Dhru Purohit Show - Light As Medicine: The Untold Science Behind Sunlight and Light Therapy for Disease Prevention and Total Body Health with Roger Seheult, MD

Episode Date: December 3, 2025

This episode is brought to you by Bon Charge, Maui Nui, and Momentous. Light isn’t just something we see; it’s a nutrient our bodies depend on. New research shows that sunlight and infrared light boost mitochondrial function, support brain health, and may even influence obesity and seasonal illness. Today’s guest breaks down why modern life leaves so many of us light-deficient and shares simple steps to bring this essential pillar of health back into their daily routine. Today on The Dhru Purohit Show, Dhru sits down with quadruple board-certified physician Dr. Roger Seheult to explore the often-overlooked role of light, especially infrared light, as a vital nutrient for our health. Dr. Seheult breaks down how modern lifestyles have led to a widespread deficiency in natural sunlight, contributing to issues like cognitive decline, obesity, and chronic disease. He shares insights from his clinical experience, the latest research on light therapy, and practical steps anyone can take to increase healthy light exposure. Dr. Seheult also outlines the eight laws of health, highlighting how nutrition, exercise, sunlight, and rest work together to support long-term well-being. Dr. Roger Seheult is a quadruple board-certified physician in internal medicine, pulmonary diseases, critical care, and sleep medicine. He serves as an Associate Clinical Professor at UC Riverside and an Assistant Clinical Professor at Loma Linda University. He practices at Optum California as a critical care, pulmonary, and sleep specialist, directs a sleep lab, and serves as Medical Director for the Crafton Hills College Respiratory Care Program. He is also the co-founder of MedCram, whose CME-accredited medical education videos are used by hospitals, medical schools, and millions of clinicians worldwide. In this episode, Dhru and Dr. Seheult dive into:  The overlooked “nutrient” your body is starving for (00:32)  How infrared light supercharges your mitochondria (4:40) The hidden link between light and cognitive decline (8:47) COVID-19 treatment with light therapy (15:23) Healing power of sunlight (21:41) Why low sunlight may drive weight gain and obesity (28:40) The surprising reason flu season even exists (41:16) Eight Laws of Health (59:56) Morning light hacks when you can’t get outside (01:04:37) Benefits of leaving windows open (1:07:50) Beating the afternoon slump (1:11:05) Red light devices and their limitations (1:16:13) Light Deficiency: The Modern Scurvy (1:24:15) Final takeaways to reboot your relationship with light (1:26:34) Also mentioned in this episode: Higher ultraviolet light exposure is associated with lower mortality Brighter nights and darker days predict higher mortality risk For more on Dr. Seheult, follow him on Facebook, X/Twitter, LinkedIn, or visit his Website. This episode is brought to you by Bon Charge, Maui Nui, and Momentous. Right now, Bon Charge is having their holiday sale and offering my community 25% off. Just go to boncharge.com/DHRU and use code DHRU to save 25% today.  Right now, Maui Nui Venison is offering my listeners a limited collection of my favorite cuts and products and a FREE 12-pack of venison jerky sticks with your first order of $79 or more! Just go to mauinuivenison.com/dhru to secure your access now, but hurry, supply is limited! Optimize your energy and mental clarity with the purest form of creatine, made by and used by the best, now available in convenient and tasty lemon lime chews. Head to livemomentous.com and use code DHRU for 35% off your first subscription. Sign up for Dhru’s Try This Newsletter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Roger, a pleasure to have you on the podcast. I've shared you before, but I'm a huge fan, and I want to jump right in. You know, we spend so much time obsessing, and I've been guilty of this too, about the food we put in our mouths, the supplements we're taking, but you've essentially said that we are starving for a different type of nutrient, one that we can actually absorb through our skin and eyes. Talk to us about this nutrient, and more importantly, why the lack of it in our modern society is making us super sick.

Yeah, this is a big topic. You know, we have assumed for a long time that, and I have, even as a health care provider, I'm a physician, sleep specialist, pulmonary, that's lungs and critical care. That light is really for the eyes and for the skin, because that's where we interact with light. It's on the outside of our body and had to be educated, really, on how that worked. So light in general is a continuum. And we've all seen that, you know, the rainbow,

or we've seen white light going into a prism and it's being divided up into the colors of the rainbow. That's just a small microcosm of the full spectrum that's out there. There's stuff to the left of red and to the right of violet. And we call that infrared and ultraviolet respectively. And those have actual implications for our body as well. So the problem is that, you know, that term that we use, like, I have to see it to believe it, right? So we all completely understand

what red light is, what orange light is with green, blue. There are other colors that you cannot see that have an impact and behave differently than visible light. So let's talk about ultraviolet light just briefly, just to round it out. We know that ultraviolet light, you can't see it, comes from the sun, and is responsible for making vitamin D in your skin. This is how you get vitamin D. You can also take it orally as a supplement, but the body makes its own vitamin D by going outside. You can't get that ultraviolet light inside. You can't get that ultraviolet light even certain parts of the day. So it's important to be outside enough to get vitamin D and to get your vitamin D checked. That's a separate topic. So ultraviolet is high frequency, short wavelength,

type of light. On the other extreme of that, so beyond violet and then going through the colors and then popping out the other side of red is infrared light. Infrared light is also a light that you cannot see, but instead of having a higher frequency than visible light, it has a lower frequency. And because of that property, it is able to penetrate far more deeply. And this is really something that took me a long time to sort of grasp, but once I did, things opened up. this type of light, this infrared light, is able to penetrate through your skin and actually go deeply into the human body.

In fact, there was a paper that was just published in July of this year. This is 2025 when we're recording this. Glenn Jeffrey out of University College London where he took people outside and measured the wavelength of light coming from the sun before it went into their body. And it was actually able to,

to measure infrared light coming out the other side of their body. In a very particular area, this was infrared light. So he did a number of other things in that study, but the first thing that really I want people to get their heads wrapped around is when you go outside and you're in sunlight, there is a particular type of light that you cannot see that's coming from the sun that is able to penetrate through clothes, through your skin,

and actually go deeply into your body and affect changes in the cells of your body. That's, I think we're all stopped there just to sort of make that out there because here's the thing, that false understanding that light is just for the skin and your eyes just got blown out of the water. Infrared light from the sun, again,

it's able to penetrate easily through the atmosphere. If you can see the sun, there's infrared light. At all times of the day, and at all times of the year. If the sun is out, you're getting infrared light. It's able to penetrate through your clothes very easily. It's able to penetrate deep down into your skin. It's able to go into your body and your body sees infrared light

and it comes out the other side in much smaller amounts, of course. So let's take it a little one step deeper. What is this light doing to our body and also the lack of it? What is the lack of it doing to our body? So that's interesting that you mention, what is it doing to our body? We have some understanding, but we're getting more understanding. And if I were to get into what I know up to this point and what we're working on, we'd be talking about quantum mechanics. We'd be talking about astrophysics.

We would be talking about biochemistry and electron transport chains in the mitochondria. Suffice to say that the batteries in your cells called mitochondria seem to be upregulated, seem to be. increased, seem to put out more energy when they are in the presence of this infrared light. We're starting to work out the thermodynamics and exactly why that happens. It has to do with activation energies and things of that nature for electron transport. But it seems as though that infrared light upregulates mitochondria. We have, this is not just a fairy tale or a theory. We actually have hard evidence generated by randomized controlled trials. put out by labs here in the last year or two

that have shown that. We've shown that red light, infrared light on a human being upregulates metabolism, increases in title CO2, reduces fuels like glucose, which is what it's using for metabolism. In that study by Glenn Jeffrey, that infrared light around 850 nanometers, it improves mitochondrial function

not only in the path of the light, but also in mitochondria that are outside of the path of the light, for instance, in the eyes. and they measured that output by measuring the visual acuity of the subjects. In other words, vision, color perception improved, and color perceptions very highly dependent on energy production by mitochondria in the cone cells of your retina, for instance. There's plenty of research in this that goes back probably almost a decade,

looking at mitochondrial function, the cytocrone C oxidase, which is one of the electron transport proteins, in the mitochondria that's responsible for making energy and a proton gradient. But yeah, there is the energy, that's what's happening. And I'll just say, well, why is this so important? Why do we need more energy coming from the mitochondria? This is really where the rubber hits the road.

Heart disease, diabetes, cancer, dementia, inflammation, long COVID, influenza, all of these diseases have at the epicenter of their causation, mitochondrial dysfunction. In fact, the theory of aging is highly dependent and actually essential to mitochondrial dysfunction. People as you get older will lose about 30, 40, even up to 50% in the retina of function from the mitochondria in the terms of its ability to make energy. So if you can reverse a lot of that, then you're talking about reversing some of the effects of aging, reversing some of the effects of chronic disease. We just talked about diabetes.

We talked about heart disease. These are big players in industrialized countries. So this is really hitting up the core for what we're seeing. And your question was, okay, this is what infrared light is doing. Also implicated in that is what will happen if you don't get infrared light, at least on a regular basis. Yeah, let's talk about some specific examples. You know, you've mentioned you take care of super sick people in the hospital. and that's also part of your origin story

around having your aha moment around photobiomodulation and light therapy. We're going to get to that in a second. But you're also highlighting how on a global level, even things that we wouldn't think of are tied into this conversation. Let's pick one of them. Let's talk about cognitive decline, neurodegenerative diseases.

What do we know about how they are related to this topic of getting the right amount of light from the sun in particular and how that infrared light has an impact on our body and our brain. Yeah, so this is an important topic. And when we talk about infrared light, realize that the sun is a package. Okay, this is something I'm going to re-stress over and over again, is that not only are you getting infrared light from the sun, you're also getting visible light from the sun, you're also getting ultraviolet light from the sun. And it happens all at the same time. The ultraviolet does modulate some, but you're getting a wide spectrum. And so when we talk about studies where people are getting out into the sunlight, realize that it's hard to parse out a lot of these topics.

But we know, for instance, that visible light alone without infrared light, without ultraviolet light, those either, visible light does help with circadian rhythm. And when circadian rhythms are aligned, you're going to get better cognitive function. No question about it. You're going to get better mood. And so just visible light itself is going to be very beneficial. You add infrared light into that. And as we've talked about already, infrared light is beneficial to mitochondria.

Multiple, multiple papers connecting Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, many other neurocognitive degenerative diseases to the mitochondria in the brain. And we've already talked about how infrared light is beneficial there. You might be asking, well, how is it possible that infrared light is going to be able to have an effect on an organ that's literally surrounded by bone? And as I talked to before, infrared light is very easily able to penetrate through tissue, even bone.

This may sound kind of incredulous about this, but there was a study that was done looking at infrared light through a hand. And actually there's a photograph of this in an article called Longer Wavelanks, is able to have systemic effects. It's actually published by Glenn

Jeffrey. That was the one in July. And in there there's a photograph of Bob Fosbury's hand who was a co-author on that paper. And it shows clearly that in the infrared spectrum that light is able to pass right through the hand. And you don't even

see bones. Like, it's just going through the bones like there's nothing. It's out of that visibility window. So that light is able to certainly penetrate through the skull. The cerebral spinal fluid is able to diffuse that infrared light. And then the crevices and the gyri, if you will, of that light is able to be collected. And there's two types of matter in the brain. There's gray matter and white matter. Gray matter is on the outside. And that's where, the propensity of the mitochondria are stored. And so it's almost like this is like a solar array in your brain that's there and designed to collect

and to make good use of infrared light. You know, I talked about your origin story and there's multiple that are there, but in the particular part of this conversation and we're talking about light, I'd love for you to give us a little bit of a background about how you had this aha moment around light specifically around the pandemic and taking care of some of the sickest people who literally

were dying or on their deathbed. You know, I'm super into giving meaningful, helpful gifts. I especially love gifting. My favorite health and wellness gadgets to my friends and family because I know how much of a difference they're going to make in people's lives. One of the gifts that you might want to consider this year is the bond charge red light face mask. This is a gift that actually gets used and makes a real difference. Their red light face mask is like giving the gift of light and health, literally.

It uses red and near infrared wavelengths to support collagen, skin repair, and bring back that healthy glow that we all lose a little bit during the drier winter months. It's effortless, relaxing, and backed by real science. Just 10 to 20 minutes while you're winding down at night. And by the way, my wife and my sisters are huge fans. And if you want to explore more ways to use the power of red light therapy, Bond Charge has a whole lineup worth checking out. Everything from their red light toothbrush to their blue light blocking glasses and more.

They've got you so covered this holiday season. And right now, it's the best time to shop. It's the Bond Charge holiday sale. You can save a massive 25% off sitewide on all their products. To get this deal, just head over to bondcharge.com and your 25% discount will automatically be added at checkout. The sale will end on the 31st of December 2025, so hurry and don't miss this massive chance to save big on your favorite bond charge products. All right, you want to know something wild? Sometimes the cleanest food doesn't come from the farm, although I'm a huge fan of farms.

It comes from the wild. This is what makes Maui-Nui venison so special. Their meat comes from wild access deer that roam free on Maui, Hawaii, stress-free, eating naturally, and harvest ethically to restore balance to Hawaii's ecosystem. No massive list of middleman running an industrial supply chain pumping plastics into your food. Just clean, wild, nutrient-dense venison aged 14 days for steakhouse level tenderness and flavor. With nearly 22 grams of protein per 100 calories, it's fuel your body will thank you for. And honestly, the taste difference is real.

Maui Nui is rich, clean, and leaves you feeling energized, not weighed down. Once you've tried it, you'll never go back, is my opinion. The only way to get this, though, is through their Ohana Reserve Box subscription. Premium age cuts, ground venison shipped frozen nationwide every 4. four, six, or eight weeks. And, you know, due to the nature of their work, supplies of the Ohana reserved age cuts are limited. Once subscriptions are filled, which often they are, spots are gone. Poof, disappear. So right now, if you're interested in this, Maui Nui is offering a free 12 pack of their venison jerky sticks with your first order of $79 or more.

You can go to the Ohana Reserve box by going to Maui Nuwevenson.com slash Drew. That's Maui, A-A-U-I-N-U-I-V-E-N-I-V-E-N-I-O-N-N-O-N-C-N-C-R-N-C-R-U. That's me for the cleanest, most flavorful meat in the world. And when you're asked about how you heard about them, make sure you mention the Drew-Paroid show. That really helps support the show, and you'd be doing me a solid and a big favor. People were coming in, and there was some research about vitamin D.

and we did see that people that came in with vitamin D, levels that were either normal or elevated, seemed to do on average better than those people that came in with low vitamin D levels. And that wasn't just at our hospital. That had been published multiple times by multiple sources. And so people began to think that this was a vitamin D deficiency that was causing it.

Of course, those types of studies were what we call retrospective studies. They were associative studies. And so when you see people, that are coming in with low vitamin D levels and they're doing worse, you don't know if something else is the cause for them doing worse and at the same time it's also causing

the vitamin D levels to be low or if the vitamin D levels are low and that's what's causing them to be worse. You can't tell. And what we usually say there is that association does not necessarily mean causation. Nevertheless, the smart thing to do

would be that case since it's not very risky is to give people vitamin D and we did that. And actually they did this in multiple trials and the results were mixed. There were some results that showed improvement and others that did not. And so I began to think that maybe vitamin D was something else that was just a marker of something else that was going on. So I started looking at studies. Two studies came to mind that really made me think that maybe it wasn't vitamin D. It was something else. Now, the first

study was a study that was done looking at Europe. Now, we all know in July of 20, 2020, that northern Italy was being hit really hard, like Milan. This is where a lot of people had come over from China, and that's where it's sort of the epicenter was. And they were having a horrible time in Italy, northern Italy at the time. I remember it very clearly. However, as things started to spread and we started going into the autumn of 2020, that's when things really started to spread around Europe and all the countries became involved. There was a study that looked at which countries in Europe were the ones that actually had their surges first. And when they lined it up, they looked to see whether it was temperature, and they could measure what the temperature

was because they had kept track of that. And it wasn't temperature. Then they looked at humidity to see if it was the humidity of the air that caused the surges of COVID-19 in the autumn of 2020 to take off. And it was a flat line. There was absolutely no correlation. Then they were the surge of COVID-19. Then they looked at latitude and that was something that really resonated there because when they lined up the countries, they noticed very clearly that those countries that had the highest latitude like Finland, Sweden, these were the countries that had the first spikes and increases and surges in COVID-19 in Europe in the autumn of 2020. The last country to get that was actually Greece in the southern portion of Europe. And there was a very very,

high correlation between latitude and surge. So that was tantalizing that somehow it was it was that the latitude was the issue. However, it wasn't definitive. And so there was another study that was published in the journals that was out of actually University of Edinburgh. It was published. And they looked at, actually Richard Weller was I think one of the authors on this paper. They looked at It's ultraviolet A. Now, this is important to understand. As I told you before, ultraviolet is that type of light that can produce vitamin D in your skin. However, that's ultraviolet B radiation that does that. And what they looked at is they looked at the portion of the United States that did not have enough ultraviolet B to make vitamin D. So in other words, they looked at a portion of the United

States in the wintertime where there was no way that vitamin D could have had any effect on the outcomes of mortality of COVID-19. And what they did was they measured the amount of light using UVA as a surrogate marker. And what they found was something that was very interesting is that as the amount of ultraviolet A went up in the regions that they measured in the United States, they found that there was a correlation between a reduction in COVID-19 mortality. In other words, more sunlight equated to less COVID-19 mortality. Well, they thought that that was actually really interesting.

and they went ahead and they repeated that, that survey in England. And they found exactly the same results. They found that more UVA, more sunlight in general, caused there to be less mortality from COVID-19. And then they actually went to Italy, and they did exactly the same thing. Once again, they found the same results. They found that more sunlight equals lower COVID-19.

mortality. When I saw that study, and in fact, the authors themselves said that, look, there's something going on here that's related to the sun that has nothing to do with vitamin D that is actually causing, perhaps, if this is causal, it's actually causing there to be a reduction in COVID-19 mortality. So it was at this point that I began to surmise that perhaps sunlight is much more than just vitamin D. And that's... That's when I started to investigate, and there was a paper that came out in 2019 that I picked up by Scott Zimmerman and Russell Ryder that showed and demonstrated that infrared light from the sun is actually very important. And it actually increases the amount of melatonin that is produced in the mitochondria, which keeps it cool from oxidative stress and allows it to do its job and output more energy. and I began to think that maybe what we really should be doing

is instead of getting people a supplement with vitamin D is really getting them outside in the sunlight. And you not only were reading about this and we're super excited about this, you kind of put your old school doctor hat on and you started trying this with some patients that you were actually taking care of. Can you talk about a couple anecdotes?

Yeah, so these are patients. These are ends of one, if you will. These are not studies. They are not done to demonstrate. demonstrate it. Going from what we just talked about to taking the patients outside in the sunlight, there were a couple of steps. One of them that convinced me that it was worth the risk was a paper that was published from Brazil where they used infrared light in COVID patients that were admitted to the hospital. They didn't use the sun in this case. They actually used LED bulbs that were tuned to

the infrared spectrum. But the results were amazing. These patients, It wasn't power to look at mortality, but these patients were, instead of staying in the hospital for 11.7 days on average, these patients were being discharged at day eight. So that's a significant reduction in length of stay. And it was at that point that I decided to take people out. The first person that I was convinced that we have to do this on because it was really the next patient that I had been asked to see was a gentleman that was admitted to the hospital on two liters of oxygen, tested positive for COVID, started getting worse within two days of being admitted to the hospital and was on 35 liters of 100% oxygen. And that's when they called me because I'm the intensivist to see whether or not this guy needed to be admitted to the ICU, put on a ventilator. You know the story. So I went down to go see him.

He was in an isolation room. His daughter was in there. They were gowned up. The room was completely dark. There was no light coming in from anywhere. The guy was depressed. His first words out of his mouth were, Doc, how long do I have to live? And I realized at that moment that we needed to do something that.

that we weren't just going to do business as usual. So I talked to the respiratory therapist. I talked to the charge nurse. We came up with an idea. We got this patient into a wheelchair, essentially, and we got them on two tanks of oxygen to help supply him with enough oxygen to maintain a saturation until we could get him outside

in the sun for about 30 minutes. We did that on the first day, did it on the second day, third day. and at this time, instead of getting worse, his oxygen requirements started to come down. We were able to get him discharged home without oxygen in five days. And that's the fastest I've ever seen somebody do that. Again, this is not, I'm not bringing up an anecdotal story to prove it.

To me, it was already proven to me when I saw this study from Brazil that showed 30 patients, COVID-19, infrared light, and they were home on average four days faster. I know where infrared light comes from. There's plenty of it in the sun. I think we just need to get those patients outside. Let's zoom out a little bit and connect some of those dots that you talked about in the beginning of the podcast.

So we're understanding the power of the full spectrum of the sun, infrared being one aspect of that, but there's other parts of the sun. UV, UVB, many other things that you've mentioned that are there. The sun is a complete package, and that's why it's healing. There's probably even things that we're getting from the sun that we don't even understand yet. You were talking about quantum physics

and other aspects, which I'm super fascinated about. And now this patient who needed so much oxygen to maintain their saturation levels at a certain percentage, if they dropped down, that was imminent death, and that happened to many people, especially in the beginning stages of the pandemic. So now that they're going out into the sun

and their mitochondria is getting more of this energy charged up in the battery packs. What's actually happening in the body that allows his body to start healing faster comparatively to when he was inside? Well, we are doing studies on that. And there's a study that was done. This was an in vitro study, which means it was done on a petri dish looking at chemicals to see what's happening. But there are cells which have something called toll-like receptor four.

and tolech receptor four are sort of gated mechanisms which open pathways and closed pathways. One of the pathways in our body for inflammation is regulated by toll like receptor four. And there was clear evidence. The paper showed that when you emitted infrared light on this type of a toll like receptor, toll like receptor four, it's significantly reduced by about half the amount of cytokines that were being emitted or secreted into the circulation. So things like two my necrosis factor

alpha, IL6, IL10, interferon gamma. These are all things that cause inflammation. And one of the big problems that we had during the pandemic was this inflammatory response about seven days in

to the infection that got people into the hospital. And so it's, this is one of the things that I believe infrared light is doing is it's actually shutting down the inflammatory conduction.

There's, I believe there's a lot lot of proteins in the body that are regulated by electron transfer that we may or may not know about. The most obvious one is in the mitochondria where we know about the electron transport chain. It's one of those things that was discovered that actually causes the gradient in the mitochondria so you can have energy production. But there are other proteins in the body. And I don't want it to make it sound like we're doing things like plants where we photosynthesize. It's a different type of light.

And we're not actually making anything. We're not synthesizing anything. we're actually, it's actually affecting our metabolism. So the term that Bob Fosbury likes to use when talking about this type of phenomenon is photometabolism. And that's the type of thing, not even photobiomodulation, because photobiomodulation seems like we're actually changing what's going on in the human body. And what we're proposing is that we're not changing what's going on with the sun.

We're actually just getting it back to the way it's supposed to work. And because of that, there are certain. proteins in the body that do utilize infrared light in ways that we could talk about in terms of quantum mechanics that allow us to metabolize more easily and to sort of grease the skids as it were. Not producing anything. It's not making sugar molecules like plants do. But it's greasing the skids. It's allowing metabolism to work more effectively, more efficiently. And as a result of that, the patient becomes more healthy. Another area that I'd love to get your perspective on, as we're laying the landscape, you're doing a great job of showing what is the evidence-based show, what's up and coming, what do we know of, and what is kind of your speculation of connecting some of the dots,

and also your trial and error, being a doctor and taking care of patients. Zooming out, one thing that we've been talking a lot about as society is our obesity epidemic. And for the first time through GLP1 drugs, we've seen a dip in at least the self-reported obesity levels that people are collecting through these different surveys that are out there. But zoom out even a little bit more. How much of our modern day obesity crisis, which really probably started,

I don't have the exact number, probably like in the late 60s, early 70s started to uptick and continue to uptick, how much of that is connected to the sun in some capacity? One of the top supplements that I recommend to pretty much everyone is creatine. Sleep-deprived parents, people working on their fitness, Those wanting to improve focus, people focused on healthy aging,

creatine is one of the most studied supplements on the planet. The real challenge? Staying consistent. Now, Momentus has made staying consistent easier than ever with their new creatine chews. Each lemon-lime chew delivers one gram of creupure creatine monohydrate, the purest form available, single source from Germany, and NSF certified for sport, meaning it's independently tested for purity, safety, and label accuracy. No powders, no scoops, no shaker bottles, just chew and go. Also, something super

important to know about creatine for any women that are listening. Women naturally store about 70 to 80% less creatine than men. That's a fact. Which means that consistent supplementation can have an even greater impact. You know, Momentus spend years perfecting this formula to meet their uncompromising momentous standard. No artificial sweeteners, no fillers, just clean, proven performance in a format that actually fits your life. You know, I've been testing. I've been testing, these out since Momentus send me some, and I can say the flavor is way better than I expected, a little sweet, and a little tart. So if you want to support your brain, your strength, and your energy, all in one simple step, go to live momentous.com and use the code Drew, D-H-R-U to save up to 35%

off your first order. That's D-H-R-U at Live, L-I-V-E, Momentus, M-O-M-M-M-O-M-M-M-M-T-O-O-U-S-com to save 35% off your first order. The sun, Hormesis, which is the term that's used to describe stress on the body in a good way that allows the body to respond in a good way. Let's just kind of look at what's see what's happened in the last 100 years. And you'll see, you'll see what I'm talking about. So in the last 100 years, maybe 120 years, we've brought a lot of technology into our living. We have air conditioning. We have heating.

that means we don't experience as much nearly as much extreme hot or cold on a regular basis okay that has implications we know that human beings when they're exposed to extreme heat or cold will secrete proteins will generate proteins in our bodies called heat shock proteins they call heat shock proteins because they were discovered after we gave extensive heat but they're also they're also there after extreme cold and what they do is they reform the proteins that have become denatured as a result. And let's face it, as we go through life, our proteins become deformed, and it's nice to have them reformed by these heat shock proteins.

But if we're never exposed to extreme temperatures, they're never going to come out. So that's one aspect that's happened over the last 100 years. We have proteins that are not being corrected as often as they should be, in my theory, or my understanding. As a result of this, we also, because we have air conditioning and we have heating, it's much more comfortable to be inside. Like if you can imagine being in Arizona in July, where are you going to be? You're going to be inside.

In the past, it sometimes might have actually been better outside because inside was very hot. You couldn't air condition it. And if you wanted fresh air, you'd have to go outside and sit in the shade and maybe cool off. But you're outside in that situation. Now with air conditioning and climate control, holding things very specifically at a certain temperature, it's much, much easier to just go inside and have air conditioning, right? Imagine Las Vegas in August with 110 degree weather. There's nobody outside in that situation.

Everybody is inside. Now, because air conditioning requires a lot of electricity and because it's expected that climate control in our environments are always going to be tight, it's a non-negotiable, right? We're never going to run hotels at 85 degrees. no one would ever show up. We have to run them at somewhere between 72 and 75 or something like that, right? So that requires a lot of electricity. And so what we focus on is trying to make the indoor environment as cool as possible

so you don't have to use a lot of electricity to cool it down. And so how are you going to do that? Well, the ways of doing that is to reduce electrical consumption. One of those ways is to prevent the place from heating up in the first place, And the way you do that is to prevent infrared light from getting inside the home. Because infrared light penetrates through the windows, at least the old ones, very easily. And when it hits anything on the inside, it's going to heat it up. And that's going to cause you to have to use a lot of money to cool it down.

Think about our buildings that we build in cities. They're basically made out of glass, which means that all of that light is coming in. Well, the technology now has where we can actually block infrared light from penetrating through glass. And of course, this is such a great idea to reduce energy costs that it's legislated at the government level. I can tell you here in California, if you want to build a home and you want the city government or the county government to pass those plans, you have to show that those plans have windows that are energy official windows. That's the law. And those are lowy glass. And so what we've created in the indoor environment is a comfortable place from a temperature standpoint.

but a place that is devoid of infrared light that you can only now get outside. You add to that the fact that now we have in the last decade had a huge shift going from incandescent bulbs, which are the old-fashioned Thomas Edison type of light bulb, which give off wavelengths in just like the sun does in all of the wavelengths, perhaps maybe with the exception of ultraviolet, but certainly in the infrared,

That's how it used to be, but engineers have looked at that and have considered all of that infrared light to be, quote, wasted energy because this is light that you can't see. So why are we using electricity to make a bulb hot and give off infrared light that you can't see? It doesn't make any sense from an energy efficiency standpoint. So we've created the LED bulb. The LED bulb is designed very specifically to give off

energy only in the visible spectrum. And so for the first time in human history, our retinas are now subjected to light that is only in one particular portion of the spectrum of light. Instead of a wide distribution where the visible light goes in and the cones and the rods are having to process that and make electrical signals that go to the brain so we can understand what we're seeing. in addition to that, in the old world, where we had incandescent bulbs who were outside, there was also infrared light that would nourish and bathe the mitochondria associated with that energy

and that task that would allow the energy and the ability to do that. Now we're just basically asking the retina to make bricks without straw, and in essence. We're asking it to process visible light into neuronal chemicals that are transmitted to the brain, but there's no infrared light

to help with the energy production to power that apparatus. This is not just a theory. There was a recent paper that actually is on the way of the publication. It's in peer review right now where Glenn Jeffrey went to such a building that we're talking about.

It was a glass building, completely surrounded by low E. Glass, went into the work environments of these people at UCL, where he works and all their environments were were basically lit with LED bulbs. And in a randomized way, he took 11 subjects out of 22 and he put a very simple thing at their desk. He put a 60 watt incandescent light bulb. So he didn't replace the LED bulbs.

He simply added a bulb with infrared light so that now they're getting infrared light, whereas before they were getting absolutely no infrared light. And then what he did was he checked the visual acuity, very similar to that first. experiment that we talked about after about two weeks of this, to see whether or not that red, sort of that infrared light from the incandescent bulb, when it was added to the work environment, changed their ability to distinguish between colors, which is one of the major functions of the cones that are powered by the mitochondria. And what he found was astonishing.

It truly was astonishing. Those people that had a simple 60-watt incandescent light bulb at their workspace had, had about a 20 to 25% reduction in the threshold, which meant an improvement in their ability to discriminate between colors. I think it's a great time to just quickly touch because our audience is fired up about hearing about all these ways that light powers the body

and how it was always designed that way. We were designed on Earth to be out there with the sun. We evolved around the sun, not the other way around. And as part of that process, our body was used to it. And I love what you said before. It's simply replacing what it was used to. It's not so much about adding in something that is a nice biohack or photo biomodulation

as I was incorrectly using. You're replacing something that was always meant to be there, which returns balance inside of the body. What I love about your message overall and why I love following you on X, and please audience follow Roger on X, is that you're also recommending to people that we're not talking about the need to spend hours and hours out day in the sun, which may not always be practical for a lot of folks.

We're talking about how even a few minutes every day could radically start improving people's health. So give us a little bit of a tease around your protocol or your recommendations for the audience that's listening today. Yeah, so it's interesting because Glenn Jeffrey's work, as he's talked to me about this, that it only takes about 15 minutes of infrared light for him to start to see the changes that we see in terms of the mitochondria. The group from Brazil that did the infrared light on the COVID patients, they just did it for 15 minutes a day,

once a day. So my recommendation is for people to simply get outside for 15 more minutes than they have been in a concerted, deliberate way without looking at the sun, but getting sunlight. And you don't have to worry about

how low in the sky the sun is. You don't have to worry about the temperature outside. If you've got a couple layers of clothing on, not a big deal. But the key is getting outside because you're not getting this infrared light indoors. That's great.

We'll expand a little bit more on some of your recommendations, including some things like that you do, like popping out for, you know, eating lunch outside, you know, even though you're a busy doctor. We'll expand on some of those things coming up. I want to zoom out here as we're connecting the dots and continuing to build on all the education

you're providing our audience. Something important, I think, that was pretty mind-blowing for me and that I've heard you talk about before. We're recording this the day before Thanksgiving in 2025. We're entering into officially the holiday season. And everybody knows, at least here in North America, Europe, as we enter into the holiday season, people get sick more often.

You start to see the flu more often. You start to see respiratory diseases, RSV, other things like that. But also, what I didn't know until I started following your work is that not only are those things spiking, and it might be for the reasons that you were never told about,

which we're going to get into a second, but you're also seeing an increase in overall deaths. And it's not because the holiday season, it's because of something else. Can you expand on that? So if you were to look at a graph of heart disease, deaths, or deaths due to heart disease, deaths due to cancer,

deaths due to kidney disease, Alzheimer's disease, respiratory disease, influenza, and the list goes on and on. You would see that they all come up together and they all peak about one to three weeks after the shortest day of the year. And they all continue to go back down again and keep going down until about one to three weeks

after the longest day of the year, which is when those death rates are the lowest. And then they start to make their way back up. Essentially, the more sunlight is hitting that portion of the earth, the lower the death rates are for all of those causes, both infectious diseases and non-infectious diseases. Can you contrast with so much, of what we've been told.

I remember all these people telling us, it's like, oh, we're in close quarters and people are gathering for the holidays. But you contrast that with a place like Australia and you see something completely different. Can you chat about that? Yeah, so no question that when we are in closed spaces that we're more likely to spread the influenza virus,

but that doesn't make us more susceptible to influenza. That just means that it's spreading it around more. What's interesting about this is that at the very same time, that we are gathering for Christmas and New Year's, the Australians are doing the very same thing, but the sun is down in the southern hemisphere. They're getting plenty of sunlight. And so you would expect that we would have

a lot of influenza during that time. There is no influenza. It doesn't exist. It's not even in the influenza season. Where we see influenza happening in the southern hemisphere is in June and July. That's when they get their influenza. So it's not necessarily these meetings

that are happening, it's when the sun has pulled away enough that there is a posity of sunlight that a population's immunity seems to be opened up for infections and a flu season. Just to sort of nail that home a little bit further. Singapore, which is only about 80 miles from the equator, if you look at their flu season, you'll find that there is actually no flu season. and it just sort of jumps around in a random fashion. The sun never leaves Singapore long enough for there to actually be a flu season. So it just sort of happens at a particular steady rate throughout the entire year.

So you can see here, if you just step back and look at the 30,000 foot level that you've asked us to do, you'll see that sunlight is just very, very effective at preventing a lot of these diseases. Now, there was a, it's hard to separate out cold air from lack of sunlight because that always happens in the wintertime. But there's an interesting thing that happened that will prove the point. In 2009, we had the H1N1 influenza pandemic. You may not have remembered it, but we had that. It went around the world. And that year, instead of in the northern hemisphere, instead of it arriving in October and November when it usually does,

it actually came extremely early in April. And so we had the ability to decouple or to bifurcate this idea of influenza happening during a cold season versus influenza happening with sunlight. And so because obviously in the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, it started in April, but it went right through the summer. And so the researchers at Harvard actually took a look. at that year and many other years looking at solar radiation data and they looked at the CDC index and they were able to plot out based on solar radiation data, which is not just latitude,

it's actually particularly what parts of the country in the United States actually get more sunlight and that has a lot to do with cloud cover, mountain ranges, things of that nature. But they were able to get it down to that minute of a level and look at actual solar radiation data. And their conclusion was, and I'm quoting, we find that sunlight strongly protects against getting influenza. Those are their words in their conclusion. Where does some of this also shine light on our understanding of the Spanish flu? The famous Spanish flu that we know killed so many people. And one of the old pandemics that people talk about.

Yeah, it was interesting. People who were sick and they put them obviously inside the hospital. but they ran out of room, they started noticing that those people that were put outside actually had better recovery, kind of accidental. But they knew at the time that there were a number of things that they were doing

that were beneficial. So it wasn't like they were completely unaware that sunlight was not beneficial. Let me give you sort of a mindset at the time. This is before antibiotics. This is before they understood a lot of medications and their benefits. And what the thinking was,

What the state of the art thinking was at the time of the 1918-19-19-19-in influenza pandemic was that sunlight and fresh air were very important in people getting better. At the time, probably the largest hospital in the world was the Battle Creek Sanitaire run by John Harvey Kellogg. He had a lot of experience in what these type of modalities were because he learned them from the European. He went actually over to Austria. He learned from Rolier, high altitude, sanitariums, tuberculosis, ultraviolet light. He actually came back and built these light boxes that he could use at sea level there in Battle Creek, Michigan. And so this was sort of the thought. The thought leaders of the world went to John Harvey Kellogg's Battle Creek Sanitarium to get better.

So we're talking about Henry Ford. We're talking about presidents of the United States, Warren, G. Harding. We're talking about Delano Roosevelt. We're talking about Amelia Earhart. These were, we're talking about Kettering. These were people that went for the best medical care, and this was the best at the time. In fact, the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1927 went to Julius Wagner Yoreg for his use of heating up the body to cure people of neurosiphilis. This is a disease that today we give penicillin for. Back then, they were able to cure this disease simply by inducing fever in patients.

He actually used malaria to do this and then cured the malaria. They actually had the treatment for malaria at the time. But this is the thinking of what was going on, and people started to do this. Now, when the pandemic came around, the Army hospitals had just got their hands on aspirin. Now, aspirin was invented in 1890.

It was discovered in 1890 by bear aspirin. It was a German company. And obviously, during World War I, we were fighting the Germans. And they were using aspirin in high doses. Why? Because they thought that it was the fever, it was the pain, it was the chills that was causing patients to die of influenza. And we found very clearly that aspirin gets rid of fevers.

Aspirin is actually an analgesic. And so they were dosing aspirin at very high levels. And unfortunately, people were dying off. I think the case fatality rate was about 6%, which is about six times higher than COVID. And so interestingly, in the in the Northeast, there was a group of sanitariums, similar to the Battle Creek Sanitarium. It was run by a guy by the name of, one of them was run by name of Dr. Wells Rubel. He later became the president of what's now known as Lomalinda University. And they had a different take on how to treat these patients in these sanitariums. And he, instead of giving them aspirin and

medications to bring down the fever. They actually did the opposite. They encouraged the fever. They got patients outside into the sunlight. They did hydrotherapy on them, which is in the sense heating up their body with hot water to induce a fever. And he actually wrote this up in an article that he published in May of 1990, looking at what the results were from hospitalization at the Army hospitals versus what they experienced in these 10 sanitariums in the northeast of the United States. And the difference was that a lot of the patients that were at the Army hospitals went on to develop pneumonia. And of course, this is pre-antibiotic era. And about 50% of those patients died. Whereas in the sanitariums, a very small percentage went on to develop pneumonia. But when they did,

again, about 50% of those patients died. So the key was preventing pneumonia. And one of the things that is very important very early in COVID-19 and influenza therapy is the innate immune system. We now know that that is regulated by interferon and that interferon is increased by hydrotherapy and increasing heat. So I think looking back at that, what we know now, what Wells Rubel reported in his article, that the thing that was actually beneficial there was sunlight, fresh air, high hydrotherapy. These are the things that was practiced in these sanitariums. And none of those things, by the way, require a supply chain. So it could be available today, even in the worst type of pandemic where we have no supply chain. You know, a huge part of what I'm walking away from the conversation so far and following your work is that anything that people are struggling with in our modern day society, especially the top killers of individuals, cardiovascular diseases, metabolic diseases like diabetes, cognitive decline, right? Even things like cancers, which we haven't gotten to yet, but we will. Those things are influenced by a lot of different factors.

Genetics plays a role, a much tinier role than we're understanding than ever before, right? But it can play a role, but a tinier role. Our food plays a role. Our nutrition plays a role. Our exercise, we're understanding that exercise is literally one of the best drugs that we have and it's completely free for us. And now we're adding to that conversation, that sunlight and the change. challenge with sunlight, though, for a lot of people. And I hope the audience can see this in

themselves, because I had to see this in myself, is that we all think that we are getting more of it than we probably actually are. So anything that you're suffering from, mitochondria is involved in every cell in the body. Mitochondria thrive when we have regular sun exposure. and because we're so chronically deficient of the sun, the things that we would normally be suffering from are made so much more worse through lack of sunlight. That's my understanding. Have I missed any gaps inside of that?

No, you've nailed it on the head. Now, I just want to be, so the point that I'm trying to make is the point that you've just made, which is that there's a lot of ailments that we suffer from that are the result of violating the laws of health. and these are laws of health that really are universal. So what are those laws of health?

It's eating poorly. So having a good nutrition, as you've talked about, and I will talk about, is actually very, very important. Exercise, very, very important. I mean, there's no side effects to exercise. There's side benefits to exercise. We just talked about hydrotherapy and water. So that's, you know, obviously using it internally by drinking it and making sure that

you're also using it externally to either heat up the body or to wash to cleanse things of that nature. Sunlight, very important. That's another, that's the fourth law of health here. Temperance is another law of health. What is temperance? It's avoiding things that we know are harmful to the human body, smoking, alcohol, things of these, these toxins that we put into our bodies for alternative reasons that for some reason actually harm our body. So cutting down on that. Air is another, so fresh air. Getting outside, experiencing the air that we have outside is not just the lack of pollutants, but it's also the presence of things from trees and plants that give off chemicals that are beneficial for our immune system. This is well shown in forest bathing and Honoki Cyprus and things

of that nature. The literature from Japan is actually very convincing on this. And then rest. So it's interesting that there's a law of health that's exercise and there's a law of health that's also rest. What does that tell you? It tells you that there's a time to exercise, but there's also a time to rest. And part of that is sleep, allowing the body to do things. There's a time to eat. There's a time to fast. There's a time to exercise. There's a time to rest. There's a time to be out in the sun and a time to have light. And there's also a time for it to be very dark to make sure that you're sleeping in a very dark room. So these are things that are simple, but they are also nuanced. And then the last law of health is a connection spiritually.

So many people, when they don't have a connection spiritually, they're not able to offload their anxieties. And chronic anxiety and worry and things of that nature can take a toll on cortisol levels and things of that nature, which can be detrimental. So these are what I call, you know, I would say that most of the chronic diseases, not all, there are some that are, you know, purely genetic or accident. obviously if you have chemicals in your water that you have no control over, that's going to cause problems that you have no control over. But most of the problems that we suffer from are from a result of the direct violation of those eight laws. And if we were to identify those and try to figure out what those are and start to follow those eight laws, you would find that people that can't find any solution to their problems. Because we'll actually start to find solutions to their problems.

Now, as a critical care of physician, I take care of patients in the ICU. I give drug medications all the time to save lives. And one of the things I just want to sort of put out there is this understanding of and or, right? So a lot of times people will think in terms of this mentality of or, meaning that we do this or that. And I can tell you, when we go into the operating room and do surgeries, the last thing that we want is for somebody to have an infection, right? And so we don't look at it like, okay, we're going to have the surgeon wear sterile gloves or we can sterilize the equipment. No, no, no. It's and we have the surgeon sterilize the equipment, put on surgical gloves.

They wash their hands. We have sterile equipment. We make sure that the temperature in the room is just right for healing. We make sure the humidity in the room is just right for healing. We make sure that we're using sterile equipment. All of these things work together to give you a better outcome. come. And I guess what I'm saying here is there may be a temptation for people to say, oh, I don't need to follow my doctor's advice and take this medication if I can just do this instead. And what I'm saying is, look, I'm all in favor of getting people off unnecessary medication. All medication have side effects. All medication have detrimental effects that can affect the problem. And there is no medication that I know of that actually solves the problem. It simply covers it up and appears somewhere else. However, if people stop taking their medications,

it could cause problems in the body that could cause even worse problems. And what I would advocate for, if somebody out there is listening to this and they want to try to make sure that they're not violating the laws of health and to start abiding by some of these laws of health that we talked about, one of which is sunshine, is see what happens when they start to do this and see if their need for these medications start to fall off. Maybe your blood pressure improves and it starts to actually become low. talk to your doctor, say, hey, can I get rid of one of these medications?

Great. Let's say you start eating better and your cholesterol starts to come down. You start to lose weight. Maybe you don't need all those medications that you were taking for the control of diabetes. Start to dump some of those medications. I think that's probably the better way of going rather than saying, I'm just going to stop all these medicines and go outside and eat this and do that and I'll be fine. It's complicated.

And you need to make sure that you're being followed by somebody who's making sure that you're okay. That's a great reminder. And it's also a highlight as you're laying out that roadmap of all these health principles that are there, these health tenants. The reason that we have you on today is because out of all of them, the one that feels like it's getting the least attention, although it's on the upward momentum, people like yourself, Dr. Andrew Huberman, who's been on the podcast before, other individuals that are in this space, the researchers who have been heads down doing incredible work that's finally getting the spotlight now, are talking about the sun. Because it's so easy to overlook. There's that old adage, which is, I don't know who discovered

water, but it probably wasn't a fish. And in that way, we all are around sun. We're in offices that have windows. We think we are seeing the sun and getting the sun, but we're not actually really getting the sun. You know, I always see how I've been in the situation too. So many my friends, myself, my family, you'll go to somewhere on holiday, maybe the Caribbean, or you'll go to Europe, maybe Italy during the summer. And yes, their food supply has way less toxins and a lot less middlemen through the process. There's no doubt about that at all. But people will talk about how they ate more calories. They were eating all sorts of foods that they don't normally eat here, but how they not only lost weight and they felt better, but their mood improved. And when you look

It's like how much of that is actually just spending more time outside, getting more fresh air, feeling more content, being more connected to source, and actually taking and giving your nervous system and your body a break. So it's not constantly on this rat race of making decisions in a reactionary way. Any thoughts on that? Yeah, I think people could do so much. Like if you just think about the eight laws of health that I just mentioned, three of them happen outside. sunlight, obviously. Exercise. You're much more likely to exercise if you're outside.

And fresh air. So already, just by simply walking outside, you've already turned on three of those laws of health that you can do. I, you know, companies, corporate companies, corporate businesses, spend so much money on consultants to come in to tell them how their employees should behave so that there's less sick days because sick days cost production and production costs companies money you know if if companies would simply incorporate into their day something that happened outside for 15 or 20 minutes there would be a huge reduction in the amount of sick

days that we're seeing look there's studies that have been done where patients that are in the hospital a two-bed room the patient's bed that's closer to the window is discharged first there's a recent paper that was just published where they gave infrared light to patients in the intensive care unit didn't matter why they were there just they were there in the ICU could have been septic shock could have been they just had surgery it didn't matter giving infrared light in that environment reduced the length of stay in the intensive care unit by 30 percent that's huge and if you think about it not only did were they leaving the hospital the study also showed that they were stronger than if they had not gotten the infrared light.

How many people, after a week or two of being in the intensive care unit, now have to go to acute rehab instead of going home? Well, if we were giving them the right amount of light, then this may not be an issue. And people will be getting out of the hospital faster, which, by the way, the pay structure for hospitals now is in a way that they get paid per diagnosis. And if the patient leaves the hospital faster,

the hospital actually collects that profit. and is able to pocket it because they don't have to pay for a nurse to take care of that patient for longer. There's a bed that opens up. They can take more patients. There's all sorts of benefits in doing that. So there's so much data now

that shows that people who get natural light can actually do much better. I was born in the 1970s, grew up in the 80s, and I went to public school in Southern California. There are actually laws on the books. They've known for decades. that children in school learn better when they have natural light. I went to school.

I went to public school when they built these buildings back in 1950s. They built these schools were literally half the classroom wall, or one side of the whole classroom was nothing but windows. And that's because at that time they understood that natural light was very important for students to be able to grow, to mature, to develop, and to learn. And that doesn't change. That's exactly the same way as it is now. We need to get natural light. And unfortunately, as we discussed about, what's happening is we're systematically eliminating infrared light from our environment. We have lights that no longer produce it. We have now

windows that block it. We now don't go outside as much as we used to. And we learn behaviors during the pandemic that reduces that, right? We have DoorDash, we have Zoom meetings. We have all of these things now that can enable us to not have to go outside. And so we have more time being spent in an environment with less infrared light, and I think it's a disaster.

Roger, I want to talk about this idea of a protocol. Your first recommendation for the audience that anybody can immediately do, and it's a low-hanging fruit, is audit the amount of light that you're getting throughout the day where you're actually outdoor with, you know, the sunlight on you in some capacity and the reminder that you've shared many times that it's going to penetrate, you know, clothing, light clothing that we're going to be wearing. You know, even if you have a hat on,

it's fine. Just getting that sun into the body doesn't have to be morning light. Although, if you choose morning light or you're worried about skin and UV rays and you're more in that boat, fine, but it could be any time of day for individuals who want it. If somebody said, hey, okay, I'm getting, I think I'm doing a pretty good job. And sure, I can get a little bit more light. But what is the next recommendation, the next ladder up for somebody who feels like, okay, I'm not getting any light. Let me at least get 15 minutes.

What's the next recommendation for somebody as part of their ideal light diet? If they can't get morning light outside in the sun, then I would highly recommend if they get up and it's dark and they have to go to work before the sun comes up to get a 10,000 lux lamp that you can buy on Amazon for $30 and to sit in front of it for 15 minutes in the morning with it about 11 to 16 inches from their head so that at least the circadian rhythm is going to be entrained. And they're not going to get seasonal affective disorders. So this is important having light early in the morning is important not only from a circadian rhythm, but part of that is also the cortisol spike

that allows the cortisol to be spiked early in the day so that it's smaller and less detectable at night, which is going to allow melatonin to take over. So if you can't go outside and get bright light with nothing between your eyes and the sun, I mean, you can wear contacts and reading glasses if you needed to, but no sunglasses, not behind a glass window inside,

literally outside. If you can't do that in the morning time, then you should at least get it artificially without the infrared light, but at least with the visible, because the visible light does have an impact on circadian rhythm, it does have an impact on mood,

and it will have an impact on cognition as well, and actually help you able to sleep better that night. The reason why I see to go outside and get morning light that way is because not only you're getting all of that, that I just described, but you're also getting infrared light, which is going to turn on the mitochondria in the morning time so you have more energy to deal with the day. But if you can't do that or the sun's not out, you've got no choice, at least get the artificial. And then maybe later in the

day, when it's lunchtime, you can pop outside in the shade. Maybe if you're concerned about getting too much ultraviolet light directly from the sun, at least you can get the infrared light that's in the shade. By the way, leaves and trees are highly reflective of infrared light. So if you're standing around them, even though your eye is seeing green lights, your body is getting infrared lights. One hack, I feel like I picked up from you. Let's say somebody is getting that morning light and wants to look at like, what's the next thing they want to do? I'm recording in my podcast studio on the office side of it. I do in person and I do remote here as well. And normally there's a big window behind me and that window is closed, primarily because I live not too far away from fire station. And so there's

different sounds, other things. I don't want to mess up. audio and have my editor, you know, if you upset with me. But when I can, and especially on like a pre-holiday day like today, I have left that window open. And even though I'm not outside, there is infrared light that's coming in. You know, I have to be inside to record it. I guess I don't have to be inside to record it, but it's a lot more feasible to do this podcast indoors.

But at least I'm letting some infrared light in and some other spectrum light in by just keeping the window open. Is there actual benefit to that? Yeah, I mean, there's a film that I think you're aware of from Phosphatec called the IRSense, which you can put over your smartphone camera and you can actually see infrared light. It bumps it up into the red spectrum. So it looks red to your naked eye on your smartphone. But it's really infrared light.

And it's quite astounding when you open one of the panes of your windows and compare. As I did recently, and I posted that picture on X, there's it's bright bright orangey red coming through the screen but through the window it's a very muted kind of dim orange that's coming through just to show you and demonstrate how well those windows block infrared light so keeping that window open allowing that infrared light to come in beneficial well is there an optimal amount of sun that we know from the literature and is there an upper limit

where now the benefits start to head downward so I will never advocate for sunburn or sun damage. So you've got to be careful. Look at the UV index, cover up, wear clothes that blocks the ultraviolet, infrared like, and go right through those clothes as we mentioned. Interestingly, from a scientific standpoint, the epidemiology says not really. There was a Swedish study that showed that the highest exposure to sunlight had the lowest mortality when measured over 20 years in 30,000 Swedish women.

Richard Weller repeated that study in both men and women, UK Biobank, and there was about 400,000 people in that study. Once again, those that had the highest levels of sun exposure had the lowest all-cause mortality, cardiovascular mortality, cancer mortality, non-caradiovascular, non-cancer mortality. And, you know, Richard Weller's a dermatologist, University of Edinburgh, he looked at melanoma. While there was a small, non-statistical significant incidence of melanoma

in that cohort, there was no increase whatsoever in melanoma mortality in that cohort at all. So that's very intriguing. Of course, this is in England. This is in a high latitude country where people don't get enough sunlight. Obviously, they're on that side of things where they're very deficient. So getting more sunlight is probably to give them more benefit than risk. If you are living closer to the equator, you know, we'll have to sort of look at that data and see the data specific for those people.

But at least in Sweden, in England, it's very clear that getting the most amount of sunlight is not detrimental. Again, still, avoiding sunburns and things of that nature because that's a sign that things are going awry. One hack that you have for anybody who's used to, especially being in an office, not that people that also work from home deal with this too, even working moms know this as well, working inside the house, is that so many people deal with the afternoon. slump. That sort of 3 p.m. energy crash. Now, we've done a lot of episodes about metabolic health and blood sugar and how sometimes a big carbly lunch with a lot of, with not that much activity can lead to these, you know, super spikes and super dips that are there and the importance of, you know, checking your sort of blood sugar levels and being on top of it. One level that you're adding into this is that there might be a little bit more to the conversation as well, too, that

some of this might be a light-based afternoon slump. It could very well be. I mean, you're in the inside for that length of time. You're there already about four or five hours by the time you get to the afternoon. Look, there was a study that was done looking at red light, randomized control trial. It dropped glucose. Okay. So it dropped the levels of glucose when someone took a 75 gram load of glucose.

The peak was not as high. It was about 26% lower when they were exposed to light. So this is what they're saying. So maybe here's a hack, eat lunch outside. You know, the people who smoke, we tell them to go outside because he can't smoke inside now, right? What's interesting about that Swedish study was that women who had the highest levels of exposure to the sun and smoked had the same mortality as those women that avoided the sun and did not

smoke. So you can see there that, you know, maybe we should be following the women that are the men that are going out for their smoking breaks, not too closely, but getting outside. And we can do that at lunch. Everybody gets a 15-minute break or a 30-minute break. I take my breaks outside, even though it's high noon. And if you can sit in the shade, get exposed to sunlight, you'd be surprised. You don't have to be in direct sunlight. You can be amongst green plants, trees, and you're going to get a lot more infrared light that way than you would have if you just stayed inside. for yourself with everything that you've read and also being

a family man, having a job, a demanding job. Is there a number that you try to shoot for in the day? And is there anything that you're doing to sort of track that, be aware of it, to be mindful of the weeks or

the time periods, whether seasonally or based on your schedule, when you haven't hit enough, the same way that somebody would wear like an oral ring and say, oh, you know, my sleep has been off a little bit this week. I need to pay more attention next week. Well, I've forgotten the name of it now, but there was a study that came out about a year ago to 80,000 people wore a watch with a light sensor and they tracked them by the hour. And they found that if you're exposed to sunlight

between seven o'clock in the morning or six or seven o'clock in the morning until about seven or eight or nine o'clock at night, there was a definite reduction in mortality over 12 years. Whereas those people who had an increase in light from about 9, 10, 11, 12 o'clock at night until about 4 or 5 o'clock in the morning, there was an increase in mortality. That watch, I understand, is actually becoming available where people can actually wear it for themselves and track the light exposure that they're getting. And there's actually a channel in there for infrared light. So that's becoming available. That's coming online. And it's, It's a wearable that you can wear.

It's kind of like a ring, but it's actually a light sensor, and it's going to be able to track that. I understand that other companies are coming out with that. So I believe sooner or later, this is going to be something that's going to happen. And this just dropped.

There is a app called shadowmap.org, and it's just been incorporated into redfin. I saw you posted about this on X the day. This is really cool. Yeah, exactly. So if you are looking at you, for a home and you want to know what the sun exposure is like at that place, you can literally plug in the address into redfin, scroll down past climate, I think, is where they have it right now,

click on the thing that says sun exposure. And you can hit a button that makes it 3D, you can map it, you can click on the roof to see how much solar you would get if you wanted to put solar on the roof. You can do that not only for a home, you can do it downtown if you're going to live in an apartment high rise. Let me tell you, if you're living in the city and you're a lot of, amongst all these high rises, it's really difficult to get sunlight because those buildings block it out. So if you want to know, if you want to go to a particular park at a particular time of day

and know that there's going to be sunlight at that time, this is a great way of actually figuring out that whether or not that's actually the case. So anyway, this is, people are starting to understand that people are interested in sun exposure and they're realizing that the lifestyles that they've built for themselves and that we've built for others, has not really kept that in mind. And so it's taken a backseat and it's becoming further backseat. And so for people who are mindful of those laws of health

that want to bring sunlight back into their envelope there of mindfulness and they want to get into the sunlight, these are the kind of apps that will help you do that. There's all sorts of devices that we will cover, have covered in the past, we'll cover in the future that will help people make that transition to going outside. You need computers, those screens that can be read outside.

You need maps that can tell you where the sun is going to be at any particular time outside. So all of these things I think are happening. People are having an interest in it and I think that's good. Red light devices. Where are they useful and where are there limitations that people should be aware that nothing can ultimately replace the sun? The thing that we need to know about what we call photobiomodulation, what is photo biomodulation?

That means we're using light on a living substance and a living organism to change what's happening there. And the key about that is that it's bifasic. And what do I mean by bifasic? What I mean to say is that usually it takes a low amount of light to have a positive change. But as you increase either the intensity or you increase the duration,

there can be a negative, there could be a diminishing improvement, and some would even say a reduction. So you could make things worse by cranking up that light. That's something that a lot of people don't understand about red light. They think that if a little bit is good, a lot more is better. And it's a very subtle situation. I could get into some quantum mechanics to explain it,

but it would be very difficult. Suffice to say that we've seen this phenomenon, and that it's really important to make sure that the dose is right and you're doing it for the right length of time. If you overdo it, either in time or in intensity, you could actually have the opposite effect. We have never seen the bifasic nature with sunlight. So long as you're not staying outside and getting sunburned,

we only see a benefit. We see the best reduction in mortality in those that have had the highest sun exposure rates. We don't want burning, but at the same time, there's something about the sun with its multiple wavelengths and at the right intensity. And as the sun is going up in the sky, the ultraviolet is getting bigger, but then in the ultraviolet's getting smaller as the sun goes down. We've got infrared at the two extremes. There's something about that system that is perfectly designed that we're starting to understand for our bodies, that red light therapy, by itself is very rudimentary.

Now, that's notwithstanding the fact that we have data that shows that people who get red light therapy versus people who don't get red light therapy actually have improvements in endpoints and benefits, right? But the question is, and I think actually is being answered by work from Glenn Jeffrey, is that when he does red light versus incandescent bulbs, which is a way of saying broad spectrum, there are actually more robust endpoints being met with the broad spectrum of the incandescent bulb than with the monochromatic single wavelength red light therapy. Does that make sense what I'm saying? Yeah, it makes sense. A couple things that I'm going to recap just for myself to

make sure I understand it for our audience. There's a lot of red light devices out there. And I believe many of these brands talk about how there's over 10,000 different published studies about the benefits of red light therapy. And that's true. And then audit the dosages that are there. You might hear this conversation say, okay, well, I'm not getting out in the sun as much as I want to. Let me just keep the red light on in front of the computer all day long. And not only are you not getting everything that you'd be getting from the sun, but you actually could be doing a disservice, depending on the intensity, the spectrum, the length of time that's there. So there is a benefit to these devices. They're not a replacement for the sun and make sure you're using them

wisely and not overdoing them because that could be detrimental. That's absolutely correct. Completely endorsed that summary. Absolutely. You know, one of the thing that you've chat about is these lights and how we are now on this energy plan throughout the planet of everybody on these LED light bulbs and how it's also downright sometimes impossible to get these old bulbs that we all sort of if you grew up in the 80s and the early 90s you're used to having in your household, and even prior to that, of course. Yeah.

What if you done in your own home, and especially at nighttime, where we know that a lot of these lights in the traditional LED, not only are they emitting these blue spectrum, green spectrum light, limited wavelength, but they also seem to have this flickering

that is causing a lot of background anxiety to the body for a lot of people. Yeah. So when I moved into my home, I was gung ho about LED. It was going to reduce my electric costs. And I said, great, let's do it. So I replaced all of the bulbs. But there was something about that that made me think, well, let me just, I'm not going

to throw out the incandescence. Let me just save them. So I save them all. And now I'm finding myself putting them back in because I realized how important having incandescent bulbs are. Glenn Jeffrey's work was rudimentary in that actually pivotal in that he showed that even in an LED environment, you only need one or two of these incandescent bulbs

to really add back the benefit. So I don't think we need to completely switch the whole thing out. I think what we need to do is be smart, maybe add some broad spectrum back in to it. But that, as you mentioned, is not going to affect the flicker. So there are certain LED bulbs that have horrible flicker where literally it's on 100%,

and the next millisecond it's off completely. You do get some flicker with incandescent, and that's only because they're running on AC, but there's sort of an inner, a visible inertia with the elements because it lights up. And even though the electrical current has reversed, the thing is still kind of lit. So instead of it being on off, on off flicker, it kind of sort of undulates a little bit. And it's not as severe with the incandescent bulbs. But nevertheless, these are issues with LEDs and the flicker. So what I'm doing is I'm replacing enough of them with incandescent bulbs.

And I'm making a general push to just not have lights on as much as possible at night. So I don't, I think that incandescent bulbs and LED bulbs both are not good to have at night in your eyes because it's shutting down melatonin. And your melatonin production doesn't care if it's visible only or whether it's incandescent. we're on the topic, blue light blockers, would you be wearing them at night? Is that on top of the idea of you generally minimizing a lot of overhead light, you know, keeping light

in sort of little sparse areas, enough to be able to see? You don't want to be running around in the dark, but you're just not trying to keep the lights on in general. But blue light blockers, good, bad, ugly? What do you feel? I think the best thing to do is to have no light. The next best thing is blue blockers, if you've got nothing else,

and then the worst thing is just having it wide open, and getting all sorts of light. Roger, this has been awesome. I just can't thank you enough for making time to come on this podcast and know how busy you are. You know, you had this great analogy that I heard you share on another podcast that I thought it would be great to end this podcast on. I've talked about how much it's so easy for all of us, including myself, to take the sun and the light that we get from our natural environment for granted and to just think that

it's there or us not being able to see exactly what's going on. So how bad could it really be if I'm not getting enough? And you really equated this next frontier of light metabolism, light therapy, getting the sun, and making it a priority in our life. You equated it to a little bit of our history with scurvy. Can you just talk about that for a second? Scurvy is this condition where you don't have vitamin C. About 300 years ago, British sailors would preserve all sorts of food, meats, fruits, all sorts of things. in a way that basically eliminated all of the vitamin C in the product.

And so when they went out to C and they were eating, they were eating food essentially completely devoid of vitamin C. And as a result of that, they got scurvy. Of course, they didn't know that they were doing that when they were preserving the food. And so it was just sort of understood that people got scurvy. And that was lack of vitamin C. You're bleeding from your gums. People were dying.

and imagine one day they found out that vitamin C was the cause, the lack of vitamin C was the cause. There's plenty of vitamin C, of course, in lemons. And in lime juice, which has actually got a ration of lime juice in the British Navy, completely reversed all of these medical problems by something as simple as lime juice. And it's almost the kind of the same of what's going on today. You know, it was Bob Fosbury that sort of coined the term that, the lack of natural sunlight in the 21st century is our version of scurvy.

It's the scurvy of the 21st century. And it seems as though that just going outside in the sun, it's almost dismissive in some cases. It seems as though you're not taking the patient seriously. But you could imagine what the sailors back then must have thought when their superiors came out and said, just this little bit of juice or just this lemon is going to prevent and solve all of your problems that you've been experiencing. And it's because there was an error in what they were doing

in terms of their nutrition. We have been on a journey where we have had, instead of a natural diet, we've had a processed diet. And we can see all of the ill effects of that. And what I'm trying to say here is that the light that we consume is just like that. We've been, we've had the ability in the past to have a natural diet of light. And what we're getting now is we are raising a whole generation on a diet of artificial and processed light. And we should expect exactly the same results. Thanks to people like yourself for championing this. And I'm sure getting side eyes as you've been talking about this for such a long time and being such a well-est, medical doctor and being willing to go through that and not care and just highlight what's

actually best for the patient and for the person listening on the podcast today, thanks to people like yourself that are putting yourself out there, it actually feels for the first time that the future is bright and that people are starting to wake up because of social media, because you've been on podcasts that have had millions and millions of views, because you're so popular on X and the right people are listening, you know, there's a turn. There's a turn in the and people are actually paying attention to such an overlooked yet simple thing that we can all do to dramatically improve our health. I can't thank you enough for the work that you do, and I can't thank you enough for coming on the podcast and educating our audience.

Well, I want to thank you for making this also a topic of your podcast as well. You know, the topic that we're talking about is far more important than any messenger. I say this, and I'll say it again, the message is more important than the messenger. So I thank you for your kind words. There is plenty of space in this discussion for as many people as possible talking about this. I always enjoy it when people pick up this message. They see it and they take it on as their own. Appreciate you, Roger.

Thank you again. Thank you. 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 it with a friend,

share with a friend who would benefit from listening. Number two, before I go, I just had to tell you about something that I've been working on that I'm super excited about. It's my weekly newsletter, and it's called Try This. Every Friday, yes, every Friday, 52 weeks a year, I send out an easy-to-digest protocol of simple steps that you or anyone you love can follow to optimize your own health. We cover everything from nutrition to mindset, to metabolic health, sleep, community, longevity, and so much more. If you want to get on this email list, which is, by the way, free and get my weekly step-by-step

protocols for whole body health and optimization, click the link in the show notes that's called Try This or just go to Drew Perot.com. That's D-H-R-U-P-U-R-H-I-T dot com and click on the tab that says, try this.