Undoctrinate Yourself - #50 - Dr. Alexis Speaks to NH Superintendents

Episode Date: April 26, 2026

In June 2025, Dr. Alexis traveled up to beautiful New Hampshire to speak to superintendents from across the state about the importance of light biology in health and disease, and why it's important to optimize public school light environments for students and faculty alike. Please feel free to share this presentation and these slides with anyone and everyone you feel would benefit.Slide Deck:https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ZO4cD9EAQ4rxwi1AjHFMigc31UYTFLnW/edit?rtpof=true&sd=trueFollow Dr. Alexis on Instagram ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@dralexisjazmyn⁠⁠:https://www.instagram.com/dralexisjaz...Follow Dr. Alexis on X @dralexisjazmyn:https://x.com/dralexisjazmynSupport the podcast on Patreon:https://www.patreon.com/c/UndoctrinateYourselfPodcast/homeJoin QuantumU:https://dralexisjazmyn.thinkific.com/courses/quantumuJoin ⁠The Incubator⁠ Book Club and Think Tank:https://dralexisjazmyn.thinkific.com/courses/theincubator

Biology from Princeton University, specializing in the metabolic effects of nutritional and exercise interventions. She conducted a postdoctorate at the University of Pennsylvania where she worked on building out a new diagnostic platform to support NF1 medicine. Most recently, Dr. Cowan has integrated her work in molecular biology with the fields of quantum biology, among other aspects, looking at the effects of natural and artificial light environments on mitochondrial health and the broad. effects on overall health outcomes. She is passionate about spearheading a new

paradigm of N of one personalized medicine into the mainstream, elevating and empowering individuals from all walks of life to find and fuel their vitality so that they may embrace their soul's higher purpose on this planet. Welcome Alexis. Hello. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to give this talk to you all. I think it's probably going to be very new, and I preface the other conversation as well with, I'm going to be providing the slide deck after each slide has references on it. I'm also going to be providing you with an e-book that walks through all the basics of light biology and how to incorporate it into your everyday life, not only for your schools, but for your personal

lives as well. And so my talk today is entitled Brightening Minds, the role of light in shaping mental acuity and overall health in both the educated and educators. And I'll preface this by saying that when I was at Princeton, light biology was not on my radar basically whatsoever. I had heard of circadian biology, which is the 24-hour rhythms of the body, and we're going to talk about that in a little bit. But for whatever reason, there was a little bit of a disconnect between knowing that information and implementing it in my life and understanding how important it is.

And I like to share the story about how when I was doing some circadian metabolism studies, at the Rabinowitz lab, which is one of the top metabolism research labs in the world at Princeton, I would go and take like 2 a.m. time points from the mice that I was working with. And when I would go in the mouse room at 2 a.m., I could only put red lights on in the room to go in and do what I had to do and then leave. And then I would take my samples from the mouse room back to my lab, getting blasted with fluorescent lights in the middle of the night. And somehow there was a disconnect there where I was like, why am I giving the mice this consideration and not myself? And I think it really exemplifies the disconnect in modern medicine and science around embodying health

versus just cerebrally understanding it. So with that, let's get started. I'm going to start with some pretty bleak statistics around the health of our kids and adults in this nation and then build the story about how light is contributing to these effects. So the motivations are pretty dire here. 12% of American kids age 7 to 17 are diagnosed with ADHD.

and 70% of these kids are taking prescription stimulant drugs. One in five American kids between the age of three and 17 have a diagnosed mental, emotional, developmental, or behavioral health disorder. Almost one in three American kids, under 18, have been diagnosed with a chronic disease. Over 20% of kids are clinically obese, and an additional one and six are overweight.

And for reference in 1980, only about 5% of school-age kids were obese. And around 20% of all teens are insulin resistant, and among the obese or overweight teens, over half of them are insulin resistant. And of course these issues aren't just in kids, but in adults as well. So 16 million American adults take prescription stimulant drugs like Adderall. Nearly one in five American adults are using prescription mental health drugs such as antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications that are extremely difficult to get off of once you're on them. And there's also

no plan from physicians to ever get people off of them. Obviously, it's quite profitable to stay on these drugs for a lifetime. And I actually have connections in pharma where literally when they're doing R&D to make new drugs, they are hoping to develop drugs that you have to take every week or every month for extended periods of time.

And there was actually recently, I'm not going to disclose the specific company, but there was an AIDS and HIV drug that was being developed that only had to be taken once every year and they nixed it because they couldn't return the profits on the development process. So this is kind of what we're up

against with regards to the medical, industrial complex and how it's really working against us from creating a long-term health perspective. So nearly one in five American adults have a diagnosed mental illness with anxiety and depression being the most prevalent, and public school and college educators in the US experience anxiety and depression at twice the rate of other working adults.

And finally, around 40% of adults age 18 to 44 are insulin resistant or pre-diabetic, around 15% of the population having overt type 2 diabetes. So this is kind of the status of our health as a nation. And my proposition, I hope that you'll somewhat agree with me by the end of this talk, is that our light environments are playing a critical role in shaping these disease outcomes. And I'm also going to share what we can do about it to help improve our health as individuals by optimizing our light environments.

So just a brief introduction to light. When we think about light, typically people will think about, you know, light bulbs or the sun. But that's the light we can see, right? But these light sources also contain non-visible parts of the spectrum. So if you look at the arrow at the bottom of that image, it's kind of, underneath that is expanding out the visible part of the light spectrum, which is Roy G. Biv, which we all learn in elementary school. But outside of that, that's a very small fraction of the light spectrum or the electromagnetic spectrum.

of that we have infrared which is above red and it's you know part of the non-visible spectrum and below that we have ultraviolet or UV light which is also non-visible if we go beyond infrared we have the radio waves the radio frequencies which includes Wi-Fi and 5G 4G Bluetooth etc these are like what are typically called non-native EMFs and you know we're all kind of bathing in those all day every day nowadays as modern humans we're going to get into that in a little while but I just want to make the point here that visible light only encompasses a very small portion of the light spectrum. Parts of the spectrum that we can't see, although we don't see them with our eyes, our cells do interact with these

frequencies, and there are physiological effects that result from exposure. Okay, so why light matters. I'm going to focus a little bit on chronobiology first, or time biology. I alluded to the circadian rhythm earlier, which is the 24-hour biocicles within the human body. And there are specific inputs that are required to set the master clock and all the peripheral clocks in all the tissues. So the master clock lives in the brain, but all the tissues in our bodies have clocks that are entraning to that master clock. And these inputs are called zeitgebers or time givers in German. And these are the stimuli that initiate the cycles and keep time in the system.

And they include light temperature, dietary inputs and activity levels. But light by far has the largest impact on the master timekeeper. in the brain, which is known as the SCN or the supra-chaismatic nucleus. This lives in the hypothalamus, which is the thermostat of the body. It keeps track of body temperature, appetite, energy expenditure. And the SCN is actually directly connected to the back of the eye, the retina. And so the reason I mention that is because the light in our environments is directly sending a signal to this part of the brain, the SCN, to tell the brain what time of day it is.

And this SCN is required for the establishment and the maintenance. of the circadian rhythm. And both bright light and blue light are particularly important for this timekeeping mechanism. So when it comes to blue light, if we're thinking about midday sun, we're talking about around 25% blue light, less than 10% UV light and over 50% red and infrared light. I mention that now, but it'll come more into context.

Why I'm mentioning that later on. But suffice to say for now that that blue light in midday sun is sending a signal to the body that it is indeed daytime. And that involves the induction of certain processes, which include enhanced metabolism, enhance cognition and mental faculties, digestion, movement, et cetera. In contrast, of course, nighttime,

which is supposed to be the absence of light and dark darkness, is engaging another set of pathways, which include regeneration, tissue turnover, a process called autophagy, which is like the cellular cleanup crew, comes in and takes out the garbage. And today, as modern, humans were facing both a deficiency in bright full-spectrum light during the day, as well as an excess or a toxicity of too much blue light and bright light at night in the form of LED

fluorescent bulbs and device screens, which are really a very modern development. Like the power grid only rolled out in the late 1800s, so before that people didn't really have light bulbs. You know, people were using fire, candlelight, but this is very dim in comparison and completely devoid of blue light in particular, which is again what's telling us. the brain that it's daytime. And so incandescent bulbs similarly, which are being phased out now, unfortunately, though I'm hoping to do some advocacy in this department. We have petitions going around.

I'm working with a lot of really cool people in the light and optic space to help kind of make a stink about this issue because incandescent bulbs, you can kind of think of them as like a filament that's on fire. So they're very similar in their light spectrum to flame, which means that they have very, very low blue light and a ton of red and infrared light, making it much less disruptive to our circadian. in biology. Okay, so I think we can move on from this. So why light matters? From a mental health, behavior health, and nervous system regulation standpoint, we're talking about isolated blue light. And anybody who just heard Tristan's talk, he talked about how

daylight computer is, you know, the America's first blue light-free, fully functioning tablet that works as well as a computer. And it's, has an amber back light, but it mostly uses ambient light from the environment. So you can use it outside. There's no glare. It solves a lot of these issues with regards to device and screen technology, creating issues from our circadian biology and our eye health and our metabolic health, et cetera.

But all of our typical device screens, LED bulbs, and fluorescent bulbs are highly enriched in blue wavelength light, which again tells that brain that it's midday, even if you're using it at nighttime after the sun is down. But in addition to sending that aberrant circadian signal, blue light also increases cortisol production, which we want in the morning. A normal cortisol spike in the morning is supposed to happen, and it helps to liberate glucose and fat into the circulation to help fuel the body and turn everything on and get everything going.

But if we're constantly exacerbating that signal with blue light inputs without that balancing force of red and infrared, which again we'll talk about later, then we're going to start to create this exacerbated cortisol elevation, which suppresses the immune system, increases blood sugar and insulin levels, and also exacerbates the sympathetic, nervous system, which is that fight or flight branch of the nervous system, and creates an overall

physiological stress response. So I want to also mention here that when you're sympathetically activated, it turns off neurogenesis, so it prevents new neurons from making connections to other neurons, spine formation connecting those neurons together, creating new, that's how learning and memory happens, right? Not only in the brain, but also motor learning as well. So when we're in a chronic sympathetic state, we're going to have trouble with learning and memory, we're going to have trouble with cognition and mental acuity. And this is all just from the light in our environment, let alone other stressors that people are experiencing on a day-to-day basis. Blue light in isolation also impairs mitochondrial function in the brain eyes and the proximal brain

regions, as well as in the skin. And screen time also increases rates of myopia. So this is kind of a combinatorial effect of blue light flicker and just simply focusing the eyes on a point that's close to the face for extended periods of time. In addition, that eye focusing also generates the sympathetic nervous system response, independent of anything else that we're actually doing or what exposures we're having. And this is also an issue because not only, you know,

is myopia an issue with regards to access to glasses and corrective lenses, et cetera, but it's also an issue because when we have those lenses on, those lenses filter the light that we're exposed to. So by the year 2050, the world population, population is expected to reach 50% myopia rates, which means that 50% of the world's population is going to be going outside with corrective lenses that are filtering out the natural light spectrum of sunlight and is actually removing a lot of the benefits that you can

receive from sunlight, in particular the UV portion of the spectrum, which we're going to talk about in a little bit. Okay, I'm going to show a short video here. This is time lapse photography from somebody called John Ott, who was a major light researcher in the 70s and the 80s. He was very interested in the effects of light on biology. His book here, Health and Light, is out of production, so it's like 300 some odd bucks to get a physical copy.

But if anybody wants a digital copy, I'm happy to share it with you. I do have that. And there's a paper here, influence of fluorescent lights on hyperactivity and learning disabilities that goes along with this video. I think the audio isn't working there, so I'm just going to put this mic down here and we're going to listen to this video. maps cameras were used in a standard first grade classroom and several hyperactive children may be noted especially the boy in the immediate foreground 90 days after the regular cool white fluorescent tubes were replaced with the new type full spectrum fluorescent tubes with radiation shields there was a marked improvement noted and the extremely hyperactive boy has voluntarily moved up to the front row he raises his hand for recognition and his now is now a very hyperactive boy has voluntarily moved up to the front row he raises his hand for recognition and is now up at the blackboard taking part in classroom activities.

Prior to the time that this new lighting was installed, this particular boy had an extreme learning disability problem, but quickly learned to read within 90 days after the new lights were installed. There was further noted a general average improvement in both the behavior and academic achievement of the entire class. There are, however, other factors that must also be considered. considered. The implications of the biological effects of light and radiation as observed through time-last photography are obvious.

Okay. So I like to highlight this video because it's alluding to something that nobody really thinks about and that's just like how the environment is influencing our behavior and our ability to operate in an efficient and meaningful way with regards to whatever we're doing, whether we're, you know, a student in a classroom or or a teacher or somebody who is working a job. Like what are our environments doing to influence our behavior or our ability to engage in that work in a positive or negative way?

I think it's something a lot of us just don't think about and with the chronic disease epidemic as well, there's so much of a push towards like drug development to treat different diseases without understanding how the environment is actually shaping health and disease. And so that's something that I'm very passionate about illuminating. Perhaps camera.

Oops. Okay, so as I mentioned earlier, we're just going to look here at a comparison of the spectra of different light sources. So if you look at the top, we have LED bulbs. As you can see, there's a big spike in blue. And then you kind of have an equal distribution across green, yellow, and red. And then if you see that dotted line to the right, that's, you know, where infrared would come after and we basically don't have any infrared from the LED bulb.

Worth noting that this is more of a warmish or like neutral white LED. So we do have some red. Worth noting, though, that the bill that is put into place that is supposedly setting these standards for indoor lighting is trying to push the energy efficiency standards to be even more stringent. So a lot of people thought when the new administration went into office that the incandescent bulb ban was reversed, but that's not the case. And actually, in order for that to be reversed, we need to go back and revise the 2008. energy bill, which sets the standards for basically light produced as a ratio with the energy consumed. And this is because there is no consideration for the health effects of light. We're only looking at the amount of wattage consume per light output. And this is a problem because the way

that I see it, energy efficiency in lighting and technology is creating an energy crisis in the human body. And that will become even more clear as we talk about the UV and red and infrared light part of the story, but we're systematically removing these frequencies from the indoor environment and it is creating a metabolic and a mitochondrial health crisis. So if you look at the compact fluorescent lamp row as well, we see, you know, a big spike in blue, spike in green and a spike in orange. Again, there's basically no red, no infrared. Contrast that with the incandescent bulb, we see basically no blue and a ton of red, and if you followed the infrared out past what they're showing, it would just, it would go way out. There's a ton of infrared light produced by incandescent bulbs.

And the same with candlelight, as you can see, the spectrum looks almost identical there. And if you look at the column titled melatonin suppression, this is with regards to melatonin produced in the brain. So again, that melatonin in the pineal gland is what's responsible for helping you get sleepy at night and get good quality sleep and good recovery throughout the night. So the melatonin suppression that's corresponding to LED bulbs,

we see 80%, compact fluorescent bulbs, around 80% as well. That drops to 40% within cancer condescent bulbs less than 2% with candlelight. And so this melatonin story is actually really important as well because circulating melatonin levels are shown to be highly associated with breast cancer incidents. And actually very interestingly enough, for Breast Cancer Awareness Month I made a post on socials about this, but low UV light exposure and high artificial light exposure at night are two of the biggest risk factors for breast cancer incidents and severity that I've been

identified. And yet nobody is talking about this within the realm of you know centralized medicine because obviously you know I mean you can talk about motives but it's not very profitable to focus on these issues especially when sunlight in particular has been demonized for the past 70 years since the 1950s really and we'll talk about a little bit about why that might be the case coming up but first I want to talk about Flickr a little bit this is another feature of modern indoor lighting so Flickr is basically a

strobing effect sometimes you can detect it with your eyes Sometimes you can't. It's somewhat a feature of the AC power grid or alternating current power grid, which provides variable input to the bulbs in question. In particular, fluorescent bulbs and LED bulbs are particularly high in flicker. I'm just going to show a video here really quick.

This is just one of the lights that I have in my house that looks completely normal with your naked eyes, but when you film it on slow motion mode on an iPhone or an Android, suddenly you can see that it is all over the place. all over the place. And if you look at TVs or computer monitors, you're gonna see very similar effects there. And this isn't just an aesthetic thing,

but Flickr also causes headaches, eye strain, cognitive fatigue. It also impairs visual performance, reading speed, and the ability to concentrate. It's been shown to reduce work, productivity, and performance. It can exacerbate ticks and stimming in people with autism and Tourette's and also just generally increases sympathetic tone in all people.

And can also induce seizures, migraines, and dizziness and vertigo in some sensitive individuals. So let's talk a little bit about the interaction between light and mitochondrial and metabolic health. So I want to talk a little bit about non-native EMFs here, which are also known as radio frequencies, including Wi-Fi, 5G, 4G, Bluetooth, etc. A lot of people think that this is a non-issue, that it's somehow like woo-woo or hippie to think that this is a problem. But most people don't know that there's 70 years of hard research showing that non-native EMFs impair mitochondrial function, impair the regeneration process within the body, and can lead to a whole host of issues,

including multiple cancer types. So non-native EMS can create a generalized stress response within the body that leads to decompensation over time. So what I mean by decompensation is initially in response to the stressor, you get an enhanced cortisol and adrenaline response to that stressful input, including non-native EMS. But over time with chronic exposure, you actually lead to a decompensation, which means the levels fall below normal. So what starts out is an enhanced stress response ultimately leads to an impairment of the stress response which affects, you know, a lot of things from cognition and the

ability to, you know, have energy levels and feel like you can, you know, get up and do what you have to do. This decompensation response is a really big problem for a lot of people who are suffering from low energy and poor cognition. Non-AVMS also foment mitochondrial dysfunction and oxidative stress increases the permeability of the blood-brain barrier and good. gut barriers and that research goes back to the 1960s. It's been very well characterized. That research in particular was by a doctor called Dr. Alan Fry. Dr. Robert O. Becker also did a ton of work in this area.

Actually, interestingly enough, Fry was mostly focused on the harms of non-NadivMFs and characterizing how they were working to create disease and dysfunction within biological systems. Becker was focused on that, but also in addition, he was focused on the regeneration pathways and how to actually heal and reverse the issues that come with non-Aidivmf exposure. And both were actually military researchers and MDs. And Becker actually, you know, he did a lot of research on what was called the sanguine antenna at the time.

It was a military antenna that was used to communicate with deep sea submarines. And there was a lot of kind of outrage about this antenna going up in certain communities. And he did research on these frequencies showing that it would cause issues in human populations that were nearby. And he was publishing these studies into the military

archives and after a few years he realized that they weren't actually being published into the archives and so he decided to blow the whistle on national TV on 60 minutes in 1977 and within a couple days of that interview all of his funding was stripped and he lost his lab and his livelihood so there's been a systematic suppression of this information for one reason or another probably because it's somewhat inconvenient especially if you know there is a desire to roll out this technology for whatever reasons, obviously it has its conveniences,

but we need to know how to use it smartly and just be aware and conscious of the issues that come with it so that we don't reap the benefits that we're just kind of naive of. In addition, I want to highlight that children are disproportionately more affected by non-Native EMFs due to their smaller body size and their poorly myelinated central nervous system. So myelin in the central nervous system peaks between age 28 and 39, At ages younger than 28, we're talking about a nervous system that is poorly insulated.

Myelin is a fatty coating on the CNS that helps to insulate the CNS against harms from the environment, including non-Native EMF. So in kids and young adults who are exposed to these frequencies, they are going to be more affected than full-grown adults. And I want to also highlight this study here that was done in 2015 that was performed in Saudi Arabia, and they looked at a school that was near a cell tower. and they looked at another school that was nowhere near a cell tower, and they compared rates of type 2 diabetes and levels of HBA-1C or hemoglobin A1C, which is a measure of the average blood glucose levels over a period of a couple months. And they found that the students in the school that was near the cell tower

had significantly higher levels of hemoglobin A1C and higher rates of type 2 diabetes diagnosis compared to the kids that were in the school that was nowhere near the cell tower. And this is particularly concerning for me, because since COVID, now that everything has become digital in the classroom and we're using a lot of tablets, Chromebooks, et cetera, now Wi-Fi is in all of our public schools. And Wi-Fi, you can think of Wi-Fi as a mini cell tower in whatever room that it's in. So now we're bringing the exposures even closer to these vulnerable bodies.

And I think it's just really important to be aware of what's going on here so that we can be more proactive in thinking about how we want to position these things and where we want to put them relative to students and faculty. and I'm going to talk about that in a little while towards the end about mitigation strategies. And this is just a letter that was written to the Forest Hills Board of Education in Forest Hills, Michigan, surrounding their concerns with radio frequencies and EMFs in the school environment. And just, you know, there's some references here. And on every slide, I have a list of references that if you want to go deeper, you can look into them.

But I just wanted to include this because there are school districts around the country that are actually raising these questions and concerns around this issue. And it's not as fringe as the mainstream would like us to think. And this is one of Becker's most popular books, The Body Electric. I just highly recommend it for anybody who wants to learn more about the impact of non-native EMFs on biological systems. And again, this is research that spans back over 70 years. This is not new.

This is not fringe. This is serious science that is just not being highlighted in the mainstream. Let's pivot to talking about some of the benefits of full-spectrum sun exposure and of specific frequencies within sunlight. So we're going to start with UVB light. UVB is probably the most demonized part of the solar light spectrum, but my scientific opinion is that it's among the most important of the frequencies. It's completely blocked by standard window glass, standard contact lenses, prescription glasses, and sunglasses, as well as sunscreen and clothing.

And it's totally absent from indoor environments, because it's not present in our modern lighting solutions, and it's blocked by glass. So with regards to what UVB light is up to in the human body, vitamin D is probably the most commonly known one. So vitamin D is made in the skin in response to UVB light exposure. And insufficient vitamin D status is highly associated with a whole host of diseases, including cancers,

autoimmune diseases, metabolic diseases, depression, and more. However, all of the big scale, vitamin D supplementation trials like the vital study have failed to show meaningful clinical efficacy outside of the treatment of rickets using vitamin D supplements. So the takeaway for me from that is that vitamin D in your bloodstream is really a biomarker of your sun exposure habits and not something that you can supplement to sufficiency and reap the health benefits of. And that will become more clear why in a moment when I talk about the other benefits of UVB

light. So we can really think about vitamin D as a biomarker of the total UVB exposure benefits that you're a rest. receiving when you're in full spectrum sunlight. So vitamin D is a steroid hormone synthesized from cholesterol. Like I mentioned, it's produced in the skin in response to UVB light. It requires two steps of activation. So what's made in the skin is a pre-vitamin D that then has to be converted in the liver

and the kidneys in order to reach its final form. And optimal levels are between 60 and 80 nanograms per milliliter. And worth noting here that over 60% of kids have vitamin D levels under 30, which is half the optimal range. So we have a severe nature deficiency, let's say, and not only kids, but in all humans. Vitamin D insufficiency and deficiency is an extremely common feature of modern human lab results. And it's something that's very easily corrected for. But in addition to vitamin D, we also have what's called POMC or Proopio Melanacortin.

So POMC is a complex pro hormone whose production is stimulated by UVB light in the skin and in the brain via the eyes. It's cleaved into 10 different hormonal products. I'm not going to go through them all here, but you're going to have access to the slides if you want to learn more. I just want to highlight two primarily. So alpha MSH is the first one I'd like to highlight here for its importance.

MSH stands for melanocytes stimulating hormone. As the name implies, alpha MSH stimulates melanosites to make new melanin, aka give you a tan in response to sunlight. But in addition to that, alpha MSH also works in the brain to suppress appetite and increase energy expenditure. Now that should be, you know, anybody who is, has tried to lose weight or, you know, is taking Ozmpic and things like this, this should kind of put off the bells and whistles because this is like a holy grail when it comes to body composition, right?

We want to decrease appetite naturally, we want to increase energy expenditure to help lose fat and maintain this healthy body composition. And interestingly enough, OZempic actually works on the same pathway in the brain that UVB light does. So both stimulate the production of Palm C. And that's why there's a lot of also newer studies coming out showing that OZempic also improves mental health disorders and cognitive impairment and things like this. And that's related to the other peptide that's cleaved from POMC that I want to highlight now, which is beta endorphine. So beta endorphin is an endogenous opioid molecule, an opioid, like a pain reliever that people, you know, take

like morphine, for example, but it's made in our bodies. And it's not only, you know, reducing pain, anxiety and depression, but it also improves neuroplasticity, it supports immune function, it increases overall dopamine status and helps improve critical thinking, learning and memory. So it has a lot of benefits, and virtually nobody is getting access to this suite of cleavage products because everybody, you know, at the first site of full spectrum sunlight, we're told to slip, slap, slap, slap the sunscreen, wear your sunglasses, protect yourself at all costs, And we're actually becoming severely deficient in this frequency in particular as a result of that.

So when it comes to mental health disorders, behavioral health disorders, weight issues, metabolic health issues, UVB light is really a star as well as immune function. There's direct effects from multiple of these peptides as well as through the vitamin D production that is directly influencing immune system in a positive way. In addition, gut health issues are at an all-time high now, and UVB light also directly works to improve the health of the microbiome in the gut via the skin gut axis. Helps to improve gut microbiome diversity, which makes the gut and the biome more resilient to nefarious inputs that, you know, maybe like food poisoning or, you know, issues with digestion,

things like colitis, IBS, IBD, etc. So it's a very interesting emerging area of research that I'm in particular really excited about because before I fell down the light biology rabbit hole I was very interested in the microbiome and its interaction with immune status, inflammatory status, the brain neurotransmitter production, etc. So now we know now that this research is out that UVB light on the skin is directly improving that microbiomes function to help improve all of those areas of health. Okay, let's talk about UVA light briefly. So UVA light is a slightly longer

wavelength form of UV light. It penetrates more deep, into the skin. It's partially blocked by standard window glass, contacts, prescription glasses, sunglasses, and sunscreen. And it's mostly absent from indoor environments because it's not present in our modern lighting and isn't really coming in through window glass to a great extent. But noteworthy here is that it is present in some small amounts in incandescent lighting. So that's another vote for incandescent bulbs. We'll get to the red and infrared light part of the story in a little bit. UVA light plays a really important role in nitric oxide production.

So you may not know about nitric oxide, you may, but nitric oxide is a free radical that's responsible for vasodilation or dilation of the blood vessels, which not only facilitates nutrient and oxygen delivery to tissues, waste removal from tissues, but also blood pressure management. Nitric oxide deficiency and aberrations in the pathway that produce it is the primary defect in hypertension. Nitrog oxide regulates mitochondrial metabolism as well as influencing the circadian rhythm of peripheral tissues throughout the body. And deficits in nitric oxide production, like I mentioned, are the primary defect in multiple cardiovascular diseases,

and is also implicated in cognitive function, cognitive impairment, and neurodegeneration as well. So when you're exposed to UVA light, that nitric oxide gets produced in the skin and then diffuses into the bloodstream. So the reason I mention that is that the more skin you have exposed, the more. more nitric oxide you produce and the greater the effect is on your system as a whole. Okay. So let's talk about the red near-infred light part of the story, which I alluded to multiple times in this talk so far. So red light is the longest wavelength of the visible light part of the spectrum.

Near infrared light is non-visible. It's just past the red part of the spectrum, but it's incredibly important for mitochondrial function in every tissue of the body. So near-infred light is a really good example of something we can't see with our eyes, but every mitochondria in our system is seeing it. it extremely well and it's it's an essential nutrient in my mind for the body and for the mitochondria so near infrared light has the greatest penetrance of any light wavelength passing even through bone and clothing and modern energy efficient lighting and window glass blocks

near infrared light completely and again I like to say energy efficiency and lighting windows and technology is creating an energy crisis in the human body it's absent from most indoor environments unless you have incandescent bulbs and your windows are open or your doors are open, that near-infred light is not coming in. In nature, as long as the sun is up, every cell in your body is being bathed in near-infred light. And moreover, short-wad-length light such as UV and blue light is always provided with an abundance of red and near-infred light in nature.

As I alluded to, less than 10% of midday sun is UV light, 25% is blue light, and over 50% is red and infrared light. And that's because of this, I mentioned earlier, that blue light can directly impair mitochondrial function. Red and infrared light have the opposite effects. It supports mitochondrial function, it increases mitochondrial energy and metabolic water production, helping to hydrate and bathe the tissues in this. It's a very special type of water. I'm not going to get into why that is, but it's extremely important from a tissue function and hydration standpoint.

And modern humans are highly deficient in infrared light, and this is one of the frequencies that's present year-round. UV light goes up and down throughout the seasons, reaching a low in the wintertime and a high in the summer. But near infrared light is stable no matter what time of year it is. And so as humans, we're meant to be bathing in this frequency year round during the daytime. And we're just highly, highly deficient for the reasons that I mentioned with regards to our lighting technology and our aversion to going in the sun and being drawn inwards indoors by our technology. So just a few references highlighted here with regards to red and infrared light. light stimulation of mitochondria reduces blood glucose levels.

This was a study by a friend and colleague of mine showing that he basically had two groups of people. One group, well, both groups got glucose, a glucose solution that they drank, and then he looked at the glucose and insulin responses to that glucose beverage. But one of the groups was exposed to 15 minutes of deep red light exposure with like a red light panel. The other group was not. And he showed that the group that got the 15 minutes of red light exposure before the glucose, ingestion they had a 30% lower glucose response to that glucose beverage and that was simply by changing the light that they were exposed to so I really

just want to dispel the myth that you need to put a Twinkie or pasta or bread in your mouth to elevate your glucose levels when we have hard data spanning back many years showing that simply being in blue light will increase your glucose and insulin levels independent of anything that you're eating and getting that red and infrared light into your environment will decrease your glucose levels in response to your meals. Near-infrared light is also a major stimulator of melatonin production. So we talked about melatonin in the brain for sleep, but melatonin also plays a critical role

in the mitochondria as well, and this is like an independent activity than the one that's required for sleep. So the melatonin in the mitochondria helps to maintain mitochondrial health and function, and near-infrared light exposure to those mitochondria that, again, is all your mitochondria are being bathed if you're, let's say, in full-spectrum sunlight. with that near infrared light dominance, you're making a ton of melatonin at the subcellular level that's helping to maintain your mitochondrial colonies.

And I really wanna highlight why that's important because all of our chronic disease burden is rooted in mitochondrial dysfunction in one or more tissues. So even when we're talking about things like cancer that are often identified as genetic diseases, a lot of people don't know that the mutations in the nuclear genome are dictated, the rates of mutations are dictated

by the mitochondrial function. So mitochondria is the most upstream, part of the equation, and optimizing our mitochondrial function is the best way to not only prevent disease, but also reverse it. And lastly here, mechanisms and applications of the anti-inflammatory effects of photobiomodulation, so this paper just highlights how anti-inflammatory exposure to reddenant fred light is by, again, helping to support mitochondrial function, and mitochondria are at the root of inflammation and the creation of excess reactive oxygen and nitrogen species that can foment an oxidative

state within whatever tissues that we're talking about. And I want to insert a little aside here about grounding. So a lot of people think, you know, going barefoot outside and hugging trees is for hippies, but actually there's hard science showing that connecting electrically to the earth with bare feet or bare hands on grass, on sand, stone, rock, et cetera, actually is very important from an anti-inflammatory standpoint. And actually just 25 minutes of grounding is shown to dramatically reduce inflammation. inflammatory burden within individuals' bodies

that are suffering from arthritis or other inflammatory conditions. And there's some really cool studies looking at thermography, so you can basically take a thermograph of somebody and look where there's heat in their body, which is associated with inflammation, and you ground them for 25 minutes, and suddenly those areas are totally cooled off.

And if you think about it, even just 75 years ago, everybody was grounded all the time. So only from the advent of like petroleum-based synthetic materials is that grounding force blocked because leather and other natural fibers and materials permit that grounding force so that you're electrically connected to the earth at some level so that your body's electrical system is working properly. Because we really are photo bioelectric beings. Thinking about things at the metabolic level is not deep enough because the metabolism is

influenced directly by the electrical processes that are going on that are really originating at the level of the mitochondria. And so when it comes to anti-inflammation, the importance of grounding can't be overstated. I'm not going to go through everything on this, but I just want to really hit home here that I really firmly believe that sunlight is an essential nutrient. And some of the conditions that adequate sun exposure protects against include all cause mortality, asthma, cancer, cardiovascular disease, cognitive impairment, Crohn's, MS, Parkinson's, stroke, type 1 and type 2, diabetes. So in the U.S., kids and faculty in public schools get less time outside than maximum security prisoners. During the time of day when sunlight exposure is the most efficient and supportive for mental health, metabolic function, mood, energy levels, learning memory, and more.

Maximum security prisoners are guaranteed one hour of outdoor time daily from an ethics perspective. This was the guideline that's been set, with most receiving two hours per day. Now we're lucky if K through six students are offered 20 to 30 minutes of outdoor recess and older kids in high school are barely even receiving that. And so I think we can be a lot more intentional about incorporating more outdoor time for students and faculty alike because it's really our lives and our health that's on the line here. And so my key recommendations for staff and student success is again to increase access to outdoor spaces throughout the school day whenever a public. possible. Minimizing the use of tablet, Chromebooks, etc., in the classroom environment, I actually really would like to hear people's feedback on this, given that this digitalization of the classroom is quite a new thing over the past couple years. I'd really like to hear

the pros and cons of what people, like, boots on the ground are experiencing with regards to what benefits are actually being gleaned and how might we be able to glean those in a different way? Like, what kind of data is actually being collected and how much is it actually supporting the students experience versus the harms that are being invoked from this new digitalization process. There are other alternatives as well to help protect kids and teachers alike. So this could include adding software onto devices to balance out the light spectrum of the device. There's a system called Iris, IrisTech.co, or F-flux.

Both of them help to minimize some of the blue light exposure from the screens and enhance the red portion. Another alternative, of course, could be to switch to using something like a D. daylight computer or encouraging the use of blue blocking glasses. So what I'm wearing right now are daytime blue blockers. They block about 60% of blue light. I have a 14-year-old stepson. He started wearing his to school because he was getting migraines being on screens all day. And of course, most kids are also, you know, on their Chromebooks during the school day, and then they go home and they're on their phones and they're playing games and they're gaming

all day on their computers. And so they're just being sucked into this screen time that is having a dramatic effect on their health, especially because their bodies are small and developing and they're more vulnerable to the effects of blue light and non-native EMFs, for example. So they really need some support in helping to round out that light environment to help facilitate their development, their learning, their memory, and their ability to succeed in life. Another thing, to opt for more full-spectrum, low-flickering lights in the classroom, putting up blinds and opening windows whenever possible. Even if teachers just bring in a couple lamps for their classroom and throw a couple

incandescent bulbs in there, it's going to be way better than nothing at all because, again, they have a ton of near-infred light coming off of them, so it will help to add some of that back. And the last thing that I alluded to earlier was minimizing human proximity to Wi-Fi routers. So there's something called the inverse square law, which basically states that the closer you are to an emitter of non-native EMS, the higher the dose that you receive. And so it's important to minimize proximity as much as possible, maybe putting Wi-Fi routers in a room that is not occupied very often or a closet, something like this. If we're going to be having a Wi-Fi router in the same room as students or teachers or faculty, at least creating some space six to

eight feet minimum between the people and the Wi-Fi router to help reduce their occupational hazard of that exposure. But yeah, so I think this is kind of my main takeaway here is just trying to be mindful around the light in our environments, whether the visible light, whether it's minimizing the blue light and non-native ammats or adding back in some outdoor time and red and near-in-fred light to help support the metabolic and mitochondrial health of everybody in the school environment and I'm really happy to you know take questions and feedback and help in any way possible but thank you for listening there's a question okay great dr. Gohan thank you so much your research very impressive thank you a lot to think about a question for the LED

spectrum is there any difference between say 5k 4k 32kk 28k in terms of that blue light yeah guessing if it goes closer to 5k which is mostly used in office environment schools and medical facilities is it better to go to 28k then it is yeah and so thank you for asking this because the new criteria for light bulbs is actually going to be shifted to a cooler temperature like 5k plus even the warm white LEDs at the current standards in 2028, they're gonna be nixed as well for public spaces. Like the public domain is gonna be full of cool white LEDs.

So I'm hoping that we can make some headway in this department. I have a lot of great people doing really good work in this area, so I'm hopeful that that won't happen. But yeah, the short answer is the lower color temperature, like the 2800, et cetera, they're gonna be more enriched in the red wavelengths that's gonna help to balance the high blue amount. And I mean, subjectively, most people will say

when they're in a warmer light environment, they just feel more relaxed and less stimulated, which is a sign that the nervous system is directly sensing that, right? And so anything we can do to help reduce that blue exposure is gonna be a huge win.