Sunlight Matters

The Light Prescription: Sunlight, Infrared, Mitochondria, and Your Health with Prof Glen Jeffery

• Dave Wallace • Season 1 • Episode 8

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In this episode, Dave chats with Professor Glen Jeffery, a neuroscientist at University College London’s Institute of Ophthalmology, whose research investigates how light, particularly long-wavelength red and infrared, influences human health, metabolism, and ageing. 

Glen Jeffery is recognised as one of the world's leading researchers in exploring how light interacts with our bodies. 

Glen explains how sunlight penetrates the body, enhancing mitochondrial function, improving vision, and even boosting motor skills like grip strength. He warns that modern LED lighting, while energy-efficient, can harm metabolic health compared to incandescent bulbs that emit beneficial infrared light.

They examine the public health consequences of our “infrared starvation,” the role of mitochondria in ageing, and the unexpectedly affordable potential solutions, such as rethinking indoor lighting and spending 20–30 minutes outdoors. Glen makes comparisons to historical issues like scurvy, emphasising the need for urgent policy reforms before our ageing, indoor-bound populations face worsening health crises. Practical advice includes seeking more natural light, using infrared-rich lighting where feasible, and adopting lifestyle changes that incorporate movement and sunlight exposure.

Glen Jeffery:

Yeah, I think that what we need to do is we need to just walk away from all the cell biology. Really what we need to do is look at the big population studies. And the big population studies, it is very clear. All-cause mortality is higher in those individuals that spend less time in the sunlight than those that spend a lot of time in sunlight. We've really got it wrong. You know, if you just look at the bigger picture, you need sunlight. We've got the science. We know that light your LEDs are doing you no favours. If we give you some longer wavelength light, we change the LED, giving you that infrared, your grip strength improves. So it is truly an issue of public health. It's an issue about how we reintroduce bright lighting for public health.

Tilly Wallace:

Welcome to Sunlight Matters, the podcast that reconnects us with the sun. Join us as we explore the So thank you so

Dave Wallace:

much. Really, really, really honoured to have you. It is a Friday, so I promise to be very gentle with you. And also, I've just got back from Finland where I did a big swim down a river. So I know we're here to talk about the sun rather than the rivers. But, you know, one of the things that I did experience was 22 hours of sunlight, which was quite an amazing experience, actually. So I came back feeling truly sun-blessed from that. So if I go off at a tangent, it's because my brain's still in the middle of a river in Finland somewhere.

Glen Jeffery:

That's

Dave Wallace:

fine. Anyway, well, welcome to the podcast, Professor Glenn Jeffery. Do you like Professor? No, no, I can't stand it. Just call me Glenn, please. Okay, well, welcome to the podcast. I'm really, really, truly honoured to have you. Just for those who may not know who you are and what you do, could you give us a brief introduction?

Glen Jeffery:

Yeah, my name's Glenn Jeffery. I'm Professor of Neuroscience at University College London. I'm interested... The Institute of Ophthalmology, which kind of implies eyes, but I'm really interested in light and what light does to the body and little things that we have in all our cells called mitochondria that regulate our metabolism and regulate loads of other things, regulate the pace of our aging, etc. I'm interested in how light interacts with those fundamental processes. That's kind of roughly where I am.

Dave Wallace:

I think it's fair to say that you are one of the leading lights, and excuse the pun, in terms of research around sunlight and sunlight's impact on the body. Can I ask, where did that sort of interest kind of stem from?

Glen Jeffery:

Oh, it's quite kind of, I wouldn't say random, but someone sent me, when you're an academic, very often people send you papers to review. Publishers really are quite naughty because they expect you to do it for nothing and they pile them all up. And most of the time you say no. And then I saw one from a group of people that I vaguely knew and it was on how long wavelength light, deep red light, improved outcomes in brain damaging animals. And I just didn't get it. But I knew these people and I knew that their science was very solid. And I think that, you know, that started the ball rolling. What's this interaction between light and the body other than, you know, the eye? It didn't have anything to do with the eye. So, you know, the body's responding to light, in this case, in response to damage, and the outcome's good. So question is, what type of light? What's receiving this light? What is the mechanism going on? And that started the ball rolling. And God, you know, probably about 10 to 15 years ago. I

Dave Wallace:

mean, even 10 to 15 years ago, that sort of feels like relatively recent. It's kind of fair to say that a lot of the research around the sort of topic is actually quite new, isn't it?

Glen Jeffery:

It is. It's snowballed. Certainly, five years ago, I walked into clinical environments or scientific environments and made certain statements, and I wasn't taken very seriously. That has completely changed. The traction is there. We find, let's refer to, say, brain damage. I'm talking to... critical care consultants in major hospitals about whether they need to think about their lighting. The whole thing has changed. Sadly, at the same time, there's been a commercial latch on. I mean, anyone who goes on the web and puts in red light, you're going to find vast numbers of companies asking for your credit card number, selling you fundamentally quite dodgy devices. So as we move forward, we're getting traction, but there's also a lot of drag on this which is coming from commercial entities that are pushing the concept and eroding the traction that we get I mean we're winning there's no question about that but it is annoying

Dave Wallace:

Well, look, I think one of the great things is the universities, people like yourself, there's other people all around the world who are really looking at the subject. And, I mean, you talk about mitochondrial function and how important that is, and it sort of feels that that's really being elevated as something that is of massive interest. But, I mean, you've done some recent studies, haven't you, which kind of show just how... impactful infrared light is so you know i think you did a study on kind of glucose metabolism which was was fascinating and then one more recently um which i wonder if you could kind of talk about as well

Glen Jeffery:

so uh the glucose metabolism as we've moved on in life you know people very often don't grab how scientists tick. They don't tick the way people think they tick. They tick rather randomly. So my first drive in life was to find a mechanism because unless you have a mechanism people don't believe what you're doing so one angle on that was mitochondria to function properly need lots of glucose and they need lots of oxygen so we did standard blood glucose tolerance tests which is what you do sometimes with your GP or when you go to the hospital so we load people up with glucose and then we give them red light the red light stimulates the mitochondria that mitochondria grab the glucose out of your serum and consequently your blood glucose levels go down. Likewise, your oxygen consumption goes up because mitochondria need glucose and oxygen. All right, that's absolutely fine. So the transition has been for us from some animal work that includes flies and bees through to some basic work on human physiology and now we're just delving much deeper into the translational aspect so what can we now say I don't want to do any more I don't want to kind of do anything else on mice I don't want to do anything on cells in dishes it's too far from the real world so the playing field now for me is an area dominated by lighting engineers by architects, etc. So two recent studies, one published, one just about to be published, showing firstly that daylight, sunlight, goes through your body. Those long, long wavelengths that we can't see, the infrared, we can detect them coming out of the other side of your chest if I just stand you in sunlight. And that impacts systemically on the body and can improve your visual function. the following day. So now we're not talking about lights in laboratories in tightly controlled experiments. We're talking about you in sunlight and your vision. So the next stage on from that, and I think this is this is what I'm really pleased with, is we move into an environment without windows, a working environment, University College London, mainly occupied by engineers and engineers. model makers, people that make architectural models, and they've all got horrible LED lighting. Now that lighting really undermines mitochondria. They really don't like it. And the consequence is there's a slowing of metabolism. We moved into that environment and we just took incandescent light bulbs. The old light bulbs you used to have, which are now becoming more difficult to find, when you switch them on, they got super hot. OK, so we got rid of them because they were super hot. And so they were wasting energy, not producing light, but producing heat. So we reintroduced those into that environment and we got a fantastic result. Absolutely. Everyone's vision improved and it improved significantly. So the if you think about me as a sort of a scientist stumbling through the world, there I was doing stuff on cells in dishes. Then I was doing stuff with flies and bees and mice, all getting the same result. Highly conserved mechanism. And then moving on to humans, bringing humans into the lab and doing things to them. And then finally, I think the latter stage of my career is really a latter stage where I'm saying, look, I'm in public health. This is a public health issue. We've got the science. We know the science is there. We know that light in the built environment, your LEDs are doing you no favours. Now, I'm doing this. I'm not the only one doing this. I mean, there's a great lab at Westminster University that are just showing if we give you some longer wavelength light, we change the LED. We put something in the LED which is... giving you that infrared, your grip strength improves. Now that's really important. Okay, so it's not just Glenn playing around with vision, right? Now we've got people who are saying this general effect on metabolism is actually impacting on your motor skills, your grip strength. Really simple to do. Great experiment, you know, really well done. It is truly an issue of, for me, public health. It's an issue about how we reintroduce lighting for public health. And particularly, let's pick up the place where we need it most, first of all, which is nursing homes with older people, clinical environments. I got an email last Friday from NICE, which runs, you know, they look at sort of introduction of new techniques, new drugs, asking about red light. We got traction. You know, we got traction. I can see the retirement door very comfortably in front of me with that kind of request.

Dave Wallace:

To be honest with you, I can see the retirement door slamming very firmly in your face because it sounds like you've just got started. Can I just rewind slightly because I sort of feel there was so much in what you said. And I'm thinking about the context of we're spending more and more time indoors. I think it's the average person is spending 90% of their lives indoors. mostly under LED light. So the fact that light can impact metabolism, I mean, and I presume metabolism is just one of the many functions, you know, as you say, you've then looked at eyes. That really makes me sort of think that this is potentially a real public health crisis that is, you know, we've got to kind of get to the bottom of. So many of... what we i guess we suffer from in terms of modern diseases may actually be to do with light is that is that too overstating things too much

Glen Jeffery:

well i you know i try to understate as much as i possibly can uh particularly to take me away from all the commercial entities but you're right that you know the so much of your life is regulated by mitochondria right you know um Your body temperature is there because mitochondria are burning glucose. Mitochondria suffer either primarily or secondarily as a consequence of disease. So, okay, some diseases are primarily mitochondrial. Parkinson's is a classic. We think macular degeneration is also another one. But as you age, your mitochondria just start to pack up. They produce... petrol called ATP. Now that ATP can go down by 70% with aging. So the whole system is starting to become frail and then it only takes a small knock and the pack of cards goes over. If we can bolster the ATP, if we can bolster the mitochondria through the difficult phases of aging, and we have an aging population. I don't know if it's true. Someone told me, I think they did know what they were talking about, that in Japan now, they're selling more diapers for old age pensioners than they are for babies. That could be untrue. I don't know, but I like the story. The demographics of Western civilization are changing enormously. We're ending up with a large number of old people who are unhappy because they can't do things they want to do. They are, let's say this in a kind way, a social burden in terms of cost. So there's a real imperative, not only from a humanitarian point of view to change this, but from a societal angle as well. And it's cheap. All we need to do is change the lighting.

Dave Wallace:

Well, I mean, it's extraordinary, isn't it? Because I guess there's the other thing that is going on at the moment, which is this rush to net zero, which is why LED lights have kind of gone into offices and homes and You know, I'm a firm believer in the law of unforeseen consequences. Yeah. You know, for the net zero kind of movement, that seems to have played out very nicely in this, that the sort of social aspects of lighting have kind of been forgotten about. And, you know, it's really interesting about the incandescent bulbs because it happens that, you know, I've got a couple of lights with incandescent bulbs on in my house and they're the ones I always gravitate towards. You know, I've got a real fire in my house. I've always wondered, why do I love my real fire so much? It's kind of fascinating that, like, within us is this connection. You know, that connection is kind of being lost. So I guess one of the questions around lighting is how do you kind of address it? Because I guess if NICE are coming in, so they are the... How would you describe them? Just because there's listeners who are from other countries here. What's the best way of describing them?

Glen Jeffery:

Agency that regulates the administration of new drugs into the market or new techniques for health care. So they say, A, it's too expensive or B, it doesn't work. OK, so they're not going to win on the too expensive argument now. And I don't think they're going to win on the it doesn't work anymore.

Dave Wallace:

But if they come in and they endorse kind of red light and, you know, one wonders then what happens. So, you know, policy has to change, I guess, not just in this country, but all around the world in terms of in terms of taking all of these things into account, because. If you play forward, like we're spending more time indoors, we've got LED lights, you know, there is perhaps an even worse health crisis waiting for us a bit further down the line, isn't

Glen Jeffery:

there? Oh, yeah, that is definitely the case. But of course, governments don't necessarily engage with this because if it's further down the line, their attitude is, it's not going to be our problem. You know, certainly in the case of the British government, I've heard people say, you know, their major concern is the headline tomorrow, not the long view.

Dave Wallace:

Yeah. So I've seen that for myself on the river stuff. So, yeah. Yeah,

Glen Jeffery:

yeah, exactly. Exactly. Pollution in rivers, etc. So it's a time bomb and it's ticking fast. And I mean, one point I would make about this, I'll keep hammering it because it's the point that I think sticks to the wall with the people with power. It's really cheap. So, you know, let me let me let me give you an example. One of our graduate students was doing an experiment with different light bulbs and he gave all these people these really horrible LED light bulbs. He got, I think we could put five in an office, and we're expecting everyone to have their vision absolutely hammered by this. And he mistakenly put one bulb in there that actually had had a long wavelength LED put in it. It had infrared. We got the data back. Everybody improved. Of course, we all went spare. What's going on? And of course, in the end, we just found out that someone had just made a simple mistake. But that's telling you something. It's telling you you don't need much infrared light to improve the situation. That one bulb that was actually adding infrared light to this office environment with maybe seven or eight people sitting in it, had had an effect on everybody. Now, long wavelength light, that deep infrared light, bounces all over the place. We can't see it, but it's bouncing everywhere. And it's got relatively few natural absorbers. Okay, so plants just reflect infrared and scatter it absolutely everywhere. So a small bulb in an environment can have a big effect. And remember, when they all tell you you can't get incandescent bulbs, remember, you can't put an LED in an oven. It melts. So you've got to have incandescent bulbs somewhere. To

Dave Wallace:

be clear, Glenn is not saying stick your head in an oven. No, I'm not saying

Glen Jeffery:

that. I'm not saying that. I think I've told everybody that we're all working together, you know, on this kind of area. Just keep telling people it's cheap and the consequences for public health, I believe, will be significant.

Dave Wallace:

It's amazing, isn't it? And I mean, that in itself, I'm like flabbergasted by. I think Bob Fosbury, who, you know, is one of your collaborators, he talks about human beings or anything alive being like an antenna for the sun, which I absolutely love as a kind of concept. But it sounds like that antennae is so well tuned to kind of accepting these rays that even small amounts can make a

Glen Jeffery:

massive difference. profession are not used to the notion of something being taken away and your health suffering so he came out with the phrase that our current situation is analogous to scurvy

Dave Wallace:

yes

Glen Jeffery:

in scurvy people got sick and died because they didn't have something they didn't have vitamin c and fruit So you take these people, you put them in a strange environment on a boat, and they go out to sea, and they're missing something, and they get a disease. We as a population have evolved such that we're going into a strange environment. We sit in buildings for vast amounts of time with infrared blocking glass on our windows, and we get sick. We get sick in subtle ways, and those are public health issues. I wish I remember... Who said it? But I was listening to Radio 4 at about 8.30 in the morning. And of course, you know, you're making coffee, you're doing all these things. You've got one ear on the radio just to find out if someone's dropped an atom bomb. They were talking to a head of public health. It was either in Birmingham, Manchester, somewhere like that. And he said, there's something going on in the office environment. that's undermining health and I don't know what it is now about a week later we're all sitting around having coffee and someone's do you remember that and we all went oh god wasn't wasn't that but it was too late we'd all forgotten who he was and we couldn't find out but public health person said there's something wrong with the office environment and if that person ever listens to this podcast I want him to ring me you know no well

Dave Wallace:

I we we need to get the message out I mean it I love the analogy with scurvy, but there is a warning, isn't there? Because scurvy, they kind of knew what was going on, but it took a hundred years, I think, before they really kind of looked to sort of make sure there was vitamin C going on to boats. And I think it feels like this is a really urgent thing that, you know, we don't get changes in terms of lighting then you know our populations as they get older like you know going into care people are going to get sicker and sicker and the burden on the health service of you know us as a population and that I guess is not just in the UK but all around the world of aging populations is huge you know so actually if there is a cheap way of kind of improving people's outcomes and their you know like a grip strength is amazing because grip strength is a real indicator of of like how healthy somebody is isn't it so yeah improving all of these outcomes just is vital

Glen Jeffery:

Yeah, I think that what we need to do is we need to just walk away from all the cell biology. Really what we need to do is look at the big population studies. And the big population studies, it is very clear. All-cause mortality is higher in those individuals that spend less time in the sunlight than those that spend a lot of time in sunlight. All-cause mortality in the Northern Hemisphere peaks just after Christmas. All-cause mortality in the Southern Hemisphere peaks after Just at the end of June. His article on this was great. You know, it had all those little snippets. You think, oh yeah, oh yeah. So if people that get skin cancer, they've been out in the sun, therefore they should have very high vitamin D levels. They've been in the sun. Sunlight regulates vitamin D. Opposite. In actual fact, they've got very low levels of vitamin D. So we've got causation and outcomes here the wrong way around. And what we need to do is we need to look at big population data to get a handle on it. Blood sugar control is much better in people that spend a lot of time in sunlight. And the studies that have done that have been across Europe, and they've had tens of thousands of people in them. So you can't say this doesn't work because it didn't work in my arm. You need to look at big population studies.

Dave Wallace:

Which is why we need academics to be really driving a lot of this forward. Well,

Glen Jeffery:

some academics you don't want driving anything forward. You want to lock them away. But you do need a big picture to understand what's going on. You know, don't say I did this experiment in a dish with cells and nothing happened. You need to look at the human. You need to look at big picture. And you need to look at the concept of aging. Because with us, we're not supposed to live really beyond 35 or 40. We're putting all these people, average lifespans, 82, 83. We have a vulnerability which is completely novel in terms of our evolution. Right? Really novel. I think an incandescent light bulb out of an oven may represent a form of protection for many. I took as many qualifications as I can.

Dave Wallace:

Yeah, well, look, I'm going to go straight on to Amazon after this and buy a few incandescent light bulbs. Like, you know, and it's a very real thing for me because I think about one of my son's he is the archetypal gamer who went into his room in COVID and never really came out. And I'm like, you know, look at him and think, gosh, you know, what's going to happen to you? So like the thought that actually if I could get an incandescent light bulb into his room, it's probably not as optimal as the sun, you know, in terms of kind of his health. But at least it's something,

Glen Jeffery:

isn't it? It is. And if it, you know, in the cases where you could say, well, look, you know, maybe it didn't work for my son. The point is, if we took a thousand people. it would work, right? Because there's noise in humans. I still occasionally work on things like fruit flies. You work on fruit flies because I can get thousands of them in a study. And I do things like, how long do they live? So fruit flies live longer when there's an incandescent light bulb than rather with an LED. You've got to look at large numbers. Humans are messy. Fruit flies are all exactly the same, pretty much, males and females. If you look at, say for instance, you look at my two kids, their lifestyles are radically different. I mean, they're both fairly healthy, but radically different. So if I did something to them, I'd expect noise in the data. Looking at small numbers at individual humans is problematic. you need to look at big numbers. And I've fallen foul of that as well because sometimes I find it very difficult to get my hands on subjects. So I look at big population data and I let that guide me for the sorts of experiments I might do with smaller groups of people.

Dave Wallace:

So, I mean, fascinating, fascinating. And if you ever need a subject, I'm here. And I'm sure I can rustle up many more as well. But, I mean, what are some of the other things that you'd like to have a look at? I

Glen Jeffery:

think, you know, so we're reaching a point where what we want to do are the key metrics in aging. So another really key metric in aging, super simple. How long can you stand on one foot with your eyes closed? Right. So that and that is a motor skill. It's a balance skill. It's got a lot in it. So a lot of stuff packed into that. I want to start looking at different metrics. Ultimately, I want to know how we can influence the clinical environment. We know that people who have beds next to windows in hospitals tend to be discharged earlier than people that are sitting a long way from a window. I didn't know that, but the consultants in critical care told me that. Oh yeah, we all know that. Christ, let's change the windows. Where I want to be and what I want to do before I walk through that door, it's all around public health. It's public health. We've got there to some extent. We're talking a lot to architects. A lot to architects, a lot to lighting engineers. And they're really, they're grabbing hold of it a lot quicker than the medics did. They're a lot closer to it. But, you know, they've got phrases like well-being, which I love well-being. I don't know what it means, but well-being going up is clearly good and well-being going down is bad. And they've got the idea of daylight and well-being. Fine, I'll back that package firmly.

Dave Wallace:

I mean, the other thing I'm struck by is, you know, when we first chatted, you said the other really easy thing to do is to go and spend 20 or 30 minutes outside. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, and like I've been reading some of the, I think it's Roger Swift, I can never say it. Welts. Yeah, there we go. It's a killer. Dyslexic, right. But Roger's... stories around people who are very ill going into sunlight and you know getting dramatically improved um by by just sort of spending time outside and you know i guess that's kind of a good indicator for um you know the rest of us actually if we could just spend a bit more time outside it sounds like we don't need to do a lot based on your incandescent bulb thing

Glen Jeffery:

No, in fact, you know, I'd say to you, if you've got a reasonable lifestyle, don't, under any circumstances, buy any red light device that you see on Amazon. Don't go near them, right, unless you have a specific reason to go near them. So, you know, you've got a vision problem or something. But if you change your view of the world, we can't see infrared. But if you take a camera and use infrared, All the plants around you are screaming at you. They're reflecting all that infrared light like you've got behind you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Go grab a leaf in strong sunlight and then put your other hand on a brick wall. The brick wall is warm. The leaf is cold. The wall is absorbing infrared. The leaf is reflecting infrared. Now, when I go with my plants, instruments and I go up to a leaf, the reflection of the infrared light is very close at one moment in time to a therapeutic dose, to something that improves physiological function. But of course you go for a walk in the park for half an hour, right? So change your lifestyle, go for a walk in the park. Bob Fosbury, um, Bob loves Spectra and he loves toys and he likes expensive toys as well. So I was with him a couple of weekends ago and he just took His device, his spectrometer, which measures infrared light, and we put it under a fern in his garden, and there was almost no visible light. It was very, very dark under the fern. But the infrared light, I mean, it wasn't a few times greater. It was log units. It's times 10, times 100 greater under that plant. So there's this world out there of infrared light that we don't see. Now, I don't think there's any animal that I'm aware of that really extensively sees infrared light. So it's out there. It's having a profound effect in physiology. Go on the web. Type in infrared photograph, okay? And do it and look at a tree. It looks as if it's been snowing. It's amazing. It's amazing. So don't spend your money. Go for a walk in the park. You benefit in two ways. One is you'll get loads of infrared light. And secondly, you'll be doing some exercise, which a mitochondria love anyway. I

Dave Wallace:

mean, it's fascinating. And again, it's like we're talking a no-money solution, aren't we? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think this is sort of like actually understanding that nature-based things can really be... the most effective is kind of wonderful to hear. I read this brilliant article or listened to this brilliant interview by one of the doctors who writes for Private Eye magazine. And this was a few years ago. And he said that the public health crisis in the UK would be solved if we all had a dog. And, you know... And obviously, you know, dogs aren't suitable for everybody. But his sentiment was very much about, you know, dogs get you out, don't

Glen Jeffery:

they? They do. They do. So, you know, a double whammy in the sense of going for a walk in the park. You're getting exercise, you're mitochondria-like. You're being surrounded by infrared light, but you're mitochondria-like. Both of them are going to have a really positive effect on your blood sugars. What's one of our major crises that we've got in front of us? We've got a diabetic crisis in old, well, not just old age. We've got a diabetic crisis, but it gets worse as you get older because you've got less control over your insulin levels. So, yeah, it's really simple. you know, it's really simple. It was quite heartwarming. You know, I'm a cyclist. I've always been a cyclist. And after COVID, the gentle kind of expansion of cycling in London has been very noticeable. I was cycling down the Holloway Road 10 years ago on my own, you know, breathing in all that crap. And it's different now. People, you know, cyclists are all piling up and we're breathing less crap because half the buses are now electric so exercise super super super important Yeah, no,

Dave Wallace:

I love you, the gentle expansion of cycling in London. Having done it, there's nothing gentle about it. No, no, OK. The Tour de France every day. But, no, I think I get your point. You know, actually, you look at London and, you know, I know there's a lot of anti-Euler stuff, but actually, you know, air is really critically important as well, isn't it? Yeah,

Glen Jeffery:

I... I sold my diesel car and got whatever it was, the 2,000 quid for it, and I felt free as a consequence. You know, this is slightly anecdotal, but we were doing some work some way or way, the colleague, and he dropped me off in London before going off home, and he dropped me off on the North Circular. As I got off, I ran my hand along a railing, a pedestrian railing, And it was just black. And all circular was packed. And I thought, oh, my God, this is in my lungs. So, yeah, there's a whole load of stuff about public health. There's a whole load of stuff that we need to readdress because of an industrialized society. Public health is not the same issue as it was in 1850. And public health is not the same as it was in 1950. we have to change what we're looking at and the questions we're asking. But, you know, outcomes don't have to be super complicated. No,

Dave Wallace:

I think that is such a wonderful message. Well, listen, we're sort of out of time. I mean, I'd love to... I genuinely love to carry on chatting, but, you know, I think we could perhaps have a follow-up at some point.

Glen Jeffery:

Yeah, absolutely sure. But, you know, I'm always here. I do my best. You know, I've said this on multiple times. I answer people's emails. It rubs out my social life, but I will answer people's emails, and I'm very

Dave Wallace:

easy

Glen Jeffery:

to find.

Dave Wallace:

I think that's really impressive. I think you're such a great spokesperson for the movement as well. And, you know, as I Thank you very much. I mean, I'm here with the sun beating down on my back because of your research. I know that I've got photons which are zooming through me, a lot of them stopping on their way through, and my mitochondria are probably thanking me. I mean, I'd love to... You could tell me someone who could help explain mitochondrial function really simply as well. I'd love that. I bought Nick Lane's book, Transformer, about a year ago, and I started reading it, and I was like, wow. I need a different brain. Nick,

Glen Jeffery:

Nick, Nick is a, Nick is a tour de force. He's a great, he's a great writer. Power, sex and suicide. The story of mitochondria is great. Some of these books like transformer, even for an academic bit like stirring cement with your eyelashes, but it's great stuff.

Dave Wallace:

I love, well, look, I, you know, I think it's the idea that we have these tiny things in our, each one of ourselves, which, you know, powers us forward, I think it's almost magical, isn't it? You know, I think it's incredible. But anyway, thank you so much. I mean, I think, you know... One of my thoughts is actually to start building a winter sun toolkit. So, you know, obviously we've got Shadow Map, which enables people to go and have a look at places in the sun. But it'd be nice to think that we could kind of layer in some other bits and pieces. So I might come to you for some advice in terms of lighting and things. And, yeah, we could actually do a link to Battersea Dogs Home so people could get dogs

Glen Jeffery:

as well. Yeah, well, I'm always here, happy to respond. And... always great to talk thank you so much