The Problem With Modern Light | Jonathan Jarecki

Jonathan Jarecki (0:00)

You know, 93% of an American's day is spent indoors. Sunlight is the best red light therapy device. It's the perfect intensity, it's the perfect wavelength. My philosophy is nature is the best medicine. It's perfectly designed for us. 95% of the melatonin that your body produces is actually produced during the day and in response to light. I think what we're really seeing with the vitamin D story is vitamin D is more so a proxy of how much sun exposure somebody is getting. Every single study looking at sunlight and melanoma mortality shows that as we increase sun exposure, we actually reduce melanoma mortality. The cheapest, most simplest, I think also the healthiest thing that people can do is simply buy a 40 or 60 watt incandescent light bulb, place it on their desk, especially if you're, you know, if you work a nine to five.

Mark Bell (0:49)

All right, Jonathan, I'm just going to start out by asking you flat out. Do you think a lot of the lights that people have bought and purchased over the last couple of years to bring inside their home to utilize red light therapy, do you think some of those efforts may have been worthless?

Jonathan Jarecki (1:08)

And when we look at a lot of these red light therapy devices, I mean, you know, I've seen ones that are like 850 mW or 70 squared, which is really high intensity. And then when you contrast that with what I would say the best literature shows around sort of, you know, red light therapy and the effects of red and infrared, these longer wavelengths of light on mitochondrial health, you know, a lot of this is coming out of the Glenn Jeffreys lab at University College London. And he has seen that he is basically tie trading down and down to lower and lower intensities in his studies and seeing still having the benefit and those beneficial outcomes while being super low intensity. So he's even seen, you know, benefits with 1 mW or 70 squared. And when we look at sunlight in general, right, natural sunlight, which is what our body expects to have 24-7, you know, my question is, all right, what is the intensity of that? And when we look at full sunlight spectrum, so spanning from UV all the way into far infrared, which goes past 3000 nanometers.

Cumulatively, that is around 100, a little bit over 100 mW per centimeter square. Now, if we were to take a specific wavelength of the sunlight spectrum, so let's say you took, like, 850 nanometers, which is in the near infrared, which a lot of, you know, red light therapy devices and panels have that specific wavelength in it. If you measured that wavelength, the intensity of that wavelength coming from the sun, you're at around 1 mW per centimeter square, so super low intensity, where these red light therapy panels are at 100 plus mW per centimeter square, very high intensity. And I think, you know, I've talked about this, like, on my page and stuff, and I find I don't use red light therapy devices, the vast majority of them, for this particular reason. I don't, we do not have any literature showing that it is necessarily harmful. However, I think I take a precautionary principle around it. And, you know, sunlight is the best red light therapy device. It's the perfect intensity. It's the perfect wavelengths. It's the full spectrum, right? And that's the best red light therapy device that we have. I take a precautionary principle around these red light therapy devices. One, they're not regulated, right? We don't have long term, you know, efficacy studies on them. And they're not, like, they're not natural, right? There still could potentially be benefits because you are getting these long wavelengths of light back into the environment. I recommend people, because it's super high intensity, what I recommend is, like, distance is your best friend. So the further you go away from the device, just how the physics works, the lower the intensity gets as you move away from the device. And even with devices that have, like, near infrared light, so the properties of near infrared light is that it balances and scatters, so it doesn't absorb with a lot of material. So let's say you turned your, like, red light therapy device around, facing it against a wall. What's going to happen is those longer wavelengths of near infrared light are going to bounce against the wall and come right back at you. So you're going to still get the benefits while not having that super high intensity. So I think, you know, getting to your question here, it's like, I think when we look at sort of, you know, the biohacking culture of today and trying to, like, biohack everything and finding the device to fix everything, you know, my philosophy is nature is the best medicine.