cold averse population because they don’t have the brown fat there to help buffer it and their metabolism is slower because of the lack of thyroid hormone.

This is the population that could benefit some of like the most by leveraging cold because they’re going to be able to build back some of that brown fat that can then help them to convert their hormones to allow them to increase their T3, the active T3, which is supporting metabolism directly and brown fat thermogenesis or heat production as well.

Typically, what I tell people is you don’t want to go from 0 to 100. When I first started, you can even have water at 65 degrees and start with that or even 70 degrees. Anything below body temperature is going to be somewhat cooling. You can gradually work your way down like lowering the temperature, extending your time, and do it slowly. You can even just start also with like doing face dunks into some ice water. There’s a lot of temperature receptors on the face so that’s a good way to get that stimulus into your system.

Try to feel it out. You can then move on and put ice packs on your core, for example, and just get used to doing that. You can start with the 65 or whatever degree water and gradually work your way down. That’s going to be building up your tolerance and resilience by helping to boost that brown fat and beige fat, which is going to allow you to make heat in response to cold, which is going to make the experience less painful and more enjoyable for you. There are incredible neurochemical benefits from cold, so when you get cold, you get a huge boost in norepinephrine and dopamine.

Norepinephrine is the neurotransmitter of motivation and drive. Dopamine is the neurotransmitter of the reward when you get to the destination. By willingly or voluntarily engaging in cold exposure, you get this incredible neurochemical benefit that mimics what you get from something like Adderall but you get even way more of a boost than you get from a drug like Adderall, norepinephrine and dopamine. It’s a great thing for mental health, mood and for focus. I usually tell people, “I would dare you to get into a cold plunge and then be in a bad mood after.”

It’s almost impossible, especially because there’s also the psychology of like doing something hard that you didn’t want to do but doing it anyway. It’s very good. It’s like a muscle you have to work out. The more you work it out, the better you’re going to get at doing things that you don’t want to do. It’s an important thing to do to build resilience. A lot of people are weak minded. They’re just stagnant. They’re not moving towards goals in their lives. They want the easy way out of everything.

A lot of that comes back to the screen and tech abuse because again, they’re hijacking that dopamine system, which means that you’re not getting a reward for anything anymore because you’re glued to this screen instead. The more you can get out into the world and into nature and engage in that way, the better you’re going to feel, the more motivated you’re going to feel. It’s like a feed-forward mechanism that helps you improve your life over time relatively quickly.

Going back to the cold for a second and with the compassion that I have for the people that not have much time in the day to do stuff. How about you cold plunge between 1 and 5 minutes and maybe work on the axis of the equation that’s the temperature? Maybe you go down from 60 to 55 to 50 to maybe God forbid, 45 and 40. I understand what you said about the skin versus the core but still, if people can do it for 3 or 5 minutes, what can they do?

From that perspective, the shorter session, you’re still getting the neurochemical benefit. You’re still getting some of the brown fat benefit. You’re just not going to get a lot of that semi conduction benefit that you would get from longer sessions. Maybe only once a week you can do a longer session. That’s going to be way better than nothing and then do some shorter sessions before that. There is some nuance here, though. Colder temperatures aren’t necessarily going to be better especially for women.

For women who are cycling, going for too long too frequently and too cold are all ways that you’re going to royally screw up your cycle. I track my hormones every day and when I first started doing that, I was plunging every day and things were getting jumbled around. It wasn’t anything crazy. Also, I had no PMS and no cramps or anything when my cycle restarted. There was a lot of benefits from that, but by simply just doing every other day instead said of daily. I was able to remove that crazy shift that was going on, but still get the benefits with regards to luteal phase at least.

There’s going to be some level of individuality for women where you have to play around with frequency and timing temperature. Typically, 55 degrees isn’t a huge stressor for anybody. It’s going to feel cold but you get used to it within a couple of minutes. It’s not going to feel like it’s a super intense stressor on the body. Men on the other hand can tolerate longer colder more frequent. You can play around with that. There is one interesting piece of research that came out showing that if you do cold exposure for men, cold exposure followed by exercise gives a dramatic boost and testosterone levels.

For women, the cold alone is enough to boost the torn interestingly enough. There’s some dimorphism here. For men, if you want to do shorter sessions or longer sessions or colder temperatures, you can do that. If you’re looking for the hormonal benefits, the literature would recommend that you do some form of exercise after that, whether it’s walking or hit or lifting or biking. Whatever you want to do. It would all be valid. The modalities to help give the hormonal benefit as well.

For both sexes, you want to work your way down but for women I don’t typically recommend much colder than 50 degrees. It’s not necessary and it’s not usually fun for people anyway. Once in a while maybe, but 50 to 55 degrees is ideal, especially for cycling women and for men if they want to go colder and do ice plunges. You can go for it. Try to squeeze in some exercise afterwards to naturally warm your body back up and you can get the hormonal benefit while you’re at it.

What about the marriage of sauna and cold plunge? I heard the interview with the Danish researcher. You may have heard it, too. I think it was Huberman who was interviewing her. I know it’s done very much in the Nordic countries, sauna maybe 10 to 15 minutes followed by cold plunge by maybe a few minutes. Sometimes with another cycle but she said, “Finish with cold.” Do you have any thoughts about this?

I agree. Wasn’t it Søberg?

Yes, it was.

It makes a ton of sense that the Scandinavians would discover this because for a period of the year, they have virtually no sunlight and they get no UV light for a period of the year. By innovating in sauna and cold, the saunas giving them infrared light, which you would naturally get from sunlight. The cold is allowing you to make your own infrared and UV light. It’s a great way to offset poor light conditions from the environment. I agree with sauna and then plunge. If you want to continue the cycle, you can do that but ending on cold is important if you want to get the metabolic benefits because it forces your body to warm itself back up versus leveraging the sauna to heat your body back up for you.

For those metabolic and glucose clearance benefits that you get from cold, ending on cold is imperative. You can do contrast therapy. It’s good for working out the vascular system because you’re getting this expansion and contraction of the vascular tree which is essentially working it out. It’s also made of muscle. It’s just smooth muscle but the more you can get that moving, the more you’re going to prevent things like cardiovascular disease, atherosclerosis, etc. You’re also getting the detoxification benefits of sweating. You’re getting the metabolic benefits of cold.

You’re getting the mitochondrial benefits of the infrared light from the sauna. You’re getting the semi conduction benefits and the mood benefits from the cold. There’s a lot going on there. Typically, for people with existing heart conditions, contrast therapy isn’t usually recommended and even shredding lightly to start at least with cold exposure is prudent as well in these people just because their system is usually not very malleable and flexible distress.

You want to be gradual with it but for healthy people, contrast therapies is something you can incorporate. It also makes it a bit more stimulating too because having that ability to go from feeling super hot and the refreshing cold then getting cold. There’s something nice about that contrast. It’s very supportive from a mental health standpoint and a physical health standpoint as well.

We never got into water. We didn’t have the scope for it yet but I believe that also sweating in the sauna, sweat itself expels, again we didn’t cover it. What is it? What the heck is? Deuterium depleted water out of our body which is beneficial. I don’t know that we have the scope for that but sweating is good from that standpoint, right?

Sweat is deuterium in rich so it helps your body to deplete deuterium. Briefly, deuterium is a heavy form of hydrogen. The amount of deuterium in your drinking water varies depending on what latitude you live at, high latitudes, lower deuterium, equatorial attitudes. Deuterium is enriched in plant foods, roots, fruits, and starches and is depleted in animal foods. At more Northern latitudes, we’re only meant to receive deuterium during the part of the year where we can grow and eat plants. Now, in the modern environment, we have access to any food at any time of year.

A lot of people, if you’re eating processed foods, are eating deuterium bombs and then they’re never sweating. They’re never getting out to sunlight to help them remove that deuterium. Deuterium clogs and gunks up mitochondria. If deuterium levels get too high in the tissues, it creates mitochondrial dysfunction, which then begets more deuterium overload, more inflammation and more disease. On the converse to that, deuterium depletion is being used in the treatment of cancer and diabetes now but there’s a large scope for other diseases as well to reverse some of the root causes of the disease of the mitochondrial level.

That’s why if people have heard of deuterium depleted water, it’s something that is leveraged within these clinical trials, for example, to help ameliorate these two disease types. For people who are interested in that, I’ll just make one brief note that the concentration of deuterium in the water is important. You don’t want to just drink straight deuterium depleted water because the deuterium in the bloodstream plays an important role.

The blood is the most enriched source of deuterium in the body. The tissues have the least. Wherever those mitochondria, the deuterium goes away from that ideally. It’s concentrating in the blood where red blood cells have no mitochondria, so they don’t have to deal with this issue. When you’re sweating, what you’re doing is you’re pulling water out of the blood volume because that’s deuterium enriched water. What you’re effectively doing is removing the deuterium enriched water from the body and then what you have to do in order to establish equilibrium is to pull deuterium out of the tissues to reestablish the right concentration of determine the blood.

In effect, you’re depleting deuterium from your tissues. when you sweat. Similarly, with the drinking water is directly in homeostasis with your blood volume. If you’re drinking deuterium depleted water, and the ideal range is between 105 and 120 parts per million. That’s going to very slightly reduce the blood deuterium levels which then results in the deuterium being pull out of the tissue to restore the roughly 150 parts per million concentrations in the bloodstream.

Those are a couple different ways. When you’re sweating your releasing deuterium. There’s also some evidence that when you’re getting exposed to full spectrum sunlight, it also helps to remove deuterium from the water in the body. There’s just a couple things there. It also makes sense too because when you are in an environment, let’s say it’s summertime and there’s more plant foods available. There’s more deuterium in those foods.

You’re eating that but the body has the ability to handle that deuterium load better because the sunlight quality is better, versus in the winter time when there’s no plant foods available and you’re meant to be eating animal fats and proteins, which are low deuterium foods. That helps your mitochondria to work better in the absence of full spectrum like UV light and more intense longer days.

Eating seasonally is a natural way to optimize your deuterium intake for your environment. For people with existing conditions who are looking to get better, there is evidence to suggest that using deuterium depleted water protocol can help to ameliorate those conditions. There may also be some context in sports performance as well and in just in general a health optimization.

If we take it out to the general public, not considering the price. Will it make sense to drink deuterium depleted water at let’s say 125 PPM? Let’s say if it was free to buy, would it make sense for us to do it on an ongoing basis?

I would say 125 is roughly what you would get if you were in the more Nordic region. It’s like around 135 parts per million drinking water up, let’s say in Scandinavia. If everybody had drinking water around that, it would honestly be ideal. I know Jack Cruz talks about in the Cenote system down in Mexico. It’s one of the only more equatorial areas that also has deuterium depleted water available due to the, I believe it’s calcium carbonate deposits within the ground there from the asteroid impact basically. That is a natural deuterium filter.

The water there is deuterium depleted even though the sun quality is intense almost year-round and the people in that region apparently have very good health and people would travel there to have that water because it was seen as like a healing water. If everybody had access to slightly deuterium depleted water year-round, it would be of benefit to everybody to drink it.

I heard you before in some context saying, you make sure that when you fly because of all the stressors and radiation and everything. I’m going to call it DDW rather than say deuterium depleted water. You make sure to drink DDW the day before or the day off or the day after but again, is that due to cost or if you had a choice, you just drink it all the time?

I would say it’s cost and I was working with somebody to make an at-home unit that could make deuterium depleted water at home and you could toggle it on and off. It all be like a reverse osmosis system. Anyway, the project ended up falling through, unfortunately. Hopefully, somebody does it or maybe I’ll work on it in the future because if we could drink 125 to 135 per million daily, that would probably be the sweet spot to helping buffer the system against disease, especially in the modern environment. That would be prudent if we can make that call not cost prohibitive for people. It would be a great asset from a health optimization and disease remediation perspective.

By the way, I’m jumping backwards to the grounding part. One tip that I got from you was extremely useful, so I want to make sure I mentioning it here because a lot of people have yards that don’t lend themselves to be on the ground or on the grass. They live on a hill and the shrubs doesn’t work. You mentioned something very interesting. Even if you have cement pads, which a lot of people have in their yard. Good possibility is the cement itself is a conductor. You can walk barefoot on the path in your yard and you’re still grounded.

In that grounding test highlight Reel on my insta, it shows people how to use a voltmeter to roughly test. It’s not if it’s non-zero, you’re not grounded. If it’s zero, you’re grounded. Don’t pay attention to the number exactly, unless it’s zero. You can test and see if your patio is grounding or whatever outside is. The only issue is with patios, sometimes they have plastic liners that underneath them. In that case, it would block the grounding force but as long as that’s not the case, you can ground through cement, you stone, sand and grass. Those would all be valid ways to ground dirt as well. If you don’t test guests, you can always use the meter and you can see if you are indeed grounding and then you just know for sure.

Alexis, you clearly are a treasure trove of super valuable information, in my opinion. Everybody should have and learn. I can already say that there’s a very useful eBook that you wrote. I’d like to know how people can get to it, how people can get in touch with you and learn from you besides just looking for you on YouTube, where you have a lot of presence. How can people reach and benefit from your knowledge?

I’m mostly active on Instagram at @DrAlexisJazmyn and my Lincoln bio there and all on X. My X handle is the same. There’s a link in my bio on both and all of my offerings and stuff around there, products that I recommend, my website where you can buy my eBook and any of my courses. Those are all linked in there. Other than that, I have a show called Undoctrinate Yourself. Usually, I’m posting weekly on there and topics ranging from science, medicine, spirituality and other things as well. I’m trying to break out of the box.

The whole purpose of calling it Undoctrinate Yourself was just start asking questions and getting curious again instead of going along with the status quo and taking things for granted us being true. Questioning things and looking at things was like a first principles lens and also with just fresh eyes. A lot of us can get just jaded we’re told certain things over and over again. We subconsciously believe they’re true without even questioning it. Starting to question things again is very healthy and not just going along with things because the tribe is or whatever else.

The show is on there. It’s on Spotify and YouTube. Though, YouTube is annoying. I have to censor a lot of my episodes on there because we talk about some controversial stuff. Typically, it’s a bit of a lag with the YouTube channel relative to Spotify, but you can find the episode on Spotify. There’s also a Patreon if you want like first access to it. You can join the Patreon for $5 a month. Those are some of the main things. I also go on other people’s show quite often.

You could probably just search my name and find a bunch of episodes that way. Those are most of the things that all I’ll mention for now. If there’s anything else that I’m missing. There’s my mailing list. If you go to that link in my bio, you can sign up for my mailing list. Sometimes Instagram. Overlords don’t love me, so if you want to stay abreast of what I’m working on, you can sign up for the mailing list and then I’ll send that meaningful update out usually once a quarter.

How do you sign up for the mailing list?

It’s just a link. If you scroll down on my link bio, there’s a link that says, “Sign up for emails from me.” You can just put your email in and then anytime I send out an email to the list, you will get all the updates that are there like any new courses that are coming out for example. In a few weeks, I’m launching a new course with a friend that’s going to get into the history of corruption in science and medicine, which I’m excited about.

It’s a little twist on what I usually talk about which is the actual science, but understanding how we got to where we are is something that I’ve been very interested in unpacking. I’m going to share some of that with people. I’m also launching a mentorship roughly in September which could be for light people but I have a lot of doctors, providers, nurses, and things like that that are interested. We’re going to go from like laying the foundations of the scientific knowledge, so literally starting with like biology, chemistry, organic chemistry, biochemistry, and developmental biology.

From that foundation, we’re going to be building out the circadian and light biology and the quantum biology and the mitochondrial medicine because what I’ve noticed online is there’s a lot of like influencers in the quantum and circadian space that they may have some good information but they don’t have a strong foundation of understanding to look at things from a first principles perspective. It’s ultimately like they’re regurgitating what they heard from other people.

It may be true but I feel like it’s slightly a shell of what it could be. I’m trying to address that issue by helping people that don’t want to go necessarily and do a four-year undergrad degree in this stuff to get at least the foundational basics they need from each subject to then build off of. That’s coming down the pipe in the fall and that will probably be like twelve weeks or more. It’s going to be pretty rigorous. Those are some of the main things you can look out for. I also have other courses that are pre-recorded that you can self-guide yourself through at this point as well as the eBook, which is available in English and Spanish.

It’s so much information and so good. It’s so important. Thank you so much for taking the time. It was great to have you here.

Thank you for having me. This was fun.

I’ll talk to you soon.

Important Links

• Dr. Alexis Jazmyn, PhD
• Dr. Alexis Cowan on Instagram
•  Dr. Alexis Cowan on X
• The Body Electric
• Health and Light
• Own Your Labs
• Iris
• F.lux
• Healthlighting
• VivaRays
• Bon Charge
• Chroma
• Undoctrinate Yourself on YouTube
• Undocrtinate Yourself on Spotify
• Quantum Health eBook

About Dr. Alexis Cowan

Dr. Cowan is a Princeton-trained PhD specializing in metabolic physiology, mitochondrial medicine, and light biology. Alexis Cowan, PhD, embarked on her path to health following a childhood marked by recurring illnesses and significant weight struggles. Through her personal battles with an eating disorder and subsequent development of ulcerative colitis, these early experiences sparked her interest in the scientific underpinnings of nutrition, exercise and other lifestyle interventions. Alexis pursued her education fervently, earning a B.S. in Biochemistry and Math from Moravian College, followed by a PhD in Molecular Biology from Princeton University in 2021. She now works with individuals in her practice, and educates on metabolism and circadian optimization through her online courses.