What’s Your Light Diet? With Dr. Martin Moore-Ede

Join Adiel and Dr. Martin Moore-Ede, aka “The Light Doctor,” in this incredible conversation about the power of light (including the sun) to heal us. After years of sun demonization, while spending most of our days under artificial blue light spectrums, we are now starting to understand the true relationship between our health and light. Not all light is equal, nor is all light beneficial for us at all times of the day. Learn about the true impact of light on our mitochondria and how having a poor light diet contributes to chronic metabolic disease.

For over 40 years, Dr. Moore-Ede has been a leading expert on circadian clocks and the health problems including sleep disorders, fatigue, diabetes and cancer caused by light at night. As a professor at Harvard Medical School (1975 – 1998), he led the team that located the suprachiasmatic nucleus, the biological clock in the human brain that controls the timing of sleep and wake, pioneered research on how the human body can safely adapt to working around the clock, and wrote the best-selling book “The Clocks That Time Us”.

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What’s Your Light Diet? With Dr. Martin Moore-Ede

Just In Time For Summer, The “Light Doctor” Reveals The True Power Of Light & Its Impact On Our Health.

I’m very excited to be here with you again. I’m especially excited because we have Dr. Martin Moore-Ede. Dr. Moore-Ede has made some fundamental discoveries related to circadian biology in our brain. We’re going to learn a lot. I’m going to call you Martin. Martin, welcome to the show.

I am pleased to be joining you here, Adiel.

Unveiling The Brain’s Master Clock: The SCN Discovery

I will start with this very sexy claim to fame. It’s hard not to talk about it. In the 1980s, you led a group at Harvard that discovered the SCM, or the suprachiasmatic nucleus, our main clock. We don’t have that much time, but this is too much not to cover. Can you tell us about that process?

It had been discovered in some other animals before then, but the general belief at the time was that humans didn’t have a circadian clock like other animals. Indeed, the atlases of the brain show nothing of the structure that is associated with being a circadian clock in the brain. What we discovered was that the atlases of the human brain only keep every 50th slice. In other words, they throw out 59 thin slices in between, and so you just get an image every 50 slices.

This clock in the brain, called the suprachiasmatic nucleus, is smaller than that. It often got lost. It was not seen. When we went back and looked at all the slices of the human brain from one end to the other, we were able to prove that it was sitting there not only in rats and monkeys, but it was there in the human brain. That was one of the fundamental misbeliefs that we were able to overcome at that time.

The SCM is so small that it fits within those slivers that they cut. That’s why it was missed.

Decoding Light’s Influence: How Natural Light Synchronizes Your Body

When it did turn up, it was given ten different names. They only saw it once in a while. We had to sort this whole thing out, identify where it was, show how it was linked, and then go on to show that it was synchronized by light. It was another thing that was not believed at the time. They thought humans were synchronized by social interaction with each other. We were able to show that light was the key zeitgeber, which is the time-giver of the human clock.

It was right at the very beginning of this science of human circadian rhythms. It was a great time to be a scientist when the field was wide open and the key discoveries were there to be made. That’s how we got started in terms of understanding this and then understanding, as time went on, what happened when we disrupt this circadian clock and all the other clocks in the body. We should point out that there are circadian clocks in virtually every cell of the body, millions of them. They all have to be kept in sync for you to be in good health.

Not only do we have trillions of cells, but in most cells, we have mitochondria. We’re talking trillions. They all do their work, not just randomly. They have a sequence. They have a clock. We have trillions of clocks, and from what I understand, they are synchronized by the SCN. Getting out there in the morning light is a very good signal to the central clock, the SCN, to synchronize itself. Is that true?

Yes. The natural tendency of our internal clock is to drift slightly later every day. In other words, it’s not perfectly timed to 24 hours exactly. It drifts a little longer. Hence, it needs a nudge every day to get it back in sync with the 24-hour day. That shift of the clock to correct it back from a longer than 24 to 24 hours occurs in the morning as the sun rises in the first part of the morning. Getting exposed to morning sunlight is critical for our health. It keeps everything in the body in sync.

If we live indoors and don’t go outside, then we gradually get out of step with the world. It’s not only just the clock being out, or the SCN being out of step with the world, but all those other clocks start getting out of sync with each other. That’s what leads to so much chronic ill health. We know that what’s called circadian disruption, that’s all those trillions of clocks getting slightly out of timing with each other, is actually what’s behind obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and certain cancers. They are particularly endocrine-sensitive cancers like breast cancer in women, prostate cancer in men, and colorectal cancer.

All of these are illnesses of today’s world that are increasing the chronic diseases of our time. It’s why lifespan is not getting any longer for the human race. We’ve got ourselves slowed down by the life we lead indoors with artificial light. What’s more, it’s more than just light. It is the blue component of the light. It’s a particular color of blue within white light. We take the light we see for granted. The natural light contains a full spectrum of everything from violet, blue, red, green, yellow, and everything in there. It’s a particular blue, a sky blue color, that is the key signal.

We know that because in the eye, there are cells that detect. They’re sky blue receptors. They’re throughout the animal kingdom. It’s a key. Why would you pick blue as the color to synchronize with you? Another fascinating discovery is that when you go down to the depths of the ocean where life began, the only color that penetrates is this sky blue color down into the ocean depths. That was what light was when life began. It was sky blue. When the sun wasn’t shining on the ocean, the color was pitch black. That’s why we understand that regulating light and regulating, particularly the sky blue content of light, is so critical.

Beyond Blue: The Full Spectrum Of Natural Light For Optimal Well-Being

When life started at the bottom of the ocean, it was almost like a binary state. It was either blue, which means daytime, or black, nighttime. That was all. It’s not that super different even now with us. We want to have that blue. This is a more refined question about getting the light in the morning. Is it more beneficial to be there and go outside right before the sunrise, so you can watch the sunrise? The UVA comes about an hour later, depending on where you are. Is it okay if you wake up at 8:00 AM? The sunrise has already happened, and you go outside.

You don’t want to go out too early in the morning, particularly in the summer hours. You shove the clock back in the opposite direction. You can shove yourself further eastward by being out too early in too much light. I wouldn’t worry too much about it. Essentially, you want to get out in the first half of the morning before the sun has reached its peak. That will help stabilize it, getting a good dose of blue. If you’re too obsessive about getting to sunrise, particularly in the summer, you could end up shifting yourself way out of whack from perhaps what might be convenient.

That is a new bit of information for me. It’s quite important because Jack Kruse was asked, “What’s the one thing you do for health?” He said quickly, without even thinking, “Never miss a sunrise.” I know there are a lot of people trying to never miss a sunrise.

You could say there are other reasons, spiritual or whatever else, for that purpose. We ought to also recognize that many other aspects of the light spectrum are also critical for health. One of the big things we’re understanding is that all the various parts of the light spectrum are doing different things. That’s why natural light is so beneficial. By the way, the full light spectrum is partly invisible. It’s the ultraviolet that’s coming out of the sun.

It’s invisible infrared that’s beyond the near-infrared, just outside the visible range. All that light has significant health benefits. For each part of the spectrum, we’re learning fascinating things about how red light around the 670-nanometer mark boosts mitochondrial energy. We know that near-infrared and light can be associated with healing effects, more effective healing of scars, and everything else. We know that light down in the ultraviolet range may be particularly important. The deep violet, almost invisible light, may be important for preventing myopia in children, and so on. It’s a mixture of all those. Green is a color in the spectrum that induces relaxation, calms down the amygdala, and reduces pain in migraine patients.

We’re learning an awful lot of information. Getting the full benefits of natural sunlight is much more than simply getting your circadian clocks aligned. It’s that full health benefit. Some of that light is not penetrating much further than the eyes. Other parts of that light, particularly the near-infrared, are penetrating deep into the tissues and will stimulate mitochondrial respiration and ATP energy production in mitochondria. It’s a fascinating area.

The lights we use, particularly these LED lights, just permeate the market. It’s almost all you can buy at the big box stores these days. Those lights have a very artificial, narrow spectrum. They have no violets in them. They only have limited amounts of the blue. They have certain types of blue in them, but not others. They’re rather low in the sky blue light sometimes. They have no infrared and red in them. We’re depriving ourselves. One of the issues is that producing light for vision is not the same as producing light for health.

There are two big functions of light. We understand vision. We design lights for aesthetics, visibility, and visual acuity. That’s why we think about lights as a design thing. The people who sell lights most of the time are lighting designers. It tells you something. It’s a design thing, an aesthetic thing. Light has very much to do with physiology, health, and well-being. We need to be thinking about the content of the light we see.

Is it efficiently full spectrum? Does it have the right ingredients during the daytime? Equally, during the evening hours, does it remove those ingredients that are causing a missed signal? That’s a big thing there. The blue part of the LED lights is disrupting our circadian clock. That’s something you don’t want your standard LED lights in the evening. You want a light that is essentially zero blue or blue-free in its content.

That’s where I’m going to take my next questions with you. There are two parts to this equation. One is spending time outdoors in the daytime. We know the benefits. I’m going to go a little bit into that. Here comes the second part, which years ago was much simpler than it is now. It’s very challenging for most people. What do you do after the sun goes down until you go to bed? We’ll go to that in a couple of seconds. I know you have some great solutions. Let’s talk about being outside. It is much easier. All you do is step outside. Is that sky blue 480 or 477 nanometers?

About 480 is the best estimate. That’s the spectrum of the melanopsin that’s sitting in the retinal ganglion cells in the eyes, the blue light detectors. We’re able to show the number of studies narrowing down to about 480. It’s in that range, 480 plus or minus three nanometers. That’s the peak effect. It’s broader than that, so that light between 440 and 495 does have some effect. It’s with a peak of about 480.

Sunscreen And Sunlight: A Balanced Approach To Skin Exposure

I’m going to go to the short length part. That’s the UVA and UVB. UVA comes earlier in the day than UVB. There is a time in many latitudes between 10:00 AM and 2:00 PM when both UVA and UVB are there. It feels pretty hot. It’s strong depending on the season and the latitude. There is a dilemma here. We know what UVA does when it hits your skin. It is nitric oxide. There are some other benefits. UVB, vitamin D, and all the cleavage of the POMC to all of these products are very healthy stuff. Should a person be out and let their skin be in the sun, depending on what kind of skin they may have, between 10:00 and 2:00, or should they be careful and be in the shade?

You should be somewhat careful with too much of that. In other words, you don’t need so much light to have the beneficial effect. There is a severe increased risk of sunburn. What’s interesting is that the studies are showing that people who spend more time outdoors live longer. That means years longer. One of the classic studies was done with 29,000 Swedish women who were studied because they were interested in skin cancers and melanoma in particular. The hypothesis was that the more time outdoors they have, the more melanoma they have and bigger cancer problems. That’s the beauty of science when it gets the result you don’t expect. What they found is, to their total surprise, the women who were outside more lived years longer.

The difference is as big as non-smokers versus smokers in terms of effect on lifespan. They got more skin cancers, but they didn’t die from the skin cancers. In other words, they just lived longer and healthier. Their cardiometabolic health was far better, and so forth. There is a question. How much? There is such a thing as damage that can occur if you’re out in Australia and out back in too much sun, those extremes. I grew up in England. It tends to be, much of the time, cloudy and not as intense sun. It’s rather less of an effect. This study was done on Swedish women. They’re fairly far north in terms of their latitude. The short answer is, yes, getting outside is critical. There’s always too much of everything in life, but getting outside for a decent amount of time makes a difference.

Regarding the Swedish women’s study, you could hypothesize that if they lived longer, they had more of a chance for the occurrence of developing all cancers. When you live longer, there is more of a chance for those things. That should be put as part of that equation.

Even despite that, they didn’t die of it. Over total cancer rates were lower.

People put on sunscreen. Even the highest quality, the mineral sunscreen, tends to want to block UVB and probably UVA. You are getting a light frequency to hit the covered skin, which is not known to the body. It’s weird because there’s a part of it that’s blocked. Is sunscreen a benefit or a detriment?

I don’t know. I don’t choose to get in the middle of that argument. What we’re talking about is light coming through the eyes. That’s where you want to see this light. You want to be exposed to the eyes. There’s a place for sunscreen for excessive amounts of solar radiation because you can get skin damage and so forth from that. Particularly, light coming through the eyes is the critical thing.

Children who are exposed to playing outside as they used to do, much more than they do today, have far less myopia, far less short-sightedness. Myopia is a huge epidemic in Asian children, moving from 25% to 50%. It is a horrendous effect because kids are indoors. When they are then prescribed eyewear, and eyewear blocks some of that UV light, they don’t get better. If you prescribe eyewear that lets through some between 360 and 400 nanometers, then that protects them. There are a lot of questions we’re learning. It’s been out there and discussed for a long time about the benefits of UV.

Everyone used to be a physician at the turn of the century. We’re having all their patients out of the sunlight because exposure to sunlight was shown to be curative. We’ve got much more sophisticated treatments these days for many conditions, but the lesson is there that sunlight is pretty important for health. A jaundiced baby will get well. The jaundice will be removed just by being exposed to sunlight, as opposed to being kept indoors. There are many other conditions like that. It’s a fascinating question.

Sunglasses Vs. Hats: Optimizing Eye Exposure To Beneficial Light

Many people, when they go outside, automatically put on sunglasses. Based on the fact that we need the stimulation into our eyes, wouldn’t it be better to put on a hat for shade and not use sunglasses?

Yes. Some sunglasses allow that critical blue to come through. For example, the new glasses called BlueSync will provide a sunglass effect, but actually will be selective of which light it blocks and which light it doesn’t. It can let the critical circadian blue come through. If you need sunglasses to reduce glare, and there are reasons to wear sunglasses when you’re driving or there’s too much glare, then you can do it without them.

You can be selective because there are certain wavelengths in the blue, the violet end of blue, particularly between 425 and 450. In high bright levels, it can cause damage to the eyes, called cell death, at very bright sunlight. The blue that’s around 480 does not have that effect. That’s the one you want to see. Some sunglasses can address that issue. The science is moving along interestingly. Products are coming out that are offering some interesting solutions.

Reversing Chronic Conditions: The Power Of A Circadian-Aligned Lifestyle

I want to move into the inside life in the home, which is much more challenging nowadays with our computers, television, phones, and all the stuff that we have indoors. You have explained in your book that many chronic conditions, including predisposition to certain cancers, start developing and progress. Somebody reads this conversation. They read your book, and they say, “What have I been doing?” They change. They go outside in the daytime. They minimize lights in the home.

Many night owls have told me that the minute they did that, they started going to bed at 9:00 or 10:00 naturally. Night owl is maybe a relative thing. If somebody starts to live the circadian life the way they should, all the processes that we’re building towards those chronic diseases and cancers, are they going to stop? Are they going to regress? Are they going to go back if they already have cancer? What will happen once people make the shift?

First of all, if you make a shift to a lifestyle which includes exposure to daylight, minimizing particularly the blue content of light in the evening hours, and sleeping in the dark at night, that’s the basic formula. If you do that, people have remarkable effects in terms of their well-being. You feel much better. You are much more alert. Sleep quality is better. What’s going to happen is that the natural body’s immunological processes and the body’s natural melatonin-driven processes, which help suppress cancers, can keep cancer risk under control.

I’m not going to say all cancer is going to disappear or immediately reverse, particularly if it’s well-advanced. I’m not going to claim they can be all suddenly reversed by this. Certainly, the rate of new cancers developing and the rate of cancer growth is radically reduced if you are living a lifestyle that boosts the maximum amplitude of your circadian rhythms. By that means you reach the peak during the day and the lowest levels at night, of state of alertness. Your melatonin is high at night. You have full repair and restoration. Cancer is suppressing. The antioxidant effects are at their maximum. It has a huge effect.

Conditions like a tendency towards obesity, diabetes, and heart disease issues can be reversed. All those things are essential to why people live longer. A huge Swedish study done with 300,000 golfers shows that golfers, who are therefore tending to spend more time outdoors than non-golfers, because golf is an exercise where you’re out there for several hours for a reason, live five years longer than average than non-golfers. It’s all age-matched and socioeconomic-matched.

The golfers with the lowest par, the lowest scores, and hence presumably paying the most for golf, live even longer, which is a fascinating thing. You don’t have to play golf. I’m not claiming golf is the solution to everything, but it’s one more example of that exposure to light during the day. It’s got to be coupled also for full effect with the darkness, sleeping in the darkness at night, and with removing the blue during the evening hours.

Harnessing Near-Infrared: Beyond Visible Light For Mitochondrial Health

You don’t have that much time, but I still want to talk about the near-infrared. There is a paper by Zimmerman et al. They showed that we make melatonin in the mitochondria, and it’s stimulated by near-infrared light. That’s in a huge order of magnitude more than the pineal. Near-infrared light is also very important. Since trees and greenery reflect it, that explains why people like to be in gardens and trees. It just feels good. Being outside will give you all of that.

This is a corollary question that I had. There’s a huge industry that sells us this panel that’s red light, and the red and near-infrared, usually 810 and 670. My question is very simple. Why should a person use and/or buy such a panel if they can just step outside and get not only the 670 nanometers and 810 nanometers, but get every other bit of the spectrum, including probably much better 670 and 810? Plus, it doesn’t come from a panel, which who knows what defects it may have. What do you think about that?

The natural exposure is always better because there’s so much more we discover every day that’s in natural light. By just selecting one or two wavelengths and focusing too much on that, you’re getting an imbalance. What may be very important is the balance between these different wavelengths. Natural light is evenly balanced. Most natural daylight is evenly balanced across all these different wavelengths.

We live indoors so much. Another feature that’s blocking is that we have windows. Windows these days are more energy-efficient. E-windows will remove all the infrared, so it doesn’t come in. They remove the ultraviolet, so it doesn’t come in. Therefore, even sitting indoors near a window, you are not getting the full spectrum of light. It’s better to be near a window than far away from a window. People in the offices near windows sleep longer on average than people in interior cubicles with only artificial light. The natural light during the day is the most important thing.

One other thing is that the effects of infrared and deep red light, the 670 and so forth nanometer light, are most pronounced in the morning hours, which is interesting. Its effect on mitochondrial and glucose metabolism and everything else is so much higher in the morning than in the afternoon hours. It therefore raises the question of getting outside in the morning. You’re getting the benefits of when you need to see that light for its maximum effect in terms of mitochondrial energy and energy production.

What about sunset?

Sunset is a key part of the overall signal. We were able to show when we did our studies that as little as one second of light was enough to synchronize you if it was sufficiently bright. One second of light is enough to have an effect if there are no other confusing cues. We don’t live in a world of pitch darkness for 23 hours, 59 minutes, and one second of light, but that would be enough to synchronize this if it’s bright enough.

The key is avoiding that light after sunset, the blue light. That’s where you need to pay attention. We took groups of healthy young people into a room lit with standard LED lighting and showed that we could render them pre-diabetic in just a few hours. The glucose levels climbed. The insulin resistance went up. They had the signs that they failed the glucose tolerance test. They failed the diabetes test just sitting in a room with LED lighting. We put them in the same room with LED lights, but the LED lights are spectrally engineered.

We’ve carved out and removed that blue color from them. What we can do is show that we repair that problem. In other words, they don’t get diabetes. These effects can occur pretty soon. That’s why it’s not in your sleep. It’s your metabolism and so forth that occur. As Professor Kenneth Wright did at the University of Colorado Boulder, he took people outside into the natural wilderness in the Colorado mountains, where they had no electronic devices. They had no flashlights, no cell phones, or anything like that. They just lived under natural conditions. Their sleep got so much stronger, better, and longer. They felt healthier and better. That was just in a few days that would occur.

If you adopt that lifestyle, the effects are pretty fast and occur pretty quickly. You mentioned morning types and evening types. There are differences between people who tend to get up early in the mornings and go to bed earlier versus those who are night owls and stay up. The difference went away between those types of people when they’re outdoors. It is showing that the difference between day and night is actually due to sensitivity to blue-rich light at night.

Particularly, night owls are very sensitive to the blue in LED lights. If you take out the blue, then they start suddenly going to bed at a more typical time and sleeping longer. That’s part of the whole formula here. The light you see is important to your health, as is the food you eat, the water you drink, and the air you breathe, as I like to say in my book, The Light Doctor.

Lighting Up Your Home: Choosing Healthier Light Bulbs For Nighttime

Let’s jump into the home. I’m going to start with the most basic. We have more benefits from the old incandescent lights. If nobody does anything, unfortunately, within a few years, they’re not even going to be there anymore. They also produce a lot of near-infrared, which is heat and wasteful. In your book, you put it beautifully. You say, “We need to see, then we need to be healthy.” The last thing is the energy efficiency. Even there, there’s a lot of debate. I hope the new administration is going to change that. I know that you are there on the forefront. As a first level of defense, is it better to have incandescent lights in the home, assuming you have them?

For several reasons, incandescent lights are better than LED lights. They have way less blue for the evening hours. They have more infrared. This whole issue of energy efficiency is merely because it’s a very false metric we use. All the government regulators use for energy efficiency something called lumens per watt. Watt is electricity, but lumens is an archaic method of measuring light. It was invented in 1924. It just measures effectively the yellow and the green parts of the light, and nothing much else. It doesn’t measure red, blue, or anything else.

What it does measure is the light that is visually seen as bright. Effectively, what these regulations are forcing upon us is cheap, bright junk light. Just like junk food, this is light that is not natural at all. It is all in the name of energy. It’s not energy-saving. It’s certainly not money-saving to produce more ill health through just going after light bulbs, which are only 6% of all light fixtures in the home. Only 6% of the energy is used. Incandescent lights have been banned in America since 2023. The halogens have gone.

There’s a move to ban all healthy lighting that can’t meet this very artificial LED standard. The only thing that can meet it, 125 lumens per watt, an average for a light bulb, is rather unhealthy or very unhealthy blue pump LED lights. We’ve got a problem here. That’s a big education campaign. We’re trying to create a class of healthy light bulbs to protect this class. Any light that’s got infrared in it, any light that’s full spectrum, cannot meet those so-called artificial energy standards that are not energy efficient at all.

I understand that you are very deeply involved in solutions. I would like very much to distill these solutions for our audience. What can we install as light bulbs in our home for the night?

If I were to recommend one particular solution, it would be the solution by Korrus with their new line of OIO light bulbs. Think of two eyes and a nose between. Those light bulbs are just coming out. You can go to the Korrus website and see them. They’re just about to be released. The beauty there is that they not only regulate the content of the light, the amount of blue, but they do it fully automatically. The last thing you want to do is have to remember to switch one light on and switch another light off.

We’ve got to make it automated. We’ve also got to sync it to local latitude, longitude, and seasons of the year. We’ll just naturally do the job for us without having to think about it. They are light bulbs that change automatically. In the meantime, you can buy light bulbs that are zero blue. Another Korrus brand is called Soraa. Those are zero blue bulbs. They’re single. That’s good for the evening. Essentially, we need to move to automatically changing light bulbs, where we don’t have to do anything other than screw it in and let it do its thing.

Is there any truth, and what do you think about putting light sources at night, even these ones that you just mentioned, lower to the ground rather than high up?

There are certainly benefits that part of the reception to the blue content of light is predominantly in the lower half of our retina, which means it’s looking up at the sky. Light coming down from the sky is where has the strongest effect. Light coming up to the ground has a lesser effect, just because of where these blue detectors are situated in the retina. If you don’t have any blue content in the light, it doesn’t matter too much. In general, lights that are low to the ground will have less effect. During the nighttime hours, sleeping in the darkness is the key.

If you do need some lights to get around, find your way to the bathroom, and so forth, then you should be using lights ideally low to the ground. They don’t have any blue content, yellow, or red light. Your alarm clock, and if you’ve got a clock in the bedroom, don’t have a classic white or blue dial, because that’s the worst thing you need. You don’t need that light pollution. Have one with a red dial. You can manage your lighting environment. It’s the holistic light diet.

In other words, you’re following just like a nutritional diet, a light diet, with more exposure to morning sunlight, in particular daylight during the day exposure to blue-free light in the evenings. By the way, we should mention that for most of human existence, our ancestors used fires, candles, and things like that. They all have virtually no blue in them. In other words, candlelight, firelight, and wood-burning fires have less than 1% blue content. Incandescent light bulbs invented by Thomas Edison were aimed to replicate candlelight because that’s what people used to have, rather much less blue than is in the LED lights of today.

Nevertheless, if you had a choice between using an incandescent, not bright, because it’s night, versus a couple of the ones that you mentioned that are especially tailored, wouldn’t the newest ones be better than incandescent still?

I think so because the incandescent does have too much blue in them. We’re quite sensitive to the blue content. It depends on how bright those lights are. It’s a dosage effect, like any medicine. It’s the overall intensity of the light coming out, the amount of light, times what type of light is there, and what is the spectrum. If you got lights with less than 2% blue content and ran those lights bright, you would still get blue. You might get too much blue. It’s a combination of how bright the light is.

Screens And Sleep: Managing Blue Light From Devices

On the other hand, in the real world, we need the lights bright enough to see. Your children need to be able to do their homework. You may have to do your tax returns, whatever. You need to be able to see and have good visual acuity. We need to balance the visual aspects of light with the health aspects of light. That’s why we need to engineer lights to take out these harmful parts of the spectrum.

We talked about lights in the home. Can we talk about the devices? You and I are looking at each other on this Zoom call. I’m looking at a screen. You’re looking at the screen. It’s not nighttime where I am. I think I read it in your book. I could be mistaken. Please correct me if I’m wrong. When the cell phone manufacturers try to make people not fret about blue light, they have a mode called night mode. If I’m not mistaken, it was you who said it’s a sham. It just tints the screen orange and makes you feel good, but it doesn’t do the trick. Is that true?

That’s right. What they’re doing is changing what’s called color temperature. This is what the lighting industry has done to try to meet the demand, and device manufacturers need to do something, changing the color temperature. Unfortunately, the color temperature of a light is rather loosely related to its blue content. You can change the color and make it a more yellowish color without changing very much the blue content. You can make a whiter light appear with less blue in it by engineering it, or you can make a light look yellower. They’re not solving it. They freaked out when the headlines were, “Your iPhone is making you fat.”

It caused the obesity problem. People eat more, stimulated by blue light. You eat twice as many snacks at night if you’re using blue-rich lights. The answer to the screens is similar to engineering the LEDs inside them. There are demonstrations by Korrus of screens that take out that blue and then will automatically do it during the daytime. You’d have blue-rich light, scaling blue in the daytime and the screen, and the screen would automatically change to remove that blue in the evening hours.

You have a screen already. What does Korrus do to make the screen behave in that beneficial way? Do you need to buy a new screen from them? Do you need to put something? What is it? How does it work?

You can do it two ways. You can put filters on a screen. That is one solution that people can do. They’re aiming to have an automatic screen. The engineering industry has demonstrated some of these screens. I predict that these are going to become normal because you can do this without much change in the visual quality of the screen. Why have a screen that’s pumping out blue light? A lot of people do their computer work in the evening hours. Why would you want to do that?

I would say the light coming from your light fixtures, light bulbs, has a bigger effect than the screen. The levels of light coming from a screen are relatively less, typically from light fixtures, depending on where you are. It’s how we should create a whole environment, a whole world that is designed for health. There’s no reason not to have healthy light 24/7 whenever we need it.

People look at this so much. What can be done with this? Is it the same solution you mentioned that Korrus has for this screen as well?

That’s right. You can do the same thing with any type of screen. It is changing the chip.

What about blue-blocking glasses? What do you think about those?

There are a lot of loose claims around there. If you don’t understand what’s going on, then you can buy glasses that block the wrong blue. I won’t name the major manufacturer, but they’re the largest manufacturer by far of eyewear around the world. They will sell you a coating, which gives you a blue tint in your glasses. It looks quite attractive and so forth, but it has nothing to do with circadian health because it’s blocking light down at the violet-blue end of the spectrum.

There’s no effect whatsoever on the key blue, which is the 480 circadian blue, the sky blue color. There are blue blocking glasses that have the right effect. They tend to look yellow-orange, rather noticeably, but make sure it is blocking the correct blue. It is blocking the melanopic, the blue that is critical for circadian health. Don’t wear them during the day because you want the blue. This is for use in the evening hours when you want to remove blue from your environment.

Assuming you buy the correct blocking of 470 to 490, and whatever it is needs to be blocked, the glasses are beneficial. Isn’t your skin also reacting to the blue light in some way? We have receptors on our skin as well. Shouldn’t you be dressed?

We should all be walking around like cavemen. I don’t think so. The issue there is that the blue has very little penetration of the skin. What does penetrate is when you get up into the far reds and the near-infrareds. That will penetrate deep. That has deep effects on the body. I know that the shorter wavelengths, the violets, the blue, and the light do not penetrate very far at all.

Here’s a person. They finished the whole day. They did very well based on our discussion here. They were out quite a bit. They come home. They have the right lights installed, the ones that you described. By the way, there is software called Iris. Does that work well on minimizing blue light on screens?

A lot of it is changing color temperature. It depends on what they’re doing. The problem is that changing the color temperature is not the solution, because it has a relatively weak effect. Typically, people talk about high color temperatures around the 6,000 Kelvin range. That’s a bluish white light. When you get down to the more yellowish type white lights around 3,000 or 2,700, that change will only bring down the percentage blue from 25% down to 8% or 10%. You need to get down to 1% or 2% blue. You can’t just do it unless you go down to extremely low color temperatures, below 2,000 effectively. That’s why color temperature is weakly related.

You have to watch out. A lot of people are doing things for the appearance, but not the actuality. There are devices. You could with a spectrophotometer. It is the technical way you can do it. You point this device at it and see exactly how much all the colors are. There are diffraction devices that are out there. You can just hold this up to a light. You can see the content. Does it have this blue? Doesn’t it have blue? It is simply with a cheap little diffraction device. There are ways that an individual can measure it. Korrus is planning to distribute these along with its light bulbs.

Here is the person. He lived the whole day very nicely based on our discussion outside in the daytime. There are the right lights at night. They worked hard. They say, “I want to watch a show on television.” They have the giant screen. What do they do?

Being some distance from the screen helps because of the square law. The intensity of light drops dramatically the further away you are from the screen. The advantage of a giant screen is that you typically have some distance from it, as opposed to a small screen near your face. TV screens can be engineered with blue-free screens, too. That’s all coming down the road. The big screens aren’t engineered that way, but they certainly should be. I predict they will be.

Until they are here, should the person use the right blue-blocking glasses when they watch TV?

Blue-blocking glasses would help solve that problem. If you can change the lights yourself, great. If it’s something you can’t change, then the right blue-blocking glasses, the yellow-orange ones, are your solution. If you’re in a public place, the library, or your workplace, where you can’t change it, then blue-blocking glasses can make a difference in the evening hours.

There was a social article about those weird tinted glasses becoming a fashion. You see a lot of people out in the theater or a club. They’re wearing these weird glasses that are a little bit reddish or yellowish. It’s becoming a fashion. That’s a good thing.

It’s a good thing if it’s worn at the right time.

I’m talking about at night.

There are a lot of people wearing those things during the daytime for fashion.

Isn’t there a company in San Francisco that is working on a tablet called the Daylight Computer?

Yes.

If I’m not mistaken, the primary light is not blue at all. It’s amber, if I’m not mistaken. That’s a nice premise for a device, don’t you think?

Yes. Companies are doing that. There’s a lot of innovation in this space. A lot of companies are now working on this. We need to wrap up pretty soon. This is where we’re getting. There is a lot of innovation in this area. It’s a very active area. A lot of great products are coming out. These are exciting times, and the solutions are all there.

I know you don’t have much time. This is your book. I highly recommend it. You wrote it, not for the scientist. I’m an engineer, but still, I read it. I enjoyed it. It’s very accessible. To me, this is one of the most important books that you can get these days. I assume they can find your book on Amazon. It’s not that complicated.

It’s on Amazon. You can order it through bookstores. People are buying internationally. It’s available through the normal channels.

How can people reach your work and your updates in that manner? What do we need to do?

First of all, I write a bi-weekly Substack column, which is about what’s going on in this world, the new products that are coming out, and what the new science is. That is to keep up to date on Substack. I also have a website called CircadianLight.org, where you can keep up to date on what the products are and guidance on where to find products that solve this lighting equation that we need for our lives. That’s a good place to go. I’ve got a website, TheLightDoctor.com, which features the books and my other publications.

I found this very helpful. It’s more than helpful. This is at the basis of the good existence that we should lead for health.

I couldn’t agree more.

Thank you so much for taking it. I know you were a little bit short on time. I appreciate that you gave us this time. I know our audience is going to benefit from it. Thank you so much for being with us.

It’s been my pleasure, Adiel. It was a great conversation.

Important Links

• Dr. Martin Moore-Ede on LinkedIn
• Jack Kruse’s Website
• BlueSync
• Professor Kenneth Wright on LinkedIn
• The Light Doctor
• Korrus
• Soraa
• Iris – Software for Eye Protection
• Daylight Computer
• The Light Doctor on Substack
• Circadian Light

About Dr. Martin Moore-Ede

For over 40 years, Dr. Moore-Ede has been a leading expert on circadian clocks and the health problems including sleep disorders, fatigue, diabetes and cancer caused by light at night. As a professor at Harvard Medical School (1975 – 1998), he led the team that located the suprachiasmatic nucleus, the biological clock in the human brain that controls the timing of sleep and wake, pioneered research on how the human body can safely adapt to working around the clock, and wrote the best-selling book “The Clocks That Time Us”.

In 1983 Dr Moore-Ede founded the global consulting and technology firm, CIRCADIAN® (www.circadian.com) which optimizes 24/7 workforce productivity, health and safety with a client base that now includes over half of the Fortune 500, from offices in Boston, London, Amsterdam, Brisbane and Osaka. Based on this experience, he wrote the global best-selling book “The Twenty-Four Hour Society: Understanding Human Limits in a World That Never Stops” that was published in six languages.

To address his clients’ growing concerns about the harmful effects of conventional fluorescent and LED lighting on workplace health, safety and performance, Dr Moore-Ede founded the CIRCADIAN Light Research Center in 2010 which identified the key blue wavelengths that synchronize circadian clocks. He then spun off CIRCADIAN ZircLight in 2011 to develop evidence-based LED circadian lights that provide healthy blue-rich light during the day and blue-depleted safe light at night based on medical research and an IP portfolio. In 2022 the IP for evidence-based circadian lighting was acquired by Korrus, the leaders in human-light interaction.

Dr. Moore-Ede graduated with a First-Class Honors degree in Physiology from the University of London, and received his medical degrees from Guy’s Hospital Medical School, and his Ph.D. in Physiology from Harvard University. He has published 10 books and more than 180 scientific papers on the physiology of the circadian system, interaction with environmental light and the consequences of circadian disruption including human fatigue, ill-health, errors and accidents. Dr. Moore-Ede holds multiple patents on assessing and mitigating circadian disruption and fatigue.

He has served on multiple national and international committees, and has received numerous awards including the Bowditch Lectureship of the American Physiological Society. He is a frequent guest on television (CNN, Today Show, Good Morning America, 20/20, Dateline, Oprah Winfrey, Nova, BBC), radio (NPR Fresh Air, Connection), and print media (Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, Time and Newsweek). He has testified before Congressional committees on multiple occasions, and advised government agencies on the health and safety of the 24/7 workforce in the US, Canada and Europe.