Mark Bell's Power Project - How Light Pollution Is Sabotaging Your Health And What You Can Do About It - Dr. Max Gulhane || MBPP Ep. 1088

Starting point is 00:00:00 What we're told is to avoid ultraviolet light because it causes skin cancer. Yet what we notice is that people with skin cancers, both non-melanoma and melanoma skin cancers are associated with low vitamin D. To have the biggest impact on our circadian rhythm, when do you think would be the ideal times if you were going to look at minimums to try to get out into the sun so that you can have the best overall outcomes? The sunrise is the most important time. so that you can have the best overall outcomes. The sunrise is the most important time.

Starting point is 00:00:24 Does the food we eat impact the sun we get more, or does the sun we get impact the food we eat more? I would say the latter. You can't out-diet a poor light environment. You can eat the highest quality grass-fed steak, but if you're doing it at 3 a.m., all those organs like the liver, the pancreas, the muscle, they all will have these circadian clocks so they can all be disturbed by the blue light by the eating late at night We have dr. Max Gullhane on the show today really happy to have you on the show

Starting point is 00:00:54 I've been following your podcast and you've been enlightening to say the least because of the research and stuff that you're doing on cold therapy light because of the research and stuff that you're doing on cold therapy, light, and all these various things. Kind of a question that sort of kicked things off a bit is like it seems like the body can really adapt to a lot of things. And there are some people that do spend a lot of time inside

Starting point is 00:01:20 and there's some people that are seemingly like quote unquote fine. And there's people that are like kind of doubters of some of this stuff about how clean our water has to be, how particular it has to be, how particular our light and dark cycles and so forth need to be. And we hear a lot of gurus and stuff like that saying that we need cold exposure and that we need sunlight and that we need darkness. And obviously this is something that you're communicating

Starting point is 00:01:46 to people a lot. You're a practicing physician. You see a lot of people, you are a doctor. And so I'm sure that you're probably using a combination of some of the things you're learning about these light and dark cycles, along with probably some conventional medicine interventions here and there.

Starting point is 00:02:03 What do you think the truth of this is and how concerned should people be about kind of, I guess, locking in like a more natural, more primal circadian rhythm? Yeah, it's a great question, Mark. And look, I think what is normal has become so skewed in today's world that what people might be kind of, they might turn off a light here and there, or they might try wearing some glasses and blocking a bit of blue light here and there, and maybe not notice too much

Starting point is 00:02:39 of a difference. And I think that what we're accepting in terms of our modern light environment has drifted so far away from what was normal in our ancestral past that I think for a large proportion of people, that they haven't been necessarily adherent enough, I think, to everything that they really need to if the goal is to really respect our circadian biology. And people would be surprised, just given how ubiquitous artificial lighting is in modern society, how difficult it truly is to respect a circadian light and dark cycle. And for some context, if you're listeners aren't aware, this idea of this circadian

Starting point is 00:03:28 rhythm is an inbuilt timing mechanism of our body to basically run the show according to a clock. And the clock is taking inputs from light and a bright day and essentially a dark night or a night that only had a bit of moonlight. That was the norm for this ancestral past, well before we were even existing as primates, as mammals, all the way back until single cellular organisms show these responses to light and dark cycles. But what we did is when we lit up the night with this artificial power grid, with first the incandescent bulbs, and now we're hurdling towards a completely LED blue lit world, is that we really messed that system up.

Starting point is 00:04:20 And now it's incredibly difficult to get into an environment where you have a completely dark night unless you're going camping in Wyoming. I mean, it's easier in Australia. That's the degree to which, with obviously devices like iPhones or iPads, it's very difficult to get true darkness. Then you add on the fact that people are inside in an environment that contains glass that blocks the full spectrum of sunlight, then you've really got a very, very distorted impression or environment. I think that the importance of getting all these things is underlied or is emphasized

Starting point is 00:05:01 when people actually manage to go, camping for six days and they're truly getting up with the sunrise, go going to sleep with the sunset, outdoors all day and that's when I, in my experience, have seen people really make massive improvements because they've been able to go the full, the whole hog so to speak. If you can just give some of us a rundown on the way that light affects sleep, because like as you're talking about it, some people might be like, well, it's not that important. I'm sleeping already and I watch TV at night, et cetera. So what are the ways that your light environment can be affecting your sleep negatively or positively? Yeah, it's a great question. And fundamentally sleep and this, the state of sleep is the most important

Starting point is 00:05:47 of the manifestations of our circadian rhythm. This idea that when it's dark, we should be resting and recovering and repairing on a very fundamental level, all the way down to the mitochondria. What the body has done as humans is we have these receptors and we have these light-sensitive proteins. They actually exist all throughout the body. Most significantly, they're in the eye, in the retina, and a certain amount of cells called these intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells, they don't form images in the way that rods and cones do. So one way I've explained in the past is to think about your eyes not only as a camera

Starting point is 00:06:33 function that is able to form images, so I can see Mark, I can see him holding his big stainless steel growler, but it's also a detector. And it also, almost like a motion detector, has certain cells that sense the presence and absence of not motion, but of blue wavelength light. And that, if we think about the visible spectrum, blue has this peak. It's around 480 nanometers for this specific light detector. And it's essentially sky blue. It's the blue of the middle day. And those cells and these retinal ganglion cells, they sense the presence or absence

Starting point is 00:07:13 of this blue light and they send that signal all the way to the brain, to the special part of the brain, this hypothalamus, which is running the clock. It's like the Swiss clock at the top of the town hall. It's the master clock. And that clock is programming all the other clocks in the body to make sure almost every single process in the body is happening according to this 24 hour rhythm. The reason why this is relevant to sleep is because we are supposed to have bright light during the day. And when we expose

Starting point is 00:07:47 ourselves to this bright blue light during the night, that's essentially confusing your body. It's telling you, hey, it's midday. It's a noon midday at an equatorial latitude when your body is supposed to be going to sleep and kicking off repair mechanisms that help us deal with things like cancerous cells before they become problematic. This is fundamentally a light. It's a confusing light signal and it distorts this melatonin, which is a hormone that gets regulated very closely with cortisol to, again, influence our wakefulness and activity and sleep. And essentially what you're doing when you're looking at the iPad late at night with this

Starting point is 00:08:33 blue light is you're turning off your secretion of melatonin. And that melatonin normally helps you fall asleep, keeps you asleep, and also triggers all these repair mechanisms. So that's fundamentally what's happening on a hormonal level when we look at the iPad. You did mention cancer, and there's some doctors that believe that you can basically get a lot of people in remission from cancer from like a ketogenic-style diet. We're also seeing that there's research showing that a lot of people that have skin cancer,

Starting point is 00:09:05 which we kind of thought came from the sun, maybe the sun can trigger it, maybe you can explain it better. But a lot of these people have a lack of vitamin D. And so that kind of is interesting because you're like, well, if they had overly, you know, if they were overly exposed to the sun, then they would probably have higher vitamin D levels, right? It's a, it's a very good question. I'm glad you brought it up, Mark. So the paradox, or it's a supposed paradox, really the thing that needs to be explained by the centralizing narratives about the causation or why we get skin cancer. This is the fundamental thing that needs to be broken down. What we're

Starting point is 00:09:47 told is to avoid ultraviolet light because it causes skin cancer. Yet what we notice is that people with skin cancers, and to really briefly break the types of skin cancers down, is that there's these melanoma and non-melanoma skin cancers. The non-melanoma ones are basal cell and squamous cell carcinomas, and these are typically what people get in sun-exposed areas, say on faces, on the neck, on shoulders, back of the neck. You get them when you're 60, 70, 80, again, in those sun-exposed areas. They are quite easily removed, they're cut out and have a relatively squamous cell more than basal cell, relatively low risk of metastasis or spread. So much so that many cancer registries don't even take records on the incidences of BCC,

Starting point is 00:10:41 particularly an SCC. We can put that aside. The most scary skin cancer and most potentially skin cancer with the most mortality is melanoma. And there's cutaneous, meaning skin melanoma, there's non-cutaneous melanoma, things like uveal melanoma. But let's focus on the cutaneous melanoma. They can metastasize and metastatic melanoma is a very, very ugly disease. The commonality that you alluded to is that all of these skin cancers, both non-melanoma and melanoma skin cancers, are associated with low vitamin D. Vitamin D, we generate vitamin D on exposure to ultraviolet B light around 290 to 315,

Starting point is 00:11:28 320 nanometer light. If the sun were the chief causative factor or completely a necessary cause, then why are people who are getting skin cancers vitamin D deficient? Why do they have a deficiency of vitamin D if that is what they need to generate the vitamin D? The answer is, or the resolution is, it's a complex problem and there's multiple things going on here, but having a high vitamin D by slow chronic exposure to UVB light is protective of not only skin cancer development, but all kinds of other internal cancers. And the reason for that, and I listened to your excellent discussion with David Herrera and you touched on this topic in that discussion too,

Starting point is 00:12:22 the reason for that is there's vitamin D and non-vitamin D reasons, but vitamin D is profoundly has an anti-cancer effect. It has a profound anti-proliferative effect on cells. And it's been investigated, isolated compound of activated vitamin D, you put it in cell culture and it stops cancers growing. Like that's how powerful this compound is. of vitamin D, put it in cell culture and it stops cancers growing. That's how powerful this compound is.

Starting point is 00:12:48 When we've cultivated that so-called solar callus, which is this idea of a gradual progressive exposure to full spectrum sunlight to build that vitamin D, we are protected against the development of skin cancer. The answer, therefore, is that there's something else that these people are doing that are getting skin cancer that isn't going out into full spectrum sunlight and building their solar calis gently. Then, what is the reason that people link getting too much sunlight to getting skin cancer? Because you still see people that, you know, they mentioned use sunscreen, don't get too

Starting point is 00:13:31 much sun exposure, or you could get skin cancer. Yeah, and I really want to add the nuance here, because ultraviolet light does cause DNA damage in skin cells. And that is a critical point to understand. So, ultraviolet A causes reactive oxygen species that can damage DNA. Ultraviolet B can cause direct damage. It's ionizing radiation, so it can cause DNA strand breaks and then therefore cause mutations. So, what we have to think, we have to hold two beliefs in our mind. That both, yes, that UV light can cause mutations in skin cells, but we also, on the other hand, have to believe and understand that UV light is a critical hormetic stressor for our body

Starting point is 00:14:18 that we need, not only to generate vitamin D, but to generate all forms of other essential compounds for health. So much so that one of the compounds that we make from ultraviolet light is beta endorphin, and that is essentially an opioid chemical. So nature's made us to be addicted to ultraviolet light, even though it can cause mutations in the skin cells. Thankfully, the body has evolved a whole range of mechanisms to deal with that background of carcinogenic or cancer-causing, mutation-causing effects of ultraviolet light. One of the most elegant ones is the fact that your skin is like bark, and the cells, essentially,

Starting point is 00:15:05 as they develop, they mature and they essentially die. The top layer of your epidermis is actually dead keratinocytes. What they do is they can absorb ultraviolet light significantly, and they're simply dead, and they continue to slough off. Just think about if you've got a skin cell that's accumulated a mutation, you know that with enough time and correct light dark cycles, which regulate the turnover of these cells appropriately because your skin as well has a circadian clock, that if there's a mutated, like a bad apple, essentially just gets shed like

Starting point is 00:15:43 bark. So that's just one of the mechanisms that the body has come up with to deal with ultraviolet light, which we evolved under. And that's again, just one, but things like melanin and the amount of melanin that we have in our skin is another critical defense mechanism. And that's kind of a nuanced topic, but essentially the amount of melanin that we have in our skin is ancestrally a function of how much ultraviolet light was in our environment. If we're from an equatorial area or an area of incredibly high ultraviolet light, say Indigenous Australians, equatorial Africa, then that amount of melanin in the epidermis is enormous, so much

Starting point is 00:16:26 so that it protects the cells from this ionizing ultraviolet B radiation, but it also reduces our ability to generate vitamin D. The last point I'll make briefly is that we've known for a very long time, there's about six studies since the first one was in the, actually around World War II, this couple of researchers of US Navy sailors noted that they were getting skin cancers at quite a high, relatively higher rate. I believe it was six-fold greater. I'm not sure exactly who their control group, their comparator group was, but they noted that their rates of internal cancers, so colon cancer

Starting point is 00:17:12 or prostate cancer, all these other more cancers that have a higher mortality rate, was significantly lower and their mortality was significantly lower. So this was just repeated. There was another study in the 1945, Frank Appley, MD, he plotted the solar radiation in US states and noted their cancer mortality. And the more solar radiation, the lower the cancer mortality. So that was, again, another associational study. And then we fast forward to basically 2015, the most landmark study that I think every one of your listeners who want to understand sunlight the best and its role in health was called the Melanoma in Southern Sweden study.

Starting point is 00:18:00 And briefly, what happened is these researchers noted that women in Sweden, and they were native Swedish, this was before widespread changes in the demographics of that country, they noticed that these women would go tan, they would lie in tanning beds, they would go overseas to tan. And what they wanted to know is, their hypothesis was that these women are going to be dying of melanoma at a higher rate. So they followed them, they enrolled all these middle-aged women, they asked them those four hypothesis was that these women are going to be dying of melanoma at a higher rate. So they followed them, they enrolled all these middle-aged women, they asked them those four

Starting point is 00:18:28 questions, do you tan in the summer, do you tan in the winter, do you visit tanning beds, and do you travel overseas to tan or to get sun? And then they followed them for 25 years. And what they expected, as I mentioned, is that these women would be dying of melanoma and it would confirm the biases or the presupposition that the sun was harmful. What they noticed was that the women who had the most sun, who answered three out of four or four out of four of all those questions about sun seeking behavior and ultraviolet exposure, they had the lowest mortality and there was a dose response. So the women with the intermediate sun exposures had died at a faster rate and those who avoided

Starting point is 00:19:17 the sun, those women who were going nowhere near the sun, they died the fastest. And that's a profound finding. And they actually calculated that the magnitude of that difference was equivalent to smoking, such that you had a woman who avoided the sun, but didn't smoke, had the same mortality as the woman who went sunbathing regularly and smoked cigarettes. So this, and Pelle Lincolst and his team were shocked because

Starting point is 00:19:49 that was exactly the opposite of their original hypothesis. Yet it confirmed what Peller and Stevenson found in the early 30s, what Apley found in 45, and Garland and Garland reduced colon cancer with increased solar exposure. The most recent confirmation of this finding is Richard Weller's analysis of the UK Biobank, again, showing the more UV light you get, the lower all-cause mortality, which is medical speak for death by any cause, the lower cardiovascular mortality, so death by any cardiovascular cause, and the kicker out of Weller's analysis was the lowest skin cancer mortality.

Starting point is 00:20:34 Even those who got skin cancer but had more UV light, they lived longer. This is the holistic picture of sunlight and health, which is yes, you might slightly increase your risk of skin cancer, but the trade-offs or the benefits you're getting in all-cause mortality and reduced other forms of nasty cancers is enormous. Dr. Justin Marchegiani I think some of the idea here is just to try to be reasonable with all the stuff and you know, if it's, you know, the sun's blazing out there and it's a really hot day and the UV index is through the roof and you're super pale, then you have to be cautious with how long you're in the sun for.

Starting point is 00:21:17 And if you have children, there might be reason for you to make sure they have particular clothing to protect them. I would choose that over sunscreen, but there might be cases like for my kids, I remember when they were really young, they would be in the water, in the ocean or whatever for hours on end, hours and hours and hours. And we had to like reapply stuff to them

Starting point is 00:21:39 because at that time I certainly didn't have some of this same knowledge, but with a kid that's like four, I'm not going to be like, oh, we got to get you like tiny exposure here to the sun and like, try to figure all these things out when the weather's super nice and it's time to go to the beach. You just want to have the easy access to go to the beach. So you have to kind of treat these things case by case and do what you think is reasonable. But as an adult, you can feel the sun. You feel the sun.

Starting point is 00:22:07 You're like, oh, I don't know if this is so good. You'll start to feel ill sometimes. You'll start to just not feel well. And you're like, I should go sit in some shade. So you naturally just go sit under a tree or something like that. So I think just trying to apply some logic to it, being very cautious that you're not just going to go out in the middle of August and go to a concert and just be pounded by the sun and end up with like blisters and all that kind of stuff. Exactly. That is exactly my message, which is we have to respect our skin type. So there's

Starting point is 00:22:42 a phispatric scale of basically the amount of melanin that you have in your epidermis and your propensity to burn. It goes from one, the most pale Northern European, to six, the most dark, maybe Somalian or South Sudanese. These are different prototypes. We have to respect our individual prototype type and the amount of UV light in our environment. Those two factors are going to be the most important considering how to get sun exposure in a safe and appropriate way and how to build this solar callus, as you said, Mark, in a way that is sensible. It doesn't make sense because you can just compare yourselves if you're living maybe in a, and lots of us are, living in countries that are different to where our

Starting point is 00:23:30 ancestors grew up. You just have to compare yourself to the skin color of the people that were traditionally from that land. If it's different, then there's a mismatch here. There's a mismatch between your skin type and the latitude that you're living in. So respecting that difference is key. And this concept is called, well, I've called it a skin type latitude mismatch. It's important because there's actually two types of mismatch. So again, if you're Swedish living in Sweden or if you're Indian living in India, then you're not mismatched. You're obviously in the same area that your parents and grandparents and ancestors evolved. So

Starting point is 00:24:09 it's less difficult. This formulation needs less explanation because you're in your native land, so to speak. But if you are a lighter guy, say you, Mark, living in California, perhaps you have less melanin in your epidermis than the native people. What that means is that you just have to be careful and there's more UV light around than your skin can protect you from. It's actually pretty simple. You just have to use the shade and you just have to avoid peak UV times and titrate your UV exposure to that skin type and those feelings that you mentioned. The opposite is actually more difficult to get around. That is

Starting point is 00:24:54 when you have a very dark, like a type five or type six, you're Nigerian or West African and you're living in London, UK or Scotland Scotland, UK, or Tasmania, Australia. This is a big problem because the amount of UV light in the environment, both during the summer and during the winter, is insufficient to generate enough vitamin D for optimal health. I'm not talking about to prevent bone disease. Yes, there's probably enough to prevent, you know, Frank Ricketts. But I'm talking about health optimization, which is the observational data that people seem to have much less cancer, cardiovascular disease, all these other autoimmune diseases when you essentially climb above a threshold. So this is much more difficult to achieve if you are, as I mentioned, a Brit who is

Starting point is 00:25:50 of West African origin, because there's not enough UV light. So the answer there is that you could be naked in summer and you're still not generating enough because your melanin is soaking up all that UVB light and not allowing you enough to generate vitamin D. So the solution for these people is actually, it's more complicated, but it involves firstly relocation. Obviously that's hard, but things like traveling, you know, during seasonally to get some more sunlight and other kind of workarounds like that. What you got, Andrew?

Starting point is 00:26:22 Yeah, I'm curious. Hopefully I can word this correctly without stumbling over my words, but thinking about which one impacts the other more. Does the food we eat impact the sun we get more or does the sun we get impact the food we eat more? Yeah, that's a really good question. I would say the latter. I think the sun that we get is going to influence the food, the suitability of the food that you should eat, and that is going to have a bigger impact on health. The food that you eat is going to affect your photosensitivity. We know that because many people who might listen to this have tried cutting out seed oils. Suddenly, they found that their ability to sunburn has reduced.

Starting point is 00:27:16 We know that food consumption, particularly the omega-3 to omega-6 polyunsaturated fatty acids and their proportions really do influence photosensitivity and predisposition to sunburn. So that's definitely a thing. But the opposite side of the coin is that if we're eating a diet that is incongruent with our light environment, that's when the metabolic syndrome, obesity, fatty liver, and all these other problems really take off. That gets to this idea of seasonal eating and the attempt to eat what's locally available as much as possible. So much of the food side of the obesity epidemic and what's going on in our

Starting point is 00:28:06 countries from a chronic disease point of view is people eating processed food and food from elsewhere and just not respecting their light environment. You're probably wondering why am I wearing these glasses? Well, it's because I'm being bathed in blue light and blue light isn't necessarily bad. There's blue light in the sun. But if you're in your office, if you're indoors, if you're in front of a screen during the daytime, it's not a great idea to have your eyes being bathed by blue light all day long. That's why EMR Tech, a company that we've partnered with, has blue light daytime glasses and blue light blocking evening glasses. These glasses right here are meant for you to wear during the daytime when you're in front of screens, etc. But if you're outside, take the glasses off and get the natural sunlight. And if you're at home in the evening when sun sets and

Starting point is 00:28:49 you need to be in front of the TV or you need to be from your computer or on your phone, these glasses are the ones to get. They also have the best red light therapy devices on the market. If you stand in front of any of EMR Tech's red light therapy devices, you'll actually feel how much stronger the output of the red light is on those devices versus any of the competitors. They also have some of their smaller red light devices like their Firewave, Fire Dragon, and Fire Storm. And then if you want to get some of their bigger panels, they have their Firehawk, which is their biggest panel, and the Inferno panel.

Starting point is 00:29:19 These are literally the best red light therapy devices on the market. And if you want to save on them, Andrew, how can they do that? Yes, you got to head over to EMRtech.com. That's E-M-R-Tech-T-E-K.com. And check out Enter Promo Code Power Project to save 20% off your entire order. Again, that's EMRtech.com Promo Code Power Project. Links in the description, as well as the podcast show notes.

Starting point is 00:29:41 You mentioned you can't out-diet a poor light environment. Can you expand on that more? It's a pretty profound statement, I think. It speaks to this focus in the holistic health world on diet, on food, and particularly in the low-carb and carnivore type space where they have made amazing gains and helped lots of people. It's a very effective intervention to lose weight and get rid of insulin resistance and reverse diabetes. There's an associated myopia or tunnel vision in my mind that diet is the only thing that matters.

Starting point is 00:30:22 These other environmental inputs like light and temperature are peripheral and they're not as important. But they are in my mind. And when you drill down to the mitochondrial level and start really understanding what are the inputs into these engines that make the energy in the cell, and you understand the importance of those light-dark cycles, then it really becomes quite apparent that you can eat the highest quality grass-fed steak from a regenerative farmer, from Will Harris at White Oak Pastures, or a dozen oysters every day. But if you're doing it at 3am in the nighttime, because you work shift work and you keep doing that for 5 years, 10 years, you can't escape that reality that those, I would argue, even more fundamental inputs into health and mitochondrial health are basically perturbed

Starting point is 00:31:25 and suboptimal. So it's an invitation for people to think about light when it comes to health and health optimization. And it seems like the light can just drive you towards bad behavior because if you're going to eat something at 3 a.m. it's certainly not going to be oysters. Yeah, you're right. And we talked about this offline. And I think you're so right, Mark, which is that it's a constellation of poor lifestyle habits. And people are getting home and it's late at night and they order the takeaway or the Uber Eats and it's seed oil drenched processed foods with sugar added. And they're giving themselves the blue light input right in front of their eye at 11pm. So yeah, they're really stacking these suboptimal

Starting point is 00:32:14 inputs at the same time. You mentioned temperature for a second there. So what were you referring to? So your body's collecting information. That's one way of thinking about it, is So your body's collecting information. That's one way of thinking about it, is that your body, through its circadian system, through these non-visual photoreceptors, are constantly bringing in information from the environment and it's using that information to help time all these bodily processes. Temperature is one of those inputs. They're known as zeitgeibers or timekeepers. Obviously, light is the main zeitgeiber for the circadian rhythm, but temperature is also a function. An idea of how to illustrate that is that cold, particularly, can have profound effects on physiology, mitochondrial function, mitochondrial efficiency, and therefore things like metabolic

Starting point is 00:33:15 health. There are studies showing, I believe it was somewhere in Northern Europe, they just got a bunch of diabetics and they told them to eat whatever you've been eating, don't change what you're eating, but simply walk around. They were in some cold city, maybe it was in Latvia or something like that. Just walk around in a t-shirt and shorts instead of your normal North Face puffer jacket. They showed profound improvements in their insulin resistance, in their fasting blood glucose and other markers of metabolic health, simply by inducing essentially a cold thermogenesis

Starting point is 00:33:55 or this cold temperature input. What it did, there's many different mechanisms how these things are happening. But one of them is to upregulate the production of brown adipose tissue. If you imagine white adipose tissue as a storage bin for energy, the brown adipose tissue is like a furnace. It simply just sucks in glucose and other energy substrates and burns it for heat. This is what their bodies were doing. The temperature is fundamentally influencing our metabolism. Just like I mentioned earlier, we're living in these hermetically sealed houses that are temperature- not only are they blocking natural sunlight from entering

Starting point is 00:34:45 and artificially manipulating the spectrum of sunlight, but blocking UV, blocking infrared and therefore proportionally allowing more blue light in. So back to the blue light story, is that you're actually getting essentially relatively blue light toxic by being behind a standard glass that is probably mandated by energy-saving guidelines, government regulations these days, because you're blocking those other balancing wavelengths. Not only that, everyone's houses are also temperature controlled. If your body is expecting to go into winter, and the season is winter, it's New York and it's December, but your 24 degrees Celsius indoors the whole time, then there's this discrepancy.

Starting point is 00:35:33 Again, it's like a mismatch and that has profoundly chaotic effects on metabolism and mitochondrial function and the way that your body's dealing with energy. So, it seems like there's so many things that can impact your metabolism and your mitochondria. And so if someone comes to you and they have really poor, you know, A1C and glucose and maybe they're pre-diabetic or maybe they're diabetic, it sounds like there's a lot of strategies that you can employ that could be really helpful. Obviously, again, there might be pharmaceutical intervention. If someone comes to you and their blood sugar is like 500, they're going to probably need

Starting point is 00:36:13 like medical assistance. They're going to probably need medical help right at that moment. But it sounds to me like a lot of what you're describing, that the sunlight could be effective, some type of cold therapy. Now, when you think cold therapy, all we think is cold plunge, but there's a lot of therapies that you could utilize that would probably give you the cold exposure

Starting point is 00:36:33 that could actually make a difference. Really just getting yourself chilly kind of and getting some goosebumps is probably sufficient enough to do that for a couple of minutes. What are like, you know, what are some of these habits that someone can kind of stack? My are some of these habits that someone can stack? My mother-in-law has had diabetes for maybe 10, 15 years.

Starting point is 00:36:51 She really just struggles with nailing the diet down exactly the way that she needs to. She just likes her snacks. She likes to keep those in there and she balances everything out with some metformin, but her blood sugar is starting to creep back up and I've had success with her helping her with lifting and walking and then also like carnivore diet but she just she really has a trouble like adhering to it so maybe for someone like that like what are a couple things that she could do that could also assist in kind of regulating her blood sugar. Yeah you're exactly right Mark.

Starting point is 00:37:24 She's 75 you know she doesn't care anymore. He's doing her best. You know what I mean? She's doing the best she can, but she still just likes her little treats here and there, you know? The, I mean, the fundamental thing is always how interested someone is in changing, because that that's going to be the key differentiator is in terms of these, these options, these lifestyle options, because you have to want to implement them.

Starting point is 00:37:46 But, and it's a great way of conceptualizing it as you did Mark, which is, I sometimes think of it like a tool bench and you've got different size spanners and you've got different size pliers. And each one of them is good for a different purpose. You can, you can, or, you know, shift spanner where you can change the size of the spanner. They're all different options. Just like you said, there's medications too. There's a spectrum of

Starting point is 00:38:14 diet and lifestyle and pharmaceutical drugs that we can use as holistic doctors. I guess the skill is to understand the patient, understand, say, your mother-in-law, understand where she's at, what she's willing to change, and then choose the right tool for the job. So you mentioned exercise, that's great, very, very effective, especially walking pre and post meal. And we talked about cold exposure briefly, and as you said, you don't need to strip down

Starting point is 00:38:46 naked and hop into the local river in the middle of winter to get a benefit. You can simply just wear less clothing and start building tolerance to natural cold. It's actually surprising how quickly people find that they're no longer disturbed by the cold temperatures and how they can simply deal with it. So exercise cold and fasting, extremely powerful. I know that you've been delving into intermittent fasting a lot lately. So fasting is a great way to kick yourself into ketogenic metabolism and start, it's real rehabilitation for the mitochondria. Ketogenic diet that a lot of people have talked about, again, it's a real mainstay of metabolic

Starting point is 00:39:31 lifestyle medicine is to get people into nutritional ketosis and start helping them access that fat burning mode. It's like a gear of the car. Sometimes I called it. It's like imagine if someone's only been stuck in first or second gear in the gearbox. When you unlock nutritional ketosis for them, you're really just opening up fourth, fifth, sixth gear that they never or they forgot they had. Very, very powerful.

Starting point is 00:39:57 And then you've got light. Like we said, sunlight is so important and it's having effects both from a circadian rhythm point of view and from a direct somat point of view. From a circadian rhythm point of view, if you eat during the daytime, if you have good quality, high quality sleep, then that is going to improve your insulin sensitivity and make you more leptin sensitive so that your body knows exactly how much energy is on board. All those organs like the liver, the pancreas, the skeletal muscle, the adipose tissue, they all have these circadian clocks in them too.

Starting point is 00:40:35 They can all be disturbed by the blue light, by the eating late at night, and so forth. But then you've got these direct daytime effects of full spectrum sunlight. And one way that this was illustrated was a very small, very simple randomized trial which just took two groups and they didn't use sunlight. They actually used 670 nanometer red light. So pure isolated red light. And for half of them, they shone this 6-7 nanometer light

Starting point is 00:41:07 patch on their back for 15 minutes, and then gave them this, what we call a glucose tolerance test. So in medicine, we make people drink 75 grams of glucose and then take blood tests 30 minutes, one hour, two hours, and we measure the shape of the response in the form of how high did their blood glucose climb, how high did their insulin level climb, and the shape of that curve gives us a lot of very useful information about their metabolic health. What they noticed, these investigators, is that the people that had that red light shone on their back for 15 minutes, they had significantly lower blood glucose levels after this challenge. Their mitochondria were more active. They measured expired CO2,

Starting point is 00:41:54 so they could see that it was because the mitochondria were being upregulated. What we can extrapolate from that is that the sun has not only six, seven nanometer light, but all these other frequencies and wavelengths that have amazingly synergistic beneficial effects on our health. So getting out in morning sunlight, that could be highly effective for your mother-in-law and to simply have some bare skin exposed and do that for 15 minutes. So those are kind of the main things. There's other things that can help, things like grounding is, I believe there's some evidence for that.

Starting point is 00:42:33 Things like going even more obscure, but there's a bit of evidence about deuterium depleted water. So, but there's a whole, those are the tools, I guess, in the toolkit from a natural health or lifestyle point of view. I want to ask this, going back to the morning sunlight. A lot of people have jobs where they have to be in an office from nine to five, and then they may have to do something after that in another building, et cetera. So to have the biggest impact on our circadian rhythm and our circadian biology, when do

Starting point is 00:43:05 you think would be the ideal times if you were going to look at minimums to try to get out into the sun so that you can have the best sleep and then just the best overall outcomes? So, I mean, the sunrise is the most important time of the circadian day. That light and getting that light into your eye, and ideally on your skin as well, is the highest value. Obviously not depending on the time of year, the season where you're living, your routine,

Starting point is 00:43:32 people can't always see it, but that is the biggest bang for the buck in terms of programming this massive array of important bodily bodily functions. I just want to interrupt for a second and just say that I've noticed for myself that I just wake up earlier, like if my sleep is all messed up and I wake up earlier and I actually see the sunrise, which is kind of a pain in the neck sometimes because it just is earlier and earlier, the deeper you get into the summer, that it really helps set

Starting point is 00:44:03 up the rest of my sleep. Yeah. And there's mechanisms by that in terms of the programming of melatonin and the melatonin release later that night is really set up by that early morning sun exposure. I like to tell my members and my patients, try and wear, if you can, see the sunrise wearing as little clothing as possible. And the reason for that is not only are you obviously at the sunrise, you're getting that light information to your eye, but you're potentially getting that on as much skin as possible. And then you're also getting the ambient temperature signals from wherever you are in the world. That is again informing the body of your seasonal rhythm. It's not only about a 24-hour rhythm, but

Starting point is 00:44:50 there's also these seasonal rhythms that we need to respect if we're living at higher latitudes. Remember, if you live in the equator, the day length is equal. The temperature is stable, the light dark cycles are stable. So it's much easier to respect your body's circadian rhythm if you're living at the equator. And that's the value of relocation for people who are really sick. Because if you want to stick to the letter of the law to your circadian biology, but you live in Scotland or Iceland, then you're going to be up 18 hours a day during summer and you're going to be in a cave, so to speak, for most of winter.

Starting point is 00:45:30 And that's difficult to really be adherent from a lifestyle point of view. Let me ask you one more thing on this. Would you say that sunset, because I know Sunrise, Biggest Made for Your Buck, but would sunset also have an effect on helping you to wind down? Anecdotally, I'll say that that's actually been a benefit for me. So I try to get out minimum sunrise and sunset. But what would you say to that? I would say 100%.

Starting point is 00:45:58 So a brief recap of the type of light that we get in the morning, it's predominantly red and infrared light with a little bit of blue. And then as the sun rises over the horizon, and again, the angle of the sun is going to depend on your season and which hemisphere you're in, you get arrival of ultraviolet A light, and then you get arrival of ultraviolet a light and then you get arrival of ultraviolet B light at the same time as having these the red infrared and blue and then that process reverses itself over the afternoon and nighttime and evening. So evening and the sunset is a massive amount of red massive amount of infrared and some blue and other visible light. But it is incredibly powerful for putting people to sleep. I call it nature's valium because every time I have

Starting point is 00:46:53 been, I'm really adherent and watch the sunrise, watch the sunset, you're out like a light. Especially if you're wearing blue light blockers, you put your orange blockers straight after you see the sunset and you've already eaten, you put your orange blockers straight off. Do you see the sunset and you've already eaten? You've already eaten your meal, maybe an hour before you're ready to be tucked in and go to sleep. So it's highly effective. So these are incredible habits for us to have.

Starting point is 00:47:19 But if somebody's listening, they might be thinking, well, I get on my phone right before bed and I can pass out right away. And I'm definitely one of those people. And if it wasn't for my kids, I would have all of the worst habits. And sometimes when you put it into that context about, well, these little ones are gonna mimic everything you do. So when it comes to this artificial light

Starting point is 00:47:42 and some of these bad habits, how have you seen or have you researched in regards to like how blue light impacts young children? Yeah, so children are very much susceptible to the effects of artificial light and there's a number of reasons for that and related to essentially their developmental stage and other kind of anatomical features. But the problem to think about, another way of thinking about it is they're getting these type of exposures at a much, much younger age than say, Andrew know, Andrew, you or I, and obviously a lot

Starting point is 00:48:26 younger than Mark. And we kind of dealt with the blue light and these other inputs much, much later. And we weren't being exposed during these key, these critical formative times of our life. So yeah, it's incredibly damaging. So the effects could be obviously poor sleep, so with the attendant difficulties on attention during the day, so potentially contributing things like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, ADHD, or other kinds of exacerbating things like other neurodevelopmental issues like autism. When you couple that with, remember circadian biology is this coupled light cycle and the

Starting point is 00:49:13 dark cycle. If you're exposed to this blue light during the night as a kid because you're on the iPad and then you go to school and you're not getting natural sunlight with its infrared spectrum of nutrients, but you're under these compact fluorescent lamps, you're kind of making the problem even worse. So behavioral issues, myopia, I mean myopia is at epidemic proportions in East Asia. And I think- Can you explain myopia real quick? Just repeat what I don't know the term.

Starting point is 00:49:43 So it's a refractory error. It's a it's it's to do with the shape of the eye in terms of the way the eye concentrates light to perceive images. And if we have been indoors all day, all day, we live an indoor lifestyle, if we on screens all day, then the shape of the eye and the way that it projects light is essentially wrong or incorrect. And then we have to wear eyeglasses to correct it. But that sets us up for a whole host of other issues and it's a really not a good position to be in. But what we do know is that seeing morning red and rich light is highly effective in improving myopia. So it is a classic disease of this indoor civilized world and artificial light environment. And if you

Starting point is 00:50:34 simply put the kid or the adult back into nature, depending on how long it's been, then there is a degree of reversibility and definitely prevention of worsening of it. So these are just some of the consequences for kids. And I mean, we haven't even talked about what they might be looking at. And I guess that's a complete separate topic that's not even related to circadian biology. But they're all, it's like a wagon wheel and they're all coming off this modern technological environment that we're living in.

Starting point is 00:51:10 Seems like, you know, one of the things I really liked about your podcast is that you talk about EMF that we have naturally. We have non-native EMF. We got these electromagnetic fields that could be harmful. got these electromagnetic fields that can be harmful. We got electromagnetic fields that can be helpful. Kind of depends on how we utilize them. It sounds like you're a proponent of utilizing the sun. It sounds like you're a proponent

Starting point is 00:51:34 of utilizing some red light. Sounds like you're a proponent of, you know, blocking the blue light whenever possible. And we all understand, or maybe people listening maybe don't understand is that Obviously there's blue light during the day when you're outside, but doesn't seem to Have the same harmful impact as you know watching TV or looking at your phone Because you're mainly only absorbing that blue light when you're outside during the day. There's multiple spectrums of light

Starting point is 00:52:03 But I think that you know, we I think that we can get real crazy with some of this stuff, and we can burn down the 5G tower that's out in front of our house. But what have you really seen in your practice? Have you advocated for someone like, hey, you said your diabetes sparked up over the last two years, and there is you said your diabetes, you know, sparked up over the last

Starting point is 00:52:25 two years and there is a 5G tower across the way or there's a cell tower or whatever you want to, whatever, you know, non-native EMF is there to mess with somebody or their phone is in their room or something like that. Have you seen really profound things or is this more of like a subtle thing over time and, uh, talking about all the disciplines that we're talking about here today. Yeah, it's, it's very difficult to tease out these individual, uh, causative, the individual variables. Um, especially if you've got someone who's interested bought in and they make a bunch

Starting point is 00:53:00 of changes. Uh, I think, I mean, there, there is some evidence, and I believe it was in vitro, so lab-based evidence showing that some non-native cell cell phone radiation, 4G, was induced like oxidative stress in beta cells of the pancreas, so the cells that make insulin. It's difficult to, again, elucidate the contribution of 5G or Wi-Fi to diabetes specifically, but I think there's enough circumstantial evidence that we can infer that it's having quite a negative effect on things like metabolic syndrome and insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes. I think the biggest probably benefit that I've seen in clinical practice is simply people just turning off their wifi router.

Starting point is 00:53:50 Because before we even go to sources outside our house, the biggest bang for the buck on the non-native EMF side of things is to really just go through your own house with a fine tooth comb and unplugging the Wi-Fi router at night is the biggest kind of value play. And people just report they sleep a lot better.

Starting point is 00:54:13 That's probably the most consistent finding. And when it comes to red light therapy, there's a lot of brands and stuff like that out there. But do you have any particular brands or like what should people look for like the strength of the red light or what do you have any particular brands or like, what should people look for like the strength of the red light or what do you, what do you suggest? Yeah, it's, it's a, it's one that I use, I guess judiciously because I don't want people to think that they can replicate this, you know, the giant orb in the sun, in the sky with a, with just this little panel because they can't. And but you know, if they're in the correct situation,

Starting point is 00:54:45 and depending on what we're using it for, it definitely does have a place. I think I really like what Andrew Latour is doing with Gemba Redd. He's a US-based company. Just because he's a very, very transparent guy, he's got a great amount of educational resources about red light therapy on his website and his YouTube. I don't have any affiliation at all, but the kind of field is a little bit of a shark pool because it seems like you can just call up a

Starting point is 00:55:19 Chinese factory and brand a device and you don't know what are the specifications, what are the manufacturer reported versus the actual real world tested specifications to do with wavelength, to do with intensity, to do with all these kind of things. And it's quite convenient for these manufacturers to be kind of a bit opaque and not completely transparent about what they are doing. But EMR Tech, Gamber Red are two reputable brands that make high quality equipment that are transparent about third-party testing. So yeah, they're two options. What are some things that you've seen with cold therapy? Like what are some things you've seen be able to help people? Because

Starting point is 00:56:12 Jack Crews talking about how a lot of people evolved through cold and some other people evolved through the sun. I think it's like a really super interesting way to look at some of that. But what are some things you've seen with cold therapy? I mean, my focus has mainly been on metabolic disease and obesity, this type of thing. And it helps, it does help in terms of improving those markers that you talked about earlier, like the HbA1c and fasting insulin. And it seems to really be effective in kind of getting rid of this ectopic fat or visceral fat. I know you talked to my good friend, Dr. Shorten O'Mara recently, and his emphasis is very much on strategies that are specifically targeting visceral fat. I agree with him on almost everything.

Starting point is 00:57:00 But the cold therapy specifically seems to be quite effective at really getting rid of that and improving things like non-alcoholic, what's called metabolic-associated fatty liver disease now. Like the liver enzymes and these other types of things. There's no shame in wanting to have great sex. And there's no shame for wanting your member to perform the way it should be. A lot of us sometimes have some issue with blood flow, but that's where Joy Mode comes in. Let me read you these ingredients

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Starting point is 00:58:18 promo code power project links in the description as well as the podcast show notes. Thinking about somebody potentially even hearing about this stuff for the first time ever, although it has been extremely popular in recent years, but what do you think is, I'm gonna say the lowest hanging fruit or I guess the most relatable issue

Starting point is 00:58:40 that artificial light brings that will really start to like open people's eyes. Because if I explain this stuff to my dad Who's you know 70 years old? He's not gonna change anything He's gonna watch TV throughout the entire night and he's kind of you know, he's he's already gone through it, but Somebody my age, you know about to be 40 So I'm right at that that age group that you know didn't quite grow up with all the technology. But as I grew up, it started coming out and now it's really, really good.

Starting point is 00:59:11 And so because I didn't really see the drawbacks the way you explained it earlier in the podcast, I might be thinking it's totally fine for my kids to have it. It's totally fine for me to have it now. What do you think is kind of like the, the thing that breaks the ice for people when it comes to artificial light for them to wake up and be like, Oh, no, I actually can no longer ignore this. I need to address this because of this reason. I would say the most people suffering from from obesity,

Starting point is 00:59:41 just being overweight, I would say, look, it's your light environment is making you fat. I think if that, and specifically talking to the problem that people care about the most, if it's a guy, as you said, 40, and he's starting to get the dad bod, and he's getting pudgy, and he enjoys his diet, he's not necessarily eating that, what he might feel is that unhealthy, then really being like, look mate, your light environment is making you fat. This midday signal with this bright blue light is tricking your body into essentially storing energy and really putting on weight. I mean, I also am really in favor of speaking to exactly the person in front of me. So if someone's again

Starting point is 01:00:25 sleeping poorly, then it's like, dude, it's no wonder to me why you're sleeping so poorly is because you're essentially killing your body's own melatonin production. Maybe he's taking melatonin from the pharmacy and it's like, well, you can make it yourself, but the iPad at 11 PM is really stopping that. And then maybe they're obviously in the gym, they're trying to make gains and sleep quality as you would know, Mark, and all of you guys would know is key for testosterone optimization, for muscle mass retention and growth. So that's a real topic that I think speaks to a lot of people. And then the ladies, there's evidence that the blue light, this isolated blue light, which

Starting point is 01:01:13 is also known as a high energy visible, induces wrinkling. Photo is essentially causing damage and aging. Aging people contributing to things like melasma. So if they're more of an aesthetic or interested in aesthetics or beauty, then staring at this blue lit screen is going to be actually aging their face much quicker than it would otherwise, because there's no red and infrared. And we know that from, again, the medical literature, that infrared light induces collagen production, induces elastin, all these fibroblasts. They make these compounds to make your skin look more young and more vibrant. That's what we would have got because in our ancestral past, we got all of those natural wavelengths of sunlight. We got the red, the infrared, all those UV light that again causes those DNA damage. But then you got the red and the infrared

Starting point is 01:02:12 that repairs all that hormetic stressor of UV light. So that's another kind of attack or way of thinking about it. And then obviously the children and talking about those behavioral issues. So I mean, there's just some of the strategies that I think. But you know, people feel tired, people have brain fog, people have migraine. I mean, we haven't even talked about migraine and the fact that migraine is linked to this flicker effect that we get from LEDs and fluorescent bulbs. You can improve migraine massively by just getting rid of those artificial lights. I think there's so many, every facet of people's disease or ailment and general state of poor

Starting point is 01:03:00 health today is going to be improved by fixing their light environment, by blocking blue light and getting sunlight. I like to just take it back to offer people, what would your great grandmother do? What type of light did they live under? When you put it simply like that, people are more like, okay, yeah, of course she wasn't looking at her iPad. She was outdoors all day and then had darkness at night. And so just offering that and then making suggestions like you have marked throughout the podcast, and just trying something or buying a pair of cool blue

Starting point is 01:03:36 light blockers. These are all little entry points that people might find benefit in. Soterios Johnson Let me ask you this, Cause I think we asked Jack Cruz a similar question. If you could rank these things on level of importance that you would say how important they are community. That's first sleep, exercise slash movement, nutrition and light. How would you rank those? I can repeat it if you need me to repeat anything. I'm going to quickly community, community, food, light, sleep.

Starting point is 01:04:09 What was the other one? Exercise and movement. Exercise. It's a difficult question because I think for each individual, they've gotten to the either state of good health or bad health, depending on a different combination of these factors. I think the relative weight and importance for each individual, it does vary.

Starting point is 01:04:34 I'm kind of hesitant to paint it with a broad brush. I would put light at the top, given how critical circadian biology is to the organism function. It is that old. These light-dark cycles predate the development of the gastrointestinal system that we have as humans. So I put light at the top. Sleep is half of light because a regulated circadian rhythm is that light and dark cycle. It's a yin and the yang. That's the way I think about it. So the yin and the yang has a perfectly symmetrical white, light and dark, and you can't have a balanced yin and yang without the tail of the white perfectly syncing up with the head of the black. That's the symbol in Taoism. So I would put circadian biology and light and sleep first.

Starting point is 01:05:32 I then put food and exercise and look, I mean, not to diminish the role of community. I think it's critical, but probably in that order. Yeah, food is a tough one to kind of figure out sometimes because like, you know, on one side you're like, well, food is just so simple. You just eat the natural foods that are here for us and that should be that. But we see how complicated it can be for people and just I guess how difficult it can be for someone to navigate multiple days in a row where they're not over consuming calories because they're highly palatable processed foods that are around. Yeah, it's, it's very difficult. And again, I think it also gets to Andrew's question about the children and the blue lights and the iPads and so much of lifestyle change is contextual.

Starting point is 01:06:18 I truly believe that this is all made incredibly easy or incredibly difficult depending on our context and our environment. So maybe I need to put community in a different, may higher up because look at the Amish for example. All this is second comes effortless to them because their culture enables, they don't have, and I'm not advocating that everyone return to an Amish-type lifestyle, but only to emphasize the point that if it's your culture to not turn on bright blue LEDs every night, then it becomes

Starting point is 01:06:54 much easier. Your community or your routine is to grow your own food locally without pesticides and herbicides, then it's again much easier. So I think that cultivating our environment is key. And part of Dr. Jack Kruse's message is relocation where appropriate. And his perspective, and I really share it as a doctor, it's actually our job to give you all the options. Even if it's as unpalatable to you as moving to the 13th North Latitude where he lives, then you might not like that advice, but we at least have to tell you that that is something that is in your best interest.

Starting point is 01:07:41 What that might look like for people is move to a smaller country town, where you move a bit further away from the 5G tower, get closer to some local farms that sell out of their barn door to people. I think a lot of people might be more convinced that they're unable to change their environment than they truly are. And all this processed food and all these inputs that we're actually talking about avoiding, that keeps people in a powerless situation from a mental and emotional point of view, I think, definitely, so that they feel like it's more difficult to change their

Starting point is 01:08:22 environment than it perhaps might be. But really being conscious of, hang on, do I really need to be living in this place? Do I really need to have all live this lifestyle? If you can make the lifestyle a bit more easy, easily accessible to everything we've talked about in terms of this ancestral living, then the job's made easier for you. Yeah, it's hard to figure out, you know, is the TV the problem? You know, is it is it somebody just watching television? Like that's their choice of entertainment, that they watch a

Starting point is 01:08:52 lot of TV and they sit down or is the actual blue light? You know, it's very difficult to sometimes sparse these things out. But it is clear that these things that you know, just technology in general can kind of grab our attention. It could pull us away from being outdoors. It could pull us away from otherwise doing healthy things. And we're not really gonna propose that. Everyone should be as weird as we are

Starting point is 01:09:14 and take things to the level that we do. We actually just find them to be fun and we find them to be interesting. And I think for all of us, we like doing almost like experiments. Like me let me just see what this does you know I heard 15 different people talking about you know going on some walks maybe I should try it you know I've heard you know it's a good idea to get some morning sunlight I heard Andrew Huberman talking about you know seeing the sunrise what's it hurt

Starting point is 01:09:41 for me to wake up tomorrow morning and just check that out and sort of discover that for myself. I have kind of a fun and interesting and kind of a weird question for you. More recently, there was a post from a guy named Jeff Nippard and he talked about the use of anabolic steroids and he talked about a study that was done on people that have taken steroids and basically in this study, I don't really know the exact way that they came up with this, but it basically just showed that these people that utilize steroids became dumber.

Starting point is 01:10:14 Their brain was aging faster. What's that? Their brain was aging faster. Their brain was aging faster. And I don't know what the measurable item was there, but when he mentioned that, I was like, oh, that kind of goes along with some other stuff I've heard from some other people talking about mitochondria and stuff.

Starting point is 01:10:29 Do you have any explanation on why something like that might happen? Why that could be possible? The only frame of reference that I have would probably be a lot of what Jack Cruz has talked about. To paraphrase his perspective on this is that our bodies have... We put our mitochondria in a certain number of organs that are critical for us to thrive, and that's our brain and our heart. Those organs reflect these characteristics of being human, which is incredibly intelligent, the most intelligent animal, and with this highly efficient cardiovascular system and part of the reason why we live the age that we do. So, and this is in contrast to say the gorilla,

Starting point is 01:11:23 which has a much smaller brain and has much larger skeletal muscle, so essentially muscle and it's therefore stronger. So what Cruz says is that there's this bio-energetic trade-off that's occurring in the body with regard to our energy production and again, the mitochondria are there to help make transform energy for us. Imagine there's a limited number of M&Ms on the table, so to speak. If you're taking a bunch of those M&Ms and putting them in the pile of muscles, of skeletal muscles, so biceps and all your physical strength type muscles, then you're essentially deducting potentially, potentially deducting this energy from those more energy demanding tissues like

Starting point is 01:12:23 your brain, like your heart. So that is Dr. Cruz's kind of point about building muscle or hypertrophy as a longevity strategy. And he would say that it's not a effective longevity strategy if we have to care for our heart and our brain, which we need to live beyond 60. If we want to be vital and coherent and into our elderly age, then we need to have a really functioning brain and heart. And if these gentlemen who were doing anabolic steroids for maybe decades on end, maybe they were stealing, so to speak, bio-energetically from their brain.

Starting point is 01:13:07 And that was reflected in, I don't know, maybe cerebral atrophy on MRI or whatever that outcome was. That would be my thought. And again, that's really just filtered through Dr. Cruz's perspectives. It makes sense to me, but yeah, that's my two cents on that. What are your thoughts on muscle for longevity?

Starting point is 01:13:28 I'm very much in the camp of, it's actually what we've discussed earlier, Mark. I think we really hashed that out on our early discussion, which is strength and effective strength that is functional. Because I've seen patients with fall and break hips. strength and effective strength that is functional because you know, I've seen patients with fall and break hips. It's not a nice state to be in and it's usually a quick... Strong over being jacked kind of thing, right? Exactly. Exactly. Being strong and functional over being

Starting point is 01:13:58 jacked here. All right, man. Thank you so much for your time today. Really appreciate it and we'll have to link up again because we recorded the greatest podcast of all time and it didn't work. The audio got messed up. There was too much juicy stuff in there. They didn't want to hear it. They didn't want us to release that one. So yeah, a hundred percent. Well, it's been a pleasure. Thank you everyone for having me on and yeah, it was great to connect. Oh, I forgot one more thing. You got to sell Andrew on.

Starting point is 01:14:25 We got to get Andrew eating fish over here. So maybe you can tell him why he needs some DHA in his life. Yeah, it's a great question. I think it's the key distinction between the carnival crew and the maybe kind of the more quantum biological kind of approaches to lifestyle and health optimization. Basically the reason to include DHA or fresh seafood in the diet is because this compound, this polyunsaturated fatty acid DHA is essentially what made us human from a cognitive point of view. It was thought, and there's a gentleman that you might actually want to interview him. He's 95, world expert,

Starting point is 01:15:13 Professor Michael Crawford from the UK. He is as sharp as a tack. If we're talking about health optimised into his old age, he is cognitively and incredibly sharp, and he eats seafood five times a week. But essentially, his work, his anthropological and scientific work, has shown that without this DHA compound, we wouldn't have had the brainpower that we do as humans. So it's playing an indispensable role in brain health, but it actually facilitates the skin's ability to harness energy. And we haven't talked a lot about it in this podcast about the role of the body as this bio-energenic kind of vehicle, but really it converts energy, light, into essentially electric current. And the more DHA-

Starting point is 01:16:08 Makes you a better solar panel. It makes you a solar panel type thing. Yeah. 100%. So the more DHA that you can pack in your cell membranes, the better you can harness energy and fundamentally life is about energy. Because an optimal health is just the slowest form of dying. That's the difference between a corpse and us is energy.

Starting point is 01:16:30 That's the role of DHA. I think it's underappreciated, especially for pregnant women, especially if they're breastfeeding, especially for young children. It's just so important for brain growth. Building the solar calis and getting the sunlight, you want to be disrespecting those seed oils and getting a bunch of fresh seafood because that will again help with your photosensitivity and reduce your likelihood of a risk of sunburn too.

Starting point is 01:16:58 Jason Vale Do you guys, this is for everybody, suggestions on what type of fish and from where, because I mainly shop at Costco and I see they have a lot of salmon and stuff. It's all wrapped in some pretty thick plastic. And again, I don't even know how to cook that because it's not my jam. You gave me some Wild Planet mackerel, which was surprisingly, I enjoyed it. It wasn't like I took the first bite and I was like, oh, here we go. Put some salt on it. Okay. Like it wasn't like I took the first bite and I was like, Oh, here we go. Put some salt on it. Okay.

Starting point is 01:17:27 It's a little bit better. And then put some lemon juice on it. And then I was having a party and then I was like, okay, this is actually like, I can have this again and not like have to like cringe and like, you know, here we go. Have you tried sardines? No. Wild Planet has sardines. They come in six, uh, six canisters at Costco sardines and rice.

Starting point is 01:17:45 Oh, they have them at Costco. Yeah. Yeah. Oysters sold oysters are really high in DHA. They might be. Those are kind of funny though, right? They're a little weird. Yeah. A little weird. It kind of feels like he got tossed around in the ocean. It's kind of what it tastes like a little bit, but I dig it. My entry point, my advice for people who don't like seafood are oysters Kilpatrick, which is essentially an oyster with barbecue sauce and bacon bits baked. So that's a great entry point into oysters. Or a white fish that is kind of pan fried or baked with butter or ghee and just make it really fresh and heaps of lemon

Starting point is 01:18:25 juice and salt. That's like my basic entry point. That's beginner level. And then more advanced but really delicious is ceviche or some of these other Peruvian preparations of fresh seafood like tiradito. That's another one. These taste absolutely amazing. So it's essentially white fish that is marinated in citrus or other form of lemon. And it just gets mixed through and it's fresh, so it's not cooked at all. It's simply just marinated. That tastes really good, again, really bioavailable. Actually octopus, barbecued octopus. Um, there's a, there's a way of preparing it.

Starting point is 01:19:09 You have to actually boil it first for about 45 minutes and then you whack it on the barbecue. Uh, really, really high protein. I don't know if you gentlemen have ever eaten octopus in your bodybuilding. You have yet. Raw might be a bit slimy. I use it for like, like, you know, poke. So you can get it raw online and stuff. It's like eating a power cord though.

Starting point is 01:19:30 Yeah. It's very weird. And then all the way up, and then other middle ranges, like a baked whole fish, that's probably even beginner, but with the skin on. Costco, you can get wild-caught, I believe, Alaskan salmon in filleted portions. That's fantastic, a really good option because you're avoiding the suboptimal conditions of farmed seafood.

Starting point is 01:19:59 And then for advanced players, it's raw, so raw raw oysters and raw, the other forms of, of a, of like wild caught raw seafood. Sashimi is in that camp and probably at the top. And this is what I actually recommend. If you are partner is pregnant and you can afford it because not everyone can is something like a wild caught ocean trout roe, which is like the fish eggs, because they are so rich in DHA and that it's incredible. That's actually what the Inuit gave to their pregnant women. Western Air Price, who did some interesting work anthropologically, looking at traditional people, he at traditional people.

Starting point is 01:20:45 He studied these people and their dietary habits. All these societies had very, very defined and well thought out protocols for feeding their women around the time of preconception, during the pregnancy and breastfeeding. The Inuit basically prized these fish eggs. What about peanut butter pretzels? Yeah. Extremely rich in DHA. I think there's DHA in lamb as well, right? I don't know if there is in like goat, because

Starting point is 01:21:22 there could be like maybe goat milk or goat cheese might be some options for people. And then maybe does raw milk have DHA in it? Do you know? I don't believe it has. If it did, it would not be anywhere near on the scale of seafood or of lamb meat. And then the next point that needs to be really emphasized, I don't know if you have vegetarian or vegan following Mark, is that it's not the same to get the DHA of algal origin. And David explained that on his podcast to you guys, and it's to do with the confirmation

Starting point is 01:22:01 of some of the molecules. So you essentially need pre-formed DHA from animal sources, which is called SN2 position, if you want the maximum effect. Where can people find you, Max? Where can they find out about podcasts and stuff? Yeah. So I'm on Instagram dr-max-gul. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. bringing together a lot of the type of topics that I have been talking about in this podcast and others in my interviews, which is circadian and quantum biology, regenerative farming, and ancestral diets. So that's that we're hosting a summit soon in Albury, New South Wales. And we post the videos online, the talks online after that. But yeah, if you want to connect via Twitter

Starting point is 01:23:04 to similar handle. But yeah, those are want to connect via Twitter to similar handle, but yeah, those are the platforms where I'm on. And my podcast is called Regenerative Health Podcast. And it's on Spotify and Apple podcasts and YouTube, obviously. All right. Well, have a great rest of your day. Thank you so much. Appreciate it.

Starting point is 01:23:19 Thank you. Thanks very much. I'll try sardines, though. Dude, try like, because you said they're kind of crunchy or something like that. They're not crunchy. They have a bone inside. That's what, yeah. But the bone is super soft. I'm try sardines though. Dude, try like, cause you said they're like kind of crunchy or something like that. They're not crunchy. They have a bone inside. That's yeah. But the bone is super soft.

Starting point is 01:23:28 I'm not saying that's bad. Like it's, it might be a good thing. Cause sometimes like a texture can be weird, but that's why I like shrimp, you know? Cause like when you bite into it, it has like that little like kind of a crunch to it. Not shrimp for me is fucking delicious, but. Shrimp's great.

Starting point is 01:23:42 Yeah. You know one thing that I've been digging a lot, cause you can get kimchi and sauerkraut at Costco. So I'll have a bunch of kimchi and sauerkraut and I'll just put two things of sardines on there and I'll put some hot sauce on it. And like you can break the sardines, it tastes actually.

Starting point is 01:23:53 It's so awesome that that's like, yeah, such a great meal, quick. Yeah, super quick. And there's olive oil in the sardine thing from Wild Planet. So you don't have to throw out the olive oil. I'll use all the olive oil from one of them and then I'll throw out the olive oil in the other one. And I'll sometimes put over white rice,

Starting point is 01:24:09 dump olive oil from the package on it, hot sauce. That would be delicious. It's fucking delicious. That sounds really good. It is. Yeah, and if you really hate the fish that bad as you're eating it, you could eat most of the fish away and then eat the fish and the rice together,

Starting point is 01:24:22 you know what I mean? Yeah, that's typically how I... I do weird stuff like that sometimes. All the. Sometimes if I eat something and I'm like, ah, I don't really love the flavor. That's so, um, I guess we'll just keep recording here, but like that's what I've told my wife when she asked about certain things, like, oh, you haven't eaten the thing, you know, yet. And I'm like, that's because I didn't like the other stuff. That's really good. That's my jam. Yeah. But yeah, that was, um, Max is a cool dude. He's got a lot of great information. I think the cool thing is that he's he's reasonable with it

Starting point is 01:24:47 you know, it's uh, it's easy to get like super caught up in all these things and Just uh, you know walk around with your glasses all day Oh, you know on and like be terrified of everything But that's like no way to really live your life and that's not really healthy either to be like paranoid and worried about stuff But yeah, well, I loved his approach that he's been pretty like open-minded to a lot of stuff. And when he was saying that he mainly deals with people that are obese and diabetic and stuff like that,

Starting point is 01:25:18 to me, that's super interesting because it's almost easier when someone has like a profound side effect from their behavior. And when they don't, and it's like a little bit more minor, it's like, what are we really talking about to somebody? You know, like if it's not making them, like Mike Gizretel had a post a couple days ago and I kind of reposted it and I said, you know,

Starting point is 01:25:40 there's a lot of other things going on other than just getting fat. You know, when you're talking about consuming, when you talk about eating a particular way, and I've heard this from many other bodybuilders that talk about anxiety, and steroids certainly could have a major impact on anxiety, 100%, maybe the sport of bodybuilding in general

Starting point is 01:26:02 puts some extra stressors on you, but I gotta look at people's diet. When someone tells me they blast 400 grams of carbs a day, I'm like, your workouts that you do for an hour, I don't know how much muscle you have. I don't know if your body's really chewing that up the way that you're thinking it is. My experience, which I've never had that amount of muscle,

Starting point is 01:26:27 that someone like Mike Isretel's height and size, I've never had that amount of muscle like that. Or maybe I did when I was powerlifting. But he's fucking huge. And so I know that those guys have very particular goals. But I just think a lot of times diet is a huge mover of everything. So when you hear Dr. Jack Cruz talking about blue light making you fat, or you might have

Starting point is 01:26:51 heard Dr. Max kind of share the same thing, it's kind of like, well, if someone fasts, they're going to lose weight even if they had a bunch of blue light on. If you had someone have 800 calories a day for two weeks, like their body weight is gonna go down unless there's some sort of drastic, crazy problem with the person, I would imagine. I think every single time you're gonna see their body weight go down.

Starting point is 01:27:20 But I think the blue light could be an influence that could almost quote unquote make the body want to do other things. Like it's a reinforced bad behavior because normally when you sit down and watch TV, normally like you're eating, you got your favorite show and you got your favorite food going. And I think those habits need to probably be looked at a little bit more. So I'm not like a believer that the blue light necessarily makes you fat in that way, but I think it can orchestrate a lot of other things

Starting point is 01:27:56 that you're doing in a given day and set you up on a bad path. But exactly with that, with like everything that we've learned about sleep, about how a lack of sleep will affect your hunger hormones and hormones have you feel full, which is inherently like how you act during the day, then we can kind of just work it backwards and think about, okay, if you're watching TV and on your phone late into the night, and then your sleep quality ends up being negatively affected and you wake up not feeling

Starting point is 01:28:20 the greatest. If you're now trying to stick to a diet where you're doing some fasting or you're counting some calories, you're trying to mitigate anything, you're inherently going to feel hungrier. And you might be able to handle it for a while, but there's going to come a string of days where you're just going to be like, fuck it, because your sleep is affected

Starting point is 01:28:39 because of your light environment. You can certainly make it easier for yourself. You can make everything work easier if you pay attention. I know this is, it's benefited me. You know what I mean? It's made dieting and all those things much easier and it's improved my sleep quality.

Starting point is 01:28:52 And we know so many people who've had the same effect. It's like, it just makes sense. Like if you really just think, like try to even just like take all the science out of it and just think about like your light environment, what you're looking at at night and how it could be probably affecting you and everything else, it just makes sense.

Starting point is 01:29:08 It's like, you don't have to reference the studies for it, even though there are studies that you can reference for it. Let's say it's 7 p.m. or 8 p.m. in the summertime, right? And you're eating and or watching TV and or doing both. Just look outside, you know, and then go out there. The sun's going down, like go check it out. You know, it only takes a couple of minutes. You don't have to be out there forever.

Starting point is 01:29:31 You don't have to like, you know, sit out there hungry and wait for your food, or you could go outside and eat even. But I think that it's just interesting, you know, we're inside and we're watching something or we're comforting ourselves with food. I heard a stat today that said 85% of people deal with stress via like eating.

Starting point is 01:29:51 Like that's their solution to the stress that they have, which is understandable again, because like what else are you gonna do? You come home from work, you know, and you had a day and you got an argument with a co-worker and a bunch of weird stuff happened and you're thinking, man, I don't even want to go back there tomorrow. This whole thing sucks.

Starting point is 01:30:14 And you come home and, you know, maybe you had a plan to like stick to a diet, but again, like all these behaviors and the stresses of your just life in general are probably kind of pushing you in this other direction. You had all the best intentions and now there you are eating potato chips while you're trying to cook something and order door dash all at the same time. Yeah, I always like to reference cars and fuel and it just makes more sense to people.

Starting point is 01:30:42 Like if your gas tank's full and then you run through half of it, but you only fill it up a quarter, now you're 75% full. You can get through the next day, but then you're at 25% and then you fill it, so then you're half and then you sew on and so forth. So like we all do it to ourselves where we stack the cards against us because we think that the card that's actually going

Starting point is 01:31:03 to give us a little bit of like, oh, this is going to help me rejuvenate. I'm going to watch a couple of episodes, going to have a little snack, and then I'm going to feel better about the day. And then I'm going to start over tomorrow. But in actuality, I just set you back so far, you know, when really it's like just, yeah, go outside, go for a walk, get to bed early. You know, like for those of you who haven't really messed with like changing up your light environment at home, I'd suggest like you can go on Amazon.

Starting point is 01:31:30 I think there's a red light bulb called a Huga. H-O-M-G-A. You got the same ones? I've had them and I literally just got more as I left today. Like they delivered more. There you go. So you can get those on Amazon. They're not crazy expensive.

Starting point is 01:31:44 I think it's like two for 18 Yeah, it's like 20 bucks for two 20 bucks for two So like what you can do is, you know pay attention to the some main lights in the house, right? And maybe your living room, right light you can get a bathroom. I just channeled Sean Fucking if you guys haven't seen that podcast with Sean that shit was fucked up living room right? Fuckin' if you guys haven't seen that podcast with Sean, that shit was fucked up. But maybe the living room light,

Starting point is 01:32:08 you can get yourself a lamp for your bathroom, because what I'll do is like, I have a lamp in the bathroom, so when it gets night time, that one lamp has a red light bulb in it, and you don't have to change every bulb, but you can just change some of this main bulbs in your house, so that after sunset,

Starting point is 01:32:22 you can turn off the main lights, and now it's just red light in your house. Yeah they make like some like like orangey amber ones that are a little bit brighter so like I have those in like you know like this the ceiling fan right so it's like if this lights on right the one above us that means we need the light right now. In lamps I have the dark like red dungeon looking lights and so that's that's really cool now I'm gonna the plan was to figure out a way how to put one in the bathroom,

Starting point is 01:32:48 but you just said, I'm just gonna get a lamp. I don't know why I didn't think of that. So I'm gonna do that. Yeah, and then obviously EMR Tech has their amber glasses if you want to, because I like watching TV with my girlfriend at night. But, you know, I'm not gonna stare at the bright ass screen. So those glasses are pretty helpful.

Starting point is 01:33:03 They makes me feel tired sooner. These are things that aren't that difficult to do. Yeah. And I have the brightness on my TV all the way down. So you can't see it during the day, which is on purpose. Like I don't want it to be entertaining during the day time. Like fuck off, like go outside and do something. But at night it's like not like super duper bright. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:33:22 So yeah. I think we need things that are easy and simple and then maybe you'll do them. But I think also if you don't know much about it or if you don't feel anything from it, then like why do it? So if you try, but I think I just wanna encourage everyone just to like try some of these things.

Starting point is 01:33:38 As far as the light goes, something that could be effective is David Herrera said like in his house, he doesn't use a lot of light that's like actually like overhead, just more like eye level. And that keeps the light, you know, you kind of think about the light is all like perpetuating downward, right? It's not like blasting your face.

Starting point is 01:33:56 I don't really have any particular like light bulbs. Some of the lights in my house are insanely bright. I have like LED, fricking whatever, but I never turn them on. And what I'll do is I'll turn on lights in other rooms. So the light from the other room will just provide like just enough light for this other room. And the family has gotten used to me being weird

Starting point is 01:34:18 and Andy's gotten used to like doing her nails and- Shuffling in darkness. Yeah, and folding the laundry and shit while we're watching TV, like with just the light from the TV or whatever. But throwing on some of those glasses and stuff like that, it's too easy not to do it. Yeah. Getting outside and getting some exposure to the sun

Starting point is 01:34:36 and getting used to it if you have trouble sleeping. Just see what it's like. Try it for a couple of days in a row. Check out the sun rising, check out the sunset, and see how it works for you. Strength is never weakness, weakness is never strength. Catch you guys later, bye.

Mark Bell's Power Project - How Light Pollution Is Sabotaging Your Health And What You Can Do About It - Dr. Max Gulhane || MBPP Ep. 1088

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