0:00 He was literally two days away from dying. So, this is a story where a 15-year-old boy was diagnosed with blood cancer, but he developed a flesheating infection in his lung. He wasn't going to make it. So, he has one request. He wants to go outside. And that's exactly what they do. And this was actually mind-blowing to me. After the second day, the infection is probably 60 70% gone. And it became clear to me that sunlight has so many important benefits. For instance, if you're the bed closer to the window, you get discharged from the hospital faster. So, I want you to give me any information you have as it relates to light health. For example, do you recommend these kinds of things? Dr. Roger Seahol is a board-certified critical care physician who breaks down complex science into clear life-saving advice. I see people at the very end of
0:47 their lives, so I know what prevents them from getting this ill and how to extend life. So, let's distill it down into eight pillars. The first thing that exercise it reduces stroke. It reduces depression. Next, sunlight. Did you know that infrared light from the sun is able to penetrate up to about 8 mm and stimulate and upregulate melatonins which prevent a lot of diseases like dementia, cardiovascular disease, diabetes? What if you live in a cloudy country? There's some very actionable things that you can do and we'll talk about that. Next one, water. For instance, people who use sauna are more likely to have less death from cardiovascular disease. Next, air. There are studies that show that just going out one day a week can elevate our immune system and make us more relaxed. And then there's but finally trust. This is something
1:32 that can't be ignored because studies have shown that people who have a good faith and trust in a god hard. I see messages all the time in the comments section that some of you didn't realize you didn't subscribe. So, if you could do me a favor and double check if you're a subscriber to this channel, that would be tremendously appreciated. It's the simple, it's the free thing that anybody that watches this show frequently can do to help us here to keep everything going in this show in the trajectory it's on. So, please do double check if you've subscribed and uh thank you so much because in a strange way you are you're part of our history and you're on this journey with us and I appreciate you for that. So, yeah, thank you [Music] Dr. Roger Schwelt. with the work that you do. What is it that you're aiming to
2:17 accomplish? Outside of my clinical duties, uh, and maybe even part of that, I would like to clearly explain very easily graspable tools that can be implemented to make people live their best life. And it's specifically in terms of their health and their well-being. And as we dig down into health and wellbeing, because that's quite a broad basket, what is it within health and well-being that you've spent your career, your life focusing on? So, I'm a a board-certified internal medicine specialist. Then, I did an extra three years of training uh here in the United States on pulmonary and critical care. So, I deal with all of the issues that are related to the lungs and the critical care aspect. So, if you are uh if you are admitted to hospital and you're critically ill, you go to the
3:04 intensive care unit, I'm the doctor that you see. So, I'm putting in, you know, the lines, putting them on vasopressors, intubating them. I worked in the clinic this morning. And what are some of the unappreciated things that most people don't think of? Because we think of, you know, don't eat processed food and, right, exercise, but is there things outside of that that you don't think the average person appreciates enough? Yes, absolutely. What are those things? So if we look at those things that extend life and are beneficial, we could put them into what I call eight pillars of health. If you can imagine your life is a chain with a bunch of links, okay? And I'm talking medically. Each one of those links is an organ system. So your heart is a link,
3:50 your lungs are a link, your liver is a link, your kidneys, etc., etc. As you go through life, imagine those links starting to erode. So that at some point in your life, you're going to get some sort of a disease or a diagnosis that focuses on one organ system of your life. For many here in the United States and in the UK, it's the heart. And as that link gets more eroded, we can see very clearly that this is going to be the link that's going to break first. And therefore, attention is paid to that link. For many that diagnosis comes with medications. So here here is one of the first truisms that I would say going forward. All medications have side effects. And what the aim is to do in modern medicine is to utilize the
4:36 knowledge of those medicines and their effect on the human body so that we leverage the other links to protect that weakest link. So, I could go through a bunch of medications that I give all the time to patients in the intensive care unit where I'm focused on saving their life because I can clearly see which link is the weakest, but I'm doing it knowing that there's side effects because I'm trying to save that link to save that life and I'm leveraging those other things. For instance, somebody comes in with a stroke and uh they have they've they've lost weakness on the on the right side of their body or the left side, whichever side, I can give them a medication immediately that will break up all of the clots in their body. It's called TPA
5:22 or TNK. And it will restore blood flow to the brain and it will reverse many of their symptoms. If they come in soon enough, we can do this. What's what's amazing is that that medication has an effect that can do that, but it also has a pretty significant side effect and that it could break up clots somewhere else and cause bleeding. So, we have to be careful about what it is that we're doing. Clearly there what we're doing is we're saving one link at the expense of other links. But that's what you have to do in an emergency situation. But if after that I simply send that patient home without telling them why they had that stroke and what they need to do to prevent themselves from getting that stroke again and what are the lifestyle factors that cause that to happen. I
6:07 haven't done my job. So what is what are the interventions that we can do hopefully early on in life so that we don't have those links eroding so that all of the links are strong and as we get older we can continue to strengthen all of the links. Here are the eight. So nutrition that's that's nutrition. Uh basically you know we know there are studies that have done that show that that depending on what we put into our bodies as food can have a dramatic impact in terms of our well-being. Okay so that's nutrition. Exercise as I was saying exercise not only I mean drugs and things have side effects. Exercise have side benefits. So exercise obviously is going to make you more fit. It's going to make you have better endurance. But did you know that it reduces stroke? Did you know that it improves uh um well-being? It reduces
6:54 depression. There's so many benefits. So, all of these links are actually improving. There's no leveraging here. And exercise is incredible. Water. So, this may sound obvious, right? Like you drink because you're thirsty. Where I would like to go today is to talk a little bit about what the effect of water externally on your body can do. And you're talking there about like hot and cold. Exactly. Usage. Exactly. in terms of showers or cold plunges, sauners, that kind of thing. Exactly. And we'll get into the actual evidence for this. We'll get into it later. But what is thisffects your immune system which changes your probability of diseases and things like that. Absolutely. Especially in the acute setting, especially so not only in the acute setting, but we also have pretty good data from Finland where they have more saunas than almost than people uh
7:40 where they've actually done the research and and shown with dose response curves that this is actually very beneficial. We won't get into too much of that, but what I want to focus a little bit more on because of my job in the intensive care unit and what we're seeing right now with viruses and mutations in the innate immune system, why something like this may actually be very important uh as we look forward. Interestingly, as we look forward to future things, pandemics, we can look backward and see what we had done in the past. And we've got some really actually really good information on that. Let's go to sunlight. This is something that um I've really become more and more involved with because of some of the benefits that this can do. A very big misconception that people have is that
8:25 sunlight equals vitamin D. And therefore, if you take a vitamin D supplement, you don't need to go in the sun. This is really something that's now um being debunked. Sunlight has far more benefits than just vitamin D. Not saying that vitamin D is is not something that you want to supplement with. I supplement with vitamin D. I think it's there's a benefit to supplementing with vitamin D. No question. But sunlight has so many important things. And I and I really would like to spend the bulk or the line share of the time talking about this because this is really important. Um this is a this is this is amazing. Uh and it really made me think about sunlight. So, this is a story by a lady by the name of Amy Hanmeer. Her
9:12 15-year-old boy was diagnosed with lymphablastic leukemia. Went into uh the hospital actually started chemotherapy for it which is blood cancer. It's a blood cancer. Yeah. And so this the treatment for blood cancer is chemotherapy which he started. The side effect of chemotherapy is suppressing the immune system. And unfortunately, he didn't realize it, but he developed uh he didn't realize it immediately, but he developed a a fungus flesh-eating infection in his lung and went into the hospital in June of 2024. Uh this was in Minnesota, tertiary care hospital. and he got worse and got worse and got worse to the point where the
9:57 only way that they could control this infection was to actually remove his left lung, which they did. So, this is a 15-year-old boy. He is without his left lung. He only has a right lung and he starts to decline even after that. They do a CT scan and it shows that now the infection has moved to the his remaining right lung. They have a family conference and as Amy is telling me this story, I could hear her choking up. She's telling me this on the phone. She's saying that he's 15. He's completely awake. He's completely alert. He knows everything that's going on around him. He's on a ventilator, like a machine that they use for for sleep apnea. It's like a BiPAP machine that's breathing for him. It's not intubation, but it's on his on his mouth. And the doctors, you know, have
10:43 done everything they possibly can and they say, "Look, he's getting worse. We can't take obviously we can't take the right lung out. We can't put him on a heart lung machine because there's no sort of destination to where he's going. U we recommend not intubating him and making him what they call DNR. Do not resuscitate. So they're like, "Wow, they were not expecting this coming." So they have a big conference somebody they they call in help to like how do you explain to a 15-year-old boy that you're dying and how how is that going to feel? So they ask the doctors how how much time does he have? They say two days. So in this in this situation, they ask this boy, okay, you're going to die. What do you want to do with your
11:30 life in the in the next two days? What do you want to do? And surprisingly, he says, I want to go outside. I just want to go outside. This this guy grew up probably on a farm or something, and he spend his time outside. So, he wants to go outside. So, you know how I mean, I don't know if you know this, but like if you're a nurse or you're a doctor and you've done everything you can and this and you're just completely horrified at the fact that this 15-year-old is going to die and he has one request. You're going to move heaven and earth to fulfill that one request. And that's exactly what they do. They get this boy the hospital bed outside. He's on a BPA machine the respiratory therapists have put together. So this guy is outside
12:16 and they're not putting him outside to get better. He's just This is his dying wish. They also use this thing called a Firefly. It's like a light device that they were using. I to I'll be honest, I don't know which did it. The Firefly. What's that? It's a It's a light device that gives off light at different wavelengths and they would use that for about three times a day for five minutes. This guy does not die. After the first day, his white count starts to come down. That's like a measure of the infection that's going on in the lung. And and by the way, they do a CT scan of his lung before this all starts. And and it's just the the the remaining lung on the right is just filled with infection. It's horrible. By the by the second day, the white
13:02 count comes down even more. And there, by the way, they haven't changed any of the other treatment. He's been in by this point he's been in for 6 weeks. He has not seen the light of day. And and he's still getting the powerful antifungal medication amphoterin B and posiconazol. All of these things are are really high powered drugs that that just completely fight fungus, but it's not working. He's getting worse. But now he's out for the second day. The white count's coming down, which is good. Not it's a good sign. His oxygen requirement is coming down. That's a good sign. He's requiring less and less oxygen. By the time he gets to day five, okay, we're already past 2 days. He's off the BPAP. He's on regular just nasal canula oxygen that you see people wearing on their nose. The doctors are scratching their
13:48 head. They're like, "We we should get a CT scan to see what's going on." So, so Amy tells me that they they get a CT scan of this guy and they're in the room and some some even like swear under their breath like they they're completely amazed because on the CT scan obviously the left lung is still gone but the right lung the disease is probably 60 70% gone and he he's still alive. He goes home. There's no sign of the disease after after treatment. And he he uh I I just she just uh communicated with me to tell me that he just got his make a wish uh thing for for his cancer. He's continuing treatment and to and she just
14:34 can't believe that he was literally two day two days away from dying. They changed nothing. They changed none of his treatments. The only thing that they did was they took him outside and they they were using this Firefly before inside, but they were using it more consistently when he got outside. Maybe hospitals should be outside. This is exactly what Okay, so if you wanted to know what my drive was, what what it is my purpose that I'm doing right now, I'm working at three different hospitals and I'm trying to work in each of those three different hospitals to try to get patients outside. The biggest barrier that we have is staff taking those patients outside. That's the thing that's the hardest. But this is what we used to do, Stephen. This is what we used when we built hospitals at the turn of the
15:19 century. We had hospital rooms where beds could be taken out onto the veranda and people could get sunlight. I would love to see a time where we could go back to that type of uh effect. There's studies that have been done. People in a two-bed room, if you're the bed closer to the window, you get discharged from the hospital faster on average. Really? Yes. I need to swap sides of the bed with my girlfriend. She's on the sunny side. There there's so much evidence for this. People who are in hospitals that are have bigger windows, they give better surveys. And hospitals uh reimbursement is tied to the surveys that they get from patients. So, it's literally a win-win-win. If hospitals started to, I believe, get patients outside and and
16:05 they're already doing this there. I don't want to say that this isn't happening. There are hospitals that are have programs to get patients outside. Um, I think we just ought to be doing it a lot more. Um, temperance. Temperance. What does that mean? It's an old term, isn't it? It really means moderation. And and I I would say in this sense temperance really means to uh avoid toxins in the body. Um as somebody who is a pulmonologist who is what's a pulmonologist? Pulmonologist is someone who takes care of the lungs. And so as a result of that I see a lot of issues uh with lung cancer related to smoking. Um I see in the intensive care unit people with liver failure as a result of of alcohol
16:51 abuse. I also see people uh on empetamines here in Southern California where I uh reside and where I work. We we have quite a bit of that and uh temperance. If if you want to live a long and wholesome life, there are some toxins that you want to avoid. And uh and and understanding that is really important. So this is something that if you stop some of those things that we're talking about, all of those links are going to be improved. Air seems kind of obvious. Early on, I used to think that that what this meant was getting pure air with absolutely nothing in it except for just nitrogen and oxygen. That's not true anymore. We now understand that for you to have the
17:36 best type of air, it actually has to come with some things in it. Just like our our gut has a microfllora that you may have heard about, so too does the air that we breathe also must have that. And um the best type of air that you can have is actually outside. Rest. This is really interesting because we just mentioned that exercise was a pillar, but rest also is. How can rest and exercise at the same time be pillars of health? And it really comes down to knowing when to do what? Sleep, which is also part of rest. So we're not just talking about a daily rest when you go to sleep. And and as a sleep physician, I can tell you uh quite a bit. We have lots of information about how long we should sleep, the quality of sleep, some
18:23 of the diseases that prevent us from sleeping. Sleep is so important. I can't I I I couldn't overexpress it enough. Not just a a daily rest, but um I would also say and v and venture out. We can talk more about this. A weekly rest. A weekly rest. What do you mean weekend? Like Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. How many times do we uh even on the weekend do we put down our our phone? Never. Or we stop reading emails and we take the time out to do things that we would never be able to do. Finally, trust. So, this is something that really just can't be ignored. And and I'll say this upfront that um in the world of research and science
19:09 there is a there is a silo of science and there is a silo of faith. But what's what we can't ignore is the growing body of evidence from the scientific world that's peeking over and looking at faith that people who have faith and people who have faith in God uh whether that is uh their God in in that particular denomination are better apt and able to deal with stress and depression and anxiety. So this is something scientifically that has been shown. Now, if you you may have noticed that I I did these in a particular order. Um, and if you go through them, you've got nutrition, you've got exercise, you've got water, you've got sunlight, you've
19:56 got temperance, you have air, you have rest, and finally you have trust. You put that together and it spells out new start. So interestingly these these particular topics are not copyrighted but there is a um there is a university in Northern California called Weimore University that is actually put these together in that very pattern as called it new start they actually have a new start program um and so this is something that uh that is actually being used uh internationally. So, of these subjects that you just went through there for this new start um framework, where do you want to start? I think actually sunlight is is one of those things where I'm excited about all of those, but I think sunlight is is
20:42 really where we have it's the let's put it this way, it's the lowest hanging fruit. Okay. Explain to me why sunlight is the the place where your focus is at the moment. It's a long trip that has gotten me to that. Um, and I and I think part of it has goes through right through COVID. So, as a critical care intensivist, when I heard that there was this virus that was coming, they all told us that it was going to be people with respiratory illnesses, which I was certainly comfortable with, but that's not what it turned out to be. We certainly saw people with respiratory illnesses, but what we saw in the intensive care unit, the people that were dying around me were people with obesity, people with heart disease, people with kidney disease, people with dementia, people with chronic diseases. And it made me
21:30 think, why was that the case? All of those things have one thing in common and many other things, too, but specifically they're rooted in something called mitochondrial dysfunction. So, let me unpack that for you. And and this has to do with longevity. This has to do with aging. This is a huge topic that is now just emerging. And we're we're now finding more about this. So, when we were when I was in high school biology, when I was in college, uh we all learned about this little organel in all of our cells except for red blood cells called the mitochondria. And and I have to say it, what is the mitochondria? It's the powerhouse of the cell, right? So, it's the thing that makes energy. What we didn't know at the time is that as we get older, the output from these
22:16 batteries in our cells drops by about 70%. Damn. Can you imagine running your house on 70% less energy? How fundamentally that would change change what happens in your house? Like you could not run the laundry the same way. You could not run the microwave and the laundry at the same time. And what does that look like in terms of symptoms? Excellent question. Because what it looks like is depending on the cell type that we're talking about, that's going to have the issue. So, if we're talking about the liver, the liver is going to get more fatty. If we're talking about the heart, the heart's going to is going to become more congested. If we're talking about the brain, it's going to have more dementia. And so, what's what's happening here is that as we get older, the batteries in our cells are not working the same way as they used to. Metabolism is slowing down. And and so, these are these are
23:01 huge issues. And all of these diseases that I just talked about, all the ones that we saw in COVID, if you look in a lot of these diseases, they are rooted in mitochondrial dysfunction. So the question is is why is that the case and what can we do about it? So there was a paper that came out in 2019 that fundamentally changed the way I saw this. It was written by um Russell Writer who is the uh executive editor of Melatonin Research. It's a he's out of University of Texas and Scott Zimmerman who's a light engineer and what they set forth was to show that basically sunlight is made up of so many different types of wavelengths. You've got ultraviolet on one end which of course makes vitamin D and it's very
23:48 beneficial. It it's the type of light from the from the sun that is very shortwave and but cannot penetrate very deeply. Let me let me back up a little bit and explain. You pull up to a stop sign and somebody pulls up next to you and they're playing the latest hiphop music. How does that sound to you in your car? It's very boom boom, right? Yeah. And muffled. It muffled. And the reason why is because low wave frequency has the ability to travel very far. Go to the Grand Canyon and there's a thunderstorm at the other end of it. What do you hear? It's like a rumbling. And then as it gets closer you hear the higher pitch sounds. This is a fundamental physics uh principle. And so when the sun is is shining there's very short wavelengths ultraviolet B involved
24:34 in vitamin D. But at the other end there's this infrared light which we'll talk about or red light. It's very long wavelength and it can penetrate very very deeply. That's very important because what we're talking about is the human body. And if the sun is going to have an effect on the human body, it's got to be more than just the skin. So that's exactly what what this paper showed is that basically infrared light from the sun is able to penetrate probably up to about 8 cmters according to Scott Zimmerman in this article. And it fundamentally interacts with specifically the mitochondria. And what does it do to the mitochondria? So let's let's back up and talk about the mitochondria because this is central. The mitochondria to the cell is like the
25:20 engine in your car. The engine produces locomotion that causes this the wheels to spin. But in the process of doing it, it causes heat to uh surround the engine. And if you don't deal with that heat, it will shut down the engine. It will make it more inefficient and eventually it will shut it down. So what do all internal combustion engines have? They have a cooling system. They have a radiator. They have a an oil pan. they have a water pump and that's exactly what the cell has to have for the mitochondria. It's not heat in the mitochondria. It's called oxidative stress and it's specifically oxidative stress that causes destruction and uh and um yeah destruction of the mitochondria and leads to these types of diseases. So oxidative stress causes the
26:06 mitochondria not to work well. This leads to diabetes. Oxidative stress makes the mitochondria not work so well. This leads to dementia. So there's this has already been laid out. This is not that controversial. The controversial part is what do we do about it? So what these guys in this paper showed was that and and not just them but look reviewing the literature is that the mitochondria makes its own cooling system and that cooling system is melatonin. Now you might be thinking wait a minute melatonin isn't that the isn't that the stuff that we take that our brain makes right before we go to sleep? Yeah that you're it's absolutely correct that's what happens. The problem is is that this is not melatonin that's made in the brain. This is not melatonin that goes through the blood supply and goes goes through our
26:51 blood and tells us it's time to go to sleep. This is melatonin that's made in the cell in the mitochondria and it's a powerful antioxidant that basically prevents the oxidative stress from occurring. What Scott Zimmerman and Russell Writer showed in proposed in this was that basically the infrared radiation that's coming in to the body is able to stimulate and upregulate melatonin and a number of other factors that keep the mitochondria cool and can actually improve the energy output of the mitochondria. So, this is this was actually mind-blowing to me. And I'll tell you why I resonated with this as a critical care physician because there was two things that bothered me the most. Number one,
27:36 SARS KV2 virus when it comes into the body, it interacts with something called the A2 receptor. You may have heard about the A2 receptor. Okay, this is where the the virus actually latches on to the cell and gets internalized. So, what is this A2 receptor? Is this was this there for all of humanity just to be a receptor or does it actually have a role? It turns out it actually has a role and mind-blowingly the A2 receptor is involved in mitigating oxidative stress. So in other words, it's another part of the cell's cooling system for the mitochondria. What what's happening is that the the virus when it attaches to the cell is basically eliminating that action. And
28:22 so imagine you have a bunch of people with various different engines running at different temperatures. In other words, you've got some people with chronic disease and we know their engines are running hot. We have other people who are completely healthy and they're doing quite well. Their engines are nice and cool. They have no problems at all. Now imagine COVID comes and SARS KV2 is infecting everybody. What that h tendency is to do is because it's knocking out everybody's A2 receptor which has the ability to cool down the engine if in other words it's causing everybody's engine to run hot. Right? So but in somebody so in other words picture this way you're you're you're driving along in your car and your thermometer is there and all of a sudden there's this big hill that you have to climb called CO 19. who's going to make it over that hill and who's not
29:09 going to make it over that hill. The people that make it over the hill are those with great cooling engines whose temperatures are running great. The ones that don't make it over that hill are the ones that have the thermometer on their engine running hot. Those are the ones that poop out at the top and can't make it. And they're they're the ones pulled over to the side of the road with the hood up and the steam coming out of the out of the engine. Do you understand what I'm saying? Of course. So, this makes perfect sense to me why I wasn't seeing what they were predicting, which is these respiratory patients coming into the ICU. Who was I seeing in the ICU? I was seeing people with dementia, as we talked about, diabetes, kidney disease. These are the ones that were that that were sick. The other thing that that really hit me and resonated with this was and this was this was not even controversial. We knew early on in the
29:54 pandemic that people who came into the hospital and had higher levels of vitamin D did really well. They didn't die. They they didn't have the same chances of dying. People who had low vitamin D levels, they had much higher levels uh chances of dying. So, we would check these vitamin D levels. And so, think about this. You're you're there at ground zero and you're taking care of these patients and you see this data over and over and over again that vitamin D is very predictive of who's going to die. Obviously, what are you going to do? Even though this is an associative study, that association doesn't mean causation. You're going to be giving people vitamin D and try to get those levels up. The problem is is that we gave vitamin D
30:40 and it really didn't have much of an effect. So you gave it in supplement type. Yeah. When people would come into the hospital like this. Exactly. Exactly. Just like that. In fact, I was supplementing myself. I mean, what have you got to lose, right? I already took my vitamin D uh tablet this morning. I don't there's not that's very hard to overdose, but it's possible. So, you noticed that it was hard to treat people with vitamin D, but giving them a a tablet didn't really do much. That's correct. Why? Well, this is what I believe is the is the is the fact is we saw that people with high levels of vitamin D or normal levels of vitamin D did better than those that had low levels. I believe that that was a marker of something else. In other words, people who had higher
31:28 levels of vitamin D meant that they were out in the sun more. they were outside more than those that people that had very low vitamin D levels. The people with low vitamin D levels were telling me these are people that were not getting outside into the sun. And so what's the real factor here? What's doing the heavy lifting? And I would propose and Scott Zimmerman and Russell Ryder would propose and I I can tell you a number of other scientists that would agree with me on this is that infrared radiation from the sun is causing an effect at the mitochondrial level in terms of oxidative stress and that vitamin D was just the marker of who was getting the infrared light and who was not. Who was going outside and who was not going outside. So when the sun is
32:14 shining, for the most part, you're getting infrared light. You're getting the entire the entire biological spectrum from the sun. We can go to the longest wavelength, which is far infrared, all the way to the shortest wavelength, which is ultraviolet B, okay? Which makes vitamin D. So in other words, when you are outside in a natural environment, you're getting a very broad spectrum of light. And so because of that, if you're getting infrared light, you're also going to be making vitamin D. Yeah, you're getting both. Um, now that can change because in the wintertime when the sun is lower in the sky, especially, you know, in England, this is this is a special issue at that latitude. When the sun is low in the
32:59 sky, it's got the light has to penetrate through obliquely through the atmosphere. And because of that, shortwave radiation from the sun like ultraviolet B does not make it very well. So there's times of the year where you're not getting enough ultraviolet B or maybe even no ultraviolet B from the sun, which makes the vitamin D which makes the vitamin D and that you're going to be deficient. You need to supplement. However, during that same period of time when you're not getting enough vitamin D because there's no ultraviolet B radiation, that sun is low, but that's it's still enough to allow that long wavelength penetrating infrared light to still come through. So, is the longwave infrared light the type of thing that we see these gadgets
33:46 doing? Absolutely. And and uh I would say just to be specific is because you can see that as red light there that's not infrared light because you can see it. So infrared light technically is completely invisible. But this these do give out infrared light but you just can't see it. Exactly. So it's toward that red end of the spectrum. And people like Glenn Jeffrey out of UCL is actually doing research at 670 nanometers of red light and has shown in randomized control trials that that type of light right there at 670, the type that you can even see actually does improve mitochondrial efficiency. He's shown this in a number of randomized control trials. It improves eyesight and and you have to realize that the retina at the back of your eye is very rich in mitochondria.
34:32 He's shown this in terms of managing glucose and and output from mitochondria. And and the reason why these things uh work so well is because what's going on here is as you get older, your skin starts to become more saggy because the the fibroblast or the cells in your skin, they're designed to make collagen and collagen is the skeleton that makes your skin soft and subtle. Yeah. Don't mind me, please. No, no. So this is this is exactly my wife uses the same thing. This is a fun charge one. So what what's going on right now is that red light which can penetrate very deeply down is going into the skin and it is activating the mitochondria in your fibroblast to produce more energy which those cells need to deposit
35:17 collagen. And so when you deposit collagen that's going to give the skin a more tight uh feel because as you get older that collagen deposition is going to get less and less and less. So, this is going to help keep me looking young. That's the whole point of it. And you're saying that the the light in these penetrates what six or seven centimeters or is it infrared does about 8 cm? Uh, this red light would be a little bit less because this light light obviously you can see it. So, it is a little bit shorter wavelength, but yes, this light, the red light can penetrate deeper than for instance yellow light or blue light. And it's this light particularly that interacts with the mitochondria to increase that. So, should we be putting this all over our body? because okay, it's good for my skin, but if it's penetrating deeper, presumably there's other parts of my body that would benefit from that, another mitochondria.
36:03 It's interesting you say that. Um the the the study that I'm referring to with Glenn Jeffrey out of University College London, he took uh young people in this study, he gave them a a bunch of glucose and everybody who gets a bunch of glucose should have a spike in their blood sugar in he randomized them on their backs to see what would happen when he shined red lights uh on their backs. And the people that got the red light had lower spikes. In other words, it seemed as though the mitochondria were metabolizing faster, which caused less of a spike of the glucose in their blood. The way he confirmed that is looking for the byproducts of the mitochondrial metabolism, which is carbon dioxide. So, when we breathe, when we metabolize, we're breathing out
36:49 carbon dioxide, which is the result of of a mitochondrial um metabolism. And in fact, in those people that had the light on, it showed a higher level of carbon dioxide in the exhaled uh breath. The whole point of that is to get back to your question is whether we should be putting this all over your body. He was able to get that effect systemically with just putting the light on the back. Um that was a that was a systemic uh ability. But we don't understand everything about the mitochondria, but what we do seem to understand is that they can communicate with each other and that you don't need to have this all over the body to have systemic effects. In this particular case though, if you want to have the skin here to be more uh you know younger looking, then it makes
37:36 sense that this is where you need to have it. If you want to have a particular other part of your body to look younger, then then perhaps that that's where the light needs to go. So interesting. How long did it take in those studies to see the effect of red light therapy like this? Well, that's a very good question. If you talk to Glenn Jeffrey, which I have, he noticed a an improvement in 15 minutes. 15 15 minutes. What did he notice in 15 minutes? He said he has studied the mitochondria in fruit flies, in mosquitoes and bees, and in human beings. And it's the same every time. He says after about 15 to 20 minutes of this type of light in that type of setting there is a switch that turns on and and you and you don't need further stimulation. Further stimulation doesn't do anything more. It's a it's a
38:22 very bizarre thing. You would think that the more light that you gave the more the effect would be. It's not. After about 15 minutes it it there's something that changes in the mitochondria. There are certain theories about where this might be. This might be in the electron transport chain uh uh complex 4. Uh these are very technical things. There's a lot of studies that are actually there's a number of groups that are actually looking at this. Uh there's a whole area of science called photobiomodulation which is looking at this. But 15 minutes is really what it takes. So we're not we're not talking about a long period of time. This is really really interesting. So getting back to my experience in the intensive care unit, the vitamin D wasn't working. These patients were dying and it became clear
39:07 to me that COVID was a metabolic uh issue for these patients. By the time I had realized this, the s I mean the pandemic arguably is still going on because people are still becoming infected, but the rush to come into the hospital and and the number of bodies that we were seeing circulating through the intensive care unit had dropped dramatically. And at that point, I was able to see that potentially infrared light may be very very beneficial in these patients with CO 19. Now, there was a study in Brazil. They took COVID patients that were that were sick enough to be admitted to the hospital, but not too sick to be intubated in an intensive care unit. And they did something
39:54 tremendous. They actually manufactured a jacket that they could put on patients. And on the inside of this jacket were these LED bulbs that gave off infrared radiation at exactly 940 nanometers. They put the jackets on and they randomly randomized the sign which jacket was turned on and which jacket was turned off. It was blinded because the light coming from this jacket could not be seen by the human eye. It wasn't even enough to produce enough heat. And so they they did this on 30 subjects and they randomized them. 15 did it 50 all 15 or all 30 had the jackets on. 15 had it turned on. 15 did not have it turned on and they watched them. what happens to these patients? Every single endpoint that they looked at was statistically significant. And
40:41 what does that mean? It means that the differences between these two groups could not have been from chance. There was a real difference. The group that had the jacket turned on had improvement in their oxygen saturation, had could take breaths in more deeply and stronger, had improvements in their blood, white blood cells. Um, and not only that, had improvements in their heart rate, their respiratory rate, all of these statistically significant, but the most important and mind-blowing statistic was the length of stay in the hospital. So, they had these jackets on for 15 minutes once a day for 7 days. In the group that did not have the
41:27 jacket turned on, their average length of stay was 12 days in the hospital. For those that had the jacket turned on, it was 8 days. That was 4 day difference. That's tremendous when you realize that it costs thousands of dollars to hospitalize patients. It's it's a huge amount when you think about the fact that there are certain drugs that get FDA approved for influenza, for instance, by just cutting short the symptoms for 24 hours. This is not just 24 hours, 40. people were discharged from the hospital 4 days faster. When I saw that study, that was enough for me to convince me. I mean, obviously, it was 30 subjects, right? We should do a bigger study. We should do a hund a couple hundred, right? That would be that would be ideal to do. But the fact
42:12 that with just 30 patients, they could show statistical significance. That was enough for me to say every patient from now on that I see that comes in with CO 19 that's hospitalized that they're asking me to go intubate to bring to my ICU, these patients are going to get outside. I don't have that jacket that they made in Brazil. I I I don't even know how I would make that jacket. They made it for the study and it's not commercially available. There's no 940 nmter light, which is what they did in the study. But I do know this. I do know that sunlight has 940 nanometers in it and if I could just take these patients outside maybe they could improve. So I had I got my wish. I had a patient on the floor. He was on 35 L a minute 100% oxygen
43:02 through his high flow through his nose through his nose barely barely saturating because he had CO 19. And uh I was asked to go see him because he was potentially needing to be intubated or brought to the intensive care unit. I could not believe it because I had not seen one of these in months. So I went down, walked into the room, opened the door. It was in isolation. I had a mask on. The whole nine yards. The room was completely dark. The blind was closed. His daughter was there and the first words out of his mouth to me was, "Doc, how much time have I got?" I mean, it was a catastrophe. Like there was no light, no circadian rhythm. This guy was depressed. I immediately called my respiratory therapist, immediately called the charge nurse. We got everybody together and I said, "We need to get this guy outside." It was a bright and sunny day. How are
43:47 we going to get this guy outside? 35 L, 100%. We, my respiratory therapist, Kim, managed to put a couple of oxygen tanks together and we were able to get this guy into a wheelchair and we wheeled him outside. And uh he told me this uh weeks later, but he says, "You know, that first day that you got me outside in the sun," cuz we did this for like 7 days in a row. He said, "That felt so good." Um he after just one day dropped down from 35 L to 15 L. 15 L of of oxygen and then down to 12 and then down to eight the next day and then down to five. 5 days the amount of oxygen he was inhaling to keep him alive. Correct. So in other words, we were titrating down the amount of oxygen that we had to give him to maintain a
44:33 saturation in the '9s. In 5 days, he was discharged home without oxygen. Now obviously that's an anecdote, right? That's not a study, but I'm looking at the risks of getting people out in the sun for 15 20 minutes. There's not a lot of risk to that. And if there's a benefit, I thought it was worthwhile doing. We we need to have larger randomized control trials. But it got me down the road to looking to see what what was it about sunlight that was affecting this change. And you know what? There was there's there's ample data there. There was a study actually that was done in in Europe where they looked they said, "Okay, here's CO CO's going up. When does CO go up? Is it because of temperature that changes? Is it because of humidity?" And
45:18 the answers to both of those were no. Do you know what predicted when countries were to have their first surge in the autumn of 2020? There was a study that was actually done on this. It was latitude. It started in Finland and then really went down the entire continent. The last country in the in the autumn of 2020 to have a COVID surge was Greece. So a as the sun is literally pulling down into the southern hemisphere, as the shadow starts to go over Europe, that's when we start to see CO surges one by one by one. There was Yeah. Is Is that because CO and the sun aren't friends? So if I it makes it harder to spread because, you know, if I put CO on this table and then I put sunlight on the table, the CO is going to die. Yeah, it it's possible. Uh although we
46:03 now know that CO probably doesn't spread too much through contact. it's it's more of an airborne thing. So there there was a a study that was done out of University of Edinburgh and they looked at this very question that we had talked about earlier about vitamin D. They looked at the United States in the in the wintertime. So and they eliminated the southern part of the United States because in the southern part of the United States you can actually get some vitamin D in the wintertime. So they just looked at the sort of the northern portion of the United States and they were able to show that the more sunlight there was in particular areas the lower the mortality from CO 19. So they said this is interesting. What about in England? So they they did the exact same study in England and and sure enough of course they didn't have to eliminate any
46:49 part of England because the whole country doesn't get any vitamin D in the winter time. What they showed was that again certain parts of the country in England as you know get more sunlight than other parts. Well those areas that got more sunlight had lower mortality from CO 19. Then they took the same they predicated the same uh study and they looked in Italy exactly the same finding and they published this and they said in their study and this is what really amazed me. They said the fact if this is causal, they say they said that um this might actually show a possible public health intervention. The fact that it is completely independent of vitamin D means that there's something else going on.
47:35 There was a study in 2011 in Sweden. Yes. Is that linked to this? No, this is a completely different study. But that that's also a very important study. So the Swedish study is is is groundbreaking. Um this was a study where they asked 20,000 20 to 30,000 Swedish women about their habits in sunlight. And they divided these women into three categories. Those women that did not get a lot of sun, those that got a moderate amount of sun, and those that got a lot of sun. And they followed them for 20 years. And they they kept a track of each one that died and what they died of. And when they were done with that, they were astonished because what they found was that the women who had spent most spent
48:20 the large amount of their time outside or that spent the most amount of time outside had the least amount of mortality from cancer, from cardiovascular disease and non-cardiovascular disease. And those that spent the least amount of time outside had the highest levels of that. The magnitude difference between those two was so much that they were able to show that women who in Sweden who spent the most amount of time outside and smoked had the same mortality as those women that did not spend as much time outside and did not smoke. They were equal. They were equal. In other words, being in that category of not spending much time outside in the sun was the same
49:08 risk factor for death as smoking. How do they know it wasn't linked to exercise? How are they able to establish causation? Because that's a you're absolutely that's an excellent question. So the the difference here as you go up is this is a this is an association study. Okay. So the question is is how can you get causation from association? You can't. But if you look at the Bradford Hill criteria, there is a way that you can potentially make a a strong argument for causation if there's something called a dose response curve. In other words, if you can show you're not just comparing two things, but you're comparing three or more. If you can show that as you increase the variable that there is a change in the the output, that is strongly suggestive
49:55 of potentially causation. By the way, this is exactly what we did to show that smoking causes lung cancer. Obviously, we can't do a randomized control trial here. You get to smoke, you don't get to smoke, we'll follow up in 20 years to see who has lung cancer. This is exactly what we did. We showed that that there was such a strong association with cancer risk with smoking that we were able to say through association that smoking causes lung cancer. By the way, Richard Weller, who's a dermatologist in England, uh did just last year a very similar study as to the Swedish study, except it was 10 times bigger, and he did it with both men and women. He found the same results. It was a UK bioank study. What did he discover? He discovered that either from from solariums or from um or
50:44 being outside using solar radiation data, uh he was able to show both on their their questionnaire and also where they lived that the more light that they had the lower their risk of of of um mortality uh and um and cancer mortality. So the question was does it increase melanoma? What's melanoma? Melanoma is is a skin cancer. So that's the big risk. That's the big risk that everybody's concerned about. You go out into the sk sun and you're going to get skin cancer. And he was able to show in that study, this was like three three 400,000 people in this study, UK bioank study, Richard Weller. He was able to show that there was no increased there's no statistical increased risk of melanoma incidents but
51:31 there was a reduction in non-skin cancer mortality. Okay. So, so here's the trade-off. If you want to go out into the sun in England, okay, the benefits are you're going to have a reduction in non-skin cancer mortality. So, everything other than skin cancer. Correct. On the other hand, there's no increase in melanoma incidents. So, that caused him to write an a an op-ed and publish it. And actually, you can look up this oped. It's a great op-ed uh published in a um in the journal of investigative dermatology called sunlight, time for a rethink where he goes through the arguments and he's actually shown and and there's been a number of changes that people have
52:17 around the globe. So public health uh uh organizations that are saying now you know before we have said that you know the the sun is a deadly laser and you should avoid it at all costs. We may need to rethink that. So are you telling me that essentially 15 minutes in the sun every day turns on a switch in my body that improves my mitochondrial function which is going to impact a variety of different parts of my health. Is that essentially what you're saying? Essentially. Yes. uh and and and we're we're looking and this is in an environment where where we are spending less and less and less time to give to give you to put in perspective if we were on a British ship 300 years ago and I came to you and I said do you see this little yellow fruit just by eating a
53:04 little bit of this yellow fruit all of this disease that you're seeing around you with your fellow shipmates is going to go away that that would seem almost incredulous right but that's exactly the case we we are the scurvy of the 21st century is the lack of sunlight. Everything is inside. Uh we we avoid the outside. We avoid discomfort. We avoid high temperatures. We avoid low temperatures. We are we used to go out and play sports. We now are are playing virtual sports on on pads. We have windows that are specifically designed, especially here in Southern California, to eliminate infrared light because why? infrared light comes in and it heats up. One of the interesting things, we didn't mention this about infrared light is the
53:50 way that we interact with infrared light. You can you can tell this on your own. You go outside and close your eyes. You can tell which side of your body the sun is on. And the reason is is because that infrared light not only can penetrate through your body, it's also penetrating through clothes very easily. And you can feel that that that heat that you're feeling is the infrared light going through the going through the clothes, going through the skin and interacting with your heat receptors that are well below the surface. Um, so all of this right guys going to go get Steve. The guest is here. Ready? Come in. Oh my god. Steve, what are you doing? This is uh the Bontage face mask. It's good for blemishes, wrinkles, uh, clears up the skin. It's red light. Have you
54:37 not used it before? No, tried this before. It's um it's really really good. It's shines red light on your face which helps increase and boost collagen production. Actually found it out because of the misses. Seen her wearing it. She terrified me a couple of nights in a row. Um I thought it was to scare people with but actually it's really really good for your skin. So they are a sponsor of the podcast and uh I've been using it every day for about a year and a half now. Wow. You're glowing. Well, Steve, it's great. Yes. And Bonchard ships worldwide with easy returns and a year-long warranty on all of their products. So, visit bondcharge.com/diary for 25% off on any product sitewide, but you have to order through that link. That's bondcharge.com/diary with code diary. Whether you are a novice or you've been in the tax and bookkeeping industry for years, if you
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56:08 I'll put that on the screen. That's intuitit.com/expert. How long does the average American spend indoors or the average Brit spend indoors? Good question. They're almost identical. Uh I think the Brits spend a little bit more time outside than Americans. the the the last number for Americans was 93%. And uh Brits is 92%. Were we born to be outside? I think so. You'd think our ancestors probably spent a huge amount of time outside. Yeah. And if you think about when I say outside, that also brings into play a number of other of the new start letters that we haven't talked about. Uh exercise, you're much more likely to do good exercise outside. You're much more likely to get air. That's that's the right type of air outside. The other
56:53 aspect about infrared light briefly is that trees are highly reflective of infrared light. In other words, if you're in an environment where there are trees are present, you're going to get much more of this beneficial infrared light than if you're in a concrete jungle. So, so, so plants like this, in fact, the way that we measure the the forestation of the Amazon is through satellite imaging that looks at infrared light because it reflects infrared light back. So, the best thing best situation to be in is to be outside on a green on a day where where there's lots of green trees. We we've known for we've known for decades that people who live in green spaces do much better in terms of
57:39 diabetes, do much better in terms of hypertension, mortality, all of these things. Depression, depression, all of these things. Yeah. And and when you think about this, um you you bring up a point in terms of of of correlation. How do we know it's not depression? We used to say, well, people who live in green spaces have more money. The people have they have more access to things. Maybe that's what we're seeing. I just have to tell you the study. There was something called the green heart study in south Louisville, Kentucky. They did an amazing thing. They took this four square mile area in South Louisville, Kentucky, urbanized uh area and they measured everybody's uh HSCP. What is HSCP? Highly sensitive C reactive protein. It's a marker of
58:25 inflammation and it's been correlated to bad things like stroke and heart attack. So if you have high levels of of CRP, that's not good. So they measured every they measured about 700 people. And then they did something extraordinary. They purchased 8,000 mature trees, dug holes, and planted 8,000 trees into four square mile area. And these are trees with leaves on them. Two years later, they come back and they measure all 700 people in their study. repeat the HRCP dropped by 13 to 20% which correlated to about a 10 to 15% reduction in strokes. These people didn't change their socioeconomic status. They didn't institute an exercise program. And so
59:12 really it kind of shoots in the heart the idea that the advantage that we see with green spaces has to do with something else that we're not measuring. I actually believe that we'll talk about fresh air too that things like these plants but much bigger. This is kind of like a bonsai plant but but trees outside they actually have a benefit and what they represent again is these things that don't leverage the other parts of your body in in terms of the chains uh that make all of the chains bigger because they're they're they're having a benefit. You can't get the benefit of this if you're inside a house. So, what should we do about this in terms of how what changes should I make in my life to capitalize on this? Um,
59:58 this is a this brand here is called Bon Charge. They do these these red light devices. They do like red light sauners, blankets, um, masks. They're actually a sponsor of mine because I I started wearing this and I think they they found out and I started wearing it because of my girlfriend. Yeah. She was wearing it every day and I got curious and so I as I always do I'm always super skeptical. Sure. So I went on online and started looking at some of the research and I was shocked. Yeah. It made no intuitive sense to me that a a red light mask or any like red light device could have a profound like what I see as a profound impact on my health. Like I didn't believe it. Yes. To start with. It was like woo woo stuff. To me, I couldn't disprove it. Right. All the studies, many of which you've referenced um supported that it was having a profound impact. And as I've said on this podcast before, my girlfriend's always right. She's like
1:00:44 always ahead of the curve, always right. So I started wearing her mask and now I have my own from Bon Charge. Yeah. Do you recommend these kinds of things? I I think it's reasonable to do I I will say this. Um if you are getting enough infrared light from the sun, what we find in studies, not particularly with the mass, but we find in other things is that these these other areas don't have as much efficacy. It's almost to say if you're on a ship with a bunch of people with scurvy and you already have a diet that's rich in vegetables and fruits, eating an extra lemon is not going to be that beneficial. So, what do you do? Like a lot of doctors do, we have shifts that go from 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. So, you're in the hospital, you're not going to get outside. So, at lunch, I try to get outside as much as I possibly can into the sun for my 15 minutes. What if you live in a cloudy country?
1:01:30 So, that's a good point. uh clouds because they are water molecules will absorb a lot of the infrared light. And the problem is is that that's the exactly the type of light that you want to get. However, even on a cloudy day, being outside, you're going to get more infrared light than if you were inside. Yeah. Okay. So, I still get the light I need when it's cloudy, but I just don't get a lot. Yes, exactly. Is there anything I can do to get if it's super cloudy and I know I'm going to be indoors, what do I do then? Yeah. So, the light the type of lights
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