January 30, 2025 • 69 mins
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"The electron transport chain, you know, the cytochromes in the mitochondrial wall, is less than perfect. So every, you know, few thousand times, whatever, it drops a free radical there instead of using it constructively," explains Dr. Damien Downing, who joins the Quantum Biology Collective podcast to illuminate the intricate dance between light, water, and our cellular health. As president of the British Society for Ecological Medicine and a pioneer in understanding the health impacts of our light environment, Dr. Downing shares insights from his decades-long career that challenge conventional wisdom about sunlight exposure and reveal the profound connections between our bodies and the fundamental forces of the universe.
In this captivating discussion, Dr. Downing delves into the concept of structured water and its crucial role in cellular function, explaining how different wavelengths of light interact with our bodies at the molecular level. He unveils the surprising links between sunlight exposure and cancer rates, and discusses how modern lifestyles have disrupted our natural circadian rhythms, leading to a host of health issues. From the glymphatic system's role in brain health to the potential of zeta potential in improving hydration, Dr. Downing offers a fresh perspective on how we can harness the power of light and water to optimize our health.
Tune in to today's episode of the Quantum Biology Collective podcast to discover why Dr. Downing believes we're "in touch with the fundamentals of the universe" and learn practical steps to align yourself with nature's rhythms for better health and wellbeing.
Key Takeaways
1. Prioritize getting natural sunlight exposure, especially in the morning. Try to spend at least 5 minutes outside looking up at the blue sky within the first hour of waking. This helps regulate your circadian rhythm and boosts melatonin production.
2. Be mindful of artificial light exposure, particularly in the evening. Avoid bright overhead LEDs and screen use before bed. Consider using blue light blocking glasses and dimmer, warmer lighting at night to support healthy melatonin production.
3. Stay well-hydrated with pure, filtered water. Add electrolytes to enhance the water's zeta potential, which helps keep red blood cells from clumping. This improves oxygen and nutrient delivery throughout the body.
4. Incorporate both infrared and UV light exposure into your routine. Infrared light helps build structured water in the body, while UV light enhances the depth of charge. Consider using an infrared sauna or spending time outdoors with some skin exposed.
5. Recognize that every step towards improving your light environment is beneficial. You don't need to achieve perfection - small changes like swapping out light bulbs or adding screen filters can make a difference. Focus on progress, not perfection.
Memorable Quotes
"The plot of many a thriller has hinged on the fact that the best place to hide something is where it is obvious. I think that applies to the sunlight thing. We never realized that we were systematically depriving ourselves of it."
"Structured water happens naturally just because it's in contact with a surface. All light encourages it to build up more layers, but infrared is best at doing it. The ultraviolet helps build up the depth of charge next to the cell, which keeps everything moving and flowing."
"We're in touch with the fundamentals of the universe. It's in the nature of things. All of this stuff is how the universe works - if we let it. We seem to do our best to prevent it."
Resources Mentioned
British Society for Ecological Medicine -
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Meredith Oke (00:31):
Biology Collective podcast where we break down
the practical applications of this emerging
science, starting with healthy life habits and
going wherever the quantum superhighway takes us.
This is your host, executive and life coach
Meredith Oak, with a quick reminder that podcasts
are conversations, not consultations. But if
(00:52):
you're looking for one of those, do check out our
free practitioner
directory@quantumbiologycollective.org My guest
today wrote a book on the importance of sunlight
to health called daylight robbery in 1988. Dr.
Downing has been practicing ecological medicine
(01:13):
ever since then, which is a systems approach to
health that considers interactions between
individuals and the environment and their health
consequences. So ecological medicine is a term
that is widely used in the United Kingdom, not so
much in North America and other parts of the
world. But I think it's a beautiful way to to
(01:34):
explain natural health and a nice alternative to
functional medicine, which has sort of become
synonymous with just supplements. Dr. Downing is
president of the British Society for Ecological
Medicine and was for 20 years editor of the
Journal of Nutritional and Environmental
(01:55):
Medicine. He serves on the editorial board of the
Ortho molecular news service. Dr. Downing and I
had a lovely conversation where I was able to
learn from his decades of wisdom working in
alternative health and in natural health and as
somebody who understood deeply and early the
(02:16):
implications of our changing light environment
and our changing EMF environment. So I hope you
enjoy my chat with Dr. Downing. I certainly did.
He is a fountain of knowledge that goes back many
years and he is working on a new book and
continues to be an active practitioner in London.
So if you live in that area, do look him up. He's
(02:40):
sees patience and continues to practice his
wisdom to this very day. Enjoy. And before we get
into it, please do consider your infrared light
exposure this winter and really anytime in the
summer months and in warm places, it's obviously
easier to get it full body infrared light
(03:01):
exposure when you're outside in the sunshine.
However, if you're not able to be outside in the
sunshine and also to help with detox, an infrared
sauna is really my top recommendation for feeling
good in the winter. It's something that I added
to my routine a couple of years ago when I moved
(03:21):
back to a cold place after living in places that
weren't so cold. And I really, really noticed a
huge difference in how I felt getting through the
winter months, I should say, I'm sorry, enjoying
and thriving through the winter months. I
appreciate winter so much more now that I know
how to properly take care of myself when it's
(03:42):
cold and when we're in that time of year. And one
of those things is making sure we get lots of
infrared light, which you can get from light
panels. And infrared saunas are especially good
because you have the heat as well, which is a
helpful detox. So I recommend if you need any of
those things to visit boncharge.com bcharge.com
(04:04):
they have a very nice little infrared sauna
blanket that you can just cozy up under while you
are, you know, watching a movie with your blue
blockers on. Of course. All right, enjoy my
conversation with Dr. Downing. He is a delightful
British gentleman. Have fun. Bye. Dr. Damian
Downing, welcome to the QVC podcast. Such a
(04:26):
pleasure to have you.
Dr. Damien Downing (04:27):
Thank you. It's great to be here.
Meredith Oke (04:30):
So you work in what is called ecological
medicine. Could you tell us a little bit about
your long career in that field and how you define
it? Because it's not a word that's used as
commonly in North America.
Dr. Damien Downing (04:46):
No. Right. Well, it all started in, really in
about 1979. That's before I came into the field.
One of the founders was Professor Ronnie Finn,
who was the guy that did the definitive paper in
the Lancet Journal showing that food allergy was
(05:10):
a real thing and that you could cut it out and so
forth. And he and a few others, including Alan
Grant, who did the paper that clearly showed that
migraine could be caused by food intolerances.
They set up a society. I've got the notes from
(05:31):
the. The agenda from the. The original meeting
there. And there's a meeting to consider setting
up a society for clinical ecology is what they
called it back then. And it's an 11 o'clock
Sherry. It starts, and then at 12 o'clock they
(05:54):
start talking, something like that. So those days
are gone, including pretty much everybody who's
there is now gone. But then in about 1983, we set
up what was then called the British Society for
Nutritional Medicine. And then it kind of added
bits in and allergy came in and all sorts of
(06:16):
other stuff came in. And eventually all those
societies end up merging. And we called it
ecological medicine, echoing what was said way
back then. It. So ecological medicine is kind of
a systems approach, is looking at the
interactions between you and the environment. And
(06:37):
obviously the, the whole sunlight factor, or you
know, what John Ott called mal illumination is,
is a key part of that. And my God, we didn't
realize back then, didn't realize nearly as much
as we do now because of all the evidence coming
(06:58):
from photobiomodulation and so on and so forth,
and our understanding of mitochondria it's mind
blowing. It's really got so exciting these days.
Meredith Oke (07:12):
It really has. And it's interesting because, you
know, along with the food, our light environment
has got, you know, our, our food sources and food
production have gone off the rails. And at the
same time the light that we're surrounded by in
our environment has become worse and worse. While
(07:33):
in parallel, the research showing how important
real food and natural light are is also mounting
weight. Yeah, we seem to be in a state of
complete imbalance there. What are your, what are
your thoughts on how, how that happened? Because
you wrote a book on the importance of sunlight to
(07:53):
Health in 1988.
Dr. Damien Downing (07:56):
Yeah.
Meredith Oke (07:56):
And so to, you know, as you, as you were saying
about the foundation of the ecological field of
medicine, this was, scientists and doctors were
aware of the importance of our environment and
yet somehow the innovation of the technology and
the processing of our food just went on
(08:18):
completely unchecked. Could you sort of speak to
that a little bit?
Dr. Damien Downing (08:22):
Yeah, it's always been, in all of this field,
it's always been more of a patient driven
progress than driven by doctors or even
scientists know, and that the British Society of
Dermatologists reviewed it and said it's a load
(08:42):
of rubbish, basically. And the British Naturist
Society, you know, people who like to be naked in
the fresh air, they reviewed and said, oh, it was
the most important medical book of the decade.
Meredith Oke (08:56):
So the dermatologist said your sunlight book was
rubbish and the, the naturalists said it was
brilliant. Yeah. Okay, that tracks right.
Dr. Damien Downing (09:03):
Yeah. And in America, of course, I mean, I was,
I'm not the expert on all this, but I understand
the, the dermatologists launched a two million
dollar campaign in about 1982, whatever, to,
(09:23):
well, to demonize sunlight and get everybody, you
know, looking themselves for, for cancers. And
that kind of made dermatology quite lucrative,
which it wasn't before. So there are inevitably
vested interests in this sort of thing, aren't
(09:44):
they? You know, you're not going to get away from
that. But it's interesting writing now because
I'm writing. Well, I don't know if it's a sequel
or whatever, but a successor to the Daylight
Robbery. It's interesting to look at how it, you
(10:05):
know, I completely lost my train of thought
there. Maybe you can cut this bit out and I.
Sure, yeah, go back and think. So.
Meredith Oke (10:20):
We were talking, yeah, we were talking about the,
the progress of the research on light and food
compared to the, you know, what's happening in
society and technology.
Dr. Damien Downing (10:34):
Yeah, well, so it's interesting to look at what
happens with these trends, because in writing the
sequel to Daylight Robbery is. I've been struck
by how long it takes for these things to actually
(10:56):
be adopted. Somebody does the original science,
you know, I mean, Albert Einstein did the AMC
squared in 1920. Something got the Nobel Prize
and so forth, but it was decades before it was
really applied. Shent Giorgi. I don't know how to
pronounce it. I'm not sure anybody does, but, you
(11:17):
know, the guy. I mean, yeah, guy isolated vitamin
C and so forth and also wrote a lovely little
book called bioenergetics in 1957. And he said,
he talked about this queer substance, water. And
he said that not just water, but almost any
(11:38):
liquid where it's in contact with a solid surface
tends to structure from the. The surface
outwards. So that was what, more than 60 years
ago this was known about. And it's only just now
with Gerald Pollock's work and so forth. They
were saying, oh, my God, structured water. And it
(12:01):
is, it's. I mean, it's. It's crucial. It's
brilliant. But I'm not surprised at how long
these things take. And I don't think it's just,
you know, people making a profit out of it not
being recognized. And so I think it's just, well,
(12:21):
doctors tend to think that what, you know, they
learned in medical school is it and so forth, and
if they didn't learn about it, then it can't be
real. And of course, they didn't learn about
nutrition in medical school, and they certainly
didn't learn about sunlight and its benefits.
Meredith Oke (12:41):
Yeah, absolutely. So true. I just saw a post
yesterday from a woman who was diagnosed with
ulcerative colitis by her md this was in the
United States. And she said to him, okay, how
should I change my diet now that I have this
(13:01):
diagnosis? And he said to her, it doesn't matter
what you eat. This was like a year ago. So she
left and got a new doctor. But it just was a
reminder to me that physicians are still saying
that about food, never mind getting to the light
piece of it.
Dr. Damien Downing (13:21):
Yeah, yeah, we used to call it. When we started
up the journal in 1990, we used to call them
nutritional flat earthers who still believe the
earth is flat. Nutrition isn't important. How can
it not be important?
Meredith Oke (13:38):
So you've had a major focus on gut health and
food allergies. Could you explain to us a little
bit, sort of, after all of your. Your decades
working with patients and doing research and
giving presentations and running the ecological
Journal. Where, where are you at with explaining
(14:02):
how food and light and digestion all and. Or
health and health overall? I would say all work
together.
Dr. Damien Downing (14:09):
Oh wow. You want a short answer to that one?
Meredith Oke (14:14):
I've got an hour, so just talk as long as you
want.
Dr. Damien Downing (14:21):
So it's interesting, when I came into this game
back in 1980, 1881, there were people saying
that, you know, food allergy had kind of just
been invented. Invented by. There was a guy
(14:41):
called Richard Mc who wrote a book called not all
in the Mind. I don't know if it made it big in
America. I don't know, it certainly did over
here. He basically showed not only from
practical, practicing doctors viewpoint, he
showed the food allergies were real, chemical
(15:04):
sensitivities were real. He remember he described
some lady who used to use a lot of hairspray and
it gave her terrible neurological symptoms and
fixed it just by cutting it out. The interesting
thing is that he wrote that In, I think 66, 10
years earlier, he wrote a book called Eat Fat and
(15:28):
Grow Slim saying that, you know, you needed a low
carbohydrate, high fat diet. And now that's
become an essential part of what we. And you
know, anybody, well, anybody in integrated
medicine does that took a few decades as well.
(15:50):
But back then people used to say, oh, I wonder if
it's the food upset me. And then all of a sudden
there were people saying, oh, I've got total
allergy syndrome. And we did an awful lot of
desensitizing back then. And then people started
getting multiple chemical sensitivity, you know,
(16:15):
started figuring. And this is all, well,
practically all people figuring it out for
themselves. You know, there's not going to their
doctor who's saying, oh, you've got multiple
chemicals and chemical sensitivity. Usually the
doctor's saying, oh, there's no such thing and
diet doesn't matter. And then of course, more
(16:36):
recently electrosensitivity has come into the
picture. You know, it's true that the, what they
call it, the gateway drug to all this is just
basic allergies, I inhaled allergies, hay fever
and so forth, or food intolerances. And you carry
(17:00):
that being severe for long enough, you then move
on to the next level and get multiple chemical
sensitivity. And after a few years you move on to
the next level. But it's also, you know, you have
to be integrated out now because it always has
(17:20):
been true that toxicity is part of the problem.
And it was John Ott that described that in the
light context. You know, his mal illumination was
a combination of not enough sunlight and too much
of this thing. I was thinking about how I could
(17:44):
do a zoom without a screen, but since you need
the video, I. I guess I'll have to stay here for
this.
Meredith Oke (17:53):
Sorry. We'll keep it. We'll keep it brief and
then go for walks outside after.
Dr. Damien Downing (18:00):
All right. Yeah. So then now, of course,
everybody's saying, oh, I think I've got MCAs.
Mast cell activation syndrome. I'm not even sure
that that's a real disease. I think it's just a
different way of looking at. Which opens a lot of
(18:20):
possibilities. There's a list of drugs and of
other treatments that may make a difference to
histamine release or whatever it is that's
driving your. Your MCAs. But, I mean, it's
always. It is all. It's all part of the same
thing. And with the toxicity, again, we should
(18:47):
have realized a long. Well, we. To some extent,
we did realize long time ago. When I started in
this, it was. There had been one or two papers.
It was kind of regarded as a given that aluminum
probably had something to do with Alzheimer's.
But that was 40 years ago, and we're still
(19:09):
arguing about it now. And, you know, papers
coming out saying, no, no, it doesn't work. Yes,
it does. You know.
Meredith Oke (19:20):
Yeah, it's. It's interesting. I mean, what I'm
really hearing, speaking with you is how, you
know, what you were just saying earlier, like,
how long it takes for these new ideas to get
traction. And it doesn't seem to be related to
(19:40):
how true they are. There seems to be other
factors at play. So we had, you know, John Ott,
decades ago, talking about doing all the light
research, and Georgia, you mentioned, and so many
other researchers. I know. And anyway, it's just
(20:06):
interesting to me, right, because we all. We're
all like, oh, this is this. All this new stuff.
And it's like. It's not new. It's just kind of
hiding or being ignored or being pushed to the
periphery, and it's taking all of us. You know,
we have to go looking for it. But it. The. The
research is there and the evidence is there, and
it's been there for a long time, and you've
(20:29):
created it. You know, you and your colleagues
have created a entire field around it.
Dr. Damien Downing (20:34):
Yeah. Yeah.
Meredith Oke (20:35):
So walk me through that. Oh, read. I'm sorry,
what do you read me?
Dr. Damien Downing (20:40):
Yeah, yeah. First sentence of Daylight Robbery,
1988, goes. The plot of many a thriller has
hinged on the fact that the best place to hide
something is where it is obvious. I think that
applies. Oh, absolutely, in space, to the
sunlight thing. You know, you say, how, how would
(21:02):
we m. How did we miss it? Because it was always
there. We never thought, we never realized that
we were systematically depriving ourselves of it.
Even though, I mean, what's, what's the real
punishment in a, in a prison or a dungeon? Let's
(21:22):
be true. It's depriving you of sunlight. That's
why they talk about a prison term, you know,
sheet white people. You know, you see somebody
like that, I think they've probably been inside.
Yeah, yeah, sorry, go on.
Meredith Oke (21:40):
No, it's just, it's so true. And, you know, I
think back to the years of my life where I was
completely bought into the idea that, that the
sun was bad for me. And I was, I was a good girl
and I was going to follow the rules and I put on
my SPF 9000 every time I went out in the sun.
Dr. Damien Downing (21:59):
Yeah, I know.
Meredith Oke (22:02):
And I feel, I feel a little betrayed, I have to
say.
Dr. Damien Downing (22:07):
What, what turned it for you?
Meredith Oke (22:10):
The first moment was actually from a woman who
did cosmetic. Like she, she was doing stuff for
my skin. I was in my 20s and she had been trained
in Hungary. She was probably in her 60s, so 60
something Hungarian woman. And she was looking at
(22:31):
my skin and she said, you don't go out in the sun
enough. And I was like, what? And she said, the
sun is life. And she said it with such force and
such conviction that it actually broke through my
false paradigm and stayed with me. And I didn't.
(22:52):
It was a long time before I understood it the way
I do now. But it was enough that I stopped being
so crazy about, about putting on SPF and started
to think like, oh, that actually makes sense. The
sun is life. Like, you know, you can tell
something is true by how it feels when it, you
(23:14):
know, how it feels in your body. And I was like,
God, how are you? Do you find that when you have
been working with people or when people come to
you and you broach the subject, are they open to
it? The idea of sunlight, I mean, you.
Dr. Damien Downing (23:33):
Know, way back, nobody really thought about it,
you know, but sometimes you get dramatic changes
in people. But then you think, we didn't, we
didn't have nearly as many screens back then. You
know, you were pretty advanced if you had a
computer.
Meredith Oke (23:54):
Yeah.
Dr. Damien Downing (23:55):
And smartphones hadn't been invented, you know,
so the, the situation was not as bad really. It's
got a lot worse over the decades. Firstly,
because we're even more out of natural light. And
in toxic light, if you like, we're mal
(24:15):
illuminated more and more. Secondly, because
other forms of toxicity are just getting worse
and worse all the time. You know, there's a, a
principle that I keep thinking about. I'm not
sure to how, to what extent it works. The
(24:35):
principle is that natural light, good light, will
protect you from the effects of bad light. Now,
there are a few instances where it clearly is
true, but the good light, you have to have the
good light exposure first, and that may be near
infrared or whatever, but the extent to which you
(24:59):
can then fix the damage of bad light and so forth
by good light, I'm not sure. Yeah, well, we're
not sure, but I mean, it is obviously it's the
fabric of the universe that we're dealing with
here. This whole. Especially once you bring
(25:20):
structured water in. You know, there's the
smallest things, electrons, photons, protons and
so forth, you know, and it's. Suddenly you start
to realize, my God, it's on our side. He always
was on our side. You know, there's a paper I've
just been looking at that somebody linked me to
(25:47):
by some Korean guys about magnetic sense, you
know, that birds navigate by magnetic sense and
so forth. And some of it happens in the eyes and
other bits of it happen with magnetic granules or
whatever, somewhere in the brain. And it turns
(26:07):
out that humans can do this to a certain extent,
but it's only men, really. And it's own by this
method anyway. And it's only slightly over 50% of
(26:30):
them. But that could be just because all the
rubbish EMFs that we're exposed to. So it's only
men, it's only when they're hungry, and it's only
when they're exposed to blue light. So if you're
a hunter gatherer and you wake up hungry, well,
(26:51):
obviously this is a real advantage, isn't it?
Meredith Oke (26:54):
You know, and this is the, the ability to
navigate by magic, by the.
Dr. Damien Downing (26:59):
Magnetic field, to know where true north is or,
you know, which is a, a reasonable, fascinating
pie Mason, isn't it?
Meredith Oke (27:09):
It really is.
Dr. Damien Downing (27:11):
Yeah. But so it's the, the principle. This is the
environment we're involved in, where there is
blue light in the mornings and there is a
magnetic field that we can navigate by.
Meredith Oke (27:25):
When you talk about the fabric of the universe,
how do you, how do you think about that and where
we fit into it and where our mitochondria and our
cells and our bodies fit.
Dr. Damien Downing (27:39):
Into it, Mitochondria, wherever they came from,
you know, that melatonin is Basically as old as
mitochondria.
Meredith Oke (27:51):
We did not.
Dr. Damien Downing (27:53):
Yeah. And it's the. Probably the best antioxidant
going. I'm not sure that, you know, it makes much
sense to have a league table of antioxidants, but
it's a powerful antioxidant and it's probably,
they say, about five times as potent and
(28:14):
antioxidant as vitamin C. Really? Yeah. I don't
know how they figured that out. What is said. And
you know that it's produced in the night in order
to help you sleep. No, that's wrong. Is that it
(28:40):
is produced in the night by the pineal gland and
the pine. We used to think it going around the
bloodstream. You know, you could measure the PI,
the melatonin there. And it was on its way to the
brain. No, the pineal pumps it into the
ventricles of the brain, which circulate it
(29:01):
through the. You know about the glymphatic system.
Meredith Oke (29:04):
Tell us.
Dr. Damien Downing (29:05):
Okay. The brain doesn't have an ordinary
lymphatic drainage like the rest of the body. The
rest of the body has lymphatic ducts that run
away from the tissues and take the things to the
(29:26):
regional lymph glands, you know, the ones in your
neck here, the ones in your armpit and so forth.
And what they're taking there is firstly, waste
and secondly, inflammation. And that's the same
stuff, you know, because the immune system needs
to know what it's going to have to handle. And
that's how it gets that information. And that's
how it activates the lymphocytes and so forth to
(29:49):
do it. But we always thought that there wasn't a
system like that in the brain, although it was
just a tiny bit of it and so forth. Turns out the
brain has a better system. It's got what you
would call a paravascular system. So that there
(30:12):
are spaces around the vessels that are to some
extent driven by the pulsing in the vessels. And
they carry a load of other stuff that isn't in
the blood, for instance, in the brain. The other
thing about the brain is that that's got an
(30:35):
inward and an outward direction of travel for
this glymphatic or paravascular system. Right.
The inward takes the stuff from the ventricle
into the tissue of the brain, and the outer one
(30:55):
takes it from the tissue of the brain and the
interstitium, if you like, of the brain out and
connects to the lymphatics around the back here,
and more particularly through the nose and the
structures around Here. And so another
interesting fact about that is that when you suck
(31:19):
and chew and, you know, adjust the pressure in
your mouth, there's a certain amount of pumping
action going on on this stuff coming from brain.
Why do comforters work on children? Probably for
that reason. It calms the brain physically and
literally.
Meredith Oke (31:38):
Like a soother. You mean like a pacifier when the
baby.
Dr. Damien Downing (31:41):
Exactly.
Meredith Oke (31:41):
That sucking motion. Oh, okay. Makes sense.
Dr. Damien Downing (31:45):
And the melatonins produced by the pineal goes
straight into the ventricles, and from that it
goes by the paravascular route into the brain,
timed to happen when the glymphatic system is
activated, which is when you are asleep and
(32:07):
particularly in deep sleep. So it goes in there
and all the. Helps to mop up all the antioxidant,
all the oxidative stress and toxins, and also it
activates some of the other molecules like
superoxide dismutase and so on. And then all the
(32:31):
gump is taken out and delivered to, actually to
the. The lymph nodes around here in due course,
including the ones in here, the tonsils. So all
this stuff is. Is so in the brain. But that's one
half of the story, because. And again, it's. It
(32:53):
happened a long time ago. 1972, there was a paper
where they took the pineal gland out of little
furry animals, rats or whatever, and measured
their circulating melatonin, and it obviously
went down, but only by about 80%. So there must
(33:19):
have been melatonin coming from elsewhere. And
where it's coming from is every cell in the body
and particularly the mitochondria of every cell,
because that's where it's needed. Because when
you produce energy, the electron. I think, not
quite sure who said it, but I will find out
(33:41):
eventually. The electron transport chain, you
know, the cytochromes in the mitochondrial wall,
is less than perfect. So every, you know, few
thousand times, whatever, it drops a free radical
there instead of using it constructively. And so
(34:01):
you. When you exercise, when you produce ATP,
you. You build up oxidative stress, and you also
produce the melatonin to. To deal with it, and
you produce it locally and not much of it gets
out. So it's hard to know quite what circulating
(34:25):
levels of melatonin need mean. Sorry, it's hard
to know what they mean because it's the overflow.
It's not like it's being delivered somewhere.
It's the stuff that spilled over from the
mitochondria and, you know, during the night from
the brain.
Meredith Oke (34:46):
So the melatonin has spilled over from where it's
produced and then is used by the rest of the body
for all kinds of important things, presumably.
Dr. Damien Downing (34:57):
Yes, but I mean, if you get a paper, there is a
paper, for instance, that says you can get a
boost to your circulating melatonin level from
eating two bananas. Well, I'm sure it's true, but
(35:17):
what does it mean in real life? Because if it's
there circulating, it's not necessarily getting
into the mitochondria, which is where it's really
needed.
Meredith Oke (35:32):
So what is the best way to ensure sufficient
melatonin production?
Dr. Damien Downing (35:40):
Good circadian rhythm with, you know, decent
sleep at night for a reasonable period. And
probably I. Well, either use, you know, Andrew
Huberman's thing about getting outside in the
first hour of waking, get outside for five
(36:01):
minutes and look up at the blue sky and so forth.
Well, I tell you, it doesn't work here, but it is
miserable and cold out there and it's dark. But,
yeah, that's a good principle. And better still,
do some exercise, because exercise causes you a
high spike in circulating melatonin, so it must
(36:27):
be causing even bigger a spike in the melatonin
where it's needed in the mitochondria, presumably
in your muscles. So I think those are really kind
of the two elements of the circadian rhythm that
you first need most important.
Meredith Oke (36:44):
Morning sunlight and morning movement.
Dr. Damien Downing (36:47):
Yeah.
Meredith Oke (36:48):
And night sleep and sleeping well at night.
Right. With ideally not a lot of artificial light
exposure before bed.
Dr. Damien Downing (36:57):
Yeah.
Meredith Oke (36:58):
Or while you're sleeping.
Dr. Damien Downing (36:59):
Well, yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, yes. I
mean, it's. How much is enough to disrupt. Not
much, really. There's. There is a study,
actually, if you gave me a couple minutes, I
could probably find. But we talked about it back
then, A daylight robbery showed that using a. A
(37:22):
single blue light bulb, which is not very bright
at all, an incandescent bulb by the bed, and
having it on and off in a cycle would. It would
entrain women's menstrual cycles. So that's an
(37:43):
effect coming from really not much extra light of
that color.
Meredith Oke (37:51):
Coming in, but it's still enough to completely
change our hormone cycle. Yeah, yeah. So we
really need to be mindful of this because most
people. I mean, where I live, most people have,
you know, gets dark outside, they flip on the
overhead LEDs, the widest, brightest light. They
(38:13):
probably have that light bulb next to their bed
to read before they go to sleep. If they're not
reading on their phone or their iPad and it's
just considered normal. Nobody even thinks about
it.
Dr. Damien Downing (38:23):
Yeah, no, no, that's right, it's, it's, you know,
well, it's in plain sight, so we're missing it.
Meredith Oke (38:33):
Right. So what prompted you to write Daylight
Robbery? What was going on that led you to write
an entire book on the health benefits of
sunlight? What were you seeing? What was
happening in the world? How did, how did that
happen?
Dr. Damien Downing (38:50):
Well, really it was meeting John Ott. I mean,
obviously I was already doing nutrition and
things like that. I came into this stuff really
originally by training in acupuncture. But then
when I started up practicing it, set up a clinic,
(39:12):
a couple of people came to me and said, oh, I
think I might have a food allergy if you read
this book by Richard McAnus. And so I started
doing, you know, more and more of that. And then
I read something about John Art and I got
interested now as an extension of the whole
(39:34):
nutrition thing and went over to see John Ott. He
was a lovely guy living in Florida and he showed
me his special glass in his windows and the, the
way he'd adapted his TV so it lay on the floor in
a, in a box pointing upwards. Then he had a, an a
(39:58):
mirror at this angle above it so that it came out
there. But hopefully harmful rays were going
straight up the ceiling.
Meredith Oke (40:09):
Oh my goodness. I've never heard that. Yeah, so
he, he invented his own defense kind of
mitigation technology.
Dr. Damien Downing (40:19):
Yeah.
Meredith Oke (40:19):
So these things are possible. We don't have to
be. I mean if he could just do that in his living
room, I'm sure all these brilliant engineers
could figure this out if they wanted to.
Dr. Damien Downing (40:28):
Yeah, yeah, that's right. And I've got a
colleague who's quite influential in the whole
electro, well not just electro sensitivity, but
harm from electromagnetic fields and so forth.
And you know, I mean, you understand that we
(40:49):
have, we now have billion in certain frequencies.
There are a billion times as much electromagnetic
fields waves about now as they were 50 years ago.
And of course it's harmful. One of the people
(41:09):
who's quite influential in that has the problem
herself and has been shown in a double blinded,
blinded experiment to react to mobile phone
things and so forth. But she manages to use a
computer and so forth, just has them solid wired
(41:30):
and necessary insulate stuff, you know, and you
can get a bit of tin foil and put it around the,
the connectors or whatever. It's better than
putting it around your food.
Meredith Oke (41:43):
Yes, that's true. So we can, we buy the tin foil
but we use it to wrap our, our wires, not our
food. Okay. This is, yeah, we're, we're
definitely not, not looking like the basic
normies out there anymore. Okay, so you were
talking about meeting John Ott.
Dr. Damien Downing (42:06):
Yeah.
Meredith Oke (42:06):
And then that led to writing Daylight Robbery.
Dr. Damien Downing (42:09):
Yeah, well, I led to doing a, a bit more research
and so forth. And I mean, it wasn't just going on
the Internet those days. I don't know if, you
know, you had to, had to write off to the British
Library, fill these little forms in for the
paper, and a couple of weeks later they sent it
to you. I've still got a few of those hanging
(42:30):
around. But, you know, things emerged like the,
the cancer connection with lack of sunlight. The
basic principle is that. Well, not the principle,
the rule of thumb, if you like, is that the
further north or south from the equator you go,
(42:53):
the more cancer there is, the greater your
chances of developing cancer. And the figure kind
of comes out with is two and a half times, if you
live in, I don't know, Oslo or somewhere way up
north or possibly Edmonton even, you've got
(43:16):
around two and a half times the probability of
developing cancer as you have in the, in let's
say in Florida. And that, that paper goes back to
like the 20s, you know, so some of this is a
hundred years old now. And of course that's got
(43:41):
worse because of a whole bunch of things like the
actual ionizing radiation. What we haven't really
appreciated is that firstly, an event like
Chernobyl or Fukushima, which is still going on.
(44:05):
All right, firstly, they're not the, you know,
the hundred ones in 100 years events. The
Chernobyl was a succession of the, the light
latest in the succession of events and there have
been several since nuclear. If you've got all
this nuclear stuff, you know it's going to go
(44:26):
wrong sometimes inevitably, and it does. The
second principle is that that radiation doesn't
just stay there where it is, it goes all around
the world. So we're all exposed to a greater
background level of radiation than we were. And
(44:49):
with Chernobyl, there's the amazing story of the,
the Pripyat marshes, which are all around the
exclusion zone in, around the reactor in
Chernobyl. And every couple of times a year,
(45:11):
different berries, the locals go into the marshes
and they into the woods there and gather up
berries to different times at berries at
different times a year. And then they bring them
out to the roads and there are merchants there
with stores on the roads and they weigh the, the
(45:36):
berries and so forth and they run a Geiger
counter over them. If the Geiger counter sounds
off high, they still buy the stuff, they just pay
the guys less. And then it goes into the, into
(45:58):
the international system. Could be in your jam at
breakfast right now. Really.
Meredith Oke (46:05):
The radiated berries.
Dr. Damien Downing (46:07):
Yeah.
Meredith Oke (46:10):
Oh, all right, so we have the background of the
really bad ionizing radiation and then we also
have the non ionizing radiation that we surround
ourselves by with our mobile phones, our wi fi,
cell towers, 5G. All of these things.
Dr. Damien Downing (46:32):
Yeah, all of this that just keeps getting worse
all the time.
Meredith Oke (46:37):
Have you noticed, I mean, you talked about the
electromagnetic, the electrosensitivity. Have you
noticed in your patients symptoms becoming more
complex and symptoms arising in, in younger
people? I know here in the United States there's
an epidemic of combination of autoimmune and mood
(47:01):
disorders and all kinds of things happening in,
in very young people, you know, adolescents,
teenagers, and often even children. Young
children.
Dr. Damien Downing (47:12):
Yeah, that. I mean, that has been going on for a
long time. Still is going on. And you know, it's
not as well. There are. Okay, there's one
interesting surprise that we just noticed, but
generally, you know, we. It's been kind of
predicted for a long time the things are going to
go on getting worse like that. And my colleague
(47:35):
of mine, Stephen Davis, described what he called
the nutrient toxin interface. Quite simply, the
more toxins you're exposed to and you know, let's
include toxic stress in this and AMS and
everything else. The more toxins you're exposed
to, the more nutrients you need to deal with
them. Simple as that. So why would we not take
(47:59):
supplements these days? The one interesting one
that I just realized I'd experience is I was
talking about kids with this strep reaction
called pandas, which is an autoimmune disease
triggered by strep infection. And I realized that
(48:28):
both of them had had shingles in childhood. So
shingles is a reaction to the. Well, it's a
reactivation of the chickenpox virus. Right, but
that's only supposed to happen decades later.
Meredith Oke (48:48):
Yeah, I always thought shingles, you got
chickenpox, I mean, this was back before they
vaccinated the crap out of everyone. But you got
chickenpox as a child and shingles as an adult.
If you were unlucky enough not to have the
chickenpox as a child or if it came back and the
shingles were way worse.
Dr. Damien Downing (49:07):
Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Meredith Oke (49:09):
So you're saying there now children were having
shingles.
Dr. Damien Downing (49:13):
Yeah, that's right.
Meredith Oke (49:14):
Okay, so that's a new development, new.
Dr. Damien Downing (49:17):
To everybody, I think.
Meredith Oke (49:18):
Yeah, yeah. And so what's. This is just another
symptom of, well, immune systems Being destroyed.
Dr. Damien Downing (49:28):
Yeah, I guess so. By all sorts of factors
together, including the mal illumination and the.
The crap in the food and so forth. It isn't just
to do with, you know, the COVID vaccine or
anything like that. It. Because it. These two
predated both that.
Meredith Oke (49:51):
Yeah. Well, it's interesting where you're saying,
you know, we need to have a nutrient load. You
know, the nutrient load needs to be greater than
the toxic load or the. The restorative inputs
need to be greater than the assault inputs. And
decade by decade, we've been adding assault over
assault over assault.
Dr. Damien Downing (50:12):
Yeah.
Meredith Oke (50:13):
And with the light piece, I think not even
understanding. I think the food piece, we kind of
knew. We just didn't do anything about it. But
with the light piece, it's like, what do you.
People are sort of still surprised? What are you
talking about? What do you mean?
Dr. Damien Downing (50:27):
Yeah, yeah.
Meredith Oke (50:28):
And I'm curious. You mentioned earlier when you
were talking about the. The glymphatic system in
the brain, you mentioned the tonsils. And I want
to ask you something. I have met two children, I
live in the northeast of the United States, and I
have. I have met two children in the last year
whose pediatricians recommended they have their
(50:49):
tonsils removed, and they did. And I'm just
wondering what your thoughts are on that. It was
my understanding that that's not necessarily
something that is recommended these days. But I
was surprised. I mean, to know personally know
two people.
Dr. Damien Downing (51:10):
Yeah, yeah.
Meredith Oke (51:11):
Should we as parents be cautious about that
procedure?
Dr. Damien Downing (51:14):
I think you should, yes. I mean, it is true that
you do get kids who have recurrent tonsillitis,
and so they're sick, they're off school, they're,
you know, their learning suffers and that kind of
thing. They're unwell a lot of the time. But I
(51:35):
mean, what's our response to that? We give them
loads of antibiotics, which trashes the
microbiome for pretty much the rest of their
life, and then we vaccinate them. And there's
good evidence that having things like measles
infection, I mean, gives you some defense against
(51:58):
allergies and that kind of thing. So that's part
of the story of the explosion of the. The
epidemic of allergies, whatever that we're
seeing. And I mean, allergies, autoimmunity is
just like the armed wing of allergy, really. And
(52:22):
in fact, now that we understand more about
autoimmunity, we realize that these just mistakes
in a language that our immune system is speaking
all the time. 70% of the immune system is
(52:44):
involved in not reacting to things, only 30% is
involved in reacting. And so you need a balance
of all of these things. You need the activators
and the regulators. And it's the same for
(53:04):
allergies, autoimmunity and for cancer. You know,
they're all to do with imbalance, disruption of
the immune system. And having a good circadian
rhythm is obviously a key factor in all of that.
So, I mean, these days, you ask me what's the
(53:26):
first thing I should do about all that. Get a
good circadian rhythm.
Meredith Oke (53:33):
Yeah, it's comforting to hear you say that
because I think the bad news is so many people
have terrible light inputs and don't think about
it. But the good news is it's not that
complicated to fix.
Dr. Damien Downing (53:49):
No, no.
Meredith Oke (53:51):
It's just changing a few light bulbs, you know,
putting some filters on your screen, you know
that there are ways to going outside. It's not
hard stuff.
Dr. Damien Downing (54:02):
No, and I don't really. It's another. This is
things like the, you know, cutting, doing,
auditing your environment for electromagnetic
fields and so forth. There isn't an absolute
threshold that you've got to get over for this to
do you any good. I mean, every move in the right
(54:23):
direction is going to be beneficial to you.
Meredith Oke (54:27):
Right.
Dr. Damien Downing (54:28):
You know. Yeah, I had. When I started thinking
about the, the screen stuff, I started getting
floaters in the eye. And I went to the big eye
hospital here in Moorfield and they say, yeah,
(54:50):
well, it's floaters. They might go away, might
not, may come back again. So I said, what can I
do about it? Nothing really. They've got no
treatments for it. But I fixed it, I fixed it. I
recommend two things. One is hydration and
(55:11):
particularly, you know, zeta based hydration.
Meredith Oke (55:15):
What do you mean by that?
Dr. Damien Downing (55:16):
Oh, okay. The zeta potential is the charge on
cells and other surfaces. So, you know, opposite
poles attract, positive and negative attract to
each other, like poles repel. So the zeta
(55:36):
potential is the negative potential on the
surface of red blood cells. And most obviously
that keeps them apart, keeps them separated. And
if you do dark field microscopy on somebody else,
(55:57):
I don't. You know, the first thing they always
say is, oh, look, your red cells are clumping.
That's why they're clumping is because they
haven't got enough negative charge to keep them
apart. And so because they're actually larger
than some of the capillaries, they have to go
down, they have to be a part. If they're clumped,
(56:19):
it's deadly. You're not going to get nearly
enough blood Oxygen, all the other nutrients to
your tissues. So zeta potential is one of. Now, I
think one of the most fundamental things you can
do. And of course, it's coming from the
structured water.
Meredith Oke (56:44):
The zeta potential is coming from the structured
water. So when you say hydrating yourself, zeta
hydration, is that a particular type of water or.
Dr. Damien Downing (56:55):
Well, it's pure water, really. I mean, I
certainly wouldn't use London tap water. I don't
know about where you are.
Meredith Oke (57:02):
No. There's fluoride, right.
Dr. Damien Downing (57:05):
Oh, God, no. That's awful. That's really bad.
I've got a great big filter under my sink,
kitchen sink, and it's got a vortexer, a swirler.
So that's. So then you just need to add pure
vortex water. Yeah.
Meredith Oke (57:27):
And then you add. Do you add minerals? Do you
add. What do you do to it?
Dr. Damien Downing (57:31):
You add electrolytes. I mean, to be honest, they
all work, I reckon, really. There probably are
some that are distinctly better than others, but
all the. The stuff, the, you know, potassium and
magnesium and so forth, that they would. They
would probably give you if you had diarrhea, but
(57:52):
without the crap.
Meredith Oke (57:54):
Right.
Dr. Damien Downing (57:55):
Well, yeah, in the. I think they all work, you
know.
Meredith Oke (58:03):
Yeah. The elect electrolyte combinations. So v.
So pure water, vortex electrolytes. Okay. So we
were talking about you, how you cured your
floaters. Okay. So that was the first piece. Well
hydrated with water that can keep our zeta
potential in a good place.
Dr. Damien Downing (58:23):
Yeah.
Meredith Oke (58:24):
All right.
Dr. Damien Downing (58:24):
And the other input that I did was the infrared.
But actually, these days I think it's clear that
you could. You need the UV as well as the
infrared. The effect of these wavelengths on the
structured water is infrared, particularly 8, 10
(58:48):
nanometers is the best penetrating one. Builds up
the layers, more and more layers of the
structured water. And the impact of the UV is to
build up the depth of the negative charge in
there. So, you know, both together is a perfect
(59:12):
combination.
Meredith Oke (59:14):
Can you explain that a little more? I haven't
heard it put quite like that. It's interesting.
Dr. Damien Downing (59:20):
Oh, okay. We assume the, you know, people
listening to this will know about structured
water.
Meredith Oke (59:28):
Yeah, more or less. Yes.
Dr. Damien Downing (59:30):
Right. Okay.
Meredith Oke (59:31):
But, I mean, but if you have. If you have a quick
overview of that, please give it. I always like
to have ever. You know, I learned something new
from the way people explain things just in their
own special way. Yeah.
Dr. Damien Downing (59:44):
Structured water. Well, shank. Your. The
unpronounceable one said that this happens, you
know, 60 years ago, that lots of liquids, not
just water, in contact with the surface, they
form a sort of A structure. And he said water has
two melting points. One, when solid ice melts
(01:00:08):
into water, and the second, which is in the 30s
centigrade, somewhere quite near our body
temperature, where the liquid ice, which is the
structured water, melts. And he speculated that
(01:00:30):
this gives our bodies the ability to destroy and
reform structured water kind of at our will. That
was, presumably, is something to do with what
running a temperature does. You know, whether
it's making the environment less friendly to
(01:00:55):
infect the Asians or they're not quite sure yet,
but that certainly happens. So structured water
forms when it's in touch with a surface that has
a bit of charge on it, and it doesn't take much,
so it tends to have a kind of a hexagonal form.
(01:01:19):
It's a layer. First it's a monolayer, then it's
multiple layers. And it's been calculated that
inside us, because there's no empty space inside
us, it's all stuff, you know, it's all molecules.
And a lot of the molecules that are at the
interstitium, like the glycosaminide, glycans and
(01:01:42):
so forth, they really like water. And so the
water on top of those will be structured water,
which. And also on collagen, which is like a.
It's like rope. It's. There's, you know, long
strings, the small filaments and so forth. So
electricity travels better through structured
(01:02:07):
water because it doesn't have to try going
everywhere. It's got a kind of Australia. It's
like providing it with a wire, but slightly flat
wire. And so this is kind of key to a lot of
life. This is the bit where the universe is on
our side, you know. So I think, honestly, without
(01:02:31):
this sort of stuff, life probably would never
have happened, but it did. And presumably these
rules must be the same everywhere in the
universe. So, you know, maybe the SETI search for
extraterrestrial intelligence will finally find
something. We shall see. But the structured water
(01:02:56):
happens naturally just because it's in contact
with the surface. And then kind of all light, to
a greater or lesser extent, encourages it to. To
build up more and more layers of structured
water. But the best at doing it is the infrared.
(01:03:20):
And in fact, it's in sort of middle infrared,
where you're talking thousands of nanometers. But
the problem with that is that not much reaches
the surface of the Earth because it's absorbed by
the water in the atmosphere. So the most useful
(01:03:40):
one is the near infrared, when there's a lot more
reaches us. And also it seems to be the
wavelength with the best penetration. So it goes,
you know, way deep into us. And things like the
cerebral spinal fluid are pretty good conductors
(01:04:03):
of that sort of electricity. You know, when you
do ultrasound examination, fluids, watery fluids,
look black. There's no reflection from in there.
The stuff goes straight through easily. And I
think if you were to do it with light, it would
(01:04:23):
be the same. Certainly with the infrared light,
it's carried well through cerebral spirit and of
course, through the amniotic fluid. So the baby's
getting a nice dose. Especially if you take your
bump out into the sun, Baby gets a really good
(01:04:43):
dose. And so the infrared does that, and the
ultraviolet, which we need for a variety of
reasons. This is one of the reasons why it's
beneficial to us because it helps to build up the
depth of the charge right next to the. The cell
(01:05:07):
or the molecule or whatever, which keeps
everything moving and. And flowing. So whether
that is why UVA and blue light, high energy,
visible, if you, like, make the magnetic sense,
were. Don't know yet. You know, there's a lot to
be figured out about that.
Meredith Oke (01:05:31):
Wow. So it really. I mean, we really are getting
charged up.
Dr. Damien Downing (01:05:37):
Yeah.
Meredith Oke (01:05:38):
We're like the. Where these little sort of liquid
crystal matrices getting charged up by the. The
light that we surround ourselves by. Or depleted,
as the case may be.
Dr. Damien Downing (01:05:51):
Well, yes. Quiet. Yeah.
Meredith Oke (01:05:53):
Wow. So I. I just love hearing about this. It
really. I mean, there's almost. Almost a
spiritual aspect to it when you think of how
exquisite it all is.
Dr. Damien Downing (01:06:05):
Yeah, I agree. Yeah. We're in touch with the
fundamentals of the universe. Yeah.
Meredith Oke (01:06:14):
Just by existing.
Dr. Damien Downing (01:06:16):
Yeah. Yeah. Is what I kind of say is it's in the
nature of things. All of this stuff is in the
nature of things. In the nature of the universe
is how the universe works. If we let it, we seem
(01:06:36):
to do our worst best to prevent it.
Meredith Oke (01:06:39):
Oh, there's the key. There's the key, Dr.
Downing. If we let it. And that's a great. That's
a beautiful way to put it, because that is all.
We only have to. We just need to allow it. We
don't actually have to do anything except get the
stuff out of the way. That's. That's disallowing
it.
Dr. Damien Downing (01:06:56):
Yeah, absolutely.
Meredith Oke (01:06:58):
Beautiful. So tell us before we wrap, tell us
about your next book. Is it. Is it building on
daylight robbery and the benefits of sunlight?
What can we expect?
Dr. Damien Downing (01:07:13):
It is, but I mean, it's had to be completely
rewritten. I couldn't just do an update. Back in
the 80s, we figured the bit about cancer, we
Figured that it was that light was good for the
heart. We didn't really understand why, but I, I
(01:07:35):
mean, that's much better these days. We
understand a lot more about lipids and about
mitochondria. And there were observations that
athletes could improve their performance by
(01:07:55):
exposing to sunlight and so forth. Very clear
evidence back then, but we didn't really
understand how that was happening. We're only
speculating. Obviously knew about vitamin D and,
you know, cancer and rickets and so on and so
forth. But now that we understand about
mitochondria, we understand that there's a
(01:08:20):
wavelength, the 8, 10 nanometers, the penetrates
that goes straight into the mitochondria. And
there was a big argument, I guess it still goes
on saying is what's happening there? That it's
cytochrome C oxidase, one of the elements, the,
the mitochondrial electron transport chain,
(01:08:43):
because that resonates the right frequency. And
then there's a bunch of people saying, no, that's
silly. It's really structured water. And now we
have. You know, it certainly would work by
structured water. I. It may be the structure of
water is not the only thing, but it's definitely
got to be part of it, you know, so all kind of
(01:09:04):
all of a sudden, except, you know, there seems to
be this latency period, about 50 years for all of
it. We've got. Oh, God, it all fits together. So
that's why the. The magnetic center spear is
downs, really. So I call this another way it all
fits together that.
Meredith Oke (01:09:25):
Right. All the pieces of the puzzle are.
Dr. Damien Downing (01:09:29):
Yeah.
Meredith Oke (01:09:30):
Are falling into place. So it started out with
observing the effect. Like we can clearly see
sunlight helps with this. And now we've gotten to
the explanation of the causative mechanisms of
how.
Dr. Damien Downing (01:09:46):
Yeah, yeah. Mind you, I'd be very careful about
saying, oh, we've got all the answers now.
Meredith Oke (01:09:52):
Oh, absolutely. Yes. That is so true. We are at
the beginning of the beginning of the beginning,
most likely in. Of a new paradigm of
understanding. And, you know, it's thanks to
people like you for, for working in this field
and researching it and bringing it to your
(01:10:13):
patients. So thank you.
Dr. Damien Downing (01:10:16):
Okay. It's my pleasure. My delight.
Meredith Oke (01:10:21):
Well, I appreciate you sharing and yeah, I would
love to do this again. I think there's lots more
that we could talk about. And thank you and thank
you for your. To the world.
Dr. Damien Downing (01:10:33):
Right. Okay. Thank you very much.
Meredith Oke (01:10:36):
This has been the Quantum Biology Collective
podcast. To find a practitioner who practices
from this point of view, visit our
directory@quantum quantumbiologycollective.org if
you are a practitioner, definitely take a look at
the Applied Quantum Biology certification, a six
week study of the science of the new human health
(01:10:59):
paradigm and its practical application with your
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Until next time, the QVC.
Biology Collective podcast where we break down
the practical applications of this emerging
science, starting with healthy life habits and
going wherever the quantum superhighway takes us.
This is your host, executive and life coach
Meredith Oak, with a quick reminder that podcasts
are conversations, not consultations. But if
(00:52):
you're looking for one of those, do check out our
free practitioner
directory@quantumbiologycollective.org My guest
today wrote a book on the importance of sunlight
to health called daylight robbery in 1988. Dr.
Downing has been practicing ecological medicine
(01:13):
ever since then, which is a systems approach to
health that considers interactions between
individuals and the environment and their health
consequences. So ecological medicine is a term
that is widely used in the United Kingdom, not so
much in North America and other parts of the
world. But I think it's a beautiful way to to
(01:34):
explain natural health and a nice alternative to
functional medicine, which has sort of become
synonymous with just supplements. Dr. Downing is
president of the British Society for Ecological
Medicine and was for 20 years editor of the
Journal of Nutritional and Environmental
(01:55):
Medicine. He serves on the editorial board of the
Ortho molecular news service. Dr. Downing and I
had a lovely conversation where I was able to
learn from his decades of wisdom working in
alternative health and in natural health and as
somebody who understood deeply and early the
(02:16):
implications of our changing light environment
and our changing EMF environment. So I hope you
enjoy my chat with Dr. Downing. I certainly did.
He is a fountain of knowledge that goes back many
years and he is working on a new book and
continues to be an active practitioner in London.
So if you live in that area, do look him up. He's
(02:40):
sees patience and continues to practice his
wisdom to this very day. Enjoy. And before we get
into it, please do consider your infrared light
exposure this winter and really anytime in the
summer months and in warm places, it's obviously
easier to get it full body infrared light
(03:01):
exposure when you're outside in the sunshine.
However, if you're not able to be outside in the
sunshine and also to help with detox, an infrared
sauna is really my top recommendation for feeling
good in the winter. It's something that I added
to my routine a couple of years ago when I moved
(03:21):
back to a cold place after living in places that
weren't so cold. And I really, really noticed a
huge difference in how I felt getting through the
winter months, I should say, I'm sorry, enjoying
and thriving through the winter months. I
appreciate winter so much more now that I know
how to properly take care of myself when it's
(03:42):
cold and when we're in that time of year. And one
of those things is making sure we get lots of
infrared light, which you can get from light
panels. And infrared saunas are especially good
because you have the heat as well, which is a
helpful detox. So I recommend if you need any of
those things to visit boncharge.com bcharge.com
(04:04):
they have a very nice little infrared sauna
blanket that you can just cozy up under while you
are, you know, watching a movie with your blue
blockers on. Of course. All right, enjoy my
conversation with Dr. Downing. He is a delightful
British gentleman. Have fun. Bye. Dr. Damian
Downing, welcome to the QVC podcast. Such a
(04:26):
pleasure to have you.
Dr. Damien Downing (04:27):
Thank you. It's great to be here.
Meredith Oke (04:30):
So you work in what is called ecological
medicine. Could you tell us a little bit about
your long career in that field and how you define
it? Because it's not a word that's used as
commonly in North America.
Dr. Damien Downing (04:46):
No. Right. Well, it all started in, really in
about 1979. That's before I came into the field.
One of the founders was Professor Ronnie Finn,
who was the guy that did the definitive paper in
the Lancet Journal showing that food allergy was
(05:10):
a real thing and that you could cut it out and so
forth. And he and a few others, including Alan
Grant, who did the paper that clearly showed that
migraine could be caused by food intolerances.
They set up a society. I've got the notes from
(05:31):
the. The agenda from the. The original meeting
there. And there's a meeting to consider setting
up a society for clinical ecology is what they
called it back then. And it's an 11 o'clock
Sherry. It starts, and then at 12 o'clock they
(05:54):
start talking, something like that. So those days
are gone, including pretty much everybody who's
there is now gone. But then in about 1983, we set
up what was then called the British Society for
Nutritional Medicine. And then it kind of added
bits in and allergy came in and all sorts of
(06:16):
other stuff came in. And eventually all those
societies end up merging. And we called it
ecological medicine, echoing what was said way
back then. It. So ecological medicine is kind of
a systems approach, is looking at the
interactions between you and the environment. And
(06:37):
obviously the, the whole sunlight factor, or you
know, what John Ott called mal illumination is,
is a key part of that. And my God, we didn't
realize back then, didn't realize nearly as much
as we do now because of all the evidence coming
(06:58):
from photobiomodulation and so on and so forth,
and our understanding of mitochondria it's mind
blowing. It's really got so exciting these days.
Meredith Oke (07:12):
It really has. And it's interesting because, you
know, along with the food, our light environment
has got, you know, our, our food sources and food
production have gone off the rails. And at the
same time the light that we're surrounded by in
our environment has become worse and worse. While
(07:33):
in parallel, the research showing how important
real food and natural light are is also mounting
weight. Yeah, we seem to be in a state of
complete imbalance there. What are your, what are
your thoughts on how, how that happened? Because
you wrote a book on the importance of sunlight to
(07:53):
Health in 1988.
Dr. Damien Downing (07:56):
Yeah.
Meredith Oke (07:56):
And so to, you know, as you, as you were saying
about the foundation of the ecological field of
medicine, this was, scientists and doctors were
aware of the importance of our environment and
yet somehow the innovation of the technology and
the processing of our food just went on
(08:18):
completely unchecked. Could you sort of speak to
that a little bit?
Dr. Damien Downing (08:22):
Yeah, it's always been, in all of this field,
it's always been more of a patient driven
progress than driven by doctors or even
scientists know, and that the British Society of
Dermatologists reviewed it and said it's a load
(08:42):
of rubbish, basically. And the British Naturist
Society, you know, people who like to be naked in
the fresh air, they reviewed and said, oh, it was
the most important medical book of the decade.
Meredith Oke (08:56):
So the dermatologist said your sunlight book was
rubbish and the, the naturalists said it was
brilliant. Yeah. Okay, that tracks right.
Dr. Damien Downing (09:03):
Yeah. And in America, of course, I mean, I was,
I'm not the expert on all this, but I understand
the, the dermatologists launched a two million
dollar campaign in about 1982, whatever, to,
(09:23):
well, to demonize sunlight and get everybody, you
know, looking themselves for, for cancers. And
that kind of made dermatology quite lucrative,
which it wasn't before. So there are inevitably
vested interests in this sort of thing, aren't
(09:44):
they? You know, you're not going to get away from
that. But it's interesting writing now because
I'm writing. Well, I don't know if it's a sequel
or whatever, but a successor to the Daylight
Robbery. It's interesting to look at how it, you
(10:05):
know, I completely lost my train of thought
there. Maybe you can cut this bit out and I.
Sure, yeah, go back and think. So.
Meredith Oke (10:20):
We were talking, yeah, we were talking about the,
the progress of the research on light and food
compared to the, you know, what's happening in
society and technology.
Dr. Damien Downing (10:34):
Yeah, well, so it's interesting to look at what
happens with these trends, because in writing the
sequel to Daylight Robbery is. I've been struck
by how long it takes for these things to actually
(10:56):
be adopted. Somebody does the original science,
you know, I mean, Albert Einstein did the AMC
squared in 1920. Something got the Nobel Prize
and so forth, but it was decades before it was
really applied. Shent Giorgi. I don't know how to
pronounce it. I'm not sure anybody does, but, you
(11:17):
know, the guy. I mean, yeah, guy isolated vitamin
C and so forth and also wrote a lovely little
book called bioenergetics in 1957. And he said,
he talked about this queer substance, water. And
he said that not just water, but almost any
(11:38):
liquid where it's in contact with a solid surface
tends to structure from the. The surface
outwards. So that was what, more than 60 years
ago this was known about. And it's only just now
with Gerald Pollock's work and so forth. They
were saying, oh, my God, structured water. And it
(12:01):
is, it's. I mean, it's. It's crucial. It's
brilliant. But I'm not surprised at how long
these things take. And I don't think it's just,
you know, people making a profit out of it not
being recognized. And so I think it's just, well,
(12:21):
doctors tend to think that what, you know, they
learned in medical school is it and so forth, and
if they didn't learn about it, then it can't be
real. And of course, they didn't learn about
nutrition in medical school, and they certainly
didn't learn about sunlight and its benefits.
Meredith Oke (12:41):
Yeah, absolutely. So true. I just saw a post
yesterday from a woman who was diagnosed with
ulcerative colitis by her md this was in the
United States. And she said to him, okay, how
should I change my diet now that I have this
(13:01):
diagnosis? And he said to her, it doesn't matter
what you eat. This was like a year ago. So she
left and got a new doctor. But it just was a
reminder to me that physicians are still saying
that about food, never mind getting to the light
piece of it.
Dr. Damien Downing (13:21):
Yeah, yeah, we used to call it. When we started
up the journal in 1990, we used to call them
nutritional flat earthers who still believe the
earth is flat. Nutrition isn't important. How can
it not be important?
Meredith Oke (13:38):
So you've had a major focus on gut health and
food allergies. Could you explain to us a little
bit, sort of, after all of your. Your decades
working with patients and doing research and
giving presentations and running the ecological
Journal. Where, where are you at with explaining
(14:02):
how food and light and digestion all and. Or
health and health overall? I would say all work
together.
Dr. Damien Downing (14:09):
Oh wow. You want a short answer to that one?
Meredith Oke (14:14):
I've got an hour, so just talk as long as you
want.
Dr. Damien Downing (14:21):
So it's interesting, when I came into this game
back in 1980, 1881, there were people saying
that, you know, food allergy had kind of just
been invented. Invented by. There was a guy
(14:41):
called Richard Mc who wrote a book called not all
in the Mind. I don't know if it made it big in
America. I don't know, it certainly did over
here. He basically showed not only from
practical, practicing doctors viewpoint, he
showed the food allergies were real, chemical
(15:04):
sensitivities were real. He remember he described
some lady who used to use a lot of hairspray and
it gave her terrible neurological symptoms and
fixed it just by cutting it out. The interesting
thing is that he wrote that In, I think 66, 10
years earlier, he wrote a book called Eat Fat and
(15:28):
Grow Slim saying that, you know, you needed a low
carbohydrate, high fat diet. And now that's
become an essential part of what we. And you
know, anybody, well, anybody in integrated
medicine does that took a few decades as well.
(15:50):
But back then people used to say, oh, I wonder if
it's the food upset me. And then all of a sudden
there were people saying, oh, I've got total
allergy syndrome. And we did an awful lot of
desensitizing back then. And then people started
getting multiple chemical sensitivity, you know,
(16:15):
started figuring. And this is all, well,
practically all people figuring it out for
themselves. You know, there's not going to their
doctor who's saying, oh, you've got multiple
chemicals and chemical sensitivity. Usually the
doctor's saying, oh, there's no such thing and
diet doesn't matter. And then of course, more
(16:36):
recently electrosensitivity has come into the
picture. You know, it's true that the, what they
call it, the gateway drug to all this is just
basic allergies, I inhaled allergies, hay fever
and so forth, or food intolerances. And you carry
(17:00):
that being severe for long enough, you then move
on to the next level and get multiple chemical
sensitivity. And after a few years you move on to
the next level. But it's also, you know, you have
to be integrated out now because it always has
(17:20):
been true that toxicity is part of the problem.
And it was John Ott that described that in the
light context. You know, his mal illumination was
a combination of not enough sunlight and too much
of this thing. I was thinking about how I could
(17:44):
do a zoom without a screen, but since you need
the video, I. I guess I'll have to stay here for
this.
Meredith Oke (17:53):
Sorry. We'll keep it. We'll keep it brief and
then go for walks outside after.
Dr. Damien Downing (18:00):
All right. Yeah. So then now, of course,
everybody's saying, oh, I think I've got MCAs.
Mast cell activation syndrome. I'm not even sure
that that's a real disease. I think it's just a
different way of looking at. Which opens a lot of
(18:20):
possibilities. There's a list of drugs and of
other treatments that may make a difference to
histamine release or whatever it is that's
driving your. Your MCAs. But, I mean, it's
always. It is all. It's all part of the same
thing. And with the toxicity, again, we should
(18:47):
have realized a long. Well, we. To some extent,
we did realize long time ago. When I started in
this, it was. There had been one or two papers.
It was kind of regarded as a given that aluminum
probably had something to do with Alzheimer's.
But that was 40 years ago, and we're still
(19:09):
arguing about it now. And, you know, papers
coming out saying, no, no, it doesn't work. Yes,
it does. You know.
Meredith Oke (19:20):
Yeah, it's. It's interesting. I mean, what I'm
really hearing, speaking with you is how, you
know, what you were just saying earlier, like,
how long it takes for these new ideas to get
traction. And it doesn't seem to be related to
(19:40):
how true they are. There seems to be other
factors at play. So we had, you know, John Ott,
decades ago, talking about doing all the light
research, and Georgia, you mentioned, and so many
other researchers. I know. And anyway, it's just
(20:06):
interesting to me, right, because we all. We're
all like, oh, this is this. All this new stuff.
And it's like. It's not new. It's just kind of
hiding or being ignored or being pushed to the
periphery, and it's taking all of us. You know,
we have to go looking for it. But it. The. The
research is there and the evidence is there, and
it's been there for a long time, and you've
(20:29):
created it. You know, you and your colleagues
have created a entire field around it.
Dr. Damien Downing (20:34):
Yeah. Yeah.
Meredith Oke (20:35):
So walk me through that. Oh, read. I'm sorry,
what do you read me?
Dr. Damien Downing (20:40):
Yeah, yeah. First sentence of Daylight Robbery,
1988, goes. The plot of many a thriller has
hinged on the fact that the best place to hide
something is where it is obvious. I think that
applies. Oh, absolutely, in space, to the
sunlight thing. You know, you say, how, how would
(21:02):
we m. How did we miss it? Because it was always
there. We never thought, we never realized that
we were systematically depriving ourselves of it.
Even though, I mean, what's, what's the real
punishment in a, in a prison or a dungeon? Let's
(21:22):
be true. It's depriving you of sunlight. That's
why they talk about a prison term, you know,
sheet white people. You know, you see somebody
like that, I think they've probably been inside.
Yeah, yeah, sorry, go on.
Meredith Oke (21:40):
No, it's just, it's so true. And, you know, I
think back to the years of my life where I was
completely bought into the idea that, that the
sun was bad for me. And I was, I was a good girl
and I was going to follow the rules and I put on
my SPF 9000 every time I went out in the sun.
Dr. Damien Downing (21:59):
Yeah, I know.
Meredith Oke (22:02):
And I feel, I feel a little betrayed, I have to
say.
Dr. Damien Downing (22:07):
What, what turned it for you?
Meredith Oke (22:10):
The first moment was actually from a woman who
did cosmetic. Like she, she was doing stuff for
my skin. I was in my 20s and she had been trained
in Hungary. She was probably in her 60s, so 60
something Hungarian woman. And she was looking at
(22:31):
my skin and she said, you don't go out in the sun
enough. And I was like, what? And she said, the
sun is life. And she said it with such force and
such conviction that it actually broke through my
false paradigm and stayed with me. And I didn't.
(22:52):
It was a long time before I understood it the way
I do now. But it was enough that I stopped being
so crazy about, about putting on SPF and started
to think like, oh, that actually makes sense. The
sun is life. Like, you know, you can tell
something is true by how it feels when it, you
(23:14):
know, how it feels in your body. And I was like,
God, how are you? Do you find that when you have
been working with people or when people come to
you and you broach the subject, are they open to
it? The idea of sunlight, I mean, you.
Dr. Damien Downing (23:33):
Know, way back, nobody really thought about it,
you know, but sometimes you get dramatic changes
in people. But then you think, we didn't, we
didn't have nearly as many screens back then. You
know, you were pretty advanced if you had a
computer.
Meredith Oke (23:54):
Yeah.
Dr. Damien Downing (23:55):
And smartphones hadn't been invented, you know,
so the, the situation was not as bad really. It's
got a lot worse over the decades. Firstly,
because we're even more out of natural light. And
in toxic light, if you like, we're mal
(24:15):
illuminated more and more. Secondly, because
other forms of toxicity are just getting worse
and worse all the time. You know, there's a, a
principle that I keep thinking about. I'm not
sure to how, to what extent it works. The
(24:35):
principle is that natural light, good light, will
protect you from the effects of bad light. Now,
there are a few instances where it clearly is
true, but the good light, you have to have the
good light exposure first, and that may be near
infrared or whatever, but the extent to which you
(24:59):
can then fix the damage of bad light and so forth
by good light, I'm not sure. Yeah, well, we're
not sure, but I mean, it is obviously it's the
fabric of the universe that we're dealing with
here. This whole. Especially once you bring
(25:20):
structured water in. You know, there's the
smallest things, electrons, photons, protons and
so forth, you know, and it's. Suddenly you start
to realize, my God, it's on our side. He always
was on our side. You know, there's a paper I've
just been looking at that somebody linked me to
(25:47):
by some Korean guys about magnetic sense, you
know, that birds navigate by magnetic sense and
so forth. And some of it happens in the eyes and
other bits of it happen with magnetic granules or
whatever, somewhere in the brain. And it turns
(26:07):
out that humans can do this to a certain extent,
but it's only men, really. And it's own by this
method anyway. And it's only slightly over 50% of
(26:30):
them. But that could be just because all the
rubbish EMFs that we're exposed to. So it's only
men, it's only when they're hungry, and it's only
when they're exposed to blue light. So if you're
a hunter gatherer and you wake up hungry, well,
(26:51):
obviously this is a real advantage, isn't it?
Meredith Oke (26:54):
You know, and this is the, the ability to
navigate by magic, by the.
Dr. Damien Downing (26:59):
Magnetic field, to know where true north is or,
you know, which is a, a reasonable, fascinating
pie Mason, isn't it?
Meredith Oke (27:09):
It really is.
Dr. Damien Downing (27:11):
Yeah. But so it's the, the principle. This is the
environment we're involved in, where there is
blue light in the mornings and there is a
magnetic field that we can navigate by.
Meredith Oke (27:25):
When you talk about the fabric of the universe,
how do you, how do you think about that and where
we fit into it and where our mitochondria and our
cells and our bodies fit.
Dr. Damien Downing (27:39):
Into it, Mitochondria, wherever they came from,
you know, that melatonin is Basically as old as
mitochondria.
Meredith Oke (27:51):
We did not.
Dr. Damien Downing (27:53):
Yeah. And it's the. Probably the best antioxidant
going. I'm not sure that, you know, it makes much
sense to have a league table of antioxidants, but
it's a powerful antioxidant and it's probably,
they say, about five times as potent and
(28:14):
antioxidant as vitamin C. Really? Yeah. I don't
know how they figured that out. What is said. And
you know that it's produced in the night in order
to help you sleep. No, that's wrong. Is that it
(28:40):
is produced in the night by the pineal gland and
the pine. We used to think it going around the
bloodstream. You know, you could measure the PI,
the melatonin there. And it was on its way to the
brain. No, the pineal pumps it into the
ventricles of the brain, which circulate it
(29:01):
through the. You know about the glymphatic system.
Meredith Oke (29:04):
Tell us.
Dr. Damien Downing (29:05):
Okay. The brain doesn't have an ordinary
lymphatic drainage like the rest of the body. The
rest of the body has lymphatic ducts that run
away from the tissues and take the things to the
(29:26):
regional lymph glands, you know, the ones in your
neck here, the ones in your armpit and so forth.
And what they're taking there is firstly, waste
and secondly, inflammation. And that's the same
stuff, you know, because the immune system needs
to know what it's going to have to handle. And
that's how it gets that information. And that's
how it activates the lymphocytes and so forth to
(29:49):
do it. But we always thought that there wasn't a
system like that in the brain, although it was
just a tiny bit of it and so forth. Turns out the
brain has a better system. It's got what you
would call a paravascular system. So that there
(30:12):
are spaces around the vessels that are to some
extent driven by the pulsing in the vessels. And
they carry a load of other stuff that isn't in
the blood, for instance, in the brain. The other
thing about the brain is that that's got an
(30:35):
inward and an outward direction of travel for
this glymphatic or paravascular system. Right.
The inward takes the stuff from the ventricle
into the tissue of the brain, and the outer one
(30:55):
takes it from the tissue of the brain and the
interstitium, if you like, of the brain out and
connects to the lymphatics around the back here,
and more particularly through the nose and the
structures around Here. And so another
interesting fact about that is that when you suck
(31:19):
and chew and, you know, adjust the pressure in
your mouth, there's a certain amount of pumping
action going on on this stuff coming from brain.
Why do comforters work on children? Probably for
that reason. It calms the brain physically and
literally.
Meredith Oke (31:38):
Like a soother. You mean like a pacifier when the
baby.
Dr. Damien Downing (31:41):
Exactly.
Meredith Oke (31:41):
That sucking motion. Oh, okay. Makes sense.
Dr. Damien Downing (31:45):
And the melatonins produced by the pineal goes
straight into the ventricles, and from that it
goes by the paravascular route into the brain,
timed to happen when the glymphatic system is
activated, which is when you are asleep and
(32:07):
particularly in deep sleep. So it goes in there
and all the. Helps to mop up all the antioxidant,
all the oxidative stress and toxins, and also it
activates some of the other molecules like
superoxide dismutase and so on. And then all the
(32:31):
gump is taken out and delivered to, actually to
the. The lymph nodes around here in due course,
including the ones in here, the tonsils. So all
this stuff is. Is so in the brain. But that's one
half of the story, because. And again, it's. It
(32:53):
happened a long time ago. 1972, there was a paper
where they took the pineal gland out of little
furry animals, rats or whatever, and measured
their circulating melatonin, and it obviously
went down, but only by about 80%. So there must
(33:19):
have been melatonin coming from elsewhere. And
where it's coming from is every cell in the body
and particularly the mitochondria of every cell,
because that's where it's needed. Because when
you produce energy, the electron. I think, not
quite sure who said it, but I will find out
(33:41):
eventually. The electron transport chain, you
know, the cytochromes in the mitochondrial wall,
is less than perfect. So every, you know, few
thousand times, whatever, it drops a free radical
there instead of using it constructively. And so
(34:01):
you. When you exercise, when you produce ATP,
you. You build up oxidative stress, and you also
produce the melatonin to. To deal with it, and
you produce it locally and not much of it gets
out. So it's hard to know quite what circulating
(34:25):
levels of melatonin need mean. Sorry, it's hard
to know what they mean because it's the overflow.
It's not like it's being delivered somewhere.
It's the stuff that spilled over from the
mitochondria and, you know, during the night from
the brain.
Meredith Oke (34:46):
So the melatonin has spilled over from where it's
produced and then is used by the rest of the body
for all kinds of important things, presumably.
Dr. Damien Downing (34:57):
Yes, but I mean, if you get a paper, there is a
paper, for instance, that says you can get a
boost to your circulating melatonin level from
eating two bananas. Well, I'm sure it's true, but
(35:17):
what does it mean in real life? Because if it's
there circulating, it's not necessarily getting
into the mitochondria, which is where it's really
needed.
Meredith Oke (35:32):
So what is the best way to ensure sufficient
melatonin production?
Dr. Damien Downing (35:40):
Good circadian rhythm with, you know, decent
sleep at night for a reasonable period. And
probably I. Well, either use, you know, Andrew
Huberman's thing about getting outside in the
first hour of waking, get outside for five
(36:01):
minutes and look up at the blue sky and so forth.
Well, I tell you, it doesn't work here, but it is
miserable and cold out there and it's dark. But,
yeah, that's a good principle. And better still,
do some exercise, because exercise causes you a
high spike in circulating melatonin, so it must
(36:27):
be causing even bigger a spike in the melatonin
where it's needed in the mitochondria, presumably
in your muscles. So I think those are really kind
of the two elements of the circadian rhythm that
you first need most important.
Meredith Oke (36:44):
Morning sunlight and morning movement.
Dr. Damien Downing (36:47):
Yeah.
Meredith Oke (36:48):
And night sleep and sleeping well at night.
Right. With ideally not a lot of artificial light
exposure before bed.
Dr. Damien Downing (36:57):
Yeah.
Meredith Oke (36:58):
Or while you're sleeping.
Dr. Damien Downing (36:59):
Well, yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, yes. I
mean, it's. How much is enough to disrupt. Not
much, really. There's. There is a study,
actually, if you gave me a couple minutes, I
could probably find. But we talked about it back
then, A daylight robbery showed that using a. A
(37:22):
single blue light bulb, which is not very bright
at all, an incandescent bulb by the bed, and
having it on and off in a cycle would. It would
entrain women's menstrual cycles. So that's an
(37:43):
effect coming from really not much extra light of
that color.
Meredith Oke (37:51):
Coming in, but it's still enough to completely
change our hormone cycle. Yeah, yeah. So we
really need to be mindful of this because most
people. I mean, where I live, most people have,
you know, gets dark outside, they flip on the
overhead LEDs, the widest, brightest light. They
(38:13):
probably have that light bulb next to their bed
to read before they go to sleep. If they're not
reading on their phone or their iPad and it's
just considered normal. Nobody even thinks about
it.
Dr. Damien Downing (38:23):
Yeah, no, no, that's right, it's, it's, you know,
well, it's in plain sight, so we're missing it.
Meredith Oke (38:33):
Right. So what prompted you to write Daylight
Robbery? What was going on that led you to write
an entire book on the health benefits of
sunlight? What were you seeing? What was
happening in the world? How did, how did that
happen?
Dr. Damien Downing (38:50):
Well, really it was meeting John Ott. I mean,
obviously I was already doing nutrition and
things like that. I came into this stuff really
originally by training in acupuncture. But then
when I started up practicing it, set up a clinic,
(39:12):
a couple of people came to me and said, oh, I
think I might have a food allergy if you read
this book by Richard McAnus. And so I started
doing, you know, more and more of that. And then
I read something about John Art and I got
interested now as an extension of the whole
(39:34):
nutrition thing and went over to see John Ott. He
was a lovely guy living in Florida and he showed
me his special glass in his windows and the, the
way he'd adapted his TV so it lay on the floor in
a, in a box pointing upwards. Then he had a, an a
(39:58):
mirror at this angle above it so that it came out
there. But hopefully harmful rays were going
straight up the ceiling.
Meredith Oke (40:09):
Oh my goodness. I've never heard that. Yeah, so
he, he invented his own defense kind of
mitigation technology.
Dr. Damien Downing (40:19):
Yeah.
Meredith Oke (40:19):
So these things are possible. We don't have to
be. I mean if he could just do that in his living
room, I'm sure all these brilliant engineers
could figure this out if they wanted to.
Dr. Damien Downing (40:28):
Yeah, yeah, that's right. And I've got a
colleague who's quite influential in the whole
electro, well not just electro sensitivity, but
harm from electromagnetic fields and so forth.
And you know, I mean, you understand that we
(40:49):
have, we now have billion in certain frequencies.
There are a billion times as much electromagnetic
fields waves about now as they were 50 years ago.
And of course it's harmful. One of the people
(41:09):
who's quite influential in that has the problem
herself and has been shown in a double blinded,
blinded experiment to react to mobile phone
things and so forth. But she manages to use a
computer and so forth, just has them solid wired
(41:30):
and necessary insulate stuff, you know, and you
can get a bit of tin foil and put it around the,
the connectors or whatever. It's better than
putting it around your food.
Meredith Oke (41:43):
Yes, that's true. So we can, we buy the tin foil
but we use it to wrap our, our wires, not our
food. Okay. This is, yeah, we're, we're
definitely not, not looking like the basic
normies out there anymore. Okay, so you were
talking about meeting John Ott.
Dr. Damien Downing (42:06):
Yeah.
Meredith Oke (42:06):
And then that led to writing Daylight Robbery.
Dr. Damien Downing (42:09):
Yeah, well, I led to doing a, a bit more research
and so forth. And I mean, it wasn't just going on
the Internet those days. I don't know if, you
know, you had to, had to write off to the British
Library, fill these little forms in for the
paper, and a couple of weeks later they sent it
to you. I've still got a few of those hanging
(42:30):
around. But, you know, things emerged like the,
the cancer connection with lack of sunlight. The
basic principle is that. Well, not the principle,
the rule of thumb, if you like, is that the
further north or south from the equator you go,
(42:53):
the more cancer there is, the greater your
chances of developing cancer. And the figure kind
of comes out with is two and a half times, if you
live in, I don't know, Oslo or somewhere way up
north or possibly Edmonton even, you've got
(43:16):
around two and a half times the probability of
developing cancer as you have in the, in let's
say in Florida. And that, that paper goes back to
like the 20s, you know, so some of this is a
hundred years old now. And of course that's got
(43:41):
worse because of a whole bunch of things like the
actual ionizing radiation. What we haven't really
appreciated is that firstly, an event like
Chernobyl or Fukushima, which is still going on.
(44:05):
All right, firstly, they're not the, you know,
the hundred ones in 100 years events. The
Chernobyl was a succession of the, the light
latest in the succession of events and there have
been several since nuclear. If you've got all
this nuclear stuff, you know it's going to go
(44:26):
wrong sometimes inevitably, and it does. The
second principle is that that radiation doesn't
just stay there where it is, it goes all around
the world. So we're all exposed to a greater
background level of radiation than we were. And
(44:49):
with Chernobyl, there's the amazing story of the,
the Pripyat marshes, which are all around the
exclusion zone in, around the reactor in
Chernobyl. And every couple of times a year,
(45:11):
different berries, the locals go into the marshes
and they into the woods there and gather up
berries to different times at berries at
different times a year. And then they bring them
out to the roads and there are merchants there
with stores on the roads and they weigh the, the
(45:36):
berries and so forth and they run a Geiger
counter over them. If the Geiger counter sounds
off high, they still buy the stuff, they just pay
the guys less. And then it goes into the, into
(45:58):
the international system. Could be in your jam at
breakfast right now. Really.
Meredith Oke (46:05):
The radiated berries.
Dr. Damien Downing (46:07):
Yeah.
Meredith Oke (46:10):
Oh, all right, so we have the background of the
really bad ionizing radiation and then we also
have the non ionizing radiation that we surround
ourselves by with our mobile phones, our wi fi,
cell towers, 5G. All of these things.
Dr. Damien Downing (46:32):
Yeah, all of this that just keeps getting worse
all the time.
Meredith Oke (46:37):
Have you noticed, I mean, you talked about the
electromagnetic, the electrosensitivity. Have you
noticed in your patients symptoms becoming more
complex and symptoms arising in, in younger
people? I know here in the United States there's
an epidemic of combination of autoimmune and mood
(47:01):
disorders and all kinds of things happening in,
in very young people, you know, adolescents,
teenagers, and often even children. Young
children.
Dr. Damien Downing (47:12):
Yeah, that. I mean, that has been going on for a
long time. Still is going on. And you know, it's
not as well. There are. Okay, there's one
interesting surprise that we just noticed, but
generally, you know, we. It's been kind of
predicted for a long time the things are going to
go on getting worse like that. And my colleague
(47:35):
of mine, Stephen Davis, described what he called
the nutrient toxin interface. Quite simply, the
more toxins you're exposed to and you know, let's
include toxic stress in this and AMS and
everything else. The more toxins you're exposed
to, the more nutrients you need to deal with
them. Simple as that. So why would we not take
(47:59):
supplements these days? The one interesting one
that I just realized I'd experience is I was
talking about kids with this strep reaction
called pandas, which is an autoimmune disease
triggered by strep infection. And I realized that
(48:28):
both of them had had shingles in childhood. So
shingles is a reaction to the. Well, it's a
reactivation of the chickenpox virus. Right, but
that's only supposed to happen decades later.
Meredith Oke (48:48):
Yeah, I always thought shingles, you got
chickenpox, I mean, this was back before they
vaccinated the crap out of everyone. But you got
chickenpox as a child and shingles as an adult.
If you were unlucky enough not to have the
chickenpox as a child or if it came back and the
shingles were way worse.
Dr. Damien Downing (49:07):
Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Meredith Oke (49:09):
So you're saying there now children were having
shingles.
Dr. Damien Downing (49:13):
Yeah, that's right.
Meredith Oke (49:14):
Okay, so that's a new development, new.
Dr. Damien Downing (49:17):
To everybody, I think.
Meredith Oke (49:18):
Yeah, yeah. And so what's. This is just another
symptom of, well, immune systems Being destroyed.
Dr. Damien Downing (49:28):
Yeah, I guess so. By all sorts of factors
together, including the mal illumination and the.
The crap in the food and so forth. It isn't just
to do with, you know, the COVID vaccine or
anything like that. It. Because it. These two
predated both that.
Meredith Oke (49:51):
Yeah. Well, it's interesting where you're saying,
you know, we need to have a nutrient load. You
know, the nutrient load needs to be greater than
the toxic load or the. The restorative inputs
need to be greater than the assault inputs. And
decade by decade, we've been adding assault over
assault over assault.
Dr. Damien Downing (50:12):
Yeah.
Meredith Oke (50:13):
And with the light piece, I think not even
understanding. I think the food piece, we kind of
knew. We just didn't do anything about it. But
with the light piece, it's like, what do you.
People are sort of still surprised? What are you
talking about? What do you mean?
Dr. Damien Downing (50:27):
Yeah, yeah.
Meredith Oke (50:28):
And I'm curious. You mentioned earlier when you
were talking about the. The glymphatic system in
the brain, you mentioned the tonsils. And I want
to ask you something. I have met two children, I
live in the northeast of the United States, and I
have. I have met two children in the last year
whose pediatricians recommended they have their
(50:49):
tonsils removed, and they did. And I'm just
wondering what your thoughts are on that. It was
my understanding that that's not necessarily
something that is recommended these days. But I
was surprised. I mean, to know personally know
two people.
Dr. Damien Downing (51:10):
Yeah, yeah.
Meredith Oke (51:11):
Should we as parents be cautious about that
procedure?
Dr. Damien Downing (51:14):
I think you should, yes. I mean, it is true that
you do get kids who have recurrent tonsillitis,
and so they're sick, they're off school, they're,
you know, their learning suffers and that kind of
thing. They're unwell a lot of the time. But I
(51:35):
mean, what's our response to that? We give them
loads of antibiotics, which trashes the
microbiome for pretty much the rest of their
life, and then we vaccinate them. And there's
good evidence that having things like measles
infection, I mean, gives you some defense against
(51:58):
allergies and that kind of thing. So that's part
of the story of the explosion of the. The
epidemic of allergies, whatever that we're
seeing. And I mean, allergies, autoimmunity is
just like the armed wing of allergy, really. And
(52:22):
in fact, now that we understand more about
autoimmunity, we realize that these just mistakes
in a language that our immune system is speaking
all the time. 70% of the immune system is
(52:44):
involved in not reacting to things, only 30% is
involved in reacting. And so you need a balance
of all of these things. You need the activators
and the regulators. And it's the same for
(53:04):
allergies, autoimmunity and for cancer. You know,
they're all to do with imbalance, disruption of
the immune system. And having a good circadian
rhythm is obviously a key factor in all of that.
So, I mean, these days, you ask me what's the
(53:26):
first thing I should do about all that. Get a
good circadian rhythm.
Meredith Oke (53:33):
Yeah, it's comforting to hear you say that
because I think the bad news is so many people
have terrible light inputs and don't think about
it. But the good news is it's not that
complicated to fix.
Dr. Damien Downing (53:49):
No, no.
Meredith Oke (53:51):
It's just changing a few light bulbs, you know,
putting some filters on your screen, you know
that there are ways to going outside. It's not
hard stuff.
Dr. Damien Downing (54:02):
No, and I don't really. It's another. This is
things like the, you know, cutting, doing,
auditing your environment for electromagnetic
fields and so forth. There isn't an absolute
threshold that you've got to get over for this to
do you any good. I mean, every move in the right
(54:23):
direction is going to be beneficial to you.
Meredith Oke (54:27):
Right.
Dr. Damien Downing (54:28):
You know. Yeah, I had. When I started thinking
about the, the screen stuff, I started getting
floaters in the eye. And I went to the big eye
hospital here in Moorfield and they say, yeah,
(54:50):
well, it's floaters. They might go away, might
not, may come back again. So I said, what can I
do about it? Nothing really. They've got no
treatments for it. But I fixed it, I fixed it. I
recommend two things. One is hydration and
(55:11):
particularly, you know, zeta based hydration.
Meredith Oke (55:15):
What do you mean by that?
Dr. Damien Downing (55:16):
Oh, okay. The zeta potential is the charge on
cells and other surfaces. So, you know, opposite
poles attract, positive and negative attract to
each other, like poles repel. So the zeta
(55:36):
potential is the negative potential on the
surface of red blood cells. And most obviously
that keeps them apart, keeps them separated. And
if you do dark field microscopy on somebody else,
(55:57):
I don't. You know, the first thing they always
say is, oh, look, your red cells are clumping.
That's why they're clumping is because they
haven't got enough negative charge to keep them
apart. And so because they're actually larger
than some of the capillaries, they have to go
down, they have to be a part. If they're clumped,
(56:19):
it's deadly. You're not going to get nearly
enough blood Oxygen, all the other nutrients to
your tissues. So zeta potential is one of. Now, I
think one of the most fundamental things you can
do. And of course, it's coming from the
structured water.
Meredith Oke (56:44):
The zeta potential is coming from the structured
water. So when you say hydrating yourself, zeta
hydration, is that a particular type of water or.
Dr. Damien Downing (56:55):
Well, it's pure water, really. I mean, I
certainly wouldn't use London tap water. I don't
know about where you are.
Meredith Oke (57:02):
No. There's fluoride, right.
Dr. Damien Downing (57:05):
Oh, God, no. That's awful. That's really bad.
I've got a great big filter under my sink,
kitchen sink, and it's got a vortexer, a swirler.
So that's. So then you just need to add pure
vortex water. Yeah.
Meredith Oke (57:27):
And then you add. Do you add minerals? Do you
add. What do you do to it?
Dr. Damien Downing (57:31):
You add electrolytes. I mean, to be honest, they
all work, I reckon, really. There probably are
some that are distinctly better than others, but
all the. The stuff, the, you know, potassium and
magnesium and so forth, that they would. They
would probably give you if you had diarrhea, but
(57:52):
without the crap.
Meredith Oke (57:54):
Right.
Dr. Damien Downing (57:55):
Well, yeah, in the. I think they all work, you
know.
Meredith Oke (58:03):
Yeah. The elect electrolyte combinations. So v.
So pure water, vortex electrolytes. Okay. So we
were talking about you, how you cured your
floaters. Okay. So that was the first piece. Well
hydrated with water that can keep our zeta
potential in a good place.
Dr. Damien Downing (58:23):
Yeah.
Meredith Oke (58:24):
All right.
Dr. Damien Downing (58:24):
And the other input that I did was the infrared.
But actually, these days I think it's clear that
you could. You need the UV as well as the
infrared. The effect of these wavelengths on the
structured water is infrared, particularly 8, 10
(58:48):
nanometers is the best penetrating one. Builds up
the layers, more and more layers of the
structured water. And the impact of the UV is to
build up the depth of the negative charge in
there. So, you know, both together is a perfect
(59:12):
combination.
Meredith Oke (59:14):
Can you explain that a little more? I haven't
heard it put quite like that. It's interesting.
Dr. Damien Downing (59:20):
Oh, okay. We assume the, you know, people
listening to this will know about structured
water.
Meredith Oke (59:28):
Yeah, more or less. Yes.
Dr. Damien Downing (59:30):
Right. Okay.
Meredith Oke (59:31):
But, I mean, but if you have. If you have a quick
overview of that, please give it. I always like
to have ever. You know, I learned something new
from the way people explain things just in their
own special way. Yeah.
Dr. Damien Downing (59:44):
Structured water. Well, shank. Your. The
unpronounceable one said that this happens, you
know, 60 years ago, that lots of liquids, not
just water, in contact with the surface, they
form a sort of A structure. And he said water has
two melting points. One, when solid ice melts
(01:00:08):
into water, and the second, which is in the 30s
centigrade, somewhere quite near our body
temperature, where the liquid ice, which is the
structured water, melts. And he speculated that
(01:00:30):
this gives our bodies the ability to destroy and
reform structured water kind of at our will. That
was, presumably, is something to do with what
running a temperature does. You know, whether
it's making the environment less friendly to
(01:00:55):
infect the Asians or they're not quite sure yet,
but that certainly happens. So structured water
forms when it's in touch with a surface that has
a bit of charge on it, and it doesn't take much,
so it tends to have a kind of a hexagonal form.
(01:01:19):
It's a layer. First it's a monolayer, then it's
multiple layers. And it's been calculated that
inside us, because there's no empty space inside
us, it's all stuff, you know, it's all molecules.
And a lot of the molecules that are at the
interstitium, like the glycosaminide, glycans and
(01:01:42):
so forth, they really like water. And so the
water on top of those will be structured water,
which. And also on collagen, which is like a.
It's like rope. It's. There's, you know, long
strings, the small filaments and so forth. So
electricity travels better through structured
(01:02:07):
water because it doesn't have to try going
everywhere. It's got a kind of Australia. It's
like providing it with a wire, but slightly flat
wire. And so this is kind of key to a lot of
life. This is the bit where the universe is on
our side, you know. So I think, honestly, without
(01:02:31):
this sort of stuff, life probably would never
have happened, but it did. And presumably these
rules must be the same everywhere in the
universe. So, you know, maybe the SETI search for
extraterrestrial intelligence will finally find
something. We shall see. But the structured water
(01:02:56):
happens naturally just because it's in contact
with the surface. And then kind of all light, to
a greater or lesser extent, encourages it to. To
build up more and more layers of structured
water. But the best at doing it is the infrared.
(01:03:20):
And in fact, it's in sort of middle infrared,
where you're talking thousands of nanometers. But
the problem with that is that not much reaches
the surface of the Earth because it's absorbed by
the water in the atmosphere. So the most useful
(01:03:40):
one is the near infrared, when there's a lot more
reaches us. And also it seems to be the
wavelength with the best penetration. So it goes,
you know, way deep into us. And things like the
cerebral spinal fluid are pretty good conductors
(01:04:03):
of that sort of electricity. You know, when you
do ultrasound examination, fluids, watery fluids,
look black. There's no reflection from in there.
The stuff goes straight through easily. And I
think if you were to do it with light, it would
(01:04:23):
be the same. Certainly with the infrared light,
it's carried well through cerebral spirit and of
course, through the amniotic fluid. So the baby's
getting a nice dose. Especially if you take your
bump out into the sun, Baby gets a really good
(01:04:43):
dose. And so the infrared does that, and the
ultraviolet, which we need for a variety of
reasons. This is one of the reasons why it's
beneficial to us because it helps to build up the
depth of the charge right next to the. The cell
(01:05:07):
or the molecule or whatever, which keeps
everything moving and. And flowing. So whether
that is why UVA and blue light, high energy,
visible, if you, like, make the magnetic sense,
were. Don't know yet. You know, there's a lot to
be figured out about that.
Meredith Oke (01:05:31):
Wow. So it really. I mean, we really are getting
charged up.
Dr. Damien Downing (01:05:37):
Yeah.
Meredith Oke (01:05:38):
We're like the. Where these little sort of liquid
crystal matrices getting charged up by the. The
light that we surround ourselves by. Or depleted,
as the case may be.
Dr. Damien Downing (01:05:51):
Well, yes. Quiet. Yeah.
Meredith Oke (01:05:53):
Wow. So I. I just love hearing about this. It
really. I mean, there's almost. Almost a
spiritual aspect to it when you think of how
exquisite it all is.
Dr. Damien Downing (01:06:05):
Yeah, I agree. Yeah. We're in touch with the
fundamentals of the universe. Yeah.
Meredith Oke (01:06:14):
Just by existing.
Dr. Damien Downing (01:06:16):
Yeah. Yeah. Is what I kind of say is it's in the
nature of things. All of this stuff is in the
nature of things. In the nature of the universe
is how the universe works. If we let it, we seem
(01:06:36):
to do our worst best to prevent it.
Meredith Oke (01:06:39):
Oh, there's the key. There's the key, Dr.
Downing. If we let it. And that's a great. That's
a beautiful way to put it, because that is all.
We only have to. We just need to allow it. We
don't actually have to do anything except get the
stuff out of the way. That's. That's disallowing
it.
Dr. Damien Downing (01:06:56):
Yeah, absolutely.
Meredith Oke (01:06:58):
Beautiful. So tell us before we wrap, tell us
about your next book. Is it. Is it building on
daylight robbery and the benefits of sunlight?
What can we expect?
Dr. Damien Downing (01:07:13):
It is, but I mean, it's had to be completely
rewritten. I couldn't just do an update. Back in
the 80s, we figured the bit about cancer, we
Figured that it was that light was good for the
heart. We didn't really understand why, but I, I
(01:07:35):
mean, that's much better these days. We
understand a lot more about lipids and about
mitochondria. And there were observations that
athletes could improve their performance by
(01:07:55):
exposing to sunlight and so forth. Very clear
evidence back then, but we didn't really
understand how that was happening. We're only
speculating. Obviously knew about vitamin D and,
you know, cancer and rickets and so on and so
forth. But now that we understand about
mitochondria, we understand that there's a
(01:08:20):
wavelength, the 8, 10 nanometers, the penetrates
that goes straight into the mitochondria. And
there was a big argument, I guess it still goes
on saying is what's happening there? That it's
cytochrome C oxidase, one of the elements, the,
the mitochondrial electron transport chain,
(01:08:43):
because that resonates the right frequency. And
then there's a bunch of people saying, no, that's
silly. It's really structured water. And now we
have. You know, it certainly would work by
structured water. I. It may be the structure of
water is not the only thing, but it's definitely
got to be part of it, you know, so all kind of
(01:09:04):
all of a sudden, except, you know, there seems to
be this latency period, about 50 years for all of
it. We've got. Oh, God, it all fits together. So
that's why the. The magnetic center spear is
downs, really. So I call this another way it all
fits together that.
Meredith Oke (01:09:25):
Right. All the pieces of the puzzle are.
Dr. Damien Downing (01:09:29):
Yeah.
Meredith Oke (01:09:30):
Are falling into place. So it started out with
observing the effect. Like we can clearly see
sunlight helps with this. And now we've gotten to
the explanation of the causative mechanisms of
how.
Dr. Damien Downing (01:09:46):
Yeah, yeah. Mind you, I'd be very careful about
saying, oh, we've got all the answers now.
Meredith Oke (01:09:52):
Oh, absolutely. Yes. That is so true. We are at
the beginning of the beginning of the beginning,
most likely in. Of a new paradigm of
understanding. And, you know, it's thanks to
people like you for, for working in this field
and researching it and bringing it to your
(01:10:13):
patients. So thank you.
Dr. Damien Downing (01:10:16):
Okay. It's my pleasure. My delight.
Meredith Oke (01:10:21):
Well, I appreciate you sharing and yeah, I would
love to do this again. I think there's lots more
that we could talk about. And thank you and thank
you for your. To the world.
Dr. Damien Downing (01:10:33):
Right. Okay. Thank you very much.
Meredith Oke (01:10:36):
This has been the Quantum Biology Collective
podcast. To find a practitioner who practices
from this point of view, visit our
directory@quantum quantumbiologycollective.org if
you are a practitioner, definitely take a look at
the Applied Quantum Biology certification, a six
week study of the science of the new human health
(01:10:59):
paradigm and its practical application with your
patients and clients. We also love to feature
graduates of the program on this very podcast.
Until next time, the QVC.
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