Transcription
Welcome back to Quantum Conversations. My name is Sarah, and today my co-host, Carrie Bennett, and I have a very special two-part episode with Glenn Jeffrey, who is one of the world's leading experts, scientists, and researchers on how light interacts with the mitochondria, our metabolism, our body's ability to heal and repair, and so much more.
Now, Glenn has really been studying how, in particular, red and infrared light impact the mitochondria and, again, things like our metabolism, blood sugar responses, and insulin. He also has studied blue light extensively, as you'll hear in this interview, and how that can actually cause people to gain weight and have blood sugar issues. So these are topics that Carrie and I discuss all the time here on Quantum Conversations, and Glenn is just a really lovely, fun person that we thoroughly enjoyed speaking with. Again, this is going to be divided into two episodes, so make sure you're subscribed so you can catch both parts.
Quickly, I wanted to let you know Carrie and I are extending our VIP Health Transformation Summit upgrade deal. Now, this deal allows you to get about $2,000 worth of courses for $99. I'll put a link in the show notes and in the information section for you so you can check out some of those. But through this link, you'll be able to get my 3-day Liver and Kickstart, My Circadian Health for the Busy Person, Carrie's Nervous System and Nature course, and again, about 12 other courses from creators who were a part of our Health Transformation Summit. And you'll also get all of the recordings in case you missed them. So again, that'll be in the pinned comment as well as in the show notes. I hope you enjoy this episode with Glenn Jeffrey, and I will talk with you again soon. [Music]
Hello everyone. Welcome back to Quantum Conversations. We are very excited to have a very special guest today here with us that is really going to expand on the light story. Carrie, do you want to do a little bit of an intro, and then we'll let Glenn just start chatting away?
Sure. So, I first, we have the lovely Dr. Glenn Jeffrey, and I came across his work originally when he was on Max Gan's podcast, the Regenerative Health podcast, which is a lovely podcast and was an excellent interview. And I said to Max, I was like, I've got to get to know this guy because I'm about to present at the Water conference, you know, in Lisbon, and you know, Jerry Pollock's going to be there, I want—and I'm speaking uh, specifically on mitochondria and essentially mitochondria, water, and ATP production in response to different lighting environments. And so uh, that that I was so excited to then have Glenn uh, reach out, reach back uh, after that introduction and then give me a whole bunch of research to dive into, which was so much fun, then to be able to present in Lisbon. And so this is right up the alley of all of our people. Glenn, your work is um, it it's cutting-edge, yet I think that there's a lot of practical takeaways that we can come up with for for our people. And so we're so excited to have you. So can you just give us, give ourselves, give our listeners a little bit of background about who you are and how you came to study mitochondria and their interaction with light?
Oh, well, it's a torturous story. Uh, I I originally went to university slightly late um, and read experimental psychology, but that was at a time when experimental psychology was a lot of physiology and a lot of statistics and maths. Um, I went on to do a doctorate um, in Oxford, and I really was in the area of vision and neuroscience. Um, I spent far too much time in Oxford um, but still profoundly in vision and in visual bits of the brain. Uh, I eventually got a a permanent faculty position here at the Institute of Ophthalmology, University College London, and that brought me into contact with a different group of people, brought me into contact with the patient population because we're part of an extremely large Moorfields Eye Hospital. And so people started asking me a few questions about some very, very strange medical conditions. Um, and then, you know, as you get older your interests shift a little bit. Um, when when I was when I was a young graduate student I was interested in development. Uh, now I'm getting old, I'm interested in aging, and the one thing that bounces up every time if you're interested in aging is mitochondria. Um, and I went to an extremely impressive seminar um, by a guy called Ilas Tanes, who's an engineer, and what he was doing was he was shining a light through the head of neonatal children that had stroke, and that light he was looking is coming out the other side, and he was making predictions about survival um, by looking at their mitochondria. And I said, hey, you know, if you can do that going through the head, do you think you could do that in the eye? And he went, yeah, it's not a problem at all. Then the ball started rolling. The ball started rolling. I started getting to mitochondria. I learned how to spell the word mitochondria, and I start—I ended up in a situation now where 90% of my lab's research is mitochondrial. It includes odd things, not just aging, children with mitochondrial disease, um, people with things like macular degeneration. Generally, you know, if if you if you're interested in aging, mitochondria grab you at every corner. Um, they are core to it. And when I learned that, you know, mitochondria make ATP, and when I learned that you make your own body weight in ATP every day, you know, you start picking up on things, thinking this is the place to be. So we've expanded; we're doing different things; we're spending lots of time working with architects now, working with lighting engineers. So it's, you know, some people spend all their lives working on this particular receptor in the brain. I don't have a personality for that. Um, I kind of bounce around a little bit. And so suddenly working with architects is really an interesting different thing; they dress nicely; they've got really nice classic cars; uh, you know, it's a different culture altogether. So that's roughly who I am and where I am today.
That's so—it's so interesting. And yes, mitochondria, I was kind of hooked too when I realized how integral mitochondria were with all aspects of our physiology, they—and so it's exciting. And what I what I've really loved as as you kind of started to lay out uh, your research is that you indicated and that I think this is something that listeners would be interested in is that the light response or how mitochondria respond to light is conserved across species. Uh, we sometimes talk about uh, you know, we kind of poo-poo sometimes where they there's research that's been done on ultraviolet light using, let's say, an arc lamp shined on like a hairless rat, and you know, it's you trying to make the translation between this ultraviolet light exposure to a nocturnal creature showing damage to ultraviolet light and how that can translate to UV light being harmful to humans. I don't I don't find that to be an apples-to-apples comparison, but what I find interesting is that the uh, optics in mitochondria are apparently conserved across species, whether you're talking about a dropa or a bee or you know, a human being. So would that be a true statement?
It's definitely a true statement, and it's quite surprising. I mean, I'm I'm quite surprised by it. Um, anything I find in a in a fly or a bee um, translates to a m a mouse, and then when we try to do that clinical hum translation, it doesn't let me down; that story still seems to be the same. Now there are little tweaks in it, I'm sure, but it's not just the big picture; it's the intermediate picture that has got this conservation of of mechanisms all the way down. That's great for me because um, if I want to do a population study, um, I can't do that with mice; I can't do that with humans. If I need 150 of this and 150 of that, first of all, you know, mice in the UK cost I don't about five or $6; they cost, you know, so many dollars per day to keep, and I work a lot on aging, so I got to keep them for a long time. So um, I've always being someone who's very comparative in the sorts of things they do. I have another side that people don't see too much, which is working on Arctic and Arctic light, and and we spent ages working on reindeer and how they coped with darkness and winter. So I'm really happy to make that jump. Um, and yeah, it is highly conserved. You know, when when you think it's such a fundamental building block for life, maybe it's not too surprising, but it is as conservative as it is. But I've yet to find a significant thing where there's a difference between the fly and the human.
Oh, fabulous. So interesting. So okay, so this is now where we get to dive into some even some fun stuff, I think, for our listeners. In terms of what have you noticed in terms of the shift from, I guess, the more incandescent bulbs, which are dominant in the red and the infrared, what what can you say about how mitochondria may be negatively impacted by these blue-dominant bulbs that we have these days? What are some things that you're seeing?
Well, it's um, it's it's it's slightly um, disarming that the model is simple; the model is incredibly simple. So if we think about the mitochondria as a battery, that's how I always explain it; my mom gets that when I explain it to her, which is a good yardstick. Um, the blue light discharges the battery; it reduces the charge; the red light increases the charge. Now, for millions of years, uh, we've wandered around under sunlight where the balance between the blue and the red is is pretty—it's been in balance; sunlight hasn't changed for billions of years. So we're wandering around in that, and then really since the early 2000s, we—everything's changed because the light that came out of an incandescent bulb was very similar to sunlight, and prior to that we had candles. Suddenly, boom, there's a massive change in lighting, and the thing that I think is terribly surprising is a mitochondria see it; they're aware of it because they respond both to blue and to red light. Now, the blue light does tend not to go very deep in the body, but the red light, you know, a few months ago we were measuring people standing out at sunlight, and we were putting sensitive devices on their back, and we were measuring the sunlight coming through their body—body; those long wavelengths go through. And if they go—we we didn't measure much coming out, but that's important because it means that well, the light is—it goes in; isn't reflected; it's going in; it's staying in; it's doing something. And I'm measuring this little bit that comes out the back. So great, if we're in sunlight. If you're sitting in your office, um, you know, with standard lighting, that light that goes through your body, you're not getting it; you're—and then you start looking at all the population data, how certain diseases change when you don't get much sunlight. So so that's that's driving me now, and we've just finished the study—great study—uh, done by one of the people in the lab, and he's gone to a big building in UCL here in London, and he's got no daylight, and we measured the retinal sensitivity of the people working in it, and then we gave them all incandescent lamps, and we left them for two weeks, and we came back, and the result was really dramatic; their ability to detect the differences in colors had improved very, very significantly. So then we did the reverse experiment; we took them away, and slowly their ability to detect color differences um, slowly declined. So so it it's an experiment that worked both ways. Now we concentrate on vision because it's my background; it makes my director happy because this is an Institute of Ophthalmology; he's not so happy when I work on bees and flies. Um, but this is really quite quite important; people in that environment, and I believe many others, are working in an underpowered situation. Now we want to go and do what we've done in other situations, which just want to test their blood sugars because we know red light uh, makes your mitochondria work; when your mitochondria work, they need food, and their food is glucose and oxygen, and we've shown that red light reduces um, your blood sugars; that has implications for diabetes. Um, we we're getting back in there, and we're looking at the the the the blood glucose in these guys sitting in this environment as we chop and change the lights. And the great thing about that experiment is doesn't cost very much; you know, you just get the light bulbs, and you change them, and then everyone gets very fed up with you when you take them away because they see what's happened to them, but it's a great simple experiment.
So are—so are the changes in visual color perception a direct reflection of the health of the mitochondria in the eye?
That you've got more mitochondria in your eye than you've got in in any other tissue; your photoreceptors are just packed with it, and the reason for that is your visual sensitivity; your range goes over 9 log units from the darkest room you can see into the brightest sunlight. Now we we don't pay any attention to that; we go from room to room with a two log unit change in light, and we just don't pay any attention, but your mitochondria have got to provide the energy for that adaptation. And so using the visual system is is a pretty good model; it's got a great readout, which is can you see it? Can you not see it? It's, you know, I can measure it; it gives me numbers; um, it makes biological sense because I just know the mitochondria there. Little things are really helpful, like you've got very few mitochondria in your blue channel; your ability to see blue. So we can watch the blue suffer before the red does, and then we can bring it back up and swap the two around. It's yeah, it's a nice system; it's fun; it's—and you can make probably some really pretty graphs in your uh, in your publications showing these shape and change colors—colors.
Yeah, yeah. Um, okay, so you alluded to blood glucose, which I think would be a fascinating thing to go into. Sarah is huge on metabolism, and our community loves talking about metabolism. And one of the things that everyone gets stuck on is, well, what should I be eating? What should I be eating? What should I be eating? And we've been kind of, along with other people in this circadian space, have been saying, but what about the lighting? Because we do know that in these blue-dominant light environments, um, you could have elevations in blood glucose in spite of not eating at all, uh, and there's there's pathways in the brain that actually can lead to that. And so it was brilliant to come across the research that you've done showing that blue inhibits the mitochondria—makes sense—meaning that the blood the blood glucose has a tendency to stay potentially elevated because the mitochondria cannot use it efficiently—has ramifications for diabetes—and then the red allows those mitochondria to use it all of a sudden and become efficient. So can you talk about some st—some of the studies that you've done in, for example, glucose tolerance testing and how that how how red light might have been impactful in those instances?
Yeah, I mean, it came out of a car drive with a colleague when we were going to do a project somewhere else, and he turned around and said, you know, Glenn, if we're doing what we think we're doing, then we should be regulating blood glucose by making those mitochondria work harder. And um, that involves human subjects; it involves doing glucose tolerance tests, which are really, really horrible—drinking loads of glucose; I think your fingers pricked. And I said, well, I'm not I'm not sure about this; let's do something else first. So we we we generally we work on bees quite a lot, and so we took a whole group of bees and basically gave a glucose tolerance test; we starved them overnight, and we gave them a big chunk of glucose in the morning, which they at like crazy, and they either had blue or they had red light. Now, the bees that had the red light, their blood glucose level—it's called hemolymph—their blood—their blood glucose level went down; the red light drove it down; the blue light took them straight into diabetes. So you know, it it it was frighteningly clear, um, and it was a super straightforward experiment. Remember, I'm pushing certainly the point that that there's conservation of mitochondrial function. So having looked at that, we went, well, we can't give people blue light; it—we we just can't give people blue light. So we um, we did standard glucose tolerance tests on people; we looked at their vision, but we looked at their blood glucose level. So we got them in early in the morning, gave them red light or didn't give them red light, gave them a horrendous uh, amount of glucose, and pricked their finger every 15 minutes. Result was very clear; the the—it is not necessarily so much of a problem if you've got high blood glucose; what is a problem is it's spiking; right? You really want to get rid of those spikes; spikes will—way down—way down. Uh, one of the other things about these kind of experiments is you really get to know who your friends are because you need the subjects, um, because we also stick a tube up your nose and measure your CO2. So after we did it on ourselves, the f—next one in line was my son that I dragged in, and and actually that was a bit of an effort to get it done. Result was clear; absolutely clear. But these were ordinary healthy people. We're now just finishing off the type 2 diabetes, and we've got exactly the same result. So red light can control blood sugars; it's not the only thing; you do have to pay attention to what you eat, and you do have to pay attention to being too sedentary. However, red light as part of the package to reduce diabetes is I think probably very important. And look at the big picture; if you look at populations that spend more time in sunlight compared to populations that are inside, the people inside have got lower ability to control the insulin regulation; it—you know, so there's thousands of people there, and then there's a few of us sitting here in the lab sticking pins in our fingers and taking bl—but it all—it all fits together. Although I would say I keep saying to everybody who comes in, I can give you a bulb, but I can do this: go out in the sunlight; just go out—sunlight; make sure you—particularly this time of year—when I come to work it's pretty dark; when I go home it's completely dark; have that walk in the park at lunchtime.
Yeah, a perfect recommendation. And what I think—I think what I want to make clear about this particular research study was that these uh, participants were pre-treated with red light, if at 670 nanometers, I believe, if I'm to be correct. So how interesting, right? That it's not necessarily uh, that you have to be in front of a red light panel the whole entire time; that it's it's this pre-treatment is essentially programming the mitochondria to be more metabolically efficient so that when they do have that glucose exposure, they're able to metabolize it more efficiently.
Yeah. Now I think there are a number of problems with this, and they came out from the vision problems, and that is that it's a surprising amount of red light—surprisingly small amount of red light—that is having this effect, you know, and and that worries me; it worries me because the model isn't following a normal biological model; there's no dose-response curve; it's a switch—d—something happens; you give the red light, and then maybe an enzyme is produced somewhere. Now that's fine; it works; it's a fantastic patch over a problem, but that's very different from daylight when you're out in daylight; you're getting it all the time. So maybe the difference is I've got you in a blue environment; I'm giving you red to pump you up, whereas when you're going out there, you're getting that natural balance between blue and red. But the take-home has to be light is regulating blood sugar levels.
Yeah, absolutely. Now I'm curious because in other studies too—this one I believe was in—was in dropa where you shined a small amount of blue light as well; it decreased mitochondrial membrane potential and potentially their their motor capabilities as well, and it lasted for a some duration. Did there—was there a specific time of day that you kept consistent with that?
We do, but just because of the patterns of our lives, we tend to do experiments in the morning; you come in, you have a cup of coffee, you stand around wasting 10 or 15 minutes, and then you tend to go in the lab and do things, and I don't know why, but for a lot of scientists, they tend to do stuff in the morning; in the afternoons they're sitting in front of a computer. So we always did our experimental manipulations in the mornings. Okay. Really did, and we're absolutely fine with that; we were very happy, but there were lots of people who were not getting the same results as us, and there was a big meeting, uh, a vision meeting in Baltimore, maybe about seven years ago, and we all knew one another, and one of the great things about this community initially was we shared data because it was so much low-hanging fruit, and we sat around and we talked to—why weren't, you know, why we were using males, we're using females, you know, remember. And then it suddenly transpired that the big effects were always coming in the morning. Right. When we worked that one out, everyone went away, and a lot of people replicated one another's experiments, and same effect. So whether you're a fly, a bee, or a human being, the red light experiments really only come to their optimum is if you do the exposures in the morning; the blue is a bit more messy, um, and I haven't really got my hand on that to some extent. I know where we're going with the blue; we've got to get rid of it; we've got to change the LEDs. I don't see why I've got to torture people and try and find out the time of day; there's there's so much stuff that we can do. Um, everyone that I'm talking to in my environment—the architects, the—the medics, the lighting engineers—are all on board for getting rid of the blue. So we've won that one, you know, conceptually; we've won it.
Great. That's great. So I'm just—I'm just, you know, I don't know, Sarah, maybe this would make you as well; I'm just wondering if since at dawn and and sunrise we know that that's a fairly dominant uh, in the red and infrared spectrum, I'm wondering if it's like the brain and the mitochondria—the skin is just—you—the eyes are just used to having a dominant input of red or perhaps even campfire before sunrise, but just a dominant input of red and infrared prior to the appearance of blue, and that's just something that triggers like a nonlinear effect.
Yeah, yeah. And that nonlinear is a word I don't use very much, but you're absolutely right; you're absolutely right. It's it's a switch; it's nonlinear; there's no dose-response curve. Um, I always try and go back and think about our, you know, where were we in evolution, and why is this important in an evolutionary context? It's got to have something to do with sunlight; the morning is just so important because all your physiology is different in the morning. So I can really only drive up mitochondria in the morning; they're dynamic when they're producing a lot of ATP; I can't do it late in the afternoon; in fact, I can't do it really after lunch very well. But then when we discuss it—when you wake up, um, you know, during evolution, you're vulnerable; someone could be watching you; you need to wake up and get stuff—get stuff on the road. So your ATP peaks naturally anyway; your hormones change like crazy, and your blood sugars go up; you know, a lot of diabetic people will tell you, you know, they have a challenge with breakfast, you know, because your blood sugars—your blood sugars are harder to—harder to control. Now I find that myself; I I've got a complete map of my blood sugars now, and I know that I can watch my blood sugars go up if I have two chols in the morning, but when I go home—when the time I've cycled home in the evening, I could—I could eat—I could eat piles of chocolate, and my blood sugars really don't change that much. So there is a lot in the time of day; there is a lot in circadian events; mitochondria have got their own clocks, and I'm not always sure what they're doing as well as they're being a master clock and and clocks in other tissues, but I'm not a circadian person.
Sure, sure. No, no, no; it it makes sense so that if we kind of look to nature to see what—what is the information that we can—how—how can we interpret this data essentially through the lens of nature and evolution? I think that's typically what—always—always try to do.
Yeah. No, I'm—if I can pin it down to something in terms of evolution, I will do, and and a great physical anthropologist uh, walked through my door, oh, I don't know, 18 months ago, and um, Nate Dney, and from Dartmouth, and he came along, and he said, "Firelight," and I—I—firelight had been in the back of my mind, and he said, "You know what was fire—what was firelight doing?" Well, you know, the spectrum of this light is very heavy in the red. Um, I'm really unsure of where we stand on this one, but it is important you—because when we evolved, we evolved originally in a in a in a forested type environment—lots of trees; we then moved out into savannah where we got a lot more sunlight, you know, particularly on our heads—big transitions—change in human evolution with fire. I mean, the obvious ones are you—you know, uh, your food's easier to digest; your food doesn't go off quite as easily; whole—and you know, Nate came in and said, "There are other angles here; what—what—what are the other angles?" So it's winter coming now; um, I bought uh, half a ton of logs in summer, and I bought a fire pit. So, of course, you know, when—when—when bls go out and they light fires, they also have their cans of beer; they can't do it without it. So what we're going to do is we're going to sit there, and I'm going to get the people to sit around, and I'm going to be measuring the—if I try and find out if I can measure firelight coming through the body by putting that instrumentation on people's backs.
Oh, I love that idea. We want to talk a little bit about why we both use more red light therapy in the winter really quickly.
Yeah, absolutely. You know, come summer, it is so easy for me to pop outside for five minutes here, 10 minutes there, take the clothes off, or—and and just soak up the natural light, right? And I know—I know you—I know you do the same, and it's beautiful because we're getting all of those um, red and near-infrared wavelengths from the sun and imparting all those u—all those healing benefits from sunlight. But come, you know, November, December in Michigan, there's very little opportunity for me to do that; it's just too cold, you know. And so I'll go outside and get my light signaling through my eyes, but my skin—really—that—that infrared and red that I want to absorb through my skin is just lacking. And so that's why I would highly recommend if you do—if you live in an environment like that, you consider using a red light therapy panel in the winter; it can be the biggest game changer.
Yeah, and we both love the BioCharge Mini. This is super convenient; you can take it with you traveling. Um, I—you know, you guys don't know when I'm recording the podcast; half the time I have it on my low back or somewhere in my body to mitigate some of this blue light. And for the months of November and December, you can use the code QuantumPod25—November and December only—to get 25% off the panel or anything on the BioCharge website. Carrie and I are both big fans.
Yeah, and one more thing really quickly with that; it's a great gift too, right? If you want to start getting people involved in this lifestyle and say it's a—the most convenient way. If there's a mom that you know who needs to tend to boo-boos and aches and pains from for kids or earaches, tummy aches, sore throats, it's a phenomenal gift to give as well because it really can wipe away pain very fast.
I love it. All right, check it out; link is in the—
Don't know—I—I mean, I think it's just—that's really interesting.
Sure. Then our nighttime sun exposure, essentially, if it does come through in a similar way as the sunlight, I—I think uh, in terms of the the fire—I study extensively mitochondria and essentially water in the body, and uh, mitochondria—we know—I'm certain you're aware of Scott Zimmerman's work and the near-infrared component of stimulating mitochondrial melatonin, which is by far—by far—the biggest source of melatonin in the body. But also, did you—are you aware of Dr. Gerald Pollock's work on exclusion zones on water?
So when someone first asked me that question, I—I—I thought, hang on, who is that person? And I had to say, hang on, I think I know the name. And um, he very kindly contacted me, and uh, I became much more comprehensively aware of what he was doing, and I have to say I'm slightly ashamed that I didn't know him as well as I should have known him, but I'm getting there.
Yeah, you know, it's it's just another layer, right, of what I had to unlearn in undergraduate and graduate school about how water behaved in the body, where it was kind of discarded as just being there, and now we know that it preferentially absorbs—at least exclusion zone water preferentially absorbs light at about 3,000 nanometers, and that actually can act again as a reservoir of energy and charge in the body because it's negatively charged. So I'm just wondering if that's how we got that energetic source at night time, you know, when the sunlight was missing, in it—where we were continually—continuously exposed to that form of infrared in some capacity to maintain what I call our water battery, you know—the mitochondria—our battery; we also have this water battery as well.
Yeah, well, look, I think there is definitely the case that we do not fully understand the role of water in this situation. If you look at um, the in atmospheric light water absorption, it occurs at certain places; doom—doom—occurs at certain places. Now I think um, that those are places where red light is not going to work terribly well, right? But I am not going to be the person that goes nanometer by nanometer by nanometer testing that; that's brainless. But I think what it does mean, it means that if we want to deliver light in a therapeutic sense, maybe we shouldn't be—what we shouldn't be giving specific wavelengths of light; maybe we should be giving a continuum in the infrared. Um, now Scott Zimmerman's quite important here because, you know, he's got his unique little light bulb—his light bulb, which is an LED light uh, but in it he's got a little tungsten coil, and the tungsten coil uh, because it runs at low voltage, um, it doesn't really burn out, and it doesn't use vast amounts of energy. So I talked to Scott weekly, and actually I said to him uh, end of last week, I think I said, "Send me 50 or send me a chunk of them, and we'll run tests on them." Now I'm doing that because my thoughts have evolved; I—it's—I realize now that it is not about a specific wavelength range; we've got to recreate a broad spectrum, and that broad spectrum is a sunlight spectrum, and Scott, I think, is the closest person to doing it. And also, Scott has—he's got a commercial interest, but he's also got a fundamental academic interest in what's going on; it makes him very easy to work with.
So yeah. Yeah, no, absolutely. I agree. You know, we can't—we can't cherry-pick wavelengths and just say these are the most important ones; that we—we evolved under the full spectrum for a reason, and perhaps we don't know the reason behind each wavelength, but there certainly is the potential for it to be biologically impactful, and for us to think we know better, I think, is is uh, a little egotistical, right? So I love where you're going with with the idea of full-spectrum light. Um, so so then with the—those particular bulbs, are you planning on doing very similar blood glucose research on them—exposing an office environment essentially to that type of light that has the near-infrared as well—the red and the near-infrared—and seeing what types of impacts it has?
My first thing I'm going to do, which is simple and it's easy for me to do and easy for me to get subjects, is to wheel people in, give them a 10-minute test on their retinal function, then give them a light bulb. Now we don't do this in in lab environments anymore; we got to move to a more natural environment. So I give them the light bulb, and I say, "Go home, use this light bulb generally in your environment; you know, try to have it on during the day behind your computer; come back a week later, and we'll test you." My testing is completely noninvasive, um, so I can—I can get subjects for that. So that's my first target; we get a positive on that target—yeah, blood sugars definitely. And we've got to start looking for other metrics. So we know if we give red light to um, to flies, um, they—they move better, right? They—they—there's some strong indications of improved cognitive ability with them; we've got to start translating that sort of thing. So I've got a—I've got a a pile of of mats outside my office, and we have been running experiments getting people to stand on one foot with their eyes closed; that's a really good one because you just said how many seconds can you stand on one foot with your eyes closed? So can we do that by changing the lighting? So vision's important; none of us like to lose our vision, but also mobility in older people, you know, you break your hip; there's a big problem—a really big problem. So balance and mobility is certainly something we're shifting over to, but not in tough experiments but in experiments where we change people's light in their living and working environment. Um, I think we've come to the end of saying, "I'm going to shine this light in your eye for, you know, 15 seconds." We've gone beyond that now; we're in a much more translational stage, which I love, and I think—
Yeah, I mean, I think that that gives the practical application is, "Hey, get a bulb like this in your environment," right? Which is pretty—a pretty easy
In the middle of an urban area, you start to feel good. Take another blood sample. What is it about feeling good in the body? Can we pin that down? Now that's an experiment I don't like doing because it's a fishing expedition, but I cannot help but believe that there's going to be something screaming at us when we compare those two blood samples. Right? And again, that's taking it away from the lab, taking it to the world that we live in and operate in normally. Um, which is, you know, key. Target? No, sure. I can't wait to see those results. I'm super excited for that test.
Um, so really quickly, this is always kind of piqued my curiosity. I know why you—the blue wavelength band of light that you used in a lot of your experiments was 420 nanometers. Is that correct? 420 to 450. Yeah, which is, which as you indicated, it's the band that mitochondria really can absorb and interact with, and it is the dominant band that you see in LED light bulbs these days. Yeah, definitely. Now, what made you pick the 760 nmet for red? Okay, the 760 nanometers, I—I picked—I'm sorry, 670s, I don't want to miss—670. I picked up the 670 because everybody else was doing it, right? So the point was there was—I—I told this story a number of times. I reviewed a paper about brain damage in animals and how it was improved by 670 nmet. I was completely confused. I had no idea. I went around asking people, "What's this 670? Is that a Christmas light? Is it a bike light?" Um, and then I realize that there have been this bit of science chugging away that I've been unaware of, chugging away in Russia, chugging away in Australia. And so we pick that up, pick that up, and you get caught in a bit of a rut. Now I know that's a rut. Now we've exhausted, I think, a lot of our 670 experimentation. So when giving light now, I'm not giving 670 because 670 floods your world with red light. You don't want to sit somewhere with, you know, reading a book and the world's flooded. So what we're now using is 850 nanometers. Um, you can't see that, and that's one of the wavelengths that goes through your body. Okay, that's one of the ones I can pick up on the other side. It is as effective as 670 and it's noninvasive. So some of my lighting, we're now negotiating about lighting in clinical environments, uh, Critical Care units. If we've got a critical care unit, for whatever reason you're in that Critical Care Unit, whether it's primarily because of a mitochondrial problem or secondarily because mitochondria are affected, I think it's a winner to actually have changed the lighting. So having longer wavelength lighting, 850, um, is the obvious thing to do. We know it's effective. So one of the experiments that is a manuscript sitting almost ready to go—takes me forever to finish these off—is we've exposed people to 850 nanometers, and we just wrapped their head in silver foil. They couldn't see a thing. Right? Little hole to breathe through. Right? So that, and the vision improved very significantly. So the point is that your body is responding to light. Right? It's responding to the light. My improvements in vision were partly because the retina got exposed to 8—to long wavelength light, but the body can do it on its own. And so I think with that in mind, we're going to move over to wavelengths of light where you walk into the room. So we've got a big 850 panel. Walk into the room, give people a cup of coffee, have a chat for 10 minutes, test their vision afterward. It improves. Okay? It improves. So we're giving you back that longer wavelength light. We're moving further out to a longer wavelength. Sometimes it's also determined by what LEDs you can get that are decent. Um, some LEDs are just absolutely awful. Um, 850, there's a lot of 850 LEDs around. Um, they're relatively good, and a lot of our devices we're building now or putting together are focused around that and thinking about the clinical environment for them.
Brilliant. Brilliant. Yeah, I love this. So what—so what I'm hearing—let me make sure I might translate this for people. What I'm hearing is that it's not necessarily site-specific exposure to 850 nanometers that derives a benefit. You can essentially cover someone's eyes yet have 850 nanometers in their ambient environment and still show improvements on the various parameters that you're testing.
Definitely. And and people have shown that in animals. You know, the Australian guys who who were very much the lead in this field, they shone red light into a into a mouse eye and they got improvements in it. Um, and then their controls to shine it on the back, and they got really disturbed because they got 50%—if they got 100% improvement in the eye, they got 50% improvement on the back. This was disturbing. Right? This really—we were fighting off the um the accusations of um polishing crystals, you know, and and and it all being very, very woolly. And that—I—I did say to people, "Can we keep quiet about this for a while?" Do we know about it? But we do know that when we shine the light on different parts of the body, we change cytokines in the blood. Everybody goes, "Oh, cytokines! They mustn't go up! They're—they're—they're awful!" But in actual fact, small changes in cytokines are very important signaling molecules. So this has given rise to the fact that if I want to treat a part of your body, I do not necessarily have to shine the light directly on that bit. Okay? So when you're on the beach and you put a towel over your face, you're still getting a therapeutic dose. It doesn't have to be through your eyes. We actually get that question. So Sarah and I have private communities all the time. It's like, "Am I—am I ruining everything with my eyes closed?" It's like, "No, no. They're not—your—your body is way too intelligent." Yeah. And also the other thing is that the published stories are actually very inaccurate. Long wavelength light goes through your lid very effectively. And the reason we wrapped people's heads in silver foil was because when we turned the long wavelength light on, the 850, when this wall panel, we went around measuring it, and it was bouncing all over the place. You know, it was so—I thought, "Well, let's turn their backs to the source. We'll have them facing us when we had our cup of coffee," you know, with their backs to the uh—and then we got really panicky because I went around and and and and, you know, it's being reflected off black walls. There's very—there's very little in the world, there's very few pigments that absorb at things like 850, so it's got nowhere to go, nowhere to hide, and it bounces around, just bounces around. So we—the only way out of it was silver foil. Well, it bounces around until it finds a human body. Right? Or I could have said that, but you know, I'm happy that you've said it. Yeah. It finds. Sure. Sure.