Dhru Purohit Show - Former Harvard Professor Exposes the Shocking Truth About Blue Light's Impact On Cancer, Diabetes, and Fatigue with Dr. Martin Moore-Ede

Episode Date: July 3, 2024

This episode is brought to you by Lumebox and Air Doctor.  Our modern world is saturated with blue light exposure, from our devices at home to those in the workplace. With chronic exposure to artificial light and insufficient exposure to sunlight, we often overlook the long-term impact on our circadian rhythms. Today’s guest joins us to raise awareness about blue light exposure and urges us to make simple changes in our daily routines to mitigate the risk of chronic disease. Today, on The Dhru Purohit Show, Dhru sits down with Dr. Martin Moore-Ede. Dr. Moore-Ede discusses the risks of chronic blue light exposure and its impact on our health. Specifically, he highlights alarming research showing how it disrupts our circadian rhythms and increases breast cancer rates among women with exposure. Dr. Moore-Ede also explores the correlation between light exposure and obesity and sheds light on why these dangers aren’t widely discussed in mainstream media. Dr. Martin Moore-Ede is a highly respected expert in circadian rhythms and light's impact on our health. As a former professor at Harvard Medical School, he has conducted extensive research on the role of light in regulating our sleep-wake cycles and overall well-being. Dr. Moore-Ede's groundbreaking work includes the discovery of the suprachiasmatic nucleus, a crucial biological clock in the brain that controls our daily rhythms. He has contributed significantly to our understanding of how blue light, particularly from LED sources, can disrupt our circadian rhythms and lead to various health issues, such as obesity, diabetes, and even breast cancer. With his expertise, Dr. Moore-Ede advocates for adopting better lighting practices, emphasizing the importance of using the right type of light at the right time to optimize employee health and productivity.  In this episode, Dhru and Dr. Moore-Ede (audio version / Apple Subscriber version): The impact of electric light on the risk of breast cancer (00:00:33 / 00:00:33) How blue-rich light disrupts our circadian rhythm (3:54 / 3:54) Lack of exposure to sunlight (12:00 / 10:11) Balancing sun exposure and the risk of developing skin cancer (15:45 / 14:06) The correlation between blue light and obesity (28:54 / 26:00) Dr. Moore-Ede’s research discoveries (30:40 / 28:00) Why these dangers aren’t discussed in mainstream medicine (37:10 / 33:30) Hospital lighting that doesn’t promote healing (41:40 / 39:00) Dr. Moore-Ede’s origin story (44:10 / 41:30) Steps to immediately reduce your exposure (47:10 / 44:30) What is at stake when you fail to prioritize reducing exposure (1:03:20 / 1:00:50) Also mentioned in this episode: Dr. Moore-Ede’s book Light Doctor: Using Light to Boost Health, Improve Sleep, and Live Longer  Soraa Zero Blue Lights For more on Dr. Moore-Ede, follow him on Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, or his website.  This episode is brought to you by Lumebox and Air Doctor. Lumebox is offering my community $260 off their FDA-approved portable Red Light device! That's over 40% off! Go to thelumebox.com/dhru and get your Red Light device. AirDoctor is offering my community $300 off. Just go to dhrupurohit.com/filter/ to clean up your home’s air and feel better today.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr. Martin Mourid, welcome to the podcast. Today, you're here to sound the alarm about electric light and how it can become toxic to our bodies when used incorrectly. In fact, that you believe, based on the evidence space that's out there, that's very strong, that you feature in your book, is that our exposure to the wrong light at the wrong time is a big factor in our epidemic of obesity, chronic fatigue, and most shocking. to me, cancer. So to kick us off here, I'd love to share a pretty mind-blowing quote from your book that shocked me personally, and I think is going to shock a lot of our audience. And that quote is, women who have never seen electric light rarely get breast cancer. In contrast, women who are regularly exposed to bright electric light after sunset have breast cancer diagnoses rates that are five or more times higher than women with no exposure to electric light.

Help us understand why are women living in our modern Western world with all our scientific advances and technology? Why are women living in that world? Why are they at a higher risk of breast cancer because of how we've abused our relationship with light? Well, our body is extremely sensitive to life. light during the hours of darkness, during the natural nighttime hours. We were designed over millions and millions of years of our ancestors and our whole genealogy, more than 10,000

generations, to be dictated by bright daylight during the daytime and only see moonlight and dimmer, much, much darker conditions at night. With electricity, we've enabled ourselves to, you know, work at all hours, play it all hours. And the problem is that that light content, and we'll get into a little bit, but the specific wavelengths in modern electric lighting, particularly LEDs, is causing an epidemic of all sorts of diseases, including breast cancer. And the reason is that the key signal is the blue content of light. Now, in the old days, you might say, well, they had candles, they had gas lights, they had wood fires, you know, for centuries. The thing is, they contain virtually no blue content.

And to be clear, light we see as white or yellow is actually made up of all the color spectrums of the rainbow. We don't see it. Our brains integrate it, so we see it as whiteish yellow. light, but in fact, all those different colors matter and the, specifically, the blue content matters. So as we got smarter and more efficient about producing light with fluorescent light, first of all, in the 1960s, 1970s, and then more recently by 2014, we really were taking off with the LEDs. We actually found that using a lot of blue content in light made it more electrically efficient. That's great for climate change. But there's a problem because that is

triggering a response. And why it's triggering a response is all to do with our internal anatomy, our wiring, receptors in our eyes that in fact detect blue light as a signal that it's still daytime. And therefore, all the restorative processes, the heating processes of the body are switched off where they should be going at full steam ahead to protect us from cancer and everything else during the nighttime hours. Well, we're going to unpack all of that in today's interview, but I want to pull on that cancer thread a little bit further. Another quote from your book, you say, based on all the evidence we have today, it looks like blue rich electric light at night, may be the tobacco of breast cancer. So how specifically are these LED lights that

we're all being exposed to throughout the night, how is that being tied into, especially in shift workers to breast cancer? Well, let's just, first of all, let's narrow the question down one step. When I say all women who have not seen electric light, well, who are they? Right? But it's women before electric lights existed. It's women in Africa and places where there's sub-Saharan Africa where there is no electricity yet, still millions of people on those conditions. And it's also women, interestingly, who are

blind, living in modern westernized societies, and they've been blind since an early age. So we know that all those three classes of women have very low risk of breast cancer. The fact that it seems to be blue-rich light is because this blue signal is suppressing melatonin in the body. Melatonin normally suppresses cancer cells. It is disrupting on circadian clocks. And the normal processes of repair the body's protections and protecting mechanisms against cancer, and hence totally disrupted by light at night. So who sees light at night? Well, all of us in the evening, of course, but a staggering number of people exposed to light in the midnight hours, overnight hours. There are, of course, lots of shift workers. There are 25 million shift workers in North America,

there are 60, 80 million, you know, worldwide people working night shifts. You can say, okay, I understand that. But there are also a phenomenal number, a remarkable number of people who leave the lights on in their bedrooms at night. And this is not much talked about, but at least 40% of people do it. And when you get into elderly groups, more than 50% do it. And they have these elevated risks of breast cancer, prostate cancer, diabetes, obesity, heart disease. just like they were shift workers. So it's not just a shift worker problem. It is anybody who is exposed to light at night, whether they're sleeping in their beds or working the night shift.

And in fact, many of our listeners know, because we've done some podcast on it, is that the World Health Organization declared shift work basically probably carcinogenic. Is that accurate? That's right. In 2007, the World Health Organization looked at this emerging research, The research that have been occurring since about 2000, the first three major studies came out in 2000, showing a 50% or so increase in breast cancer and women who work night shifts. And there were studies in animal models

showing that if you subjected rats and other animals with cancers to the light at night, that also increased the risk. So they could duplicate it. And that was the basis of the World Health Organization, coming out with this, you know, identifying as a class 2A carcinogen, the exposure of light at night in shiftwork. Now, a lot of people said at that time, well, shift work is a special case. There are all sorts of other things in the workplace. But the story now we know, it is not just shiftwork.

It is the light itself, because it's not, it's not, you could be sleeping in your chemically clean bedroom. You're not exposed to all the, you know, all the things in a potential industrial, workplace and still get the problem. So it's the light. And it is the tobacco of breast cancer. I use that phrase because when you look at smoking, only, you know, the rate of smoking in breast cancer in non-smokers, or rate of blood cancer, I should say, in non-smokers, is about 20% only of the rate. Only about 20% of people get lung cancer are non-smokers. But you've got a five times greater risk if you're a smoker. It's exactly the same story. The rate of breast cancer and people who don't see electric light at night is about 20 cases per 100,000 women per year.

That's what you see in these places and what it used to be way back before Edison. And now in people in Western societies who expose to light, it's over 100, 120, make more in people who expose the night shifts. So we go from 20, a risk of 20 per 100,000 women to a risk of 100 to 120 per 100,000 women. And the rate is climbing steeply right now, breast cancer, especially in young women, at a rate of 4% rate of diagnosis cases increasing per year. So it's a staggering thing, and that last burst, and it is a coincidence study because, you know, you can't do the direct link. But it happens to coincide with the emergence and the adoption of these high blue pump LED lights, high rich in blue LED lights that are dominating.

It's everything that's on the store shelves today because they're the most energy efficient as far as the DOE is concerned. You know, you're one of the world's authorities in this area and you have a fascinating background. We're going to get into your background in a little bit. But as I read your book and started to understand this narrative, the story gets deeper and deeper. And it's not just about our toxic exposure to blue light in the evenings. And again, you've said blue light is neither good nor bad. It's about the time of day that we're being exposed to it. And the chronic exposure of it that is linked to increased rates of, you know, snacking and obesity,

insulin issues, as we've mentioned, cancer, and even lifespan in some aspects as well, too. We're going to talk about that in a second. But the secondary part of the story that I just want to mention here for everybody who's listening is it's not just about the toxic blue light, it's also the fact that we are living a life chronically indoors, which means that we're not getting healthy exposure to the sun. Can you talk about that for a moment? Absolutely. The critical second part of the story, it's the one side you've got excess light, excess blue-rich light during the nighttime hours, but the equally important part of it is

our lack of exposure to bright blue-rich daylight. Now, we spend over 90% of our time indoors these days. We have in the, and when we're indoors, we're living in light levels that are typically three 300, 500 lux, that's a measure of how bright light is. Now, take 500 lux, which is the brightest indoor light we normally see, and you walk outside the door and you go outside, on a dim day, you're getting 10,000 lux, on a cloudy day, 10,000 lux. And if it's a bright, sunny day, you're getting 50,000, even 100,000 lux of light. So the amount of light we're seeing is incredibly small.

So one of the most immediate things everyone needs to be advised is get out in the daytime. And people who get out in the daytime and don't stay indoors all day live longer, are healthier, have less heart disease, less diabetes, and so forth. So it's a very strong effect. The other interesting feature of that is that it actually the time of day matters. And a fascinating studies have gone on looking at because one of the, one of the conditions we haven't talked about is psychiatric illness, depression, anxiety, PTSD, all the whole cluster of illnesses that are 30% higher in people who are exposed to light

at night and 30% lowering people who get outdoors regularly. But take the classic case, this is a really mind-blowing study, if you look at people who admitted to a psychiatric ward, because they've got severe anxiety, depression, and you put them in a hospital and half of the room in the hospital are facing south and east, in other words, they see the morning sun, and the other half are facing, windows are facing north and west. Those that get in the rooms, same pharmacological treatments, same physicians, same therapy, get out of hospital half the time when they see the morning sunlight, as opposed to not getting the morning sunlight because they're in those

western north racing rooms staggering finding and that's just like coming in through the windows that's not even like getting outdoors so there is something very fundamental we've lost by going indoors you know the evidence base that you highlight inside of the book is as you mentioned it's mind-blowing you know you talked about a particular study that happened among swedish women and i'll just i'll read from the excerpt from the book that's here because this ties in together an important concept. I'll read it and then I'll talk about that. So you mentioned that a study of 29,000 Swedish women aged 25 to 64 years followed prospectively over 20 years showed that sunlight exposure greatly reduced deaths from cardiovascular disease and other non-cancer illnesses such as diabetes,

more than offsetting any risk from skin cancer. And now my commentary is that, said, you know, as we've said, this is about getting toxic blue light at the wrong times of the day, not getting enough natural light from the sun, which we were designed and evolutionarily, have been raised on this earth to expose ourselves to. And then there's this message that's out there of people saying, don't spend time in the sun. You're going to get skin cancer. Tell us why that's not the right way to look at things. Well, the fascinating thing about that study that was done in Sweet.

by Professor Lindquist and his team. Fascinating part of it is they never were intending to look at, they had an assumption. And the best studies is when you start out with an assumption that proves to be totally wrong, they thought they were going to study how much more malignant melanomas were developing Swedish women who spent time outdoors as opposed to those are indoors.

They were going to track that. And they found, indeed, there were more melanomas and other skin cancers in those women. who were spending time outdoors, but they lived far longer, the staggering thing, and they were healthier. And this actually goes back to explain some rather curious findings from years ago

where they looked at sailors in the US Navy. Now, if you're a sailor out in the US Navy, you've got a lot of exposure to sunlight out in there, on those ships. And they looked at them, and gosh, those sailors developed eight times more melanomas than the average population. But they all lived longer than the average population. So basically, yes, skin cancer is a problem, and yes, there are people die of malignant maloloma,

but far bigger risk is staying away from the sun and staying away from daylight. Now, one of the key things here is where the light is coming. For these biological effects, a lot of it can be done through the eyes. You don't have to expose your whole body and risk your skin all over being melanoma. It's getting out and your eyes being exposed to bright light that does most of the trick. But it's fascinating because it turns upside down some assumptions. And so it's really a very interesting part of this whole thing that we now understand how potently positive is daylight and sunlight during the day in a way that we've sort of, you know,

rather dismissed with our modern live-indore society. So when it comes to skin cancer, if I'm understanding you correctly, we don't want to be on either one of the extremes that are there. Some dermatologists that are out there, especially on social media these days or podcasts saying, avoid the sun like the plague. And then the other extreme side of it, which is, hey, get sun all day long and don't be smart about it.

We want to be somewhere in the middle, which is you can be smart about it and get the benefits that come from being out of, outside and exposing yourself to a healthy level of sun and you can still protect the rest of your body. Yeah. And the key thing is the morning matters and before the sun hits its, you know, reaches its zenith the peak in the middle of the day, you want to go out in the morning and relatively early in the morning, you know, in your day. That provides the strongest circadian clock resetting signal that keeps your body in sync most effectively. And it's probably about an hour

or so of light that you need, ideally. You don't have to be out for hours and hours, but that is hugely important. So get out for that walk. You know, get a dog if you can't find an excuse to get out. Take your dog for a walk. But getting outside every day in the morning, regular time. And regularity is also one of the key things in terms of health too, and particularly exposure to light. So one action item and an immediate takeaway from this interview is upon waking up, ideally, you know, we've heard different things. I've heard Dr. Andrew Heerman talk about, you know, ideally in the first 30 minutes of the day,

try to get outside, you know, upon waking and get that exposure to that morning light. Is that generally your recommendation as well? I wouldn't go that far because the problem is that then the resetting of our biological clocks are most sensitive in the mornings. But if you go to, if you take that too much extreme, particularly during summer hours, you'll be nudging yourself, you know, towards Europe time if you're living in the States

by early morning light exposure. You get yourself out of sync. So I wouldn't, I think you can have breakfast first and then go out. I don't think you have to, you know, get out in the very first 30 minutes because otherwise you will actually be resetting yourself, you know, in an eastward direction and you're going to end up in mid-Atlantic time or somewhere in Europe. So have some sense of regularity with your schedule. waking up around the same time. Obviously, there'll be some seasonal variability. But in general, when you're ready, after you have your coffee or your breakfast,

go outside and spend at least, if you can, maybe 10, 20, 30 minutes outside, but you're shooting for a total of about an hour of being outside a day at a minimum. Is that to be understood? That's right. And a good brisk walk or a run is, you know, helps your health. And, you know, one of the interesting anecdotes is that, golfers live longer. You might say the non-golfers. And you could say, well, you know, maybe that's part of it. You know, if you get around a golf course, that's going to take you an hour or two.

That's a way of getting a heavy dose of natural light. You know, when we were chit-chatting before we started, I was sharing with you that a lot of my audience is very interested in the topic of longevity. In terms of really having a long health span, it's not about living to 120 or anything like that. It's more about being as healthy as we possibly can to a ripe old age, something that is very uncommon these days, but was quite common, you know, in previous generations that were there. So I want to read another quote from your book. Again, I took feverish notes here on all aspects of your book because I just found it to be so fascinating. You hinted at this earlier on the topic of lifespan. So you wrote that those who had the most light exposure at night had a dramatic decrease in life expectancy

as compared to those who slept in the dark at night, dying 40% faster from cardiovascular disease and 30% faster from all causes of death. Set that up and give us the context for that quote. Well, this is now coming as a result of some beautiful large-scale naturally. studies where in England the so-called bio-bank studies looked at a group of over 80,000 people and they all put light meters on them continuously for a week and they found out how much light they got exposed to during the day, how much light they got exposed to at night, they could tell whether they were sleeping with the lights on, for example, or off, and then they tracked those people over time. And the average age of that population is about 60.

So basically, if they looked at that population of, I think it was almost 88,000, 60-year-olds, this statistic of dying 30% faster was dramatic in the people who had the most exposure of light at night. And similarly, the reverse, you know, with the people who have got the most light exposure during the day, lived longer in a similar way. So those are very important. And then they now tied it to instances of psychiatric disease and depression and all sorts of things. So it's based on real people, real world, studied long term, studied prospectively. In other words, you did, you evaluated them and then tracked them over time and then collected all the records of what they fell ill from and when they died and all the rest of it.

Fascinating study. And it shows a very, very important part of... of a health span, a long lifespan with healthy lifespan, is making sure you are exposed to bright blue rich light during the daytime, preferably in the mornings, and avoid like the plague light with blue in it during the evening hours and sweep in the pitch dark. I just don't have those bedroom lights on.

So that's the message, and it's a really powerful message, And it's a big effect. The effects are as large as whether you're a smoker or non-smoker in terms of scale. Yeah, that was pretty crazy when I was reading that instead of the book. So just so the audience is clear, one of the most damaging things you could do to yourself and your health, especially if you care about living a long, healthy life, is sleeping with the lights on, which you mentioned that a lot of elderly people do, or there might be situations where people have the TV very bright in the background on all night,

and that is a very damaging thing for your body's natural circadian rhythm. Yes, and the secret about this is, I mean, number one, you know, people like a little bit of light to avoid trips and folds and things like that in the bedroom. Okay. But if you direct the light, down at the floor, not with your eyes. And if you make that light an amber orange light that has no blue in it, you can have potentially a little bit of a light there.

But yes, the typical bedroom lights, and these days, anything you buy, the TVs, pump out this blue rich light. Any light bulb you buy is mostly 98, 99% of them are blue rich. And that's going to change. There are now, the solutions are out there. The solutions that we can use are out there. But essentially, it is something, I think it's largely related to people's anxiety

and they like the lights on. In fact, here I am, I'm sort of expert on this whole thing. And I go on trips and speaking trips and conferences and all the rest of it. And I'm not talking to my wife the other day. And I said, what do you do when I'm out of town? She's, oh, I always speak with the lights on. I was horrified. And so I preachy to her as much as everyone else, right?

And now and now I think she understands that you've got to have those lights off at night. Or at least, as you've mentioned, which is what I've done for my wife, who likes to sleep, or at least have a little bit of light on when I'm out of town, get one of those amber red lights. So we have those bulbs all throughout our bedroom and a master switch that she can turn them on and still feel that she has something on, but she's not getting that toxic blue light in the evening. That's right. And if you've got a clock in the bedroom, you know, make sure it's a red clock, a red LED clock, not a white or blue LED clock. So yeah, all those things. Well, we're going to unpack more. It takes very little light, by the way. It means amazing.

The big effects are seen even with one to six lux of light, which is pretty dim lighting. You can see a big effect just even with that. This all points to the fact that we have to be extremely intentional with our light environment. The same way that many people here are thinking about the food that they're eating, are conscious about not over-consuming calories, are trying to do their best and choose organic and stay away from maybe some of the harshest chemical pesticides that are out there. In that same sense of diligence that we have in what we put in our body, we have to bring that diligence to light because our health literally depends on it. I want to switch topics for

a quick second here. And I want to go to the topic and the connection of blue light and obesity. What have you found out through your years of looking at the literature that's out there? Well, we've done a lot of looking at the literature, and we've also done a lot of studies now, both in the lab, but also in the workplace. And what's really interesting is when you look at people who are under blue-rich, that means standard LED, standard fluorescent lighting at night, they are number one, they have more hunger, they have a higher appetite. They actually snack in the workplace twice as many snacks on the night shift than if you give them light that doesn't have any blue in it.

So there is an appetite part of the problem. Then there is the fact that if you look at the insulin glucose axis, in other words, metabolic measures, and you test like, a glucose torrents test, for example, where the standard test for diabetes, where you drink a bottle of sugar water, and then every half hour or so the doctor takes a blood sample, and they track how the insulin glucose and insulin levels rise, and then they fall back down if you are healthy, back to normal levels by the end of two hours. If you've got diabetes, those levels climb higher and stay higher. We find that when people are under regular LED lights,

the standard LED lights, conventional lights that you buy in the store, that they get pre-diabetic, even the first, a perfectly healthy person in the first night of exposure. And so by the morning, they've got a abnormal, a diabetic-type glucose tolerance test. And so we're adjusting, we're having big effects, therefore, on the fundamental methods of not only snacking, but also how substances are metabolized in the body.

And, you know, you're creating this metabolic syndrome, you know, in real time just by being exposed to blue rich electric lights. Let's pull on a thread for our audience of a little bit of how are all these things happening from being exposed to the wrong light at the wrong time. And specifically, I'd like for you to unpack the idea of this. master switch that's in the brain that you were a big part of the team of helping us discover. Can you talk about that? Absolutely. The circadian rhythms of our body are all those functions of the body that go up and down with the time of day. So cortisol peaks, for example, just before dawn, melatonin peaks at 2 a.m. in the morning.

other rhythms, growth hormone peaks just when you go to sleep. There are all these rhythmic patterns of body temperature goes up and down. They're all called circadian rhythms. They are not products just simply of our environment and what we're doing on outside and what we're doing. They're actually driven by a master clock in the brain and then lots of clocks, millions of clocks, and every cell and tissue of our bodies. Now, that was first of all, you know, studied in animals. But when I came, when I first started in the field, it was assumed.

In fact, the leading scientists at the time thought that humans did not have a master clock. It's called the supra-chaismatic nucleus, by the way, a SCN for short. The acronyms are useful because of a mouthful. And the super-chousmanic nucleus was found in various animals. It was found in 1972 in rats and then in hamsters. But no one could see it in the human brain. And one of the things our team did was one of my postdocs actually realized that when you're looking at atlases of the human brain, that they are showing you every 50th slices of slice of the brain and throwing out 49 slices in between. So you're only getting a sort of a snapshot of one slice through the brain and they slice it through systematically and show it as a map.

But if there's a small entity like this superchaismatic nucleus, then you're going to miss it. So Ralph Leidick, my postdoc, went back and looked at all the 49 slices in between. And lo and behold, consistently there was this same structure that was seen in rats and hamsters and monkeys and elsewhere. So yes, humans did have a super charismatic clock, wired in the same way, with a pathway coming back from the eye, from the back of the eye, from the retina, through a so-called retinohyphthalmic tract, which lit direct pathway into this supercarousinic nucleus. And given that that clock is the fundamental thing that keeps everything in timing,

that's a really fundamental part of the system. Now, I mentioned millions of other clocks. The problem is if the master clock is not being adequately synchronized by bright blue light during the daytime and absence at night, then it gets out of sync and the signal becomes weak. And the various functions of the body all start getting out of time with each other. And I've likened it to a discordant orchestra. If the conductor is not guiding the orchestra, the conductor being the S-E-N-Clock,

then, of course, you get this really discordant sound. For the body to be harmonious and to be healthy, everything needs to be tightly in sync and with a robust amplitude, in other words, a strong beat to this system. And you only get that if you're exposed to bright daylight during the day and pitch darkness at night. And that gives you this strong beat. And that is the thing that keeps your body healthy, gives you a long healthy lifespan, boost your immune system, protects you against viruses and COVID and everything else. all those things are elements are a key element of health that we've too often neglected just because of the comfort of sitting indoors in a comfy situation and working half the time in front of a computer screen.

I've heard you mention that the evidence is so robust and there's so many people that are contributing to the literature in this field of understanding the exposure of light and how it impacts our health. I think you mentioned that there might be 30,000 researchers that are out there that are working on this. Then we have the mechanistic implications and the ways that it works inside the body. You know, you and your team have been a big part of that. There's been other teams that have been working on that too. We have all these studies that are out there. We know the dangers in the body of literature. And yet many of my audience members are probably scratching their head thinking, why is this the first time that I'm hearing about how dangerous

blue light at the wrong time of day is to my body so dangerous that it could be increasing my risk of breast cancer, obesity, worsening my immune system. How come no doctors or public health individuals are talking about this important topic? Great question. One of my colleagues said it very well. He says the problem is the scientists in this field just talk to each other. They don't talk to their neighbors. So this is well-known science. In fact, I did a consensus study with 248 of the world's leading scientists in this field recently, just to see, make sure we were all on the same conclusions, and indeed we came out some very solid conclusions, consensus among these scientists. The blue light was the key. It's detected by melanopsin, this pigment in the eye.

it synchronizes the circadian rhythms, that diabetes, the cancers, and everything else are related to disruptions of this system. All that is well-known, established science, but it just is staggering to me and others in the field that this has not yet penetrated the public consciousness. And it should because this is, we're talking about environmental pollutant, a blue light at night. Yet it's the simplest of all the environmental pollutants you can think of. We talk about P-FAS chemicals and we talk about microplastics, and we talk about all these things, horrendous problems to clean up. This is pretty simple, just change the down light bottle.

It's actually a pretty simple solution. And yet, there is a lot of, and you might say, why is that? well, there's a lot of embedded interest in their commercial interest in the industry. They've built these lights. That's what they sell. It's a 150 billion dollar industry that's like an aircraft carrier. It's hard to turn it around sometimes. It is a industry that is being regulated by the Department of Energy, which has put its head, quite frankly, in the about this issue, and, you know, they have refused to accept and understand that this is a real issue because their focus, their mandate is to reduce the lumens, or at least to maximize the

lumens per watt efficiency. And let me explain that a little bit. Lumens is a measure of the amount of light, but it's not the measure of the amount of light per se. It is the measure a brightness of light. And because of the way the eyes processed light, it is actually looking only at the green and yellow wavelengths in light. It's not looking at the blue, which is essential for circadian health. It's not looking at the red wavelengths in light, which is essential for healing and lot of important health issues around red light. They purely measure this brightness of light. And so they're actually not measuring the healthiness of light. They're measuring a convenient standard that engineers can get their head around.

You know, let's just make this lumenspo-watt standard as high as possible. And that way, we force out and now are ban, banning, effectively, all incandescent light bulbs. Those are the standard old light bulbs. We banned all halogen light bulbs. We're banning all fluorescence. And now we're forcing the consumer to only have these LED lights. and the LED lights that are pumping out this energy-efficient light, which is rich in blue, because that's the way you can get the most efficient conversion of electricity into lumens.

So we've got ourselves into a sort of situation where we are harming ourselves. And you might say, you know, okay, it's all about the good of the climate, good of the planet. And we all recognize the importance of global warming and curtailing that. We all recognize the electricity consumption is part of that. We all recognize the problem of greenhouse gases. But you cannot fix that by creating a huge human health problem, which is far bigger in its effect right now than the current effects of climate change. So it's really a matter of getting the balance right.

And this is a huge issue. But as I say, these fringe – these – these – these – these – these – these – these – these – forces are there, and also the inertia of the market. If the consumer doesn't understand it and isn't asking for blue-free, zero blue light at night, then the lighting companies won't build it. And the lighting companies say, well, let's have the consumer ask for it, but the consumers don't know. And the energy people are trying to regulate it so you can't get low-blue, I mean, the incand-escence relatively low in blue light, you can't get them anymore. So we got ourselves in this situation, one of the reasons of writing the book, is trying to break through this log

jam of misconception, inertia, and quite frankly, misinformation in some cases. One of the saddest things that we see today is that in the Western world and increasingly around the rest of the world, as they get access to modern health care, is that when people are sick from food, but also things like chronic poor light exposure, not enough sun, etc. And these things materialize as chronic disease as we age, they get sent to the hospital. And the hospital is an environment that has often the worst lighting in the world for the people that are the most vulnerable. Can you talk about that? Absolutely. Yeah, this is the problem. The hospital lighting is typically and historically,

it's all been blue-rich fluorescent lighting. That's what I, when I was a surgeon in training, that's what I worked under 24-7. But also now more and more LED lights, it's all about meeting, you know, energy efficiency standards and, you know, having certifications like what's so-called lead statifications that they can boast about, about how climate-conscious they're. are. But amazingly, they haven't got it yet and it is a hard sell to get people to start to change. So yes, healthcare is one thing. And yet the evidence is being very strong. I mean, in other words, in Europe, they're rather far ahead. There's companies in Europe that are

putting lights into nursing homes, circadian lighting, which is free of blue at night and rich in blue during the day, in nursing homes, in hospitals, showing a lot of beneficial end results. But it is slow to catch on. And, you know, as I say, that's part of the reason of getting the book out is to try to get this breakthrough here. We've got to get to the tipping point where when people start demanding it, then these lights get in because then, and people need to know what to ask for specifically so they can't have placebo lighting passed off on them.

Yeah, and we'll unpack that a little bit more. But I want to talk about your personal story. You know, we're talking about the hospital system, which is not only bad for patients, the lighting that's there, even though the intentions are good and to want to help people. I've seen firsthand with family members who literally cannot fall asleep, who are recovering from chronic pain or chronic diseases, and they cannot fall asleep between the sounds, the lighting and the other things, and they end up going delusional and having, you know, all sorts of even suicidal ideations in one instance, which was super unfortunate.

You have personal experience with the damages of being in this system. Can you talk about your own story and what you went through? Well, yes. I mean, here I am, you know, spending a lot of time with lights on that night because I'm either in the lab, studying these circadian rhythms, or I'm in the, obviously, it was in the hospital environment. And lo and behold, I did come down with prostate cancer. Fortunately, I caught it early. I got some, got to one of the best surgeons in the country to take care of it and now are free of it.

But, you know, that again is, you know, I'm just one of the people who have double the risk or more of, getting developing prostate cancer. Now when you have double the risk, doesn't mean everyone against prostate cancer or breast cancer. It just means twice as many, twice as likely to get it or more. So, yeah, that was, you know,

personal experience of being exposed to light at night and I spent a lot of my career, you know, getting exposed to that light because I was studying people on the night shift and also studying in the lab, these mechanisms and figuring out, you know, which actually are the light that are healthy and which lights are unhealthy when you use them during the night times.

I believe if I understood correctly, listening to your story on another podcast, you also, in your origin story of even deciding what to research look into, you were suffering from some symptoms, including brain fog that you later learned was probably exasperated by the light conditions that you're in. Can you talk about that? Absolutely. Yeah. I, um, when I was training as a first year resident surgeon, uh, and I was working those extraordinary long hours. They're just typical 36 hours on duty, 12 hours off, back in for 36, walking around like a zombie because of the disruption to my sleep patterns and, uh, and fatigue, nodding off in the operating room, writing prescriptions, I couldn't make sense of the next day. I mean, that was all

the immediate impact of working in the environment where my circadian rhythms were, to use a technical term, screwed up by the exposure to this, you know, aberrant day and night. That time, it was blue-riched fluorescence in those days that were used in those environments. So, yeah, I know I had very first-hand experience of that. It's sort of jet lagged without the joy of travel, basically, as a result of that. And it's a very profound disruption, the fatigue, the malaise. And it's not just a sleeping problem. It's much broader than that in terms of health.

Let's talk about action items that we can leave our audience with as they start to understand that they need to be diligent about this area. and that our goal here is not fear-mongering, but really awareness of something that's taking place and awareness on something that largely can be very straightforward to address and quote-unquote fix in our lives. So if we take some of the action items you've mentioned today, as well as maybe some of them that you haven't,

what are one of the first steps that you would have somebody be taking in their life to protect, themselves from the toxic blue light at the wrong time of day? Well, the first thing is that as a result of our research, we were able, I mean, when we started our research, we thought there was a huge problem. We said if it's just light at night, you know, any light at night, that's almost a very difficult problem to manage because a lot of people need light at night, particularly in the workplace.

But fortunately, we were able to find it was a rather narrow band of blue that was responsible. So we were able to develop LED lights. It's not LED is a blue or bad. It's the LED lights that were engineered specifically to take out the blue light. In other words, and we could put in some violet light in the mix to make the light whiter and more acceptable colored. But essentially, we could get these lights taking out this blue band. And those lights now are being out in the world for about five years. We've had great experience in workplaces, and now they're available in light bulbs as well.

And those lights are able to reverse these problems. So we're able to show that the appetite issue, you know, excess appetite and hunger and snacking is reversed by using those lights. We were able to show the diabetic symptoms and the disorders of glucose and insulin are reversed. We're able to show the melatonin suppression by regulating the lights is reversed. So we can actually reverse all that by just simply changing the light bulb to one that has an engineered spectrum that's designed to be effectively zero blue during the nighttime hours. So that's the big finding in terms of what you can do. You can change that. Another thing you can do is you can use eyewear if you can't control the lights because it's not your space. They're blue blocking glasses.

but blue blocking glasses have to be aware of because a lot of things are called blue blocking glasses. It matters that it blocks the right blue or the blue you need to get rid of. A lot of the glasses that are sold today, including some of the most common ones that you get when you go out and get eyewear,

they say, would you like some blue blocking in there? And people tend to say yes, cost you an extra 200 bucks or so. It turns out it blocks entirely the wrong blue. It does no benefit whatsoever in terms of removing the circadian blue. The circadian blue is a sky blue color. Blue comes in all sorts. There's violet blues, indigoes, the royal blues, the sky blues, the aqua blues,

the range of blues that go between around 420 to 500 nanometers on the scale of lighting. That's where we measure in nanometer wavelengths. But you've got to block around the 480 range, particularly around the 460-495 range. That's what you need to remove. And when you do that with proper glasses, then you get the real benefits. The melatoners are restored, the glucose and other metabolism things are restored. And, you know, some fascinating studies with if you use blue blocking glasses in the evening and you get exposed to blue rich light in the mornings, guess what?

Your children's math scores go up in school. Great end result. of practical day-to-day importance of if you can control the blue content of what you're seeing. That's fascinating. Going backwards, the light bulbs that you've been involved with in creating as an entrepreneur, inventor and working with a team, do they have a consumer name that our audience could look up or that we could link to in the show notes if people are curious about that? Absolutely. the main manufacturer of these light bulbs that are pleasant color and really take out the blue are called SORA S-O-R-A-A-A.

That's the company. The brand is Zero Blue, so Sara Zero Blue. And they're available in the Amazon store and so forth. Right now there are static light bulbs that are just screw in in the bedroom and they will just remove all the blue and their bedroom, for example, all the rooms you use in the evening. Shortly, they'll be coming out with lights that automatic light bulbs are dynamic. That means they automatically give you blue rich light during the day and change, they know they've got a clock within them, and they change to give the zero blue at night. But sorry is the main product. If you're looking for light

fixtures, then a company called EcoSense produces what are called circadian blue lighting, automatically changes the blue content within standard architectural type fixtures. So, yes, the brands are available and the lights are available to do the trick right now. That's great. So I'd love to just summarize some of these action items the way that I've internalized them and also from reading your book. And if I get anything wrong, please tell me and correct me inside of the air. So starting with the sort of something that everybody can do today without even having to necessarily

buy a product or anything else like that is making sure that at night at least turn off the overhead lighting around dusk as the sun starts to set turn off the overhead lighting that many of us has in our in our homes that is putting so much of that junk blue light into our eyes and start to sort of you know calm your space down a little bit use maybe a floor lamp that's supposed that that has a night shade around it or or use other lamps that are not at eye level or below eye level so that at least, you know, you can see your way around. We don't want anybody tripping, but just sort of tone everything down a little bit that's that in your light environment around you. Now, if you want to go a step further is something I've done in my house. You know,

you can have these red bulbs. You know, you've talked about them as well too. You can find them on on on amazon and essentially you're getting that blue light removed but the only downside is you have this red sort of amber light that's there i'll use them in our bedrooms i'll pretty much turn off the light in all of my house except for in our bedroom around evening and i do use blue light blocking glasses from a reputable company that i know that you know filters out the right ones of course that's something that people have to purchase so that is something that i would recommend you know setting aside for it's going to be something that's going to be supportive of your health and then as i understand within those things uh and and one important component is that we even have these red light bulbs in our

in our uh bathroom or when i go to my bathroom at night to brush my teeth or or get you know get ready for bed i i was i was uh always there to make sure that there's not this bright light right before you go to sleep in your bathroom so i've put in little night lights for myself and my and my wife in fact funny little anecdote is that I would see that my wife would get this surge of energy in the evening, even though we had lowered all the lights and her and I have different bathrooms. And I was thinking about it when we first moved in together after we got married. And I thought, you know what? What is she doing in her bathroom is all her lights on? And that was the case. Her lights were on and she was getting this surge of sort of this wake up energy from being exposed to all this lighting

that was there. So we switched that out and we put in these night lights. Now, to switch over to the products that you mentioned, I haven't seen those and I'm excited to try them. The advantage of these zero blue lights from that company, SORA, we'll link to it in the show notes below. I'm excited to buy a couple myself, is that these are still the white lights that people are traditionally used to in their home. So that's the advantage, except they just have that specific spectrum of blue light that is most harmful for us in the evenings. That band of blue light has been removed. Is that correct? That's right.

They've taken out the blue light, but they've also given you a color that is more normal so that if you're trying to do some work in the evenings or your kids doing some homework assignments and so forth, and you can use those lights to provide, you know, provide lighting that's, you know, conducive to doing work or doing something practical. If you need to do, you get your tax returns done or whatever it else, you need to. to have lighting and it's hard to do if the light is very dark amber, orange, or red. So that's one of the advantages there. So it sort of adds to the armatory of what you need.

I'd add a couple more things to your mixture, though. I would say make sure that your bedroom has got drapes in it that are truly light-tight. And there are two reasons for that. One is you don't really get extraneous light, or especially in the summer early in the mornings coming in, or street lights and other lights in the environment, because that's a big source of lighting. It's light coming in from street lights and people who are exposed to a lot of light from blue rich light from street lights can actually have a higher risk of cancer. But you also are doing something for the environment too because you're not pumping light out into the outside world. and we've been talking so far about lighting for the indoor world, but we've got a responsibility to the rest of the 8.7 million species on this planet

that live outside and are hugely harmed by electric light at night. And so there's been an sort of excessive lighting up with buildings, lighting up streets, light pollution issues, and so you're also benefiting that. So drapes do good for you, and they do good for you. and they do good for flora and fauna of the outside world. And then the other things we've talked about, as you know, is getting outdoors during the daytime, particularly in the mornings. So that's, there's essentially what we call a light diet, you know, just like a nutritional diet.

You can just put around the clock, you can figure out, you know, I'm going to have morning light here that's rich and blue. I'm going to have blue enhanced light during the daytime. If I'm indoors, I'm going to make sure. I'm getting blue light because I just don't get very much of it if I'm sitting indoors, so I'm going to enhance that. I'm going to bring that down at sunset. I'm going to adjust it. I'm going to try to sleep as close to pitch dark conditions as I can at night. So understanding that whole pattern of when to switch from one type of lighting to another. And to do that, you need to look for light that is not the cheap junk light,

like junk food, that may look good, or, in junk food tastes good sometimes, you got to look for something that actually has got a healthness to it. And that's critical in lighting. That's fantastic. And again, we'll link to the company that you're involved in

in the show notes below. People can check it out. Another area that there can be some cleanup and some proper hygiene being brought to our light universe, so to speak, is our phones. Our phones emit a lot of that blue light and people tend to go on their phones in bed in the evening and that light is also

a big part of them keeping themselves up and getting exposure to the wrong type of blue light spectrum. What is the hygiene that you typically recommend to people when it comes to protecting yourself from the light that comes from the phone? Well, first of all, you know, the phones and other computer screens, all types of screens produce blue rich light. It's the same LEDs that are powering them. And it's not the color that matters. And some of the various companies reduce them, Apple and all the other brands of iPhones, mobile phones, put color filters on, which is not a very effective way, just changing the colorism. way of doing, you kind of make sure you're removing the correct color. Now, I would also say

innovation is catching up here. There are now computer screens that have been prototyped and developed coming to market, which are automatically now dosing you in the same way. Can we do with phone screens. So they can provide blue rich light during the day and zero blue light during the evening hours. So that's part of the whole thing. Now, I I think there's been a bit of, too heavily a focus on sleep, because the question, you know, there's been this debate, does that blue light and night really adjust sleep? And if you look at one or two days of sleep when someone's using light,

you can't see a very big effect and therefore we dismiss this. You know, there's some articles in the literature dismissing it. In reality, it's a much broader effect on sleep. Sleep is determined not just by a circadian clock, but by the accumulated sleepiness of the day. So there's something called the two components of sleep. One's called the circadian component. The other is called the so-called homeostatic component. But that's a fancy word for saying that accumulated fatigue that occurs during the day is driving you towards sleep.

So that's not really influenced by light at all. So you can't shift sleep very easily or change it very much by this. but you do need to still remove the blue because all those other metabolic effects are occurring. The melatonin suppression, the other effects occurring with screens that are too rich in blue. And if you do the right protocol, not just for a day, but you do it for weeks and months at a time, you can see real noticeable improvements in sleep and a lot of other things as a result of that. So yes, you need to have a protocol where you're managing the use of your screens. And the other side of screens, by the way, which is a very valid point, is watching something exciting or that gets you anxious or worst thing, a horror movie just before you go to bed, gets your brain activated an entirely different mechanism.

So it's no, it's not good to be looking and checking emails and getting that, oh my gosh, is my boss berating me for something I did wrong? you know, at 11 o'clock at night, that's not what you want to be reading. So one of the messages about mobile phones is, I don't have my name in the bedroom. I do not use it as a clock. There are other clocks you can use. I put it away, I put it in the kitchen, I power it up in the kitchen, and well away from the bedroom. So I make a conscious effort an hour or so before bed at least to put it out of my reach for both my mental well-being but also my, you know, the lighting well-being. That's a great tip. I know that tip. I've heard that tip from any guests on this podcast. I have yet to fully implement that tip. I'm always honest with my audience,

but it's something that I want to aspire to do. You know, what is at stake? Can you help our audience understand, what's at stake if we don't fix this mess that we're in when it comes to light? Well, our problem is that we have this problem of chronic ill health, and it sort of builds up over time, and it's psychiatric ill health, more anxiety, depression. We have, you know, these insidious chronic diseases like diabetes and the side effects of obesity. We have failures in our immune system. We have more heart disease and more cancers. And all of that can inspire us to an unhealthy life, but also a shortened life.

And the effects can take years off your life doing that. So if we don't address this problem, we're really ignoring one of the, as I said, one of the simplest things to do that we have really a lot of control over and so easy to address if we don't by choosing the right lights for the right time of day. So it's, you know, ill health costs money. It costs lost time for work. It costs effects on mood, effects on your sick leave time, absenteers, has big effects. one of the things we see with employers when we put the right lighting in place, the circadian type lighting, we see improvements in reduction in sick leave, reduction in absenteeism, reduction in

turnover, reduces the overall stress when you adjust the body, you know, help people adjust to working hours. So all those things are really beneficial. So the big effects on if our happiness, our productivity, our health, and our lifespan that are all related to having the right light at the right time. I love to ask this question to authors that are truly subject matter expertise in their fields, which you are, in preparation of putting this book together, even with everything that you know, was there still something pretty shocking for you as you came across certain evidence base or studies that maybe you might even have forgotten?

gotten about or hasn't come across your desk that you put inside of the book? Well, I think, you know, it's stage by stage because, of course, as I look at things, you know, the science has moved on. So in the old days, you know, when we discovered the circadian clock, the supercosmatic nucleus in the human brain and located the thing, we thought any light would work, we just assumed. So it was an eye opener when we, the study starting showing that it was just the blue part of the spectrum that really matters. added here. So that was a finding. We didn't realize in the early days the role of melatonin in suppressing cancer. Now, in terms of writing the book, I think what's been striking

for me is the scale of the health issues. I think when I started looking at the lifespan questions, that was mind-boggling that it could be big enough effect to show in these studies that people would die 30% or 40% sooner under unhealthy lighting. environments where everything else in their lives are the same. So those were huge things. And as I say, the science is moving ahead so fast. So this is a rather important time where we've got a very solid basic science base. We've got the applied science and the naturalistic field studies. And we also have solutions. And one of the biggest anxieties in writing the book, would there be enough solutions available to talk about? Because there's one thing to scare everyone with

the big problem and not have a solution. And fortunately, as I say, just in the last year, you know, brand new solutions are becoming out. And that was one of the really encouraging things that now I can present not only, I don't like to be someone who just comes with a problem. I want to come with the problem and the solution. That's a far better position to be in. Absolutely. There's a big, big problem that faces us all. We're all going through this issue of not getting enough of the sun at the right time of the day and getting bad toxic light at the wrong time of the day. And yet it is straightforward in how to address it. It's just a big education gap, which is why we were so excited to have you on the podcast today. Dr. Martin Mourid,

thank you for being on here. Is there any request of our audience to help you spread this message? we of course have the link to your book below, the light doctor, using light to boost health, improve sleep, and live longer. We're going to be linking to a lot of the solutions, including a few settings that you can do on your phone

that will help reduce that additional blue spectrum light that's there. But any further asks of our audience who really feel like this shouldn't be, you know, a problem that we're all facing, because it's pretty straightforward to address. And if they want to be part of this advocacy campaign of raising awareness, do you ever ask for them?

Absolutely. This is a really important thing we all need to be working together. In fact, we're putting together a campaign for healthy lighting that you read more about at circadianlight.org. But essentially, my suggestion to you is, please buy the book, read the book. if you like this message and see the importance of the message, and I think you will, buy a gift copies for some of your friends.

That's a way because the purpose about a book is you can actually hand it to someone and it's something tangible, much easier than say go and look at a website. And also, if you're trying to get these lights in your workplace or your public library or in the nursing home that your elderly parents are in, The book is a very useful vehicle to communicate the message. The last thing I might ask is, if you like the book, please give it a review on Amazon, because that's another way that you can help get the word out and get it identified as something that people should read. Right now, as I say, the book has just come out, and we're trying to get the word out to as many people.

It's such an easy fix. It's such a benefit for yourself. everybody else that we really encourage you to join this. It's a cause that we all need to be really participating in and are hoping to provide the information you need to really persuade people to take seriously the matter of healthy lighting. Fantastic. The book is out there.

Again, the light doctor using light to boost health, improve sleep and live longer. Dr. Moury. Thank you so much for coming on this podcast and sharing your body of work on this important topic that is affecting us all. But there are solutions that are out there. We appreciate you being here with us. Thank you, Drew. Enjoy this.

Hi, everyone. Drew here. Two quick things. Number one, thank you so much for listening to this podcast. If you haven't already, subscribe, just hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app. And by the way, if you love this episode, it would mean the world to me. and it's the number one thing that you can do to support this podcast is share with a friend, share with a friend who would benefit from listening.

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