54. Scott Zimmerman: Harms of Indoor Lighting & Essential Role of Near Infrared Light

This is a deep dive into the nuances of artificial light vs sunlight, the difference between narrow and broadband infrared light sources, how infrared light affects mitochondrial function, how we evolved to harvest IR light from our environment and much more.  

Scott Zimmerman is an expert optics engineer and research scientist who is raising awareness of the role of infrared light in human health. This is my second episode with Scott, I highly recommend checking out that episode.

TIMESTAMPS
00:14:51 Light and Color Temperature Complexity
00:29:44 Sunlight and Melanin in Hormone Production
00:35:03 Melatonin's Role Outside Pineal Gland
00:47:21 Melatonin and Near Infrared Light Importance
00:58:59 The Body's Ability to Harvest Light
01:13:34 Effects of Surrounding on Sunlight Spectrum
01:20:50 Sunscreens and LED Lighting's Impact
01:26:01 Unintended Consequences of LED Lighting
01:38:21 Effects of Artificial Light on Environment

LINKS
Melatonin and the Optics of the Human Body by Scott Zimmeramn & Russel Reiter
https://melatonin-research.net/index.php/MR/article/view/19

Melatonin: Both a Messenger of Darkness and a Participant in the Cellular Actions of Non-Visible Solar Radiation of Near Infrared Light
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9855654/

Melatonin research Journal
https://melatonin-research.net/index.php/MR/index

NIRA: Near infrared light bulbs (Scott's company)
https://niralighting.com/

Follow SCOTT
Twitter - https://twitter.com/SZimmZoo

Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-zimmerman-29b7b59?trk=public_post_feed-actor-name

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DISCLAIMER: The content in this podcast is purely for informational purposes and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on this podcast or YouTube channel.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 4:12

In this episode I'm speaking again with Optics Engineer Scott Zimmerman. Scott is incredibly knowledgeable and is doing amazing work to try and raise the awareness of the fact that our modern lighting environments are profoundly deficient in infrared light, which we get from the sun when we are outside, and what is missing in modern LED lighting. So this discussion goes into the effects of that on our health and the nuances regarding infrared light and mitochondrial function. And now onto the podcast. Scott, thank you for joining me.

Speaker 2: 4:58

Yeah, good to be here.

Speaker 1: 5:00

So I would encourage everyone to listen to our first podcast if they haven't already, but we'll kind of pick up where we left off. And the main theme that I think we laid out well in that podcast was this idea that modern lighting is incredibly deficient in a bunch of wavelengths, particularly in the infrared that we need as humans to operate our biology optimally. So one thing that you said in that interview that I really like to maybe start this discussion with was when you noticed that the work of Thomas Hamblin and the photo biomodulation field what they were doing with their infrared light use was what we used to have when the world was on incandescent lighting. So maybe talk a little bit about that and if you've had any more thoughts since we last spoke about infrared, particularly, and indoor lighting.

Speaker 2: 6:08

Well, I mean, as you said, one of the first things I did was talk to Dr Hamblin and I you know I have nothing against photo biomodulation. I'm just telling you that you know the levels that they're using are typically levels that you would have in a well-lit incandescent room. It's indifferent in that most of the photo biomodulation people are doing it with LEDs, which then means that they have a narrow band versus an incandescent which is very broadband and runs from anywhere from 650 out to over 2,000, 3,000 nanometers. And that's to me was kind of striking that you know you could get a biological effect using similar energies and narrow band to what you get. What we were exposed to typically when they've been for 100 years with incandescent and also going outside in the sunlight. So I would characterize most of what's going on with the photo biomodulation is to just basically trying to optimize and accelerate wound healing, things of that nature. We all know it does it, but so does sunlight, and I think that's one of the things. That, and so does incandescent. So I think that's one of the things.

Speaker 2: 7:31

But I'm also become more and more aware of the fact that how little we do understand about what wavelengths and how the body is absorbing light and you know, optically it's to me it's absolutely fascinating. You know what the distribute, how light is distributed and spent putting various parts of the body, and how much light influences all our basic processes. You know, I did a graph not too long ago where I basically looked at the different, some of the different ways that people are doing photo biomodulation and you can get photo biomodulation effects at 650, 700, 800, 850, 900, 1200, you know 1064. And there it's doing a number of different things. I think we've kind of underestimated how much, how many different things are being done simultaneously by the body and I guess that's what I would say.

Speaker 2: 8:32

That kind of differentiates what we're trying to do versus a photo biomodulation in that, you know, we're trying to do what the body excite, all the different effects of the sunlight, not just focus on one. Because I think in some ways that's kind of what got us into the mess we're in now, in that we focused on just the visible, ignored the infrared, ignored the shortwave infrared and the UV, and created an artificial cave, modern cave, that is basically dark for 90% of the solar spectrum. So I guess you know I don't like to say I think you know red light therapy. If it works for you, great, but getting outside can also work for you pretty well.

Speaker 1: 9:22

The distinction that you made is an important one because the photo biomodulation field is, I think it's a therapeutic indication and obviously Dr Hamblin is the kind of Pope of red light therapy in and photo biomodulation in therapeutic use.

Speaker 1: 9:38

But what we are talking about, and I think what you're focusing on, Scott, is how do we bring that infrared back to our indoor environment? And it's not necessarily in a therapeutic setting and we want it as a kind of a background, a mission of near infrared in that broad band. And it also speaks to this concept of, you know, isolating specific wavelengths. And we know that isolated blue light is a problem because it has that such a narrow emission and there's narrow band of light emission. So it stands to reason that if we're only taking, you know, 2860 or whatever wavelengths of near infrared, then yeah, we're getting benefit, but we're still not appreciating the fact that the body's absorbing all these massive and different wavelengths in the infrared spectrum. So again, it's this idea of reductionist isolation, kind of refining of light versus what you might get from, obviously, the sun but even just a more broadly admitting incandescent bulb.

Speaker 2: 10:51

Yeah, and and I'm not saying that we should go back to incandescent I, you know, our product is based on a hybrid, where we bring an LED and an incandescent together. It's very small, it's just. At the end of the day, the most efficient emitter of near infrared is a tungsten filament and the most efficient emitter of visible light is an LED, you know, and so you put the two of them together and all of a sudden you get something that's a very these the closest match to spectrum of sunlight or walking in the park that you can get. But you know, it also creates a, gives us the opportunity to have a lot of practical benefits. You know, leds can be extremely efficient as long as you're operating, you know, with a blue and phosphor or you know that type of thing. The minute you start to introduce more other things, you know, in our light, we use the two together in a certain way to get the maximum amount of near infrared while still maintaining ourselves above the DOE energy standards. So that we can. You know, all of us want to save the planet, you know. But you know, rather than trying to get something that's doing 100 lumens or 120 lumens per watt, we're saying, hey, you can do something in the 50 lumens per watt that has. You know, the near infrared that we want and the visible you want, and you get a lot of other benefits.

Speaker 2: 12:20

I think the other thing that from a practical standpoint of what we're doing versus everybody else is is that if I try and generate reasonable number of optical watts you know in nature there's always a balance. You know, when you're walking outside you're getting exposed to one, say, issues as normalized, one optical, one optical lot of visible outside. You're getting three optical watts of this of near infrared, when if you're just using LEDs, that's one optical lot of near visible and zero optical watts of near infrared. So we went and switched everything in a major way and so what we're doing is we're bringing back just enough to be typical of what you would see when you're walking around in a park, where it's essentially three to one.

Speaker 2: 13:10

So if I try and do that with just near infrared LEDs or red LEDs, number one, if I try and do with red LEDs, that's okay. I got one optical watt of visible. I got three optical watts of near infrared that I need. Read near infrared that I need. Okay. If I try and do that in a house. Your house looks red, you know, it's just because there's like the city district at the at the light part of town.

Speaker 2: 13:39

Okay, I say, oh well, I'm going to do it in an infrared. Well, but you're what you got to do. Is you end up with this really high peak power level at very no, because as you narrow the spectrum, the peak, and you say I'm going to maintain the same optical watts, you have to increase the peak. And you know my concern, to be quite honest, is with the photo by a modulation and the explosion and red light therapies and things like that. So if you're an understanding that you're getting extremely high, you know for you to generate enough optical watts to be therapeutic, you're exposing people to very high peak levels in a very no rent. That, in a lot of ways, is no different than what's going on with the blue. It's narrow, so we get these blue spikes and it causes people to wear glasses and have issues and headlights to look really bright and glaring.

Speaker 2: 14:33

So and I know that I've seen some modules out that where they're putting near infrared LEDs in it and they're driving extremely high levels, you can hurt somebody. You know you can watch or watch in some ways. You know, if you get the high peak levels you know, and the problem with the near infrared, as far as I'm concerned with some of these therapies, is you. It's not like the visible, where, if you see the sun, you look at the sun, you glance away. You have a response to glance away. In the near infrared, you don't have that safety feature, you know. That's why, for a lot of years, near infrared lasers are very well regulated, because, before you know it, you can do some damage, and so I think that's my concern.

Speaker 1: 15:21

Yeah, and Cruz has said the same thing in a recent podcast with Tristan Scott which is some of these manufacturers are, you know, emitting certain narrowband near infrared wavelengths that could be damaging and could be harmful, and it's not clear exactly who is doing what or which of these panels you know perhaps is less ideal than others, and I always go back to when I teach in my circadian health course that any form of refining of light is less ideal than the sun, because the sun is the most balanced spectrum. It's what we evolved with and whatever might be causing harm, you're also going to have a complimentary wavelength that is usually dealing with or balancing out that negative effect with other beneficial effects. So it's an interesting, I think that that is.

Speaker 2: 16:19

you know the body is dealing with everything simultaneously.

Speaker 2: 16:23

We like to run experiments where we do one, do one thing and see one of them, but the body is actually trying to maintain glucose level, get oxygen to the right places, deal with a cut, deal with is doing all this simultaneously and to do that it has to do exactly what you're saying.

Speaker 2: 16:42

You can't have that level of control without having antagonistic. You know, this hormone is playing off of that hormone and keeping everything in balance. And what I think is absolutely fascinating is it's very clear, based on our melatonin paper you start when the body starts changing or you have some kind of event. You start doing exercise, you go outside, all of a sudden, these baseline levels are changing on a time scale of minutes and then you quit doing it and it drops back down to the baseline. So you've got all these different effects going on simultaneously and it's not, you know, the body is not today what I'm going to worry about glucose levels, or today I'm going to worry about, you know, whether I got the right amount of oxygen to this thing or this part of the body or whatever. So I mean you know the fact that we need to almost think more along the lines of things are elevating in response and then coming back down. Things are changing globally and locally, so yeah, and I like the analogy.

Speaker 1: 17:51

I keep drawing an analogy of food diet and light diet because I think it's really helpful and I want to make the point that maybe the use of the more narrow band photobiomodulation is most going to be most helpful when people are the sickest, and what I mean by that is if you are having a condition.

Speaker 1: 18:14

So you're not just doing this health optimization but you've got, you know, a heart failure. And I talked to Steven Hosse recently and we discussed how infrared light potentiates the exclusions of water in the body and assists in cardiovascular function and blood flow. And my thought is that when a patient is very sick, the kind of risk benefit ratio of intervention with things like medications and potentially with things like a light are going to be different. And if someone's well, then you know you just put them out in the sun. But if, maybe, if they're sicker than we could, we can more justify using something like, you know, this high wattage isolated LED near infrared. Perhaps that's just me kind of having a thinking out loud, but the point is, nature is always going to do it best and what we're doing now is still, is still reductionist and for those, you know, entering the field of photobiomodulation. You know making money putting LEDs in a panel from China. I think you know that's always going to be lucrative, but it's not necessarily the best thing to do for everyone all the time.

Speaker 2: 19:31

Well, it's very hard, I mean it's very hard to maintain a discipline of okay, I'm going to every day I'm going to do XYZ as far as exposure to a red light panel or you know where I expose myself. Whatever you know, all these things, that are parameters that become very difficult to manage, you know, especially in public. Like I say, my biggest concern is that anytime you start to narrow the spectrum, you're going to have and you have a requirement to generate X amount of energy. You're going to increase the peak levels and there's a threshold with everything. You know I can kill somebody with air and I can kill somebody with water.

Speaker 2: 20:09

Well, you can also do damage with some of these and, like I say, the biggest concern is especially in the near and farad. You know you can get exposed to something. It's like you're looking at a headlight, a clips of a moon out of the sun. You know you can stare at it and not know that you're doing harm because of you know, because of you can't see what's going on. Now, you know that you do that. Companies like Seabro and others have put in various sensors so that they can know when you're getting too much, too long, all that kind of stuff. Our approach is is that we know that we can put in X number of optical watts of incandescent and our thermal emission and we have 150 years saying that that's okay.

Speaker 1: 21:00

Yeah, yeah, can we talk about fire and sauna, which are natural, I guess, sources of heat? We feel them as heat and they're obviously emitting light wavelengths as well as, obviously, fire is. So talk about the spectrum that is being emitted from those sources and how that relates to what we've just talked about.

Speaker 2: 21:26

Well, fire is interesting because it's basically pretty close to a broadband black body emitter At about 1400 to 1800 Kelvin. So it's, you know, it's very rich in the near infrared running out into the fire, fire infrared Very broad. There's a few absorption bands in various parts associated with the process of burning, but but in general it's just a broadband thermal emitter like what we're using. In fact, that's what we always say with our light is is that when you dim it down, we our spectrum shifts towards the lower color temperatures, black body. You know, it's just a nice warm glow. It's kind of like a candle light type spectrum.

Speaker 1: 22:14

What do you mean by black body? Sorry, can you?

Speaker 2: 22:17

clarify that.

Speaker 1: 22:17

Sorry.

Speaker 2: 22:18

Yeah, I mean, if you have in physics, the sun, things like that that are thermal emitters, you can characterize them as a black body and that they emit and absorb at the same rate and you know you can calculate. There's a very clear equations on how you can calculate the spectral distribution associated with a black body as you get like the sunlight is somewhere around 6000 Kelvin. Okay, the temperature of the sun that we are what we associate with it, sorry about that.

Speaker 2: 22:58

But but as you get into candlelight and fire, the temperature drops in the black body emitter changes the spectrum and shifts further and further into the longer wavelengths and then, as I said, like I say, temperature gets is kind of a broad assumption based on the idea that the body is going or whatever temperature the emitter is. You get a certain distribution based on banks constant.

Speaker 1: 23:27

Do you mean color, color temperature or or heat temperature?

Speaker 2: 23:32

Well, what people have to understand is is that when they go to the store to buy any light bulb, they're going to say a correlated color temperature, because the only thing that you can actually claim to be a color temperature is a black body emitter, and which has a very broad spectrum. When we switched over to LEDs, we got rid of all this other stuff and so they came up with the term correlated color temperature. That's 3000, 4000, 5000. Well, what they're trying to do is essentially approximate.

Speaker 2: 24:10

If you were to look at a black body emitter that was at 3000, it has a mission from in the UV all the way out to the far infrared. So what they did is they shrunk it down and they only look at this one little slice that we can see with our eye, which is somewhere between 400 and 700 nanometers, and they said, okay, in that region this looks like a black body emitter, but in reality, you're only getting this little slice of it. It's very easy to trick the eye. It's what causes a lot of the problems, and what I believe causes a lot of problems with circadian as well is that the eye is easily confused, and you know, all I have to do is pick. You know, a little bit more blue, a little bit more red, and you can still make the eye think it's having seeing, looking at the same thing, but it's two entirely different spectrums and having entirely different biological effects.

Speaker 1: 25:04

Yeah, and so that's what I believe is the most important thing that we can do is to make sure that we can see the eye as well. The relevance of the color temperature concept is for me, I think, about the color temperature of LED lighting and the fact that it is mimicking that kind of midday signal, and that is essentially with the most intense white LED. That is essentially what we're getting, and I guess the other point is it's probably it's like a midsummer sun, because obviously the color temperature of the sun is going to be lower in a higher latitude winter, because is that correct that the Kelvin level, the emitted by the sun is going to be.

Speaker 2: 25:55

Well, you know it's, it's. It's just put it this way when you talk about color temperature, um, there are an infinite number of distributions of light that can make that, make you think it's that color temperature. So that's the problem. You know, I can take blue and a broad van yellow and I can make it look like you are getting, you know, sunlight in the afternoon, 3,000 Kelvin or whatever. I can just as easily take blue, green, red, make the same kind of thing, all narrow band to the point of lasers, and I can make it look still look the same for all gray scents. So it's unfortunate that there is so much emphasis on color temperature because it's, you know, it's kind of a poor metric, to be honest.

Speaker 1: 26:45

The key. The key point there is that what we perceive as the same color can be made up of different spectral peaks. Is that what you're? What you're implying? So so what? What? Why that's relevant is that if you've got melanopsin, which is your blue light detector, absorbing at 4, 4, 18 nanometers, and then you've got and Kefalopsin is more of a I believe that's more, it's still blue, but a little bit different and then you've you've got, you know, neuropsin, which is more violet, you could potentially be hitting or activating those receptors and with a light that looks the same compared to light that is completely different in in perception.

Speaker 2: 27:30

Yeah, and, and on top of that, you have to take into account that melanopsin is not just 480, or 74, or 480 nanometers, it's actually fairly broadband in this absorption. And so what you have to actually take into account that, as you're saying, you know, if I have something that has a whole lot of green but has no 480, then if I've got enough green, I can get the same response from melanopsin by having just green if it's high enough output.

Speaker 2: 28:03

So yeah, it's a combination of the spectrum where you're hitting on that melanopsin curve and what is the light distribution that you're hitting it with.

Speaker 2: 28:11

There's Ian, the lady in Ashdown, had a kind of interesting paper where he actually showed that it, even though everybody we very well know the distribution of melanopsin. But if I put that into a green dominant light source or a, you know, depending on the energy distribution of the light source, you can shift the peak response all the way over into the green, you know. So, as you say, if you start having a bunch of narrow bands you can have, even though they all look the same, they can have a much different effect on those options because of where they hit, you know, and how much, what intensity level. So you always have to use both the optical characteristics of the melanopsin, absorption characteristics or action spectrum or whatever you want to call it. And along with what is it I'm actually exposing the person to. I can go and take a green laser and I can miss the peak altogether, but I can still generate an awful lot of response from the melanopsin if I have enough power in that green laser.

Speaker 1: 29:23

Yeah, it's kind of complicated, Very complicated, and it gets to. I mean this idea that when we're exposed to artificial light at night, you can have a biological significant effect of red light just because you're not emitting anything in the blue wavelength to directly activate those melanopsin receptors. Your body is still having mechanisms to detect the intensity and you're still going to potentially raise your cortisol level and interfere with sleep quality if you're getting light, perhaps in the red after dark. So it's just another example or illustrative of the fact that anytime we start playing with what the body was supposed to have, there's unintended and undesirable consequences.

Speaker 2: 30:15

Yeah, I mean, you know, and it really boils down. It's like, like I say, growing pot. You know they've got it down to a science now where they're using very specific things and what they do. They had one parameter that they cared about. They wanted to get the THC levels up, okay, and so they're playing all kinds of games to get the maximum of that one parameter, what you know. What effect does that have on?

Speaker 1: 30:42

other parameters.

Speaker 2: 30:43

You know, and when you get into the human body, you've got thousands of different biological processes that are being under the assumption that we are exposed to sunlight.

Speaker 2: 30:54

When you start eliminating components, certain parts of that, then you're changing the effect.

Speaker 2: 31:01

I mean, one of the things I find absolutely amazing is that you know we showed that once you get out into the 2000 nanometer, the shortwave near infrared, that you actually get the highest level of photon density in the skin and it appears to be generating a lot of hydrogen peroxide.

Speaker 2: 31:20

Why is that important? Well, when you go and you look at how we make vitamin D, the outer 50 microns of the skin are absorbing 285 nanometers and they, in order to get that to work more efficiently, it appears that the body is generating hydrogen peroxide to photobleach, chemically bleach the melanin in the outer 50 microns. So it's more efficient at cracking cholesterol to generate vitamin D and closed cortisol and all the cholesterol-derived hormones. So I mean it's such an extreme example of how something that's way over here that everybody says, oh, it doesn't do anything. But if it makes it more, it's more efficient at generating vitamin D when we're out in the sun because we've taken the melanin levels down and it's like a 5x difference optically between a oxidized melanin and a non-oxidized melanin. So you get this amazing effect that we have this little microreactor that nobody knew anything about, that was sitting there. That's sitting there. That's actually increasing our ability to are making us more efficient at generating vitamin D.

Speaker 2: 32:38

So and there's a worldwide shortage of vitamin D out there right now.

Speaker 1: 32:43

Yeah, isn't there. And it makes me think of the efficiency of vitamin D lamps that don't emit in the infrared. I mean, if you're only emitting isolated UV light and maybe you're not able to generate anywhere as near as much UV compared to, say, a lamp that included that 2000 nanometer. But also, what are the damages being done? And I have I talked to Richard Weller, the dermatologist, and we're talking about the carcinogen of ultraviolet light and I made the point that and others have made. The point is that the literature, or so much of the basic science literature, on the harm of ultraviolet is narrowband. It's getting a xenon arc lamp and emitting narrowband UV and then seeing the tumors arise in nocturnal mammals. So the point is there's limitations in the conclusions we can draw if we're about the sun, if we're simply just using, say, narrowband UV, compared to how it would have happened or how we would have got it in nature.

Speaker 2: 33:57

Well, I mean, melanin is extremely difficult to oxidize with just light. But if you add in hydrogen peroxide which we know from work by Hudson and others that is generated in elevated levels in the outer skin cells, you, once you throw hydrogen peroxide in with light, then you're able to photobleach melanin. And that's what Yakomov showed with his Raman's microcircassi that literally the skin is oxidizing the melanin and that creates the ability for the 285 to be more efficient at cracking cholesterol, which is necessary for us to generate the vitamin D. And you know what's amazing is that you know it takes about 20 days for us to slough off our outer skin layers. You know it's a process that goes through. What this shows is that if you go out and you get sunlight, essentially you've created, you've kind of bleached out that area for a while and that gives you this a long period of time where you're a little bit more efficient at generating the components we need to make vitamin D and other hormones. It's the sex hormones, it's all the cholesterol derived hormones are being generated essentially at that outer 50 microns of the skin.

Speaker 2: 35:33

Now, when we start changing it, playing games with what we're exposing ourselves to, then we are altering something that the body assumes it gets every day. So you know, and you know I think that's really the fundamental issue we, in our arrogance, we thought we could just throw away something that the body has been using for millions of years and has adapted to, and not have a consequence. And you know, I can, like I say, I think that people don't underestimate how much the body is dealing with and how many different effects that it's trying to simultaneously control or repair. And when you get it out of Kelter, then it loses some of its ability to do what it's designed to do.

Speaker 1: 36:29

Yes, and we mentioned Melanopsin earlier.

Speaker 1: 36:31

I think what bears clarification is that hormone production is just one of the functions that you've talked about, but circadian entrainment is also critical and the fact that those, these options, that the photosensitive proteins are absorbing different light wavelengths and using that to help program the body circadian rhythm, through the skin, through the eyes, and that just goes to show that there's, as you said, there's so many different things going on at the same time and it's all been perfectly orchestrated and evolved under the assumption that we're getting solar radiation.

Speaker 1: 37:18

And when we start making that removing that solar radiation, chopping up the spectrum into what I call a nutrient-efficient or junk light diet, and then adding things like non-native EMF emission then, and sunscreens and changing the composition of the bilayer of the keratinocytes with things like seed oils and highly oxidizable polyunsaturated fatty acids like limelay acid, then you just start to see why things like skin malignancy, like skin cancer, arises, and it, to me, doesn't have anything to do or has little to do with the unchanging characteristics of the solar spectrum and everything to do with how we're living in the modern age.

Speaker 2: 38:11

Yeah, no, I you know what you know. We published a paper, got peer reviewed in biology and in melatonin research and it basically what we showed was is that, you know, melatonin is generated primarily in the mitochondria and when we do something we can actually see it coming out into this bloodstream. And all that At 9am in the morning you can generate more melatonin than you do at the pinealdehyde gland does at night. Now it only happens during, when you are stressing the mitochondria, where you're doing exercise, you're out in sunlight, you're doing cold water immersion all these things cause this change in melatonin. And I guess my point is is that none of that is covered?

Speaker 2: 39:09

You know the circadian guys have to deal with the fact that there is a transient amount of melatonin. The majority of the melatonin generated in the body is not generated by the pineal gland. It's time to change the literature. You know it's not. It's not that it doesn't do something, it's not that there isn't a circadian effect, it's, but it's not the only place that melatonin is being generated. And it's in your gut, it's in your, your muscle cells, it's in all this other stuff, but it's typically used throughout the day and consumed because melatonin breaks down into a series of cascades of antioxidants and eventually you get. You know it goes back to nothing.

Speaker 2: 39:52

And you know the problem is is that we continue to have these papers publishing that pineal gland is the primary place for melatonin production. It is not. It is one of the places for melatonin production, and so I think that you know we get off on these. You know everybody is always focused on the circadian, but they're ignoring the fact that the body has to survive throughout the day, and melatonin is one of the primary ways it does that, and it's generated in huge quantities. So I think it's time for us to accept that as you say it's. You know it's not just one thing. There's multiple things going on and they have to be taken into account.

Speaker 1: 40:36

You know when you're talking about somebody's health, the implication of what you've said is key in helping raise awareness of the role of infrared light in health, Because if we remain within the circadian only paradigm and that implies that the only relevant light exposure for our melatonin physiology is the absence of blue wave legs after dark, then we're missing so much of the picture of what you've just described and what you've written about in your amazing papers that the melatonin has been produced on exposure to infrared light.

Speaker 1: 41:14

So I'm very eager and happy to promote that, the message of these separate melatonin pools and the fact that we're generating so much during the day, not just in the pineal gland, because it implies so much more about the need to reintroduce infrared into people's lives, either helping them get outside, reminding them they need to get outside, having windows open, or starting to put near infrared lighting into our indoor environments. And, yeah, so I agree with you and in your paper and I'll direct listeners to your papers because in your paper Melatonin, the Messenger of Darkness or what's the title again it's something more than the Messenger of Darkness You've got a great graphic which shows the four different pools of melatonin, so maybe give us a quick overview of those extra pools, just for people.

Speaker 2: 42:16

Well, I mean, what we showed definitively was that based on Theron and based on Zoo, is that when we start doing exercise or do we start doing a stressor the exercise being out in sunlight, being cold water, immersion, any of those things the body is generating an excess. And as measured, theron did this great experiment. He took these people, put them on a treadmill at 9 am in the morning for four hours and he monitored continuously during that period their melatonin levels. This is at 9 am in the morning and they're doing this exercise. All of a sudden, you see that the melatonin levels go up to 200 picograms per milliliter, exceeding that of what most people have out of the pineal gland in the blood plasma.

Speaker 2: 43:08

So where's all this melatonin coming from? Well, it's coming from a variety of different sources, but it's mainly coming from the mitochondria generating a lot of reactive auction species and in response, the cells generate melatonin. That's why we see this huge spike in melatonin during. Now. There's only four papers that I know of in the entire literature that actually measure melatonin during a live event. It's always measured with you laying down quiet, dark, all these things. But if you actually measure it during exercise, if you measure it during light exposure. If you measure it while you're doing a cold water immersion, you'll see that there's this huge change in melatonin. It's got to be coming from somewhere. It's not coming from a pineal gland, because it's 9 o'clock in the morning, so where's it coming from?

Speaker 2: 44:06

It can be coming out of the gut, it can be coming out of the mitochondria and the muscles, it can be coming off the skin cells, there's all kinds of things. But what it really shows is that the body is generating huge amounts of melatonin in response to various things we call life that have nothing to do with their circadian. What's even more interesting is Gao took this work and he showed that cortisol in circadian theory, cortisol should be high when melatonin is low and melatonin should be high when cortisol is low. That's what it's supposed to be. But what Gao showed is that do the same exercise or similar exercise, all of a sudden the cortisol goes up, independent of what time of day it is. So now we've got melatonin and cortisol going up together simultaneously.

Speaker 2: 45:02

That doesn't make any sense from the circadian standpoint. Again, it's not saying circadian's wrong. Circadian's definitely there. I'm not arguing that. But you've got to take into account that we are living a life and we are wandering around, doing stuff, we're exercising, we're getting out in the sun. Every time you do that, all those hormone levels are changing. But we never measure it during that time because it's really hard. And that's what I think is so exciting about the biosensor world. We now can measure through via sweat, cortisol levels during exercise. You can see how it's changing. We can eventually be able to do the same with melatonin and other type of things. But in these few papers they actually measured what was going on when we were doing something, and that's what I think the circadian people have to take a step back and say, yes, there's this going on. But if you go out and you exercise, you're changing those whole dynamics around and I think it comes down to almost like a common sense thing People who spend a day out and putting up hey. I keep on saying it from my youth putting up hey outside all day. I slept pretty doggone well, when I went in and it's a huge change in the hormone levels that changes the entire baseline and most, if not all, the circadian research is doing it in essentially a bedridden state. That's the only place it really is totally valid, because the minute, like I say, the minute, you do something, even eating changes cortisol levels and then that's what I think it comes back to your original thing about having some kind of balance when we cortisol.

Speaker 2: 47:01

What we have right now for circadian, in my opinion, is everybody's trying to pump everybody up in the blue during the morning to get their cortisol levels up and running, which is good, not arguing with it. And then that cortisol. It takes about two hours for cortisol to actually start to drop off to about 50% of what it was when you excited it or pushed it. And but there's no counter. The melody you keep on.

Speaker 2: 47:31

We keep on getting blue light through headlights and street lights and cell phones and TVs. We're constantly pushing the cortisol button, and cortisol is mainly driven by melanopsin. It's what everybody knows. But if you don't have the melatonin to counter it throughout the day, nothing to drive it down Everybody ends up with a, you know, a lot of cortisol hanging around, and I would argue that in a lot of ways, some of the deficiencies that we're seeing in cortisol is because they're literally we've kind of, you know, drained the drain the ability to buy usability or harm the buys ability to generate the right hormone combinations together, and so you end up with adrenal ground, adrenal fatigue and things of that nature.

Speaker 2: 48:22

So you know, it's just as you say. It's just kind of like you need to get both the getting used to the idea that things are happening. There's pairs that are in triplets and things like that. They're working together to keep us in some kind of reasonable homostasis.

Speaker 1: 48:42

Yeah, the point is well taken about the circadian kind of framework which most people looking at this through, and I think it's convenient and intellectually comfortable to just presume that melatonin is created in the pineal gland and it is occurring in, you know, opposition with cortisol, that they occur in kind of opposite synchronicities, and you know it's all very boxcar and convenient.

Speaker 1: 49:12

But what you've described in terms of the real world dynamics, when we measure in real time in response to various real life physiological stresses, I mean it's just a new reality that I think researchers need to come to terms with. And it's an exciting reality too because it implies so much more about what's going on and therefore helping us and me as a clinician and you as an engineer, to kind of design, to do our jobs, to kind of optimize our people and optimize our patients. The blue light in the cortisol story, I mean I think that is one that people need to understand because it to me it underlies what I'm interested in metabolic diseases is. You know, cortisol is fundamentally promoting. It promotes gluconeogenesis, it promotes glycemic. It will contribute to hyperglycemia if it's, if it's there hanging around long enough. So to me that's just one of very simple way that we can see how our line environment is contributing to diabetes and metabolic disease, just irrespective of what we're eating, and did you have any particular thoughts or comments on that effect on blood glucose from the blue light?

Speaker 2: 50:33

Well, glenn Jeffery has done some really great experiments here lately where he's shown that you can take some red light and you can drive down the glucose level and that it actually increases the CO2 levels, which makes it clearly a mitochondrial function issue. And it's. It was amazing that, you know, he only irradiated about 8% of the body, or small, small area of the body, with red light and he was able to measure in the blood what the mark change a drop in the glucose level and the mark increase in the CO2 levels after a very short exposure period. And so you know there's there's obviously things going on there. But you know, like I say, it's just, my point is is that it's not just glucose, it's not just, you know, oxygen is not just. It's all those things going on simultaneously that really end up mattering a bunch. Yeah.

Speaker 1: 51:34

I just want to make a quick note of a couple of functions that melatonin having on mitochondrial function and I'm going to be really briefly read them out, because that this is in your paper that you wrote read. And the reason is I think it really hones in the point about why near infrared light is is important and the whole how important melatonin physiology is to human health. So you've got here. Melatonin promotes the activity of pyruvate dehydrogenase to enhance mitochondrial uptake of pyruvate, so increasing production of acetyl CoA. So that is therefore switching the so called Warburg effect to mitochondrial oxidative metabolism. So that's, that's number one.

Speaker 1: 52:19

Number two it increases the activities of mitochondrial complexes one and three to accelerate electron transport chain and reduce electron leakage. Three, melatonin up regulates the expression and activity of mitochondrial uncoupling proteins one, two and three to balance the potential overshoot of mitochondrial membrane potential and lower free radical generation. And four, it supports the transfer of functionally active mitochondria from healthy to injured cells, thereby rescuing the energy metabolism of the recipient cells. It five it regulates mitochondrial dynamics, promoting mitochondrial biogenesis in both stem cells and post mitotic cells. So it increases my mitochondrial fusion, inhibits fission and enhances mitophagy. And six, inhibits melatonin inhibits the mitochondrial permeability transition, transition pour opening to preserve the mitochondrial membrane potential and maintain functionally intact mitochondria.

Speaker 1: 53:16

So that that is just an overview of how critical melatonin is to mitochondrial physiology and I've been saying recently that you know it's the protector of the mitochondrial DNA and it's the guardian of the mitochondrial DNA which is a framing that Jack Kruse has used. So when we understand the mitochondrial bio energetic etiology of disease again, which is Dr Doug Wallace's work, and how, in preventing mitochondrial hetero plasmid, with this accelerated mitochondrial aging from damage to mitochondria, is so important to health, then we're really fitting in how important near infrared light, sunlight, is to this whole health, health, longevity story. And I think that I really want to emphasize in this why I've got you on, scott, because even within the lifestyle medicine or metabolic medicine, everyone's focusing on fasting and ketogenic diets, which is, I think, a key part of the puzzle, but without talking about light, I feel like you know you're missing the elephant in the room.

Speaker 2: 54:21

Yeah, well, you know there's a really great video I put out that you may have seen it where from Nanolib, where they're actually exposing living cells and watching them in time lapse photography, you know, for an hour or so, and they do it at different wavelengths and I think that one of the most striking one was at 474, you know melanopsin type peak. They were able to show how the exposure over time caused the mitochondria to reduce its motion and eventually stop moving at all, before the cell actually died. And then they did the same thing with that 635 nanometers, and it for 10 times the amount of energy, and they had basically no negative effect that they could see.

Speaker 2: 55:16

So I mean the idea that sunlight isn't involved in basic cellular function, I think is kind of like, you know not it's affecting the mitochondria directly and that's what I think is so important for people to realize is that and that the shorter wavelengths, the blues, the sirens and all that have much more of a negative effect than the reds and the near infrared. And the ability of that near infrared to enhance the efficiency of the mitochondria, I think is one of the things that people need to really respect More and understand that. You know we have to see blue, we have to see green, you know we need to be able to tell that that snake is a good snake or a bad snake. You know there's, it's from an evolutionary standpoint. So we needed the visible. It's the window that we get everything you know, get the information in, and but it inherently has enough energy that it can break a molecular bond on a random basis. So therefore it create, can create random loss. So if you don't, if you don't have the near infrared component, I believe that you're essentially putting the body at a higher stress level and more likely to cause damage for those on a cellular basis. Then if you don't, or if you do have it, so you know, that's kind of where it is, yeah, and I, you know, I think that people also need just to really recap a little bit on the circadian thing. You know what we're generating in most circadian systems now. They're really the. The emphasis is on generating a lot of blue early on in the day. But we have so much blue, blue light around, with artificial light at night and all this other stuff, that we never give the body the opportunity to for that cortisol level.

Speaker 2: 57:25

There was a really great paper by Mello where he took cocaine addicts and he had them, had them take a shot, a hit, a cocaine, and then he monitored in their blood the various different hormones, in particular cortisol, and while the hit, the euphoria died off in less than 30 minutes, it was over five hours before the cortisol levels dropped back down. So, understanding the time response and that you know, lrc, figuero or Figuero or whatever, it showed that you know core exposing someone to 800 lux of blue caused the cortisol levels to increase by 37%, you know, in the course of an hour. So you know, I think we need to not forget that there's a time constant in all this stuff. You do something, it takes hours for that to go away and that's what I think was so fascinating of the work with our.

Speaker 2: 58:33

What Theron stuff showed is that cortisol during exercise, cortisol, melatonin, both go up together and they both come down and in fact, cortisol is actually appears to come down quicker than melatonin does when you're doing that exercise. So there's so many ups, so many time constants that are going on, so you need to take that into account and what you're doing and it's in the orders of 10 to 20 minutes. It's not ours. In some cases it's quick yeah.

Speaker 1: 59:05

Maybe we could talk about this specific effects of blue light on mitochondria a bit more, because I know Robert Fosbury has also a co-author on several papers and they looked at the absorption of mitochondria, of blue light, by mitochondria and I believe he in one paper that he did. They were saying that it was absorbing maximally in around 420, which is in the blue wavelength, and it was being absorbed by porphyrin compounds specifically in the mitochondria. And are you aware of exactly those findings?

Speaker 2: 59:48

Yeah, I mean, Bob's done some amazing stuff as far as the absorption characteristics. Again, I say that my point is that you know, anything you do with the shorter wavelengths are can be much more deter, you know, much more damaging to the cell than the longer wavelengths are doing. And again, the experiments are always done without on. Okay, we're going to radiate something at a particular wavelength, not where irradiated in the context of being exposed to this broadband source, Full spectrum. All these things, all these things we do for experiments, are not what we get when we're outside.

Speaker 2: 1:00:33

There is no such thing as a narrow band emitter in nature. You know, they may look blue, they may look red, they may look green, but they're not narrow band, they're broadband. You know, if you look at the spectrum of the blue sky it's one of the things that always gets me about. You know, people talk about how bad blue is. Well, in the context of a narrow band emitter, I would agree with you. In the context of a, I walk outside and I look up at a beautiful blue sky, it looks great. Well, if you actually do the spectrum, you'll find that it's a broadband blue that has kind of kind of like slowly goes down, and then when you get into the near infrared, is a huge spike in the amount of near infrared. So blue in nature is not the same as blue in an LED light source.

Speaker 1: 1:01:23

It just isn't. It's not the same. That's a very critical point. It's to conflate the two is really not seeing this, this the critical aspect of everything we're talking about.

Speaker 1: 1:01:36

I think when you describe the dynamics of existing in this blue enriched artificial indoor light environment, I can't help but think of everyone who's going into a gym and working out. You know that maybe they're wearing their, you know their muscle singlet and so they've got, they've got all the skin exposed. They are under under the squat rack doing all kinds of heavy squats there. Maybe they're on the treadmill and working out and they're under compact fluorescent lamps or LEDs, and they are. You know, they're recently and not ongoing.

Speaker 1: 1:02:14

There are stories of what seeming look like fit people, athletes, who have hypertrophied muscles, you know, dying of cardiac arrest and obviously there's lots of factors at play here. But I can't help but think that after a decade of working out under artificial light, with no infrared, to make that melatonin for them as they are working out, exerting themselves to to dampen down the oxidative stress in the mitochondria, that that to me seems like a cumulative effect that is probably had a role in in things like potentially in things like sudden cardiac death and those those people. I don't know if you've if you've ever thought about that, Scott, but it seems to fit with what you've talked about in terms of the the demand production of my melatonin Well.

Speaker 2: 1:03:12

I guess I don't like to go too extreme from a standpoint of the body is a reasonably adaptable to a lot of different situations. But I do believe that there is enough data out there to prove that you can have an optimum set of conditions and you can have a non optimum set of conditions and that over chronic exposure to that over time has a huge effect on our overall health. You know it, just, it just does. And you know the idea that we could throw away all this energy content. I mean, the sun represented the single largest energy input into the body for millions of years and it was a regular thing. It happened all the time. We developed a response to it so that we could go from sunlight at you know, nine hours of magnitude change in intensity to one constant At all levels whether you're talking about being in direct sunlight or being out in the park or even at nighttime or hanging around a fire is that we are never exposed at nature to visible light, only without an excessive amount of deer infrared. Yeah, that is the baseline, and if you aren't running your experiments using that as the baseline, then you're created an artificial environment that you know may do something, may not do something, but you're not doing. What has happened to nature? And I keep on saying you know, one of the things about that is so fascinating is that when you're walking upright through the forest, the majority of the energy that your body is absorbing is not coming from the sun directly. It's coming from all the leaves, all the trees, all the stuff around, even the dirt, as a higher reflectivity in the near infrared than it does in the visible. So you're walking around in this integrating sphere and if you look at it optically, the way the body set up in the near infrared, even through clothing, you're getting this absorption and it's the body's. Think about it from the standpoint of. You have all these red light panels. They're exposing one surface to one surface. When we're outside, we are surrounded by an emitter, all this stuff reflecting off the light, off the trees and off the grass and all this other stuff. We're surrounded by that. All that light's coming into the body and being funneled or essentially distributed down into the body. So it's an extremely effective way to transfer energy into the body.

Speaker 2: 1:05:58

I just think that we need to start thinking about in the near infrared as the body as a solar collector, a near infrared collector, because what happens is that we have this ability for the near infrared to penetrate deep in the body and, as Fosbury still likes to call it, we have this translucent matrix with a bunch of weak absorbers.

Speaker 2: 1:06:24

So literally the near infrared photons are bouncing around inside our body and until they find their way to the mitochondria or the lipids and that's why I love about the Nano live videos is that people can start thinking about a cell. There's a lot of water with not much in it, and so it's pretty easy. Once you start looking at it from an optical standpoint, there's a lot of light. If there's not much absorbers, then the light penetrates very deep in the body, and that's why Bob's got these great pictures of his hand at 850 nanometers, where the whole hand lights up and the vessels are sitting there on the surface that you can see are absorbing. So we've got this kind of like a collection method where we're really collecting the near infrared and distributing it deep into the body so that all these little weak absorbers can get some energy out of the whole thing. And, like I say, when you start looking at the Nano live videos, you can start seeing how you know where the light gets absorbed is very specific and very amazing when you think about it.

Speaker 1: 1:07:44

Do you think the optics or the whole system changes if we had hair? I mean, is the fact that we are hairless as mammals is that even more facilitating of near infrared harvesting than if we were our primate ancestors?

Speaker 2: 1:08:04

Yeah, I mean, you know, I think there's a benefit associated with it. Hair has changes. It acts like a filter in some ways and reflects more off, absorbs some places, you know, depending on what wavelength range you're at. I mean, when you get out into the longer wavelengths where it's all about water and so we all have black skin and white hair, you know. So you know, people have to start thinking about how things change when you start looking, moving beyond what we see with our eyes and start looking at what's going on in the. You know, we kind of have this kind of like translucent look to us in the near infrared. You know, you can kind of see a little bit deeper into the body. You can see some of the veins, you know. In fact, some equipment manufacturers provide near infrared imaging of the hand so they can find veins to put needles in, you know. So there's that going on as well.

Speaker 2: 1:09:07

But, like I said, I'm getting more and more fascinated with what's going on at the even longer wavelengths because, at the end of the day, it's the photon density distribution within the body that actually determines what happens. So many experiments, particularly in the photo biomodulation, they talk about milliwatts per square centimeter, but that's not what's really going on. Light goes into the body and so now what you're more interested in is what's the photon density and the cells throughout the cells in the body, and you know. Then you're talking about a volume rather than an area, and I think that's what's been missed by. I mean, that's what I find exciting about the optics of the body is is that you know it is in some wavelengths it is very concentrated in a very narrow, thin layer at the skin, like in the 2000 nanometers or at the UV. In other areas it goes deep in the sin.

Speaker 2: 1:10:09

So that you know we have trillions of mitochondria. At some wavelengths you literally get most of the, especially in children. You get most of the mitochondria are seeing some level of radiation when we walk outside. You know good radiation, you know near infrared stuff and as you move through the body you know, think about this way. You know it's the spectrum is changing as you go deeper and deeper in the body, because what happens is the blue part is getting absorbed quickly. Okay, that narrows the spectrum down a little bit. Then you go a little deeper and some of the red starts to get taken out and by the time you get down to some of the cells deeper in the body, all they see is near infrared, or at least they used to, until we got rid of it all. And I just for life me cannot believe that the body wasn't smart enough to take advantage of that situation.

Speaker 1: 1:11:03

Yeah, I think of the more I learn and the more it makes sense that the evolution of our upright science and hairlessness is all kind of nature's way of allowing us to harvest as much light energy as possible, to yeah, to power our brain, to power the things that made us a human.

Speaker 1: 1:11:27

And when you incorporate the work of Professor Michael Crawford and his research on DHA and the basically the properties of DHA, which allows it to help us harvest photons to use in essentially power DC electric current in our body, and the fact that eating shellfish, particularly during gestation, was probably what made another contributor nutritionally to growing this massive brain, you really cannot start understanding how evolution has given us a body that is about light and harvesting light, using light and optimizing every function to make the most of the amazing amount of energy that's being emitted and received in the form of light.

Speaker 1: 1:12:21

I'm also reminded of a video. Dr Roger Schwell posted it, who's you've had a lot to do with I've been corresponding with him on Twitter a lot and he posted a video by Neil Degrassi Tyson and in this typical kind of arrogant scientist-scientism tone, was basically saying we cut out all the near infrared because we didn't need it. You know, just almost like arrogantly proclaiming it, and he obviously has no idea about all of your work and all of the work of everyone who's researching near infrared light. So yeah, it was. It was amusing but also very frustrating.

Speaker 2: 1:13:06

Yeah, unfortunately he has like seven million views and that type of thing, but you know it's kind of interesting that you know he should have.

Speaker 2: 1:13:16

Anybody should be able to understand the effect of near infrared. You know that's why I enjoy so much working with Bob Fosbury. You know an astrophysicist understands that there's more to the spectrum than what we see with our light and Bob's got some new work he's working on. That is just absolutely fascinating, whereas showing the effect of being able to show how, when you get into some situation like we have in the skin or even in a thunder cloud, it shows that there's this as the light scatters around throughout the thunder cloud or in our skin, it actually gets to the point, makes it more efficient at transferring the energy into these weak absorbers and you get a much deeper, higher amount of absorption in those those elements than you would if you didn't have the scatter so optically. It's just absolutely fascinating to me what's going on and an astrophysicist should actually are an astronomer like Tyson. You know a little bit better than what he's talking about before he starts saying what you're saying.

Speaker 1: 1:14:24

Yeah, the one in my mind for scientists and clinicians, doctors, and the one crime that is unforgivable to sound a little bit dramatic is arrogance and epistemic arrogance and the presumption that you know. You know exactly what's going on. I think as long as, whatever angle we're taking in science and knowledge and medicine, if we assume that we're only knowing an absolute fraction of what there is to know, then we're not going to make arrogant and stupid eventually. But what's quite obviously stupid? Claims like near infrared doesn't have any biological effect.

Speaker 2: 1:15:07

So Nassim is one of the things that I think is an excellent example. And one of my concerns is that we're especially with circadian is that one of the side effects of high levels of cortisol is the suppression of the immune system. And you know, while I understand, everybody wants to get a good night's sleep and they're trying to do all that kind of stuff. By pumping everybody up with a bunch of cortisol early in the morning, you are suppressing the immune response and it's that's separate from all the other stuff that's going on.

Speaker 1: 1:15:43

Do you mean with isolated blue light? Do you mean that? Yeah, yeah, yeah If you elevate the court.

Speaker 2: 1:15:49

One of the responses cortisol, as you said does all this stuff with how we generate, how we make energy or all that. It's good stuff. It's not that cortisol is bad, but in part of that response is that it suppresses the immune system. That's why, when you get around to you catch a fever or you catch a cold or whatever, and in the afternoon, when cortisol levels are dropping, you start to get a fever because the body's immune response is going up and therefore you get, you start feeling the effect, but you don't feel it in the morning because cortisol is suppressing that innate immune response. So I mean, while sleep is an important part of the whole equation for circadian, you also need to understand that there's a side penalty that's going on that may make some people more susceptible to disease.

Speaker 1: 1:16:45

Yeah, and, to be fair, I mean the circadian advocates that I kind of talk to, only with the ones that I have corresponded with, encouraging that blue should be in the form of natural sunlight. But, yeah, any form of isolated blue light in the morning, I think, is again missing the point of what we've just talked about, which is narrow band, isolated form of any light is not ideal and we need to get it in the context of natural sunlight. I wanted to ask you, scott, because it's been on my mind for a while, which is can you talk about the change in the spectrum of natural infrared during the day and during the season? To what degree is that constant and to what degree is that fluctuating?

Speaker 2: 1:17:41

Well, it's really more. It depends on what you're, where you're measuring. You know, as I said, you know the people always go and they grab the astronomical standard for ASTM 1.5, the direct sunlight you know, and then they try and say, ok, there's this much near infrared, there's this much visible, and that's just what it is. The day changes, there's maybe a shift towards more, a little bit more near infrared. But you know, the reality is is our surroundings have the biggest effect on what the spectrum is that we eventually get in our body. So you know, if you're sitting out there and looking, trying to measure, or if you just use the assumption that it's just direct sunlight, then you'll get one set of answers. The minute you start to put any trees or plants or anything else in the equation and you look at how that's actually, what percentage of that is actually getting into the body, you see this huge shift into the near-infrared and that is actually what the body sees, not some ASTM 1.5 state. So you know, and as the day goes on, you have a much higher level of near-infrared.

Speaker 2: 1:19:03

There's this really cool thing that Bob did where he was looking at okay, well, if I've got all this reflected light coming off in the near-infrared. Can I actually see it up in the atmosphere? And the answer is yes. So as the sun comes across and starts reflecting off all the plants and the ground and all that other stuff mainly with near-infrared if you actually measure, what happens is that then bounces up into the atmosphere and some percentage of that gets reflected back down. So as the sun's moving across, it's essentially throwing some near-infrared up and getting backscattered to us and you literally can see the change in spectrum. Is what Bob's shown and it's really quite, you know, from an optic standpoint it's kind of fun that we're actually kind of getting a little bit more near-infrared in the morning and then, as a, and getting a little bit more, you know, higher percentage of it in the evening as the sun is moving across. So but a lot of that is being associated with the reflectance characteristics of our surroundings Interesting.

Speaker 2: 1:20:07

And it's not just plants, it's dirt. But there is this, you know, and Bob brought this up way back when there's this synergistic or symbiotic relationship, it's like the plants said okay, we're going to take everything from this amount of the spectrum and you guys can have the rest and we're going to reflect it. You know, and unfortunately that's you know, the part we got rid of. But it is amazing how the plants use this part for photosynthesis. We now seem to be using the part it's rejecting, you know, and using it for health and that type of thing.

Speaker 1: 1:20:46

Yeah, very interesting, because I mean, when I communicate the benefits of early morning and late evening sun, it's proportionally the amount of infrared and red is enriched compared to blue and compared to the middle of the day. So that that is. That's interesting. But what you also said is that it also matters what our environment is, and I can imagine that if you, sitting in a garden I mean a garden is essentially a bowl of, you know, a bowl of water. It's essentially a bowl of almost like was it, the was it was at the Truman show when the guy lived in there in the big indoor thing in close yeah yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 1:21:27

Well, you're like, you're, you're, you're garden. If you're sitting in your garden with all those trance plants and trees, you're like getting a massive reflection of all new near infrared photons, which was which can imagine is incredibly healthy. So well, yeah.

Speaker 2: 1:21:44

I keep on saying you know the we have these blue zones where people live to be older older than other places, and if you look at it, they actually it's from 10 degrees north latitude to 37 degrees north latitude is where they land. But one of the things that most interesting to me is that they're in a temperate climate with a lot of vegetation. They spend a lot of an ordnance amount of time outdoors. They tend to eat. I mean, they always have all these different reasons why people are living to be longer in those areas, but they never include sunlight in that conversation. And you know, it's kind of like these people that do these biophilic walls inside buildings where they have all the plants sitting up there and always in that great, I'm getting all that effect. You're getting a benefit. I'm not arguing that. But the fact that next to it is a glass that is blocking all the near infrared from coming in to reflecting off of those plants is essentially you threw away half the benefit of having the plants in the room in the first place.

Speaker 2: 1:22:46

Yeah you know, because in nature, when you're outside 90% of the, you know, the reflectance of some plant leaves and plants is up in 80 to 90%. In fact it's really optically. It's pretty amazing that a thin leaf can reflect as high as it does in the near infrared. You know, it actually is kind of hard to do. Well, we couldn't do it that well. Yeah, so you know, it's just you know, and the fact that there is such a sharp red edge associated with the optical properties of plants versus animals is something I think people need to take into account. Interesting.

Speaker 1: 1:23:24

The perception of midday sun and the heat that we get from the midday sun compared to the morning, the evening. Is that a function of far infrared, a lot of far infrared, or is that just simply the magnitude, like what, is responsible for that intensity of heat sensation?

Speaker 2: 1:23:44

Well, if you look at just from a watch standpoint per area, you know, if you're just laying out on the beach in direct sunlight and you're just measuring what's going on, you're just measuring what's coming from the sun or onto your skin. They're equal amounts of near infrared and equal amounts of visible, and so the watts are heat you know watts and heat. It gets really frustrating because it's a, you know everybody associates infrared with heat. Well, I can just heat up something just as well with visible as I can, you know, can with the near infrared, and just you know that's what people can feel the effect. But if you have an equal amount of watts of visible and equal amount of watts of near infrared, other than the small change in reflectance characteristics, you're basically going to have the same amount of energy dumping to the body.

Speaker 2: 1:24:36

Yeah, that makes sense and that was something we talked about, and one of the differences is that in the visible it's all localized in the outer skin, and whereas in the near infrared it can penetrate much deeper, and so it's kind of like a, as I get, surface area versus volume effect.

Speaker 1: 1:24:54

Yeah, and that's something we discussed in our previous podcast, so I'd encourage people to go back and listen to that. And, with respect to this, the idea of wearing sunscreens and how you know if you, if you're only blocking, you know UV and but you're still getting all this visibility Short wave, like high energy, blue light and the dermatology profession is known that that contributes to photo aging and oxidative stress in the skin. So you know, to butcher and filter the natural light spectrum that your body's receiving through sunscreens. I mean, it's again, it's another recipe of how we're kind of messing up the whole light story in our body.

Speaker 2: 1:25:37

Well, you know and I, it is amazing how, the minute you start playing games with what the spectrum is, you know, and the ratios and that's what I keep on coming back to you have, we go through nine orders of magnitude change and intensity, going from direct sunlight down to moonlight, and that's a huge range of intensity. But throughout, every, every way, throughout that entire area, the ratio is always the same. You know, in nature. Now we came in and we said, okay, we don't need this, it's not important to look at, let's get rid of it. And I believe that you can say that there's a consequence associated with that. And and then and then necessary I mean from a practical standpoint us reintroducing near infrared back into lighting is actually a benefit, not a negative.

Speaker 2: 1:26:29

Yes, do you give up a little bit in lumensperwatt? You do, but right now, that's not our problem. Our problem is that LEDs are really hard to dim, so most people have the things running full bright. I got a neighbor down the way that you know they. She has a blue white lamp light on all night. You know it's not we're not having. We're not causing problems because of the lumensperwatt of the bulbs. We're causing problems because we can't turn a stupid light off. Yeah, you know, and I think that's that's the real crux. And even if you could turn it off, if you can't turn it off, you should be able to dim it, and that's one of the things that our products do. We have the largest dimming range of any product on the market and we add in 3x. 75% of the energy coming out of our bulb is in the infrared. 25% is visible. We still meet the DOE's energy savings requirements and you know it's, it's just like why not?

Speaker 1: 1:27:38

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 1:27:39

You know you get a better looking bulb. It behaves itself better. It's got better color quality. You know, because the reality is is that you know people like to poo-foo incandescence. But incandescence we're pretty good lights, as far as you know. Using them, they didn't you could. They dim them really well. They used minimal amount of materials and now we've replaced it with something that you can't dim. And if you do dim it, most of the time it shifts to the, to the blue, makes it look really opposite of what you want. You know, versus our light source. It goes from a high color temperature down into the 600. You know, you can get it all the way down to where it looks like a candle. You know, because it's half incandescent. You know that's what it is. It's a combination.

Speaker 2: 1:28:29

So, while people like to, the only reason we would have wouldn't have incandescence now is because it was really lousy at generating visible light and you know that's the only real reason and you know so I think that if people start accepting the fact that we need to have the full, complete biological spectrum, there are solutions out there that we can come up with that can still save energy.

Speaker 2: 1:28:58

You know I keep on saying it doesn't do me any good to take a to have a 120 lumen per watt LED light bulb and then put it inside a lamp that has a black shade. You know there's so many other ways that we can save energy by treat, showing people how to use light effectively, putting where you want it, having windows and having a house that lets in certain amount of light. You know there's so many ways that we can be more efficient at how we use light than there are of. You know the it was very naive to think that we could just make a higher efficiency bulb and that would end up because reality is. All you have to do is look at the pictures from the space station. You know we're increasing light every day every year 10% outside.

Speaker 2: 1:29:54

Inside that's because we can see it, but yet if you could, it didn't have the blocking sun. If you look during the day, you'd see that they're just as much light, or more, and most of it 99% of it is wasted on something that there's nobody there. Yeah, yeah, so we're like a whole building.

Speaker 1: 1:30:14

And the imposition of energy saving regulation to basically mandate the use of LEDs and phase out phase out halogen and incandescent to me probably is going to go down history as one of the most harmful policies of government, with these unintended side effects, for the fact that we have lost all this infrared. The policy makers, they don't understand any of this and they're simply just optimizing for reduced energy consumption. But what you mentioned earlier, and I think you mentioned in our first discussion, is that, paradoxically, the use of these lights, of LED lights, is actually increased. And I think it's an excellent example of what's known as the Jevons paradox, which essentially, when there's technological government policy that imposes, say something like LED lights, the effect isn't that everyone stops using energy. They essentially, because the efficiency is improved, they just actually put more Because the cost of running each one has gone down. So, as you talked about, they just load their house and car with more LED light panels.

Speaker 2: 1:31:40

So yeah, it also goes from a marketing standpoint. When you're, if you're going to charge more for an LED lamp, then they're trying to give them more, so they give them more brightness, they give them more output, and so you could have got by with a whole lot less, but because the marketing guys seeing they're saying, well, we got to give them something, or charging them twice as much. You know, so this thing is not only energy efficient, but it puts out more light, and it puts out more blue light in particular. And that's where I think the real crux of the problem. You know, one of the things that always happens when you scale up is is that you know, when you do things on a small level, then it's a small population that doesn't have much effect. You start doing things on a global level, then you start to see the negative consequences come out. And you know, I don't. You know I sat at a DOE, on a panel at the DOE, and I kept on trying to tell them that these were not the same by photo biologically. And you know, they didn't know.

Speaker 2: 1:32:51

There's some, some guy, coming in and talking and now we're starting to see the consequences of that because we've scaled it to a point and they're mandating it on a widespread basis. You know, and then it also assumes that we're all the same. There are some people that light sensitivity is a real problem in their life, you know. And now we've got the headlights issues with older people. I know I can't stand the existing led headlights because, you know, for older person it's kind of like the glare is dangerous and yet you know they're forcing it in and I think that they'd be much better off letting the market and people decide you know what's important to them and not put a penalty on energy. I don't care. I mean, you know there's other ways to skin this beast and to just light everything up as bright as we can get it. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 1:33:51

And I recorded a recent podcast with author of a book called Fiat Food and he we spent about an hour and a half exploring how the dietary guidelines and how they have been brought in and how they've basically wrecked havoc with people's health through, you know, recommending things like high carbohydrate grain intake and low consumption of animal foods.

Speaker 1: 1:34:15

And to me this is just another version of government policy having initially perhaps wanting to have some kind of beneficial effect, but simply messing with the system, a highly complex system, highly complex biological system with untold you know second, third, fourth order effects, all these unintended consequences and, as a result of interventionism by, you know, people and bureaucrats that just simply don't understand what they're messing with. So you look that that. That is what it is. But I'm glad and I want to talk now about not Naira and your work, because I really think it's part of the solution and you mentioned before that a lot of the reason why you do what you do is for the children and to help us to mitigate this effect of isolated blue light near infrared deficient light environment on kids and children and people. So tell us again your solution. I think it's a very elegant solution to this near infrared deficient indoor lighting problem.

Speaker 2: 1:35:21

Well, you know, as simple as core. You know, leds are really great at generating visible light and you can get to the point that you can make a very beautiful visible portion of we're using LEDs. They're not that great at generating near infrared and they're not good at generating, you know, especially a broadband near infrared Incandescent. The little filament bulbs that we used to have in our flashlights way back when are called short filaments are, if they're run at a low enough voltage, they are extremely efficient at generating near infrared and they actually outlive. The have a longer lifetime than LEDs do if you're generating, as you can see with the centennial bulb where it's been running for 130 years. So what the problem is is that incandescent are not great at generating visible light because you have to run the filament temperature up so high that it has a low lifetime. If you reduce the voltage and drive it to lower filament temperature, then it can last a long time. Putting the two of them together is what we do. We generate a hybrid. So we let the LEDs do what they do well and we let the incandescent do what it does well. That provides you with a lot of not only, so it then ends up getting you a spectrum that runs from about 400 out to 3000 nanometers. It's broadband, so most like I say, the closest match that you can get to what's going on in sunlight. As LEDs get better, we get better. As incandescent gets better, you know some of these. There's things we can do on the incandescent side to make them even better. But you know, at the end of the day you put the two of them together because you have 100% efficiency of generating what we want the near infrared. You do the math and you find out that, hey, I can still pump in an awful lot of near infrared and still meet the DOE requirements because they've made LEDs so efficient. You know they're really good at generating visible light and I believe fundamentally that you need the combination of the two, one to counter the other and in particular, the near infrared is necessary to counter the detrimental effects of the blue and the violence and things of that nature. So we put them together Electrically. There's a lot of practical benefits to that.

Speaker 2: 1:37:48

One of the problems with LEDs is that they're really terrible at dimming. You know, if you look at most LEDs, either they don't dim or when you dim them, they maybe dim by 10% or maybe even 1%, you'll go down to some of the things. Bear in mind there's nine orders of magnitude difference between direct sunlight and moonlight. In the old days, with incandescence you could actually dim all the way down to zero. So essentially, at an infinite dimming range, you could use triaxes. It was very simple to control because they were a resistive load.

Speaker 2: 1:38:33

There's a thing called power factor. Leds in general the cheaper ones have lousy power factor, which means that the efficiency of how current is actually dumped into the bulb is reduced. So you know, versus an incandescent, it's purely resistive load, so it behaves quite well, has power factor one. There's reduced material usage. You know, if you look at our lights, there's nothing in them. If you look at most LED lights, they have all these electronics and circuitry to try and adapt, to be able to do what you know, to be able to run at different conditions. So you know, that's what we do and I think dimming range is probably one of the biggest things that I think we really need to deal with.

Speaker 2: 1:39:23

Artificial light, everybody wants to be safe. You know, if you take our light, you dim it down. It's almost all near infrared where security cameras near infrared have a peak response, about 900 nanometers. That's where we're at when you're dimmed down as far as our output. So we can light up an area that doesn't really look like there's any light in it at all hardly Enough for security cameras. So, and if nothing else, you can turn our upstown to the point it has this beautiful orange glow like a candlelight, you know. So maybe you encourage a few people to turn down their lights at night. You know, to make it kind of, you know, good for you so very interesting.

Speaker 1: 1:40:10

Has anyone else paired LED with these, these small incandescent? Are you the first to to put these two together in the hybrid model?

Speaker 2: 1:40:18

As far as I know, they're the first to actually I mean, who in the right mind would throw a terrible incandescent in with a great LED? Wow, and this. So, and I think that one of the things that's really amazing is that electrically you know, electrically one of the problems with LEDs is they have a very steep IV curve, the current voltage curve, so a little change in voltage makes a large change in output, and so a lot of the electronics are associated with trying to deal with that and turn it into a current source. When you put a filament in conjunction with an LED, they have opposite effects, so it linearizes everything.

Speaker 1: 1:41:03

Wow and the filament.

Speaker 2: 1:41:05

So it's kind of like an analog feedback loop, because you know the two cancel each other out.

Speaker 1: 1:41:13

Incredible.

Speaker 2: 1:41:15

So you take one of our lights and it's very difficult to actually overdrive it because as you start to put more and more current in, the filament actually starts to get more and more resistive. So it actually feeds back and cuts down, keeps the LED from running away, even if it wants to.

Speaker 1: 1:41:32

It sounds like human, appropriate lighting and the pure white LED, blue light, wavelength, led is simply, you know, alien lighting. They invented it for the wrong species, but what your sounds is like is very, very human, appropriate, and I mean my goal. I think long term we need to get lighting like this into hospitals, into nursing homes, into schools, into kindergarten's, everywhere where people have to be inside, especially obviously in winter and seasonal times when you can't be outside. Then we need lighting that is emitting broadband infrared and I think what you're doing, scott, is critical to that. So very excited to see where this goes.

Speaker 2: 1:42:22

We've got a big task ahead. Of us.

Speaker 2: 1:42:25

I mean, I love people to buy some of our lamps. I guess I'm just. More importantly to me is I think we need to. There are people that need a change and you know there are being negatively affected. You know I get myself in trouble because I say, okay, you're creating harm, but I do believe that that's my opinion. I think that we have created an environment that is harmful.

Speaker 2: 1:42:51

So if that's the case, we need to do something about it, and there's lots of ways you can add in here. You can go outside. That's a good way to start. Wear a hat, go outside, you know, a little bit each day. But for those that can't, I think we need to do something about the windows in hospitals, do something about all this stuff. You know all the different ways that we can improve and I don't know what kind of care it takes for people to accept that as a problem. But there's something that they care about. But you know, this idea that it's all about just energy savings, like one guy said, is just wrong. You know, one day is sick a year and negates basically every energy benefit that they can possibly come up with from putting anything. And you know.

Speaker 2: 1:43:49

The fact that it's now starting to be shown to affect insects pollination rates, things of that nature, means that this is just as important as climate change. I'm sorry it is, because if you start messing around with our ability to make food and things of that nature, then you're really playing a very dangerous game. I think and we can measure that now it's not a matter of a couple of degrees. It's a matter of there's areas where you know plants or animals or insects are not pollinating at a reasonable rate, and I don't know if they do in Australia, but we have semis that are driving around with bees in the back of them trying to get to, you know, to pollinate certain crops at this point.

Speaker 1: 1:44:39

Yeah, there's such a selective focus when it comes to environmentalism on, you know, an actual waste product of biological metabolism called CO2. And it's myopic because there's so many other problems with regard to the sustainability of human existence on planet Earth things like soil degradation, things like the spraying of industrial herbicides and pesticides, plastic contamination of oceans you know, I can keep going on and one of them is artificial light at night and the fact that that is basic extinction level effect that's having on wildlife and insects, as you mentioned, and biological systems, not to mention human health. So I think it's ignorant to, it's blinkered to only focus one's energy on the narratives that we're kind of emphasised, perhaps through mainstream outlets, when there's so many other relevant environmental problems. And you know, let's add artificial light at night to that list because I think it is critical and what we've talked about in this podcast, in the previous, I think, is illustrating that. And it's been a great, great to talk to you again, scott.