January 13, 2025 • 61 mins
On this episode of Revelizations I’m joined by Dr. Martin Moore-Ede. He has over 40 years of expertise researching Circadian Clocks. He led the groundbreaking discovery of the brain’s biological clock, the suprachiasmatic nucleus, and advanced our understanding of how circadian rhythms influence sleep and bodily functions. On today’s episode we discuss:
Circadian Rhythms and their synchronization.
The various impact light has on physical health along with mental health.
The impact of modern lighting on health.
The role of blue light on Circadian Clock disruption.
The role Circadian disruption plays in chronic diseases.
Practical steps on how to normalize your Circadian Clock and more!
Learn more about Dr. Martin Moore-Ede: https://thelightdoctor.com/about/
Purchase Dr. Martin Moore-Ede’s book, THE LIGHT DOCTOR: Using Light to Boost Health, Improve Sleep, and Live Longer:
Grab your favorite snack, grab a seat, and enjoy today's episode of Revelizations with Dr. Martin Moore-Ede. Thanks for listening everyone.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
This episode of Revelizations is brought to you by Mobile Speakers.
(00:21):
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(01:52):
Welcome to Revelizations.
I'm your host, Brian James.
On today's episode, we will be discussing the effects that light has on the human body.
More specifically, we will be talking about how blue light plays a key role in regulating
our circadian clocks and the cascade of negative side effects when our circadian clocks are
dysregulated.
(02:14):
Simply, circadian clocks are internal alarm clocks that establish rhythms of our sleep-wake
pattern, hormone release, appetite, body temperature, and more over a 24-hour period.
Every cell in all of our organs has a circadian clock in it, which is then controlled by a
master clock in the brain called the supra-chiasmatic nucleus.
(02:37):
That leads me to introduce today's guest, Dr. Martin Moore-Ede.
He's a pioneer in circadian rhythm research with over 40 years of expertise.
As a former professor at Harvard Medical School, he led the groundbreaking discovery of the
brain's biological clock, the supra-chiasmatic nucleus.
His research advanced our understanding of how circadian rhythms influence sleep and
(03:01):
bodily functions.
He's the founder of Circadian, a global consulting firm focused on optimizing workforce health
and performance.
He's also a founder of the Circadian Light Research Center, which develops innovative
circadian lighting systems.
With his legacy of 10 books, over 180 scientific papers, Dr. Martin Moore-Ede has shaped the
(03:23):
conversation on circadian health, fatigue, and the impact of light.
He has been featured on major TV shows such as CNN, Good Morning America, Oprah Winfrey,
and The Today Show, as well as radio programs like NPR's Fresh Air.
Dr. Martin Moore-Ede has also contributed to leading publications like The Wall Street
(03:44):
Journal and New York Times.
And somehow, amidst all those other things, has also advised governments on health and
safety of 24-7 workforces.
Today, I have the privilege to have him on my podcast as he shares his invaluable insights
into how our biology is intertwined with light and its profound effects on our lives.
(04:05):
Thanks for listening, everyone.
Hi, everyone.
Welcome to another episode of Revelizations.
I am your host, Brian James.
And with me, I have Dr. Martin Moore-Ede.
And we are going to talk about the effects of light on the human body.
I'm very excited.
Good.
(04:25):
Yeah.
I'm delighted to join you.
And it's a great topic and a topic I think people really need to know something about
because light is as important to your health as the food we eat or the water we drink
or the air we breathe.
And most people don't realize that.
So, yeah, I'm glad to be able to talk about it.
Great. That was actually a question I had for you later.
(04:46):
It's like you have that quote and it's around.
And why do you say that?
Well, I think it makes it more relevant to people because they're trying to think light,
they take light for granted, how can that be important?
We've already been very conditioned to think about food and diet and all that, being conditioned
(05:08):
to think about, you know, lead in the water pipes and, you know, pollutants in the air.
But people don't realize that light is just as important.
In fact, I like, I liken modern LED lighting, much of it, is junk light in the same way
that we can have junk food.
(05:30):
In other words, junk food looks good, tastes good, et cetera, but it doesn't do you very
much good.
In fact, it may harm you.
The same way the light we use may seem aesthetically nice and may seem cheap and easy to use.
And it's just there and flicking on the light switch.
Who gives that a thought?
(05:50):
But in fact, you can have quite major effects on health.
And that's something we're learning more and more about now.
And it's particularly the various aspects of the light spectrum.
In other words, white light is made up in all the colors of the rainbow.
We never see it as that.
We think it's white or yellowish white, natural light or light from a lamp.
(06:14):
And in fact, what's coming into our eyes are all these different rainbow colors from
violet, blue, green, yellow, orange, red, and all of them have quite different impacts
on your health.
And so understanding what a light is composed of and what it emits is actually highly important.
(06:37):
And that's a key way we now know a lot about how to distinguish between different types
of light and what they do.
I can just give you a couple of examples just to flesh that out a second.
You know, violet light is very effective at killing bacteria and viruses.
Royal blue light is can cure jaundice in newborn babies.
(06:58):
Sky blue light is critical for synchronizing our circadian clocks and our sleep and protecting
us against diabetes and cancer and various things, depending on how much that sky blue
light you see.
Green light is actually, as I see, very significant effects on our emotions, our mood, effects
(07:18):
on amygdala in the brain.
So then in fact, it can reduce pain.
People with migraines, you treat them with green light.
Red light is actually very curative and in terms of heals scars, grows hair in your head,
can repair in some cases damage to the eyes.
(07:40):
So all those colors are in natural daylight.
So when you think about it going outside in the natural daylight, you're getting all those
benefits of natural light.
When you come inside, you're dealing with this very, very artificial type light that
just does not have all those qualities.
And that's one of the big problems.
So you basically touched on something really important right out the gate.
(08:08):
You're not making this new claim that light impacts the body.
This is well established science.
Like what you were saying, you just listed some of them, but even the sunlight, our body
converts the sunlight to vitamin D in our body.
So it's like, there is this long history.
If you stay in the sun for a long time, your skin will start to darken because of the melanin.
(08:30):
Our bodies interact to light.
It was really profound when I was looking and doing research on this episode.
You just take it for granted, like you said.
You don't think about it.
You don't think that our bodies are absorbing it, that we're taking it in, and it's having
(08:53):
a physiological change in our body.
That's just absolutely fascinating.
The importance of what you have to talk about is really understated, and I'm very curious
how history will play out this information.
Yeah, well, this is well established science now.
So what I'm talking about is something, it's not just an odd association or a random claim.
(09:18):
There are tens of thousands of scientific papers published on this.
And of course, when you're looking at understanding the effects of it, you're looking for not
just an association, something goes up at the same time as something else, that type
of thing.
You're looking at where's the whole causal chain in this?
In other words, can you show the every step along the way?
(09:40):
So when we talk about that the sky blue light, part of the rainbow spectrum, that's the sky
blue color, is synchronizing our circadian clocks and keeping them in step with their
We know, for example, that light falling on our eyes reaches and activates special cells
(10:03):
in the eye that are not rods and cones and are associated with vision.
They're actually got a fancy long name and intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion
cells or IPRGCs, but those cells have within them a photopigment that's exquisitely sensitive
to sky blue light.
(10:23):
It's called melanopsin.
We know that melanopsin has this peak sensitivity of about 480 nanometers and to explain what
that means, visible light, you know, when we look at sunlight, it's got ultraviolet
light that we can't see.
It's got visible light of all the colors of the rainbow embedded in it.
(10:45):
And then it's got infrared, which again you can't see, you can feel the heat of, but you've
got that range.
Within the visible range of light, that's between about 380 nanometers to 780 nanometers,
that's the wavelength, the length of the meter essentially.
Those wavelengths of light, every color we can classify by where it falls.
(11:12):
So the violet lights are down in the 380 to 420 range, the blue lights are in the 420
up to about 500 range, the greens are from 500 to getting up to 580, so and so forth.
So you can classify them.
So we can talk not only about just a vague blue, what is blue?
(11:34):
Well, there are all sorts of different color blues.
There's violet blues and royal blues and sky blues and aqua type blues.
All of those have different wavelengths on the map.
But we know that that 480 peak is what's sensitized to in these photo pigments in the back of
(11:56):
the retina.
We know that that pathway triggers a direct pathway into a clock in the brain.
That was something my, I led the team at Harvard that identified where it was in the human
brain.
This is the clock, the circadian, master circadian clock is called the suprachiasmatic nucleus,
or SCN for short, so we use acronyms just out of convenience.
(12:20):
And by the way, just to confuse everyone, my favorite typo when someone was typing up
a manuscript of mine, they made it the suprachiasmatic nucleus, which is, I thought, great, really
cute.
Now I've really confused your audience because we ought to go back.
It's the suprachiasmatic, all right?
(12:40):
It's supra means above and chiasm means where the optic nerves from the eyes go back and
they cross over on their way back to the back of your head where the occipital cortex and
vision occurs.
But right above that is this whole cluster of nerve cells that is acts as a master clock.
And that master clock runs in its own pace if it doesn't get any time cues.
(13:02):
So if we're living in, you know, living in a cave, as some of the early studies did,
have people in a bunker or in a apartment without any windows or any time cues, any
clocks, then that clock will drift, keep on running, but it will drift a little longer
every day.
And so that clock is a free running circadian clock.
(13:23):
Now that clock is really critical because it's a master clock, but there are millions
of other clocks in all the cells of the body.
And we have hormones that are communicating with it.
So basically that master clock is triggering the pineal, which will produce melatonin.
That sends a signal that it's dark outside, that the world is, you know, there's no light
coming in.
(13:43):
And then in the morning we have another hormone produced by the adrenal gland triggered by
the pituitary axis, a hormone called cortisol, which surges just at dawn, and that tells
the body it's time to wake up and get going.
So there's a whole system of the body to keep everything, our whole bodies in step
(14:05):
with the outside world.
And that's how it was for 10,000 generations of our ancestors.
You know, they spent their time outdoors in natural daylight, and it's really bright outside
compared to what we have indoors today.
They slept in the dark at night.
If they did have light, it came from wood fires and candles, which contain no blue,
(14:28):
virtually no blue at all.
So that signal that confuses us.
But we've changed that world today, and now we have LED lights which are pumping out blue
light night and day.
And we've totally screwed up our time systems of the body, and that's what is having devastating
effects on health.
And it's been linked to obesity, diabetes, heart disease, breast cancer, prostate cancer,
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and so forth, colorectal cancer, all of which are problems that are increased by the fact
that we live indoors in twilight conditions during the day most of the time.
We may work in our computers, but the amount of light we're seeing is minimal compared
to the outdoor world.
And then we have the lights on in the evenings without thinking about what we're shining
(15:13):
on ourselves.
And so really, the message is, and this is what I talk about in my book, a book is called
the new book called The Light Doctor, is how that transition from a world where everything
used to be healthy without us realizing it to a world that's very unhealthy because
we haven't managed the light we see is one of the, you know, I would say it's a real
(15:40):
problem for our society, but it's also an enormous opportunity because we can do a lot
to get people feeling healthier.
In fact, I challenge your listeners to take part in the challenge that we've got out there
now, which is to call the circadian rhythm disruption challenge or CRD challenge, which
(16:01):
is do some simple steps to change it and see how much better you feel.
In other words, and those steps, so I can just briefly summarize them, Brian, are sleep
in the dark at night, don't have the lights on, amazing number of people sleep with the
lights on, 40, 50%, particularly elderly people sleep with the lights on in the bedroom, sleep
in the dark at night, number one, number two, get out in the mornings, particularly
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because morning light, morning daylight and outdoor light is a huge benefit.
People get better in hospitals where they're facing the morning sun out of the hospital
room rather than get out in half the time compared to being in rooms that are facing
north and west.
So the morning light is really critical.
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And during the day, you know, get exposed to blue light where you blue rich light where
you can.
But in the evening, stay well away from that blue rich light.
So avoid being lit, use these LEDs.
You can get light bulbs that are zero blue.
That's one source or you can use red light or orange light that's got no blue in it.
(17:08):
Or you can wear glasses, blue blocking glasses that take it away, take out the blue.
But that's the basic message that, you know, you need to just as important to have a diet
for your, in terms of your food and health, you need a light diet too.
And that's those are the basic principles.
So we can dig into more behind that, but the science behind it and the background behind
(17:32):
it.
But, you know, just as a basic, if we did a few of those things, getting that morning
sunlight, getting rid of the blue at evening, sleeping in the dark, amazing how much better
you feel within, you know, within a few days, a few weeks, radically different, how much
better you feel under those circumstances.
Yeah.
The morning sunlight one is starting to catch on because my cousin does that and he didn't
(17:59):
explain why, just that it's good for you.
And before I knew anything about this subject, I'm like that, why would you do that?
What would that possibly change?
And again, it's just ignoring the science of what does light do to the body.
When I already know that light has certain impacts on the body, I would, I was just completely
(18:20):
naive to think that that wouldn't do anything.
Right.
It's also people need to realize most of these effects are coming in through the eyes, right?
Now there are effects of light, obviously sunlight on skin and their effects to do,
you don't have to be in the swimming trunks is what I'm trying to say, right?
Or you don't have to not be either though.
(18:41):
But if you want to be in swimming trunks, great.
But basically people who spend more time outdoors than the rest of the population live years
longer.
The effect is huge.
So they've done these huge studies now with one study in Sweden with 29,000 Swedish women,
(19:01):
another study in the UK with 88,000 people over the age of 50, I think it was, and then
looked at those people who got out every day, spent time outdoors and they knew this because
they can put recording devices on like a wristwatch type of activity, a thing that actually
(19:22):
records light.
So people get a lot of bright sunlight, live years longer to the extent it's as large an
effect as, for example, smoking or not smoking in terms of lifespan and health.
Similarly, people who sleep in the dark at night live longer than people who have the
(19:46):
lights on and particularly blue rich light in the evenings.
So it's really the big effects and these studies now coming out, a recent one just came out
with 88,000 people, the previous one in Sweden with 29,000.
And interestingly, the Swedish study was started out because they were doing skin cancer research
and they thought they would be studying the skin cancer, you know, how much more were
(20:10):
people getting going outside in the sun, getting get cancers.
Well, they did get more skin cancers.
They got more melanomas.
But in fact, they all live longer than the people who stayed indoors, which is really,
you know, quite significant.
So, yes, there's a pretty good research on that now.
We understand why, because it is really robustly synchronizing your internal clocks and keeping
(20:37):
everything. Our body is a finely tuned machine and keeping it robustly synchronized in a
regular pattern is absolutely critical for health.
It seems counterintuitive, especially everything that we've heard about the sun and cancer
and stay out. I remember my nutrition teacher in college, she was saying, I
(20:59):
only am out in the sunlight for 15 minutes.
Like it takes, I think, all of 15 minutes to get your recommended daily allowance of
your vitamin D for the day, which is other than that, I'm not really out in the sun.
And I think that at least popular science is saying that, like, hey, you need to stay
out of the sun and you're claiming the exact opposite.
(21:24):
Yeah, I think there's been this has been the standard medical preaching, if you like,
or medical advice and education, all being focused about concerned about UV radiation.
But people who are getting much more UV radiation than if you stay indoors, obviously
windows block UV, so you don't tend to have much UV inside.
(21:46):
But essentially, people who are out in daylight and regular natural lighting may have
some more skin cancers.
But this whole thing about the concern and there certainly is a problem, you know, if
you're in extreme midday sun and you're spending hours and getting sunburns and all
the rest of it, that's not a good thing to do for your health.
(22:08):
But we're talking about getting out for a bit longer than 15 minutes, ideally half an
hour to at least an hour, if you can, that length of time.
But you don't have to be, you know, go for a run, take the dog for a walk, you know,
sit on the bench or in your balcony, whatever, and get a cup of coffee.
You know, it doesn't matter what you're doing.
It's getting that light exposure.
(22:30):
And, you know, and so that the research was really concerned about the melanoma
effects and the, you know, the skin cancer effects.
But those researchers were the ones who first found out, oh, wow, these people are
actually doing much better and their skin cancers don't progress and they don't
have die from them, you know, the melanomas and the same thing was found.
(22:52):
It turns out when you go back to it in the Navy, to some old studies going way back
now, many years ago, they found that people in the Navy who were on board ship and
therefore getting exposed to a lot of sunlight when they're, of course, their
normal day were getting eight times more malignant melanomas, you know, than the
(23:13):
population at home, but they were living longer.
I mean, they were living longer, you know, and healthier.
And so again, that was an old study in the Navy, but now, as I say, it's been
repeated quite rigorously.
So yes, getting that daylight is really critical because indoors we're living in
such low levels of light.
(23:34):
I mean, I think just to talk about light levels for a moment, when you one way of
measuring light levels is something called lux and that's what if you have a light
meter that you use as a photographer, for example, you're measuring the number of
lux coming in.
Out indoors, you're probably most people in about 100 to 200 lux of light indoors.
(23:59):
Maybe it's a brightly lit office.
You might have four or 500 lux of light if it's really brightly lit, but outdoors,
even on a cloudy day, it's 10,000 lux of light.
It's so much brighter.
And on a sunny day, it's 50,000, 100,000 lux of light.
In other words, the bright level, the light level of light, the amount of energy
(24:23):
that's coming in from sunlight and daylight.
It doesn't, as I say, it doesn't have to be a sunny day mode of energy that's
coming in that is beneficial to you from that natural daylight is so much greater
than you ever get indoors.
You just can't do it indoors.
In fact, indoors, if you try to turn it up, make it really bright indoors, it just
(24:44):
gets so much glare because it bounces off the walls and everything else.
You can't tolerate it.
So that's why we tend to choose far dimmer.
And our eyes are just so much that we're just not really aware of how big the
contrast between being indoors and outdoors is.
Yeah, it's not until you're like in a dimly lit business or something like that.
And you go outside and you can't even open your eyes.
(25:05):
Just that, that sudden shock of sunlight.
So I want to kind of rewind back a little bit.
And so the focus is specifically.
So I want to ask, what is it about the blue light that is messing
with our circadian clock?
Okay.
So let's put it this way.
(25:27):
Back in the eighties at Harvard, when I led a team at Harvard for about 20
odd years, researching this and we identified this circadian clock in
human brain, the suprachiasmatic nucleus, SCN, we also were, because no
one thought that that time that humans had it, they knew animals had it, but
(25:48):
we were able to decipher it and discover where it was.
We also, at that time, the general feeling was that humans weren't being
synchronized, their circadian rhythm, their 24 hour cycles of sleep and wake
and hormones and temperature and so forth, wasn't being synchronized by
light and dark, it was being synchronized, it was thought, by social
(26:10):
interactions between people.
That was the theory.
And we were able to show that in fact, it was light that was doing it.
And, you know, if you had controlled the lighting precisely, then you could
control the timing of sleep and wake and everything and adjust with the clock.
And at that time, we had no idea.
We thought it was any light would do, any visible light would do.
(26:34):
And it wasn't until about 20 years ago, the first evidence started coming in
that actually we're much more sensitive to blue light than we are to other
colors of the rainbow in terms of this circadian clock and in terms of
suppressing melatonin, for example, light at night.
One of the things it does that causes harm is it shuts down the pineal
(26:56):
producing melatonin.
So the melatonin levels get very low.
And melatonin is enormously important for triggering repair and growth
and recovery during sleep.
So basically we thought it was that, but it turns out that it was blue
light that was being effective.
More recently, we were able to find that it's actually rather narrow band of
(27:18):
blue, peak, as I say, about 480, a range of about 440 to 495 blue, which is in
the sky, general sky blue range.
And that light was because it was triggering the retinal ganglion cells
that contained that photopigment called melanopsin that was acutely sensitive
(27:40):
to 480 nanometer blue, was triggering the input to the clock, was synchronizing
the clock, was sending the message to the pineal, you know, so blue was the key.
And you might say, why that blue?
It's really strange.
I mean, why would, you know, evolution result in us being so looking at blue
(28:01):
because all the other colors of the rainbow are available.
Why would it be that?
Well, it's fascinating that, and this is really an eye-opener, that if you look
at the oceans where life began, down deep in the oceans, light, sunlight
falling on seawater is absorbed as it goes into the water, but what gets
(28:25):
absorbed are all the other colors except for blue, so the violet gets absorbed
and the green gets absorbed, the yellow and the red and everything else.
And the only thing that penetrates into the ocean depths, more than about
a hundred meters, is sky blue light at exactly this thing.
So basically we think that when life began in the oceans, when it was
(28:46):
daylight, the organisms saw blue, when it was night, they saw black, but
what was the, they had to have blue detectors.
And in fact, today we can find single cell organisms in the ocean that have
blue light detectors, melanoxin type detectors that have circadian clocks
(29:07):
and also produce melatonin, all in a single cell.
You know, now we think that it's being conserved, you know, through evolution.
So now that's a fundamental part of the machinery.
It's the machinery that just keeps us linked.
So we think that's why it's that blue that got selected early on.
And it's really a mechanism that's amazingly effective and just as being
(29:30):
preserved, and so that's why we have this blue pigment in the eyes that is,
you know, that tells us whether it's night or day.
There's an important distinction to say that the blue light, it's not bad.
It's like, you need to be timing it.
It needs to be like you're saying in the morning, you need to have a lot of it.
(29:51):
It wakes you up and it changes like your physiology as you go throughout the
day, it signals different hormones and how to, how you operate your body.
And so this is the important kind of reveal of your research is like
the knock-on effects of this.
It's not just blue light is radioactive and we've, we've been living in this
(30:16):
radioactive environment our whole life.
And it turns out, yeah, of course we're getting all these diseases.
We're in a toxic environment.
That's not what it is.
It's the blue light impacting systems in our body and then the
knock-on effects of that.
So like there's documented cases like with sleep studies and how like
messing with your sleep cycle will, will have all these different negative
(30:38):
diseases associated with it.
But now you're kind of contesting a different point.
It's like, Hey, it's actually not the sleep cycle.
It's the blue light.
Yeah.
What you're saying, Brian is so important to understand.
Blue is not good or bad, right?
It's the time of day you see it.
(30:58):
And you want to see as much blue rich light as you can during the daytime,
particularly in the morning hours.
And you want to see as little as possible than the evening.
And yet we have light bulbs.
Most of us or light fixtures that are on exactly, deliver exactly the same
light 24 seven, whenever you switch them on.
In other words, that's our failure to not change the blue content of
(31:22):
light with the time of day.
And this is relatively new.
So why would anyone even think to do that until recently?
And why, why the resistance to it?
Even though, as you've pointed out, there's big case studies and
consistent results in those case studies that are showing that the
(31:44):
blue light is having negative impacts on humanity.
Well, you know, the, when Edison invented the light bulb, just to give
you a sense of how much we can talk about percent blue content, in other
words, that's one way of talking about light.
And by, if we say how much of it is in this sky blue range, 440, 495,
compared to the total amount of light we see, which is all the range from
(32:06):
380 to 780 from the violet to the red, right?
What percentage of it is this blue?
Candles and wood fires that our ancestors use have less than 1% blue,
very small amounts of blue.
Edison, when he invented the light bulb, developed something that we wanted
to look like candlelight, because that's what people were used to.
(32:29):
So his light was also pretty low in blue, about 4% blue, but nothing more.
But what we've done is a huge experiment on ourselves without
realizing it by changing to LEDs.
And the reason for that is concern with energy efficiency, you know, regular
Edison light bulbs produce a lot more heat than they do light.
(32:53):
So, you know, it's thought to be inefficient.
So the LEDs came along and they only got introduced 10 years ago.
So in the last 10 years, we've introduced these LEDs and they have,
depending on whether it's a soft white or, you know, a harsher white, they
have 10 to 25% blue content, huge amounts of this blue content.
(33:15):
And that just happens to be because the most efficient way to convert
electricity into light is to use a blue chip and they all have this
big spike of blue in them.
And this is something, an experiment we've done on ourselves just
over the last 10 years.
And, you know, during that same time, and this is an association, but
(33:35):
there's a good reason to think it might be causal, the rates of the rate of
growth, the number of women getting breast cancer is going out 4% a year,
suddenly started climbing rapidly.
The rate that colon rectal cancer is occurring in young people
started climbing rapidly.
So a lot of things have changed.
And so I think what we've now realizing is saying, wait a second, you know,
(34:00):
the Department of Energy is putting higher, firmer and firmer standards.
For example, last year in 2023, they banned incandescent and halogen
light bulbs, you can't buy them.
In fact, you were charged about $540 fine for anybody who sells a
innocent light bulb per bulb, right?
(34:20):
That's huge fines.
So they've gone off the market, they disappeared.
And so we've gone from a relatively low blue environment during the evenings to
a, you know, a blue rich environment in the evenings, doing a major experiment
all for the benefit of energy conservation.
You could say it's for global warming, for the health of our planet.
(34:43):
But I'd argue that doing something for the health of our planet is not really
sensible if it creates huge health problems in ourselves, you know, because
the problems are much bigger than the immediate health problems of another
degree of global warming, much bigger effects that we have on all of us.
So that in turn has led to a lot of innovation, a lot of technology, a lot
(35:08):
of people coming out now with lights that have zero blue that you use at night.
This is all coming, you know, and products are coming available to
market to address it.
Blue blocking glasses are becoming available.
It'll be careful making sure they're blocking the sky blue light as opposed
to, and you don't want to be wearing blue blocking glasses during the daytime
(35:28):
because that's when you want to see blue.
So it's a question of what you do.
All those solutions are becoming available now, but we're in this whole
transition where most people haven't got a clue.
This is the scientists all know about it.
In fact, Brian, I led a team of 250 scientists from around the world.
The people published the most research in the scientific literature.
(35:51):
And we came down with a consensus among these scientists, hard to get scientists
to agree on things you might know, but we got a consensus that the blue light was
the key issue, blue lighting.
There should be as little blue light as possible in the evening and lights that
we use that LED lights that are on the market today should be labeled may be
(36:12):
harmful to health if used in the evening.
That energy efficiency of lights is desirable.
We all like to reduce our utility bill and consume less fossil fuels and all the
rest of it, but not at the cost of human health.
And we can get started on the outdoor lights.
I haven't even gone there, but we're doing huge damage to the environment with
(36:36):
outdoor lighting and the LED lighting in terms of really impacting the food chains
of all sorts of creatures in the world outside the other 8 million species on
the planet.
So yeah, it's a huge issue.
So that's one of the reasons I'm delighted to get on a podcast with people like you,
Brian, and, you know, get people thinking about it because as I say, the solutions
(37:00):
for yourself are actually pretty simple.
If only you knew about it.
Yeah.
The, the real interventions that you can place in your life are very minimal.
Like you said, you can wear the glasses, the blue blocking and make sure they're
blocking the proper wavelength.
I guess you could even change habits.
(37:20):
Like let's say you don't want to wear those glasses for whatever reason, or you
don't want to change your light bulbs.
You could just get off your devices earlier or like go inside when it's
nighttime, turn off the lights.
Or minimize, you know, you have to kind of think realistically what, what people
would do, but still like be in a more dimly lit room or something, like instead
(37:42):
of turning on your bedroom light, turn on the closet light and crack the door and
just let that illuminate and just little changes that, that you can make.
What's kind of interesting is, cause I'm not in the point to, to argue against you
about what is more important, the health of the earth or the, or the, uh, the
(38:03):
acute health of, of humans.
And I can see a very strong argument being made for, well, it's not so much
like now, like we're kind of just placeholders for the next generation of
people, so we should do our best for them.
So we can, uh, you know, protect the planet for that.
Well, and I totally agree with that, Brian, just to make clear, because
(38:26):
obviously we've got to do it, but you've got to ask yourself what's happening to
that electricity we're saving by harming ourselves with LED lights.
And the answer is the same amount of energy that is projected to be saved by
switching to the LEDs from the incandescent light bulbs is the same amount
of money, same amount of electricity as the increased electricity we're now using.
(38:49):
And we'll be using in data farms that are used for Bitcoin mining and
artificial intelligence data farm.
They consume huge quantities of electricity.
So that amount of excess electricity we're using is just being taken from
what we're using by switching to lights.
And I, therefore that puts it in a slightly different context.
(39:11):
So yeah, we need to find ways to deal with global warming.
Don't get me wrong.
But the reality is that we're not cutting the electricity bill or
electricity consumption, we're just switching to other things.
And that's not worth the human cost of the LED lights we're using today.
And yeah, I was just going to kind of put forward like an interesting
(39:31):
like thought experiment, because like you're saying, there's so many.
I just keep on saying knock on effects that we don't know.
Okay.
Well now human health is declining and we don't know.
So we're living with more chronic diseases, as you said, like we're
living with more diabetes, we're living with more cancers and the technology,
the medical technology is, is getting better and we're getting better at
(39:56):
living with those diseases for cancers, living longer for some of them.
For diabetes, it's, you know, you can live a relatively still normal human
lifespan, even with those diseases, but just the economic cost of, of that.
Like if you're paying for healthcare, there's just so many different things
(40:19):
like, depending on how you want to frame it, like, it's a really fine line
between what is more important, like right now, changing this now.
And I would argue, cause you said this is relatively new technology.
This is 10 years old LED lights.
There is still plenty of time to be like, okay, this was a great invention
for what it was, but because of the cascade of human health effects that
(40:42):
we will be dealing with in the short future right now, like let's go ahead
and like change that.
What can we do to be more efficient?
What have we learned from LED that we can apply to a different model of lighting?
Yeah.
Well, the medical technology is really very, you know, amazing.
The things that can be done and so forth.
(41:03):
And we see new drugs coming along like a Ozempic, you know, and radically
changing the treatment of beastie and diabetes and so forth, but it's so
much better to prevent than to treat, right?
Depends what business you're in.
If you're in the healthcare business, you know, I'm saying better
(41:24):
for the health of people, better for the economy.
But yeah, it's a lot of people make a lot of money from medical treatments.
Don't get me wrong.
Okay.
But yeah, here's the deal.
If I take a room full of, we've done this, a room full of healthy people
and we put them in lights that are regular LED lights, we can render
(41:47):
them overnight, diabetic.
In other words, they will fail the glucose tolerance test, the standard
tests for diabetes in the morning.
If I put them in a room with lights that has no blue in, they're perfectly healthy.
So just by adding or not blue, I can render people diabetic.
So if you say, well, it's increasing diabetic risk and increasing obesity,
(42:09):
basically people's appetite, they eat twice as many snacks, people working
night shifts on the LED lights than those are under, under traditional lights.
So that's again, another thing.
All of those you can say you can treat, but the cost of changing a light bulb
is so much less than the cost of Ozempic.
I mean, their prescriptions are what 600, 800, whatever it is a month,
(42:32):
dollars a month is a ton of money and cost to be able to treat a condition.
But there's one more thing I want to probably say before we get too far,
Brian, because again, you've been very, you know, I think this conversation is
highlighting clarity, blue is not bad or good.
LEDs are not bad or good because actually we're only talking about
(42:55):
a particular type of LED.
LEDs are a very flexible technology.
I can design an LED to produce any composition of the light spectrum I want.
And so we can design LEDs that have no blue in them, but have other
colors like violet and greens and yellows and oranges, or we can make an
LED that has just yellow, orange light or red light or LEDs.
(43:20):
So it's not the LED per se that's a problem.
It's the use of this mass market production of LEDs that's just pushing
to produce the brightest light at the cheapest cost, right?
That is the particular problem.
And that's what dominates it's 98% of the market.
So it's a question of having the right LEDs and having the right blue light
(43:42):
and not banning blue and not banning LEDs, but actually having smarter use
of blue and smart design of LEDs to solve this problem.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
And it just seems like a very easy pivot.
It seems like you can avoid a lot of heartache down the line to just not try
(44:03):
and fight what the science is coming out with and just be like, yeah, okay, let's
go ahead and change this because why wouldn't you?
And what you're doing is reverting to what our ancestors did, right?
I mean, what we're doing is going back to the world where we get natural
daylight in the day and we don't get blue rich light in the evenings and
we sleep in the dark at night.
(44:24):
We're just going back to what our ancestors did and because without it,
you know, what's happening, we talked about all the modern medicine marvels,
but one of the shocking things is the average life expectancy in a country
like ours and the US has plateaued.
(44:44):
In fact, it used to be getting longer and longer as medical advances came
through and public health advances is now totally plateaued and I think we
could actually have another surge in life expectancy if only people would
start adopting a pattern of getting the light they should have at the right
time and getting this circadian rhythm strengthened and so forth.
(45:06):
So I think that's, but right now we really have plateaued for all the
medical marvels because we're adding all this excess disease and ill health
related to the misuse of light.
And there's an important distinction to say too, it's not, okay, our lives were
getting longer, our quality of lives were getting better as well, but now
(45:30):
it's, it's not, we're living the same and the quality of life is also on
decline because we're living with chronic diseases now.
That's right.
In other words, it's not just length of life.
It's length of healthy life is what we should all aspire to.
And the other side of it, I mean, a lot of this evidence on light, we've talked
about obesity and diabetes and cancers and stuff like that, but psychiatric
(45:54):
illness, anxiety and depression major and PTSD major are really a huge issue
and contribute to the increase in suicides and everything else.
You know, in other words, it's, it's a lot of disturbances in, in
otherwise young, healthy people.
And we now know that the, whether you get exposed to the right
(46:17):
light is hugely important.
So people get exposed to outdoor daylight every day, have much less
psychiatric and anxiety illness, depressive illness than those who stay
indoors all the time, people who sleep with the lights on at night have much
more anxiety and depression and so forth.
There's about a 30% change either way, those, those things.
(46:40):
So again, it's part of your, it's your mental health.
It's your immune health, your ability to resist disease and, and so forth.
So many different aspects besides your sleep, all these things are impacted
by the light we see and when we see it and what it, what it's composed of.
We've, we've talked about hospitals a few times in a couple of different
(47:03):
experiments, and so I'm wondering, cause obviously getting rest when you're in
the hospital, you need to rest.
The doctors are providing interventions or medications that will assist the body
in healing itself, but ultimately it's up to the body to actually heal itself.
And so I think there is a very strong argument and I can't imagine anyone
(47:29):
really opposing it of, of changing the lighting in hospital rooms to be that,
that more circadian rhythm lighting that we would want to see that recovery.
So we could get into that good rest cycle sleep cycle, but on the other side
of that, we want surgeons, doctors, healthcare providers to be alert, just
(47:52):
really in tune and awake and not really succumbing to the effects of melatonin
or anything like that.
So would there be an argument to, I don't know if this is possible to like, but
increase like the blue light intensity, like in certain situations, like in a
hospital or something like that, or in like a, a surgery, a room to where you
(48:18):
would want that kind of light, or is the negative impact of having a
dysregulated circadian rhythm always going to be outweighed by any sort of
short-term, more focused time?
Well, that's the interesting debate, right?
And that why some people still talk about the use of blue rich light being good
(48:38):
because it makes people more alert and cognitively performing better.
But in that actually, if you go and look at the light spectrum, there's an answer
that because actually while the sky blue light is what's the key signal as it
were for the circadian clock and circadian health, the impact of alerting
(49:00):
effects of light are actually found with the shortest wavelength.
So actually violet light or the violet part of the spectrum is actually much
more stimulating and keep people awake.
So you can have, so the solution that we developed and we've shown to be highly
effective and it's been installed in over 65 Fortune 500 companies is to use a
(49:24):
light spectrum, especially engineered called spectrally engineered LED that
produces a violet spike of light that in fact enables alertness and people be
alert and not fall asleep on the job and do critical jobs like running an hour or
a fine ray or, you know, whatever they're doing as a critical job.
(49:48):
On the other hand, and have no blue in it, so it doesn't disrupt the circadian
clocks and still have the other colors in it so that you can have a reasonably
normal looking light for your visual experience.
So you can do a lot of engineering around that and so, and we've shown that
the, you know, those lights actually reduce sleepiness on the night shift
without disrupting the circadian clock, without disrupting sleep and circadian
(50:15):
rhythms.
So you can do a lot of engineering once you understand what each part of the
light spectrum does for health to benefit people's performance.
But I think, yeah, I know you want to, you know, unfortunately, when you talk
about, I would say that some places adopt, I mentioned the Fortune 500 companies
(50:36):
being adopting this in their particular 24 seven control centers, which is really
mission critical centers.
They adopt this technology, but hospitals have been rather slow.
They're still focused on energy efficiency of the lights and brightness of
the light and everything else.
Assisted living has actually taken much more energetic.
(50:57):
And so now a lot of assisted living facilities are putting in circadian
lighting because what happens is that they find their residents have fewer
falls, they sleep better, quite significant drops in the number of, you
know, one of the big costs of a senior living facility is when residents fall
or slip and, you know, injure themselves and they may be have to be hospitalized
(51:22):
and you lose a resident, you've got to replace that resident with a new person.
It costs assisted living facility that turnover, but they keep them healthier,
fewer injuries and sleeping better by using circadian lighting.
So we're seeing it spread throughout the assisted living world, but the
hospitals have been somewhat slow in it.
(51:44):
And a lot of other places are pretty slow with adopting this type of lighting.
So it's, it's a world of change.
You know, I think the general agreement is soon, you know, in the next five or
10 years, everything will be circadian friendly lighting.
In other words, lighting that provides blue during the day and no blue at night.
(52:05):
But it's going to take a while just to change mindsets and change people over.
And there's a huge industry that's concentrated in making all this money
from pumping out these blue rich LEDs that just pump out blue rich light day
at night. It's 98% of the, of 150 billion a year industry.
(52:26):
So there's a huge, it's like turning around a battleship.
This industry is really locked into this particular, particular technology with a
big spike of blue light as part of what they deliver.
Yeah.
I mean, I can see like why you wouldn't want to do it in the short term, but in
the long term, if like, let's go ahead and use the NFL, like the NFL knew that
(52:52):
there was concussions that their sport was causing concussions, causing brain
injuries, but they were saying it wasn't.
And then the science eventually came out where it was undeniable.
It's chronic traumatic encephalitis.
And that is obviously happening because of, of the repeated head to head or just
(53:13):
sudden acceleration deceleration.
And our brains aren't, there's no cushion inside our skull.
So our very soft brain is just hitting our very hard skull.
So that protection isn't, it's meant from the outside, not from the
inside to protect that.
And with as this information, this evidence keeps on coming out and is very
(53:34):
repeatable and you can see the side effects of the light.
It seems like the, the lighting industry would be putting themselves more at risk
in the long term to be responsible for the health effects and any sort of like
class action lawsuits that could come out of.
(53:55):
That's exactly what I think the lighting industry, I know there exactly is talk
about this fear, you know, it's this whole balance of, you know, I'm making a
lot of money now selling these conventional LED lights.
It's a very good business.
I'm in as they say, but this, this business about significant lighting is
concerning because if I keep on selling these lights, I'm going to have
(54:18):
class action lawsuits.
Now it's, I mean, if you look at the case of asbestos, there's a classic one, right?
So asbestos used to be a great insulator that everybody used asbestos because it
really worked extremely well, all the pipes and buildings and things that were asbestos.
And then of course, the evidence came out that it was producing cancer, lung
(54:39):
cancers, mesotheliomas and so forth.
And then they started getting some class action lawsuits and every company
producing asbestos went bankrupt in the end because of the billions and
billions of lawsuits and absolute mess.
I mean, eventually it got obviously banned from all sorts of things, but it
took an industry, it took him a long time to change because it was good
(55:04):
business making asbestos insulation.
So it was, it's the same sort of thing, you know, and this is something where,
um, you know, it's, it's, uh, it's really getting that critical tipping point
where people are really going to start understanding this and understanding the
risks.
And then as I say, the technology, the good news is it's not like this is a
(55:27):
problem without a solution.
We now have the solution.
We've got proven solutions.
We've got lights that will remove the blue.
We can engineer those and they're on the market today and you can buy them.
But, and if you want to find out more, you can go to my website, circadianlight.org,
which talks about the various types of lights that are available and so forth.
And my book, the light doctor is, is, you know, it tells you about where to find
(55:51):
these lights and how they work and all the rest of it, but that's, this is a
chain, a time of change right now.
Uh, Brian and, um, but the biggest problem is people lacking awareness.
The scientists fully understand this and understand the risks and the general
public hasn't got a clue for the most part.
(56:11):
And that's, that's why getting the word out and having conversations
like this is so important.
Yeah.
I appreciate you saying this, like, and really championing this cause because
this is going to have real life, uh, implications and having real life, uh,
implications now.
So I'm going to take a hard left turn.
And, uh, the final question I want to ask you, and I kind of, I always
(56:35):
phrase it kind of wrong.
The only way I mean this is we, we get into these patterns where we kind of
just live our life in these established routines and we kind of think nothing's
going to change and we're not really being mindful of what we're doing.
And so this is a, a big question, a weird question, but, uh, what is
(56:55):
the purpose of your life?
Well, I think the purpose of my life is to, and one of the central focuses all
the way through is to understand these big problems to, uh, which takes, by
the way, experiencing something firsthand.
And that's when I started off, um, working as a, a surgeon in training,
(57:17):
the medical profession and being exposed to these light issues of light and
everything else, going and digging into the science and figuring out exactly
what goes on and why, and what the mechanism is, what's going on.
And then actually looking at solutions, uh, to that, developing those solutions,
building, you know, my career is involved all the way through from basic science to
(57:40):
applied science to actually engineering and developing companies to then, you
know, start marketing the light solutions like that.
And then, as I say, I now licensed the rights to major lighting companies.
So they can be broadly available.
And my last stage of my life here is sort of gaining the word out, right?
(58:02):
That this is exist, this has happened to exist.
So the purpose has been a theme of identifying a problem.
And, and, you know, there is no more joy than identifying a problem,
figuring out what the solution is, and then actually coming out with
some practical solution to it.
And then the, obviously to make it work, you've got to have people aware of it
(58:22):
and start asking for it.
And so that's, that's been the whole transition.
Yeah.
I just love to hear when people are just, they're mindful and they're
living their cause and just being just very, again, mindful of what they're
doing and how they're living their life and where they're spending their time
resources, but it's been so great to hear this and not like it's scary to hear
(58:44):
about it, but it's great that great minds are like you are working on this.
And I just, I really appreciate the time that you took to have
this conversation with me.
And so if people want to join this cause and learn more,
where can they go do that?
Well, first of all, look at my book.
It's available on Amazon called the light doctor.
That will give you really the insight into this.
And it's written for a general lay audiences, people who can interest in
(59:07):
learning more about light and health and everything without needing to be a
scientist can look at a website called circadian light.org, which will talk
about, um, you know, where the lighting solutions are available.
And so, yeah, I encourage people to take a look at that, but, uh, the book is
really written just really to get this word out and to use it as a vehicle so
(59:28):
people can actually educate others.
Some people buy it to educate their boss about light or educate the guy who
controls the decision about lighting in their hospital or building.
So, but it's, uh, it's interesting stuff and it's very, very understandable,
but it's so little understood today.
Well, this has been absolutely thrilling.
(59:48):
I really appreciate the time.
Thank you so much, Dr.
Moore-Ede.
I hope you have a great rest of your day.
Thank you, Brian.
Enjoyed it.
(01:00:16):
I've never had a quiet moment ever since I discovered mobile speakers, more
importantly, random people around me in the park, state park, national park, dog
park, movie theater, hospital, restaurant, airport, airport restaurant, really
everywhere, haven't enjoyed a quiet moment while I've been around either.
(01:00:38):
With the portability of mobile speakers, I look back at all of the
wasted time I spent in public with my headphones on when I could have been
making everyone listen to the same music as me, everywhere I go, it's a concert.
And judging by the looks people are giving me, they are just as happy
about it as I am.
Thanks, mobile speakers.
(01:00:58):
Mobile speakers, when polite society says you should keep what you're
listening to to yourself, but you know better.
This episode of Revelizations is brought to you by Mobile Speakers.
(00:21):
You're on your morning commute, listening to your favorite new musical artists minding
your own business when you realize that so is everyone else.
No one is paying attention to you.
If only other people could hear what you're listening to, then they would know what unique
and original taste in music you have.
(00:41):
At Mobile Speakers, we hear you, and soon, so will everyone else that's on the bus, subway,
train, or plane with you.
With the simple press of a button, Mobile Speakers connects to your phone, allowing
you to amplify your German industrial death bluegrass core music.
This way, everyone gets to enjoy the sweet melodies of banjos banging on dumpsters while
(01:05):
a nice fellow, presumably in Leidenhosen, sings a surprisingly relatable story about
life.
Mobile Speakers empowers you to say Auf Wiedersehen to Public Peace and Quiet and Guten Tag
to all the new friends you're about to make.
Mobile Speakers, when polite society says you should keep what you're listening to
(01:25):
to yourself, but you know better.
(01:52):
Welcome to Revelizations.
I'm your host, Brian James.
On today's episode, we will be discussing the effects that light has on the human body.
More specifically, we will be talking about how blue light plays a key role in regulating
our circadian clocks and the cascade of negative side effects when our circadian clocks are
dysregulated.
(02:14):
Simply, circadian clocks are internal alarm clocks that establish rhythms of our sleep-wake
pattern, hormone release, appetite, body temperature, and more over a 24-hour period.
Every cell in all of our organs has a circadian clock in it, which is then controlled by a
master clock in the brain called the supra-chiasmatic nucleus.
(02:37):
That leads me to introduce today's guest, Dr. Martin Moore-Ede.
He's a pioneer in circadian rhythm research with over 40 years of expertise.
As a former professor at Harvard Medical School, he led the groundbreaking discovery of the
brain's biological clock, the supra-chiasmatic nucleus.
His research advanced our understanding of how circadian rhythms influence sleep and
(03:01):
bodily functions.
He's the founder of Circadian, a global consulting firm focused on optimizing workforce health
and performance.
He's also a founder of the Circadian Light Research Center, which develops innovative
circadian lighting systems.
With his legacy of 10 books, over 180 scientific papers, Dr. Martin Moore-Ede has shaped the
(03:23):
conversation on circadian health, fatigue, and the impact of light.
He has been featured on major TV shows such as CNN, Good Morning America, Oprah Winfrey,
and The Today Show, as well as radio programs like NPR's Fresh Air.
Dr. Martin Moore-Ede has also contributed to leading publications like The Wall Street
(03:44):
Journal and New York Times.
And somehow, amidst all those other things, has also advised governments on health and
safety of 24-7 workforces.
Today, I have the privilege to have him on my podcast as he shares his invaluable insights
into how our biology is intertwined with light and its profound effects on our lives.
(04:05):
Thanks for listening, everyone.
Hi, everyone.
Welcome to another episode of Revelizations.
I am your host, Brian James.
And with me, I have Dr. Martin Moore-Ede.
And we are going to talk about the effects of light on the human body.
I'm very excited.
Good.
(04:25):
Yeah.
I'm delighted to join you.
And it's a great topic and a topic I think people really need to know something about
because light is as important to your health as the food we eat or the water we drink
or the air we breathe.
And most people don't realize that.
So, yeah, I'm glad to be able to talk about it.
Great. That was actually a question I had for you later.
(04:46):
It's like you have that quote and it's around.
And why do you say that?
Well, I think it makes it more relevant to people because they're trying to think light,
they take light for granted, how can that be important?
We've already been very conditioned to think about food and diet and all that, being conditioned
(05:08):
to think about, you know, lead in the water pipes and, you know, pollutants in the air.
But people don't realize that light is just as important.
In fact, I like, I liken modern LED lighting, much of it, is junk light in the same way
that we can have junk food.
(05:30):
In other words, junk food looks good, tastes good, et cetera, but it doesn't do you very
much good.
In fact, it may harm you.
The same way the light we use may seem aesthetically nice and may seem cheap and easy to use.
And it's just there and flicking on the light switch.
Who gives that a thought?
(05:50):
But in fact, you can have quite major effects on health.
And that's something we're learning more and more about now.
And it's particularly the various aspects of the light spectrum.
In other words, white light is made up in all the colors of the rainbow.
We never see it as that.
We think it's white or yellowish white, natural light or light from a lamp.
(06:14):
And in fact, what's coming into our eyes are all these different rainbow colors from
violet, blue, green, yellow, orange, red, and all of them have quite different impacts
on your health.
And so understanding what a light is composed of and what it emits is actually highly important.
(06:37):
And that's a key way we now know a lot about how to distinguish between different types
of light and what they do.
I can just give you a couple of examples just to flesh that out a second.
You know, violet light is very effective at killing bacteria and viruses.
Royal blue light is can cure jaundice in newborn babies.
(06:58):
Sky blue light is critical for synchronizing our circadian clocks and our sleep and protecting
us against diabetes and cancer and various things, depending on how much that sky blue
light you see.
Green light is actually, as I see, very significant effects on our emotions, our mood, effects
(07:18):
on amygdala in the brain.
So then in fact, it can reduce pain.
People with migraines, you treat them with green light.
Red light is actually very curative and in terms of heals scars, grows hair in your head,
can repair in some cases damage to the eyes.
(07:40):
So all those colors are in natural daylight.
So when you think about it going outside in the natural daylight, you're getting all those
benefits of natural light.
When you come inside, you're dealing with this very, very artificial type light that
just does not have all those qualities.
And that's one of the big problems.
So you basically touched on something really important right out the gate.
(08:08):
You're not making this new claim that light impacts the body.
This is well established science.
Like what you were saying, you just listed some of them, but even the sunlight, our body
converts the sunlight to vitamin D in our body.
So it's like, there is this long history.
If you stay in the sun for a long time, your skin will start to darken because of the melanin.
(08:30):
Our bodies interact to light.
It was really profound when I was looking and doing research on this episode.
You just take it for granted, like you said.
You don't think about it.
You don't think that our bodies are absorbing it, that we're taking it in, and it's having
(08:53):
a physiological change in our body.
That's just absolutely fascinating.
The importance of what you have to talk about is really understated, and I'm very curious
how history will play out this information.
Yeah, well, this is well established science now.
So what I'm talking about is something, it's not just an odd association or a random claim.
(09:18):
There are tens of thousands of scientific papers published on this.
And of course, when you're looking at understanding the effects of it, you're looking for not
just an association, something goes up at the same time as something else, that type
of thing.
You're looking at where's the whole causal chain in this?
In other words, can you show the every step along the way?
(09:40):
So when we talk about that the sky blue light, part of the rainbow spectrum, that's the sky
blue color, is synchronizing our circadian clocks and keeping them in step with their
We know, for example, that light falling on our eyes reaches and activates special cells
(10:03):
in the eye that are not rods and cones and are associated with vision.
They're actually got a fancy long name and intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion
cells or IPRGCs, but those cells have within them a photopigment that's exquisitely sensitive
to sky blue light.
(10:23):
It's called melanopsin.
We know that melanopsin has this peak sensitivity of about 480 nanometers and to explain what
that means, visible light, you know, when we look at sunlight, it's got ultraviolet
light that we can't see.
It's got visible light of all the colors of the rainbow embedded in it.
(10:45):
And then it's got infrared, which again you can't see, you can feel the heat of, but you've
got that range.
Within the visible range of light, that's between about 380 nanometers to 780 nanometers,
that's the wavelength, the length of the meter essentially.
Those wavelengths of light, every color we can classify by where it falls.
(11:12):
So the violet lights are down in the 380 to 420 range, the blue lights are in the 420
up to about 500 range, the greens are from 500 to getting up to 580, so and so forth.
So you can classify them.
So we can talk not only about just a vague blue, what is blue?
(11:34):
Well, there are all sorts of different color blues.
There's violet blues and royal blues and sky blues and aqua type blues.
All of those have different wavelengths on the map.
But we know that that 480 peak is what's sensitized to in these photo pigments in the back of
(11:56):
the retina.
We know that that pathway triggers a direct pathway into a clock in the brain.
That was something my, I led the team at Harvard that identified where it was in the human
brain.
This is the clock, the circadian, master circadian clock is called the suprachiasmatic nucleus,
or SCN for short, so we use acronyms just out of convenience.
(12:20):
And by the way, just to confuse everyone, my favorite typo when someone was typing up
a manuscript of mine, they made it the suprachiasmatic nucleus, which is, I thought, great, really
cute.
Now I've really confused your audience because we ought to go back.
It's the suprachiasmatic, all right?
(12:40):
It's supra means above and chiasm means where the optic nerves from the eyes go back and
they cross over on their way back to the back of your head where the occipital cortex and
vision occurs.
But right above that is this whole cluster of nerve cells that is acts as a master clock.
And that master clock runs in its own pace if it doesn't get any time cues.
(13:02):
So if we're living in, you know, living in a cave, as some of the early studies did,
have people in a bunker or in a apartment without any windows or any time cues, any
clocks, then that clock will drift, keep on running, but it will drift a little longer
every day.
And so that clock is a free running circadian clock.
(13:23):
Now that clock is really critical because it's a master clock, but there are millions
of other clocks in all the cells of the body.
And we have hormones that are communicating with it.
So basically that master clock is triggering the pineal, which will produce melatonin.
That sends a signal that it's dark outside, that the world is, you know, there's no light
coming in.
(13:43):
And then in the morning we have another hormone produced by the adrenal gland triggered by
the pituitary axis, a hormone called cortisol, which surges just at dawn, and that tells
the body it's time to wake up and get going.
So there's a whole system of the body to keep everything, our whole bodies in step
(14:05):
with the outside world.
And that's how it was for 10,000 generations of our ancestors.
You know, they spent their time outdoors in natural daylight, and it's really bright outside
compared to what we have indoors today.
They slept in the dark at night.
If they did have light, it came from wood fires and candles, which contain no blue,
(14:28):
virtually no blue at all.
So that signal that confuses us.
But we've changed that world today, and now we have LED lights which are pumping out blue
light night and day.
And we've totally screwed up our time systems of the body, and that's what is having devastating
effects on health.
And it's been linked to obesity, diabetes, heart disease, breast cancer, prostate cancer,
(14:52):
and so forth, colorectal cancer, all of which are problems that are increased by the fact
that we live indoors in twilight conditions during the day most of the time.
We may work in our computers, but the amount of light we're seeing is minimal compared
to the outdoor world.
And then we have the lights on in the evenings without thinking about what we're shining
(15:13):
on ourselves.
And so really, the message is, and this is what I talk about in my book, a book is called
the new book called The Light Doctor, is how that transition from a world where everything
used to be healthy without us realizing it to a world that's very unhealthy because
we haven't managed the light we see is one of the, you know, I would say it's a real
(15:40):
problem for our society, but it's also an enormous opportunity because we can do a lot
to get people feeling healthier.
In fact, I challenge your listeners to take part in the challenge that we've got out there
now, which is to call the circadian rhythm disruption challenge or CRD challenge, which
(16:01):
is do some simple steps to change it and see how much better you feel.
In other words, and those steps, so I can just briefly summarize them, Brian, are sleep
in the dark at night, don't have the lights on, amazing number of people sleep with the
lights on, 40, 50%, particularly elderly people sleep with the lights on in the bedroom, sleep
in the dark at night, number one, number two, get out in the mornings, particularly
(16:26):
because morning light, morning daylight and outdoor light is a huge benefit.
People get better in hospitals where they're facing the morning sun out of the hospital
room rather than get out in half the time compared to being in rooms that are facing
north and west.
So the morning light is really critical.
(16:46):
And during the day, you know, get exposed to blue light where you blue rich light where
you can.
But in the evening, stay well away from that blue rich light.
So avoid being lit, use these LEDs.
You can get light bulbs that are zero blue.
That's one source or you can use red light or orange light that's got no blue in it.
(17:08):
Or you can wear glasses, blue blocking glasses that take it away, take out the blue.
But that's the basic message that, you know, you need to just as important to have a diet
for your, in terms of your food and health, you need a light diet too.
And that's those are the basic principles.
So we can dig into more behind that, but the science behind it and the background behind
(17:32):
it.
But, you know, just as a basic, if we did a few of those things, getting that morning
sunlight, getting rid of the blue at evening, sleeping in the dark, amazing how much better
you feel within, you know, within a few days, a few weeks, radically different, how much
better you feel under those circumstances.
Yeah.
The morning sunlight one is starting to catch on because my cousin does that and he didn't
(17:59):
explain why, just that it's good for you.
And before I knew anything about this subject, I'm like that, why would you do that?
What would that possibly change?
And again, it's just ignoring the science of what does light do to the body.
When I already know that light has certain impacts on the body, I would, I was just completely
(18:20):
naive to think that that wouldn't do anything.
Right.
It's also people need to realize most of these effects are coming in through the eyes, right?
Now there are effects of light, obviously sunlight on skin and their effects to do,
you don't have to be in the swimming trunks is what I'm trying to say, right?
Or you don't have to not be either though.
(18:41):
But if you want to be in swimming trunks, great.
But basically people who spend more time outdoors than the rest of the population live years
longer.
The effect is huge.
So they've done these huge studies now with one study in Sweden with 29,000 Swedish women,
(19:01):
another study in the UK with 88,000 people over the age of 50, I think it was, and then
looked at those people who got out every day, spent time outdoors and they knew this because
they can put recording devices on like a wristwatch type of activity, a thing that actually
(19:22):
records light.
So people get a lot of bright sunlight, live years longer to the extent it's as large an
effect as, for example, smoking or not smoking in terms of lifespan and health.
Similarly, people who sleep in the dark at night live longer than people who have the
(19:46):
lights on and particularly blue rich light in the evenings.
So it's really the big effects and these studies now coming out, a recent one just came out
with 88,000 people, the previous one in Sweden with 29,000.
And interestingly, the Swedish study was started out because they were doing skin cancer research
and they thought they would be studying the skin cancer, you know, how much more were
(20:10):
people getting going outside in the sun, getting get cancers.
Well, they did get more skin cancers.
They got more melanomas.
But in fact, they all live longer than the people who stayed indoors, which is really,
you know, quite significant.
So, yes, there's a pretty good research on that now.
We understand why, because it is really robustly synchronizing your internal clocks and keeping
(20:37):
everything. Our body is a finely tuned machine and keeping it robustly synchronized in a
regular pattern is absolutely critical for health.
It seems counterintuitive, especially everything that we've heard about the sun and cancer
and stay out. I remember my nutrition teacher in college, she was saying, I
(20:59):
only am out in the sunlight for 15 minutes.
Like it takes, I think, all of 15 minutes to get your recommended daily allowance of
your vitamin D for the day, which is other than that, I'm not really out in the sun.
And I think that at least popular science is saying that, like, hey, you need to stay
out of the sun and you're claiming the exact opposite.
(21:24):
Yeah, I think there's been this has been the standard medical preaching, if you like,
or medical advice and education, all being focused about concerned about UV radiation.
But people who are getting much more UV radiation than if you stay indoors, obviously
windows block UV, so you don't tend to have much UV inside.
(21:46):
But essentially, people who are out in daylight and regular natural lighting may have
some more skin cancers.
But this whole thing about the concern and there certainly is a problem, you know, if
you're in extreme midday sun and you're spending hours and getting sunburns and all
the rest of it, that's not a good thing to do for your health.
(22:08):
But we're talking about getting out for a bit longer than 15 minutes, ideally half an
hour to at least an hour, if you can, that length of time.
But you don't have to be, you know, go for a run, take the dog for a walk, you know,
sit on the bench or in your balcony, whatever, and get a cup of coffee.
You know, it doesn't matter what you're doing.
It's getting that light exposure.
(22:30):
And, you know, and so that the research was really concerned about the melanoma
effects and the, you know, the skin cancer effects.
But those researchers were the ones who first found out, oh, wow, these people are
actually doing much better and their skin cancers don't progress and they don't
have die from them, you know, the melanomas and the same thing was found.
(22:52):
It turns out when you go back to it in the Navy, to some old studies going way back
now, many years ago, they found that people in the Navy who were on board ship and
therefore getting exposed to a lot of sunlight when they're, of course, their
normal day were getting eight times more malignant melanomas, you know, than the
(23:13):
population at home, but they were living longer.
I mean, they were living longer, you know, and healthier.
And so again, that was an old study in the Navy, but now, as I say, it's been
repeated quite rigorously.
So yes, getting that daylight is really critical because indoors we're living in
such low levels of light.
(23:34):
I mean, I think just to talk about light levels for a moment, when you one way of
measuring light levels is something called lux and that's what if you have a light
meter that you use as a photographer, for example, you're measuring the number of
lux coming in.
Out indoors, you're probably most people in about 100 to 200 lux of light indoors.
(23:59):
Maybe it's a brightly lit office.
You might have four or 500 lux of light if it's really brightly lit, but outdoors,
even on a cloudy day, it's 10,000 lux of light.
It's so much brighter.
And on a sunny day, it's 50,000, 100,000 lux of light.
In other words, the bright level, the light level of light, the amount of energy
(24:23):
that's coming in from sunlight and daylight.
It doesn't, as I say, it doesn't have to be a sunny day mode of energy that's
coming in that is beneficial to you from that natural daylight is so much greater
than you ever get indoors.
You just can't do it indoors.
In fact, indoors, if you try to turn it up, make it really bright indoors, it just
(24:44):
gets so much glare because it bounces off the walls and everything else.
You can't tolerate it.
So that's why we tend to choose far dimmer.
And our eyes are just so much that we're just not really aware of how big the
contrast between being indoors and outdoors is.
Yeah, it's not until you're like in a dimly lit business or something like that.
And you go outside and you can't even open your eyes.
(25:05):
Just that, that sudden shock of sunlight.
So I want to kind of rewind back a little bit.
And so the focus is specifically.
So I want to ask, what is it about the blue light that is messing
with our circadian clock?
Okay.
So let's put it this way.
(25:27):
Back in the eighties at Harvard, when I led a team at Harvard for about 20
odd years, researching this and we identified this circadian clock in
human brain, the suprachiasmatic nucleus, SCN, we also were, because no
one thought that that time that humans had it, they knew animals had it, but
(25:48):
we were able to decipher it and discover where it was.
We also, at that time, the general feeling was that humans weren't being
synchronized, their circadian rhythm, their 24 hour cycles of sleep and wake
and hormones and temperature and so forth, wasn't being synchronized by
light and dark, it was being synchronized, it was thought, by social
(26:10):
interactions between people.
That was the theory.
And we were able to show that in fact, it was light that was doing it.
And, you know, if you had controlled the lighting precisely, then you could
control the timing of sleep and wake and everything and adjust with the clock.
And at that time, we had no idea.
We thought it was any light would do, any visible light would do.
(26:34):
And it wasn't until about 20 years ago, the first evidence started coming in
that actually we're much more sensitive to blue light than we are to other
colors of the rainbow in terms of this circadian clock and in terms of
suppressing melatonin, for example, light at night.
One of the things it does that causes harm is it shuts down the pineal
(26:56):
producing melatonin.
So the melatonin levels get very low.
And melatonin is enormously important for triggering repair and growth
and recovery during sleep.
So basically we thought it was that, but it turns out that it was blue
light that was being effective.
More recently, we were able to find that it's actually rather narrow band of
(27:18):
blue, peak, as I say, about 480, a range of about 440 to 495 blue, which is in
the sky, general sky blue range.
And that light was because it was triggering the retinal ganglion cells
that contained that photopigment called melanopsin that was acutely sensitive
(27:40):
to 480 nanometer blue, was triggering the input to the clock, was synchronizing
the clock, was sending the message to the pineal, you know, so blue was the key.
And you might say, why that blue?
It's really strange.
I mean, why would, you know, evolution result in us being so looking at blue
(28:01):
because all the other colors of the rainbow are available.
Why would it be that?
Well, it's fascinating that, and this is really an eye-opener, that if you look
at the oceans where life began, down deep in the oceans, light, sunlight
falling on seawater is absorbed as it goes into the water, but what gets
(28:25):
absorbed are all the other colors except for blue, so the violet gets absorbed
and the green gets absorbed, the yellow and the red and everything else.
And the only thing that penetrates into the ocean depths, more than about
a hundred meters, is sky blue light at exactly this thing.
So basically we think that when life began in the oceans, when it was
(28:46):
daylight, the organisms saw blue, when it was night, they saw black, but
what was the, they had to have blue detectors.
And in fact, today we can find single cell organisms in the ocean that have
blue light detectors, melanoxin type detectors that have circadian clocks
(29:07):
and also produce melatonin, all in a single cell.
You know, now we think that it's being conserved, you know, through evolution.
So now that's a fundamental part of the machinery.
It's the machinery that just keeps us linked.
So we think that's why it's that blue that got selected early on.
And it's really a mechanism that's amazingly effective and just as being
(29:30):
preserved, and so that's why we have this blue pigment in the eyes that is,
you know, that tells us whether it's night or day.
There's an important distinction to say that the blue light, it's not bad.
It's like, you need to be timing it.
It needs to be like you're saying in the morning, you need to have a lot of it.
(29:51):
It wakes you up and it changes like your physiology as you go throughout the
day, it signals different hormones and how to, how you operate your body.
And so this is the important kind of reveal of your research is like
the knock-on effects of this.
It's not just blue light is radioactive and we've, we've been living in this
(30:16):
radioactive environment our whole life.
And it turns out, yeah, of course we're getting all these diseases.
We're in a toxic environment.
That's not what it is.
It's the blue light impacting systems in our body and then the
knock-on effects of that.
So like there's documented cases like with sleep studies and how like
messing with your sleep cycle will, will have all these different negative
(30:38):
diseases associated with it.
But now you're kind of contesting a different point.
It's like, Hey, it's actually not the sleep cycle.
It's the blue light.
Yeah.
What you're saying, Brian is so important to understand.
Blue is not good or bad, right?
It's the time of day you see it.
(30:58):
And you want to see as much blue rich light as you can during the daytime,
particularly in the morning hours.
And you want to see as little as possible than the evening.
And yet we have light bulbs.
Most of us or light fixtures that are on exactly, deliver exactly the same
light 24 seven, whenever you switch them on.
In other words, that's our failure to not change the blue content of
(31:22):
light with the time of day.
And this is relatively new.
So why would anyone even think to do that until recently?
And why, why the resistance to it?
Even though, as you've pointed out, there's big case studies and
consistent results in those case studies that are showing that the
(31:44):
blue light is having negative impacts on humanity.
Well, you know, the, when Edison invented the light bulb, just to give
you a sense of how much we can talk about percent blue content, in other
words, that's one way of talking about light.
And by, if we say how much of it is in this sky blue range, 440, 495,
compared to the total amount of light we see, which is all the range from
(32:06):
380 to 780 from the violet to the red, right?
What percentage of it is this blue?
Candles and wood fires that our ancestors use have less than 1% blue,
very small amounts of blue.
Edison, when he invented the light bulb, developed something that we wanted
to look like candlelight, because that's what people were used to.
(32:29):
So his light was also pretty low in blue, about 4% blue, but nothing more.
But what we've done is a huge experiment on ourselves without
realizing it by changing to LEDs.
And the reason for that is concern with energy efficiency, you know, regular
Edison light bulbs produce a lot more heat than they do light.
(32:53):
So, you know, it's thought to be inefficient.
So the LEDs came along and they only got introduced 10 years ago.
So in the last 10 years, we've introduced these LEDs and they have,
depending on whether it's a soft white or, you know, a harsher white, they
have 10 to 25% blue content, huge amounts of this blue content.
(33:15):
And that just happens to be because the most efficient way to convert
electricity into light is to use a blue chip and they all have this
big spike of blue in them.
And this is something, an experiment we've done on ourselves just
over the last 10 years.
And, you know, during that same time, and this is an association, but
(33:35):
there's a good reason to think it might be causal, the rates of the rate of
growth, the number of women getting breast cancer is going out 4% a year,
suddenly started climbing rapidly.
The rate that colon rectal cancer is occurring in young people
started climbing rapidly.
So a lot of things have changed.
And so I think what we've now realizing is saying, wait a second, you know,
(34:00):
the Department of Energy is putting higher, firmer and firmer standards.
For example, last year in 2023, they banned incandescent and halogen
light bulbs, you can't buy them.
In fact, you were charged about $540 fine for anybody who sells a
innocent light bulb per bulb, right?
(34:20):
That's huge fines.
So they've gone off the market, they disappeared.
And so we've gone from a relatively low blue environment during the evenings to
a, you know, a blue rich environment in the evenings, doing a major experiment
all for the benefit of energy conservation.
You could say it's for global warming, for the health of our planet.
(34:43):
But I'd argue that doing something for the health of our planet is not really
sensible if it creates huge health problems in ourselves, you know, because
the problems are much bigger than the immediate health problems of another
degree of global warming, much bigger effects that we have on all of us.
So that in turn has led to a lot of innovation, a lot of technology, a lot
(35:08):
of people coming out now with lights that have zero blue that you use at night.
This is all coming, you know, and products are coming available to
market to address it.
Blue blocking glasses are becoming available.
It'll be careful making sure they're blocking the sky blue light as opposed
to, and you don't want to be wearing blue blocking glasses during the daytime
(35:28):
because that's when you want to see blue.
So it's a question of what you do.
All those solutions are becoming available now, but we're in this whole
transition where most people haven't got a clue.
This is the scientists all know about it.
In fact, Brian, I led a team of 250 scientists from around the world.
The people published the most research in the scientific literature.
(35:51):
And we came down with a consensus among these scientists, hard to get scientists
to agree on things you might know, but we got a consensus that the blue light was
the key issue, blue lighting.
There should be as little blue light as possible in the evening and lights that
we use that LED lights that are on the market today should be labeled may be
(36:12):
harmful to health if used in the evening.
That energy efficiency of lights is desirable.
We all like to reduce our utility bill and consume less fossil fuels and all the
rest of it, but not at the cost of human health.
And we can get started on the outdoor lights.
I haven't even gone there, but we're doing huge damage to the environment with
(36:36):
outdoor lighting and the LED lighting in terms of really impacting the food chains
of all sorts of creatures in the world outside the other 8 million species on
the planet.
So yeah, it's a huge issue.
So that's one of the reasons I'm delighted to get on a podcast with people like you,
Brian, and, you know, get people thinking about it because as I say, the solutions
(37:00):
for yourself are actually pretty simple.
If only you knew about it.
Yeah.
The, the real interventions that you can place in your life are very minimal.
Like you said, you can wear the glasses, the blue blocking and make sure they're
blocking the proper wavelength.
I guess you could even change habits.
(37:20):
Like let's say you don't want to wear those glasses for whatever reason, or you
don't want to change your light bulbs.
You could just get off your devices earlier or like go inside when it's
nighttime, turn off the lights.
Or minimize, you know, you have to kind of think realistically what, what people
would do, but still like be in a more dimly lit room or something, like instead
(37:42):
of turning on your bedroom light, turn on the closet light and crack the door and
just let that illuminate and just little changes that, that you can make.
What's kind of interesting is, cause I'm not in the point to, to argue against you
about what is more important, the health of the earth or the, or the, uh, the
(38:03):
acute health of, of humans.
And I can see a very strong argument being made for, well, it's not so much
like now, like we're kind of just placeholders for the next generation of
people, so we should do our best for them.
So we can, uh, you know, protect the planet for that.
Well, and I totally agree with that, Brian, just to make clear, because
(38:26):
obviously we've got to do it, but you've got to ask yourself what's happening to
that electricity we're saving by harming ourselves with LED lights.
And the answer is the same amount of energy that is projected to be saved by
switching to the LEDs from the incandescent light bulbs is the same amount
of money, same amount of electricity as the increased electricity we're now using.
(38:49):
And we'll be using in data farms that are used for Bitcoin mining and
artificial intelligence data farm.
They consume huge quantities of electricity.
So that amount of excess electricity we're using is just being taken from
what we're using by switching to lights.
And I, therefore that puts it in a slightly different context.
(39:11):
So yeah, we need to find ways to deal with global warming.
Don't get me wrong.
But the reality is that we're not cutting the electricity bill or
electricity consumption, we're just switching to other things.
And that's not worth the human cost of the LED lights we're using today.
And yeah, I was just going to kind of put forward like an interesting
(39:31):
like thought experiment, because like you're saying, there's so many.
I just keep on saying knock on effects that we don't know.
Okay.
Well now human health is declining and we don't know.
So we're living with more chronic diseases, as you said, like we're
living with more diabetes, we're living with more cancers and the technology,
the medical technology is, is getting better and we're getting better at
(39:56):
living with those diseases for cancers, living longer for some of them.
For diabetes, it's, you know, you can live a relatively still normal human
lifespan, even with those diseases, but just the economic cost of, of that.
Like if you're paying for healthcare, there's just so many different things
(40:19):
like, depending on how you want to frame it, like, it's a really fine line
between what is more important, like right now, changing this now.
And I would argue, cause you said this is relatively new technology.
This is 10 years old LED lights.
There is still plenty of time to be like, okay, this was a great invention
for what it was, but because of the cascade of human health effects that
(40:42):
we will be dealing with in the short future right now, like let's go ahead
and like change that.
What can we do to be more efficient?
What have we learned from LED that we can apply to a different model of lighting?
Yeah.
Well, the medical technology is really very, you know, amazing.
The things that can be done and so forth.
(41:03):
And we see new drugs coming along like a Ozempic, you know, and radically
changing the treatment of beastie and diabetes and so forth, but it's so
much better to prevent than to treat, right?
Depends what business you're in.
If you're in the healthcare business, you know, I'm saying better
(41:24):
for the health of people, better for the economy.
But yeah, it's a lot of people make a lot of money from medical treatments.
Don't get me wrong.
Okay.
But yeah, here's the deal.
If I take a room full of, we've done this, a room full of healthy people
and we put them in lights that are regular LED lights, we can render
(41:47):
them overnight, diabetic.
In other words, they will fail the glucose tolerance test, the standard
tests for diabetes in the morning.
If I put them in a room with lights that has no blue in, they're perfectly healthy.
So just by adding or not blue, I can render people diabetic.
So if you say, well, it's increasing diabetic risk and increasing obesity,
(42:09):
basically people's appetite, they eat twice as many snacks, people working
night shifts on the LED lights than those are under, under traditional lights.
So that's again, another thing.
All of those you can say you can treat, but the cost of changing a light bulb
is so much less than the cost of Ozempic.
I mean, their prescriptions are what 600, 800, whatever it is a month,
(42:32):
dollars a month is a ton of money and cost to be able to treat a condition.
But there's one more thing I want to probably say before we get too far,
Brian, because again, you've been very, you know, I think this conversation is
highlighting clarity, blue is not bad or good.
LEDs are not bad or good because actually we're only talking about
(42:55):
a particular type of LED.
LEDs are a very flexible technology.
I can design an LED to produce any composition of the light spectrum I want.
And so we can design LEDs that have no blue in them, but have other
colors like violet and greens and yellows and oranges, or we can make an
LED that has just yellow, orange light or red light or LEDs.
(43:20):
So it's not the LED per se that's a problem.
It's the use of this mass market production of LEDs that's just pushing
to produce the brightest light at the cheapest cost, right?
That is the particular problem.
And that's what dominates it's 98% of the market.
So it's a question of having the right LEDs and having the right blue light
(43:42):
and not banning blue and not banning LEDs, but actually having smarter use
of blue and smart design of LEDs to solve this problem.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
And it just seems like a very easy pivot.
It seems like you can avoid a lot of heartache down the line to just not try
(44:03):
and fight what the science is coming out with and just be like, yeah, okay, let's
go ahead and change this because why wouldn't you?
And what you're doing is reverting to what our ancestors did, right?
I mean, what we're doing is going back to the world where we get natural
daylight in the day and we don't get blue rich light in the evenings and
we sleep in the dark at night.
(44:24):
We're just going back to what our ancestors did and because without it,
you know, what's happening, we talked about all the modern medicine marvels,
but one of the shocking things is the average life expectancy in a country
like ours and the US has plateaued.
(44:44):
In fact, it used to be getting longer and longer as medical advances came
through and public health advances is now totally plateaued and I think we
could actually have another surge in life expectancy if only people would
start adopting a pattern of getting the light they should have at the right
time and getting this circadian rhythm strengthened and so forth.
(45:06):
So I think that's, but right now we really have plateaued for all the
medical marvels because we're adding all this excess disease and ill health
related to the misuse of light.
And there's an important distinction to say too, it's not, okay, our lives were
getting longer, our quality of lives were getting better as well, but now
(45:30):
it's, it's not, we're living the same and the quality of life is also on
decline because we're living with chronic diseases now.
That's right.
In other words, it's not just length of life.
It's length of healthy life is what we should all aspire to.
And the other side of it, I mean, a lot of this evidence on light, we've talked
about obesity and diabetes and cancers and stuff like that, but psychiatric
(45:54):
illness, anxiety and depression major and PTSD major are really a huge issue
and contribute to the increase in suicides and everything else.
You know, in other words, it's, it's a lot of disturbances in, in
otherwise young, healthy people.
And we now know that the, whether you get exposed to the right
(46:17):
light is hugely important.
So people get exposed to outdoor daylight every day, have much less
psychiatric and anxiety illness, depressive illness than those who stay
indoors all the time, people who sleep with the lights on at night have much
more anxiety and depression and so forth.
There's about a 30% change either way, those, those things.
(46:40):
So again, it's part of your, it's your mental health.
It's your immune health, your ability to resist disease and, and so forth.
So many different aspects besides your sleep, all these things are impacted
by the light we see and when we see it and what it, what it's composed of.
We've, we've talked about hospitals a few times in a couple of different
(47:03):
experiments, and so I'm wondering, cause obviously getting rest when you're in
the hospital, you need to rest.
The doctors are providing interventions or medications that will assist the body
in healing itself, but ultimately it's up to the body to actually heal itself.
And so I think there is a very strong argument and I can't imagine anyone
(47:29):
really opposing it of, of changing the lighting in hospital rooms to be that,
that more circadian rhythm lighting that we would want to see that recovery.
So we could get into that good rest cycle sleep cycle, but on the other side
of that, we want surgeons, doctors, healthcare providers to be alert, just
(47:52):
really in tune and awake and not really succumbing to the effects of melatonin
or anything like that.
So would there be an argument to, I don't know if this is possible to like, but
increase like the blue light intensity, like in certain situations, like in a
hospital or something like that, or in like a, a surgery, a room to where you
(48:18):
would want that kind of light, or is the negative impact of having a
dysregulated circadian rhythm always going to be outweighed by any sort of
short-term, more focused time?
Well, that's the interesting debate, right?
And that why some people still talk about the use of blue rich light being good
(48:38):
because it makes people more alert and cognitively performing better.
But in that actually, if you go and look at the light spectrum, there's an answer
that because actually while the sky blue light is what's the key signal as it
were for the circadian clock and circadian health, the impact of alerting
(49:00):
effects of light are actually found with the shortest wavelength.
So actually violet light or the violet part of the spectrum is actually much
more stimulating and keep people awake.
So you can have, so the solution that we developed and we've shown to be highly
effective and it's been installed in over 65 Fortune 500 companies is to use a
(49:24):
light spectrum, especially engineered called spectrally engineered LED that
produces a violet spike of light that in fact enables alertness and people be
alert and not fall asleep on the job and do critical jobs like running an hour or
a fine ray or, you know, whatever they're doing as a critical job.
(49:48):
On the other hand, and have no blue in it, so it doesn't disrupt the circadian
clocks and still have the other colors in it so that you can have a reasonably
normal looking light for your visual experience.
So you can do a lot of engineering around that and so, and we've shown that
the, you know, those lights actually reduce sleepiness on the night shift
without disrupting the circadian clock, without disrupting sleep and circadian
(50:15):
rhythms.
So you can do a lot of engineering once you understand what each part of the
light spectrum does for health to benefit people's performance.
But I think, yeah, I know you want to, you know, unfortunately, when you talk
about, I would say that some places adopt, I mentioned the Fortune 500 companies
(50:36):
being adopting this in their particular 24 seven control centers, which is really
mission critical centers.
They adopt this technology, but hospitals have been rather slow.
They're still focused on energy efficiency of the lights and brightness of
the light and everything else.
Assisted living has actually taken much more energetic.
(50:57):
And so now a lot of assisted living facilities are putting in circadian
lighting because what happens is that they find their residents have fewer
falls, they sleep better, quite significant drops in the number of, you
know, one of the big costs of a senior living facility is when residents fall
or slip and, you know, injure themselves and they may be have to be hospitalized
(51:22):
and you lose a resident, you've got to replace that resident with a new person.
It costs assisted living facility that turnover, but they keep them healthier,
fewer injuries and sleeping better by using circadian lighting.
So we're seeing it spread throughout the assisted living world, but the
hospitals have been somewhat slow in it.
(51:44):
And a lot of other places are pretty slow with adopting this type of lighting.
So it's, it's a world of change.
You know, I think the general agreement is soon, you know, in the next five or
10 years, everything will be circadian friendly lighting.
In other words, lighting that provides blue during the day and no blue at night.
(52:05):
But it's going to take a while just to change mindsets and change people over.
And there's a huge industry that's concentrated in making all this money
from pumping out these blue rich LEDs that just pump out blue rich light day
at night. It's 98% of the, of 150 billion a year industry.
(52:26):
So there's a huge, it's like turning around a battleship.
This industry is really locked into this particular, particular technology with a
big spike of blue light as part of what they deliver.
Yeah.
I mean, I can see like why you wouldn't want to do it in the short term, but in
the long term, if like, let's go ahead and use the NFL, like the NFL knew that
(52:52):
there was concussions that their sport was causing concussions, causing brain
injuries, but they were saying it wasn't.
And then the science eventually came out where it was undeniable.
It's chronic traumatic encephalitis.
And that is obviously happening because of, of the repeated head to head or just
(53:13):
sudden acceleration deceleration.
And our brains aren't, there's no cushion inside our skull.
So our very soft brain is just hitting our very hard skull.
So that protection isn't, it's meant from the outside, not from the
inside to protect that.
And with as this information, this evidence keeps on coming out and is very
(53:34):
repeatable and you can see the side effects of the light.
It seems like the, the lighting industry would be putting themselves more at risk
in the long term to be responsible for the health effects and any sort of like
class action lawsuits that could come out of.
(53:55):
That's exactly what I think the lighting industry, I know there exactly is talk
about this fear, you know, it's this whole balance of, you know, I'm making a
lot of money now selling these conventional LED lights.
It's a very good business.
I'm in as they say, but this, this business about significant lighting is
concerning because if I keep on selling these lights, I'm going to have
(54:18):
class action lawsuits.
Now it's, I mean, if you look at the case of asbestos, there's a classic one, right?
So asbestos used to be a great insulator that everybody used asbestos because it
really worked extremely well, all the pipes and buildings and things that were asbestos.
And then of course, the evidence came out that it was producing cancer, lung
(54:39):
cancers, mesotheliomas and so forth.
And then they started getting some class action lawsuits and every company
producing asbestos went bankrupt in the end because of the billions and
billions of lawsuits and absolute mess.
I mean, eventually it got obviously banned from all sorts of things, but it
took an industry, it took him a long time to change because it was good
(55:04):
business making asbestos insulation.
So it was, it's the same sort of thing, you know, and this is something where,
um, you know, it's, it's, uh, it's really getting that critical tipping point
where people are really going to start understanding this and understanding the
risks.
And then as I say, the technology, the good news is it's not like this is a
(55:27):
problem without a solution.
We now have the solution.
We've got proven solutions.
We've got lights that will remove the blue.
We can engineer those and they're on the market today and you can buy them.
But, and if you want to find out more, you can go to my website, circadianlight.org,
which talks about the various types of lights that are available and so forth.
And my book, the light doctor is, is, you know, it tells you about where to find
(55:51):
these lights and how they work and all the rest of it, but that's, this is a
chain, a time of change right now.
Uh, Brian and, um, but the biggest problem is people lacking awareness.
The scientists fully understand this and understand the risks and the general
public hasn't got a clue for the most part.
(56:11):
And that's, that's why getting the word out and having conversations
like this is so important.
Yeah.
I appreciate you saying this, like, and really championing this cause because
this is going to have real life, uh, implications and having real life, uh,
implications now.
So I'm going to take a hard left turn.
And, uh, the final question I want to ask you, and I kind of, I always
(56:35):
phrase it kind of wrong.
The only way I mean this is we, we get into these patterns where we kind of
just live our life in these established routines and we kind of think nothing's
going to change and we're not really being mindful of what we're doing.
And so this is a, a big question, a weird question, but, uh, what is
(56:55):
the purpose of your life?
Well, I think the purpose of my life is to, and one of the central focuses all
the way through is to understand these big problems to, uh, which takes, by
the way, experiencing something firsthand.
And that's when I started off, um, working as a, a surgeon in training,
(57:17):
the medical profession and being exposed to these light issues of light and
everything else, going and digging into the science and figuring out exactly
what goes on and why, and what the mechanism is, what's going on.
And then actually looking at solutions, uh, to that, developing those solutions,
building, you know, my career is involved all the way through from basic science to
(57:40):
applied science to actually engineering and developing companies to then, you
know, start marketing the light solutions like that.
And then, as I say, I now licensed the rights to major lighting companies.
So they can be broadly available.
And my last stage of my life here is sort of gaining the word out, right?
(58:02):
That this is exist, this has happened to exist.
So the purpose has been a theme of identifying a problem.
And, and, you know, there is no more joy than identifying a problem,
figuring out what the solution is, and then actually coming out with
some practical solution to it.
And then the, obviously to make it work, you've got to have people aware of it
(58:22):
and start asking for it.
And so that's, that's been the whole transition.
Yeah.
I just love to hear when people are just, they're mindful and they're
living their cause and just being just very, again, mindful of what they're
doing and how they're living their life and where they're spending their time
resources, but it's been so great to hear this and not like it's scary to hear
(58:44):
about it, but it's great that great minds are like you are working on this.
And I just, I really appreciate the time that you took to have
this conversation with me.
And so if people want to join this cause and learn more,
where can they go do that?
Well, first of all, look at my book.
It's available on Amazon called the light doctor.
That will give you really the insight into this.
And it's written for a general lay audiences, people who can interest in
(59:07):
learning more about light and health and everything without needing to be a
scientist can look at a website called circadian light.org, which will talk
about, um, you know, where the lighting solutions are available.
And so, yeah, I encourage people to take a look at that, but, uh, the book is
really written just really to get this word out and to use it as a vehicle so
(59:28):
people can actually educate others.
Some people buy it to educate their boss about light or educate the guy who
controls the decision about lighting in their hospital or building.
So, but it's, uh, it's interesting stuff and it's very, very understandable,
but it's so little understood today.
Well, this has been absolutely thrilling.
(59:48):
I really appreciate the time.
Thank you so much, Dr.
Moore-Ede.
I hope you have a great rest of your day.
Thank you, Brian.
Enjoyed it.
(01:00:16):
I've never had a quiet moment ever since I discovered mobile speakers, more
importantly, random people around me in the park, state park, national park, dog
park, movie theater, hospital, restaurant, airport, airport restaurant, really
everywhere, haven't enjoyed a quiet moment while I've been around either.
(01:00:38):
With the portability of mobile speakers, I look back at all of the
wasted time I spent in public with my headphones on when I could have been
making everyone listen to the same music as me, everywhere I go, it's a concert.
And judging by the looks people are giving me, they are just as happy
about it as I am.
Thanks, mobile speakers.
(01:00:58):
Mobile speakers, when polite society says you should keep what you're
listening to to yourself, but you know better.
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