Transcription
And a really good example of this, this, these systemic problems, is a fantastic paper published by NASA, um, a few years ago in a very, very high-profile journal called Cell. And it said our astronauts, referring to astronauts on the International Space Station, have a mitochondrial problem. What's happening to them? They're all becoming, or many of these super-fit people are becoming pre-diabetic. So if you close your mitochondria down, they demand less glucose from your blood. That means your blood glucose levels increase. So all these fit people, they're being monitored all the time. Something else happened which a few aging people may have predicted. I didn't predict it at all. They're starting to age faster. Now, mitochondria regulate the pace of aging. Now, there are some great, there's a great photograph out there, and that is a photograph of the lady who was up on the space station for about a year, when she should have been there for a few weeks before and after. Look at the comparison between the two. She has aged enormously. Now, everybody kind of seemed to pass by that photograph, but a lot of the aging people went, "Hang on. What's going on here?"
>> Hello, Dr. Jeffrey. You are a professor of neuroscience at University College London. So, welcome to Modern Healthspan and thank you so much for coming back on the channel today.
>> A pleasure to, pleasure to be talking to you again.
>> Thank you. So, Dr. Jeffrey, that's the last time we spoke, mostly about the beneficial effects of red light, and I have linked the talk above for anyone who's interested. However, so just as light can have positive effects on the body, it can also have detrimental effects. So today, what I'd like to kind of dive into is what the impact of excessive blue light is and what we can do about it. So, kind of starting, you have been doing some research on the effect of blue light on, and it seems to be again, mito, mitochondria, just like the red light, it's the mitochondria. So, what are we seeing in terms of the impact that, uh, blue light has on the mitochondria?
>> Okay. Well, as, as with red light improves mitochondrial performance, blue light undermines mitochondrial performance. Now, as we walk around in the world outside, we have a balance between blue and red light. And that balance is a balance that's been there for billions of years. Um, why should we pay attention to blue light? We should pay attention to blue light because suddenly, in the built environment, we're getting vast amounts of blue light that we've never had before. And that is for two reasons. The first reason is LEDs, that are now the standard form of lighting in the built environment, um, have a very, very restricted spectra, only to the light we see, not to other wavelengths. But the LED also has a very big spike in the blue range, at around 420, 450 nanometers. Now, it doesn't really make too much difference if it's a warm blue or a warm LED or a cold LED. It still has this big blue spike. Now, we know mitochondria absorb light very specifically at 420 nanometers. So, that wavelength of light that is spiking in your LED, your mitochondria are responding to that, and they respond to it pretty rapidly. When they do absorb those wavelengths of light, it upsets their balance. They stop producing cellular energy and they start to produce what we call free oxygen, oxygen singlets, and they are highly inflammatory. Right? So, we know, I mean, the science behind that one is absolutely clear. We also know that if you do something to the mitochondria in your foot, by the end of the day, the mitochondria in your foot have told the rest of the mitochondria in your body there's an issue. They operate as a community. They are a complete community. There are occasions when that community gets disrupted. So, cancer is a very, very good example, because in cancer, the cancer cells and their mitochondria run off and do something different. But on the whole, mitochondria act as a community. So, if you wander around in blue light, the blue light actually doesn't get through your skin. It really is just absorbed by the surface and by your eyes. But when it is absorbed by those regions, the rest of the body knows about it. So, the detrimental effects can become systemic. That's, that's, that's, that's the bad news. It can become systemic.
And a really good example of this, this, these systemic problems, is a fantastic paper published by NASA, um, a few years ago in a very, very high-profile journal called Cell. And it said our astronauts, referring to astronauts on the International Space Station, have a mitochondrial problem. What's happening to them? They're all becoming, or many of these super-fit people, becoming pre-diabetic. So, if you close your mitochondria down, they demand less glucose from your blood. That means your blood glucose levels increase. So, all these fit people, they're being monitored all the time. Something else happened which a few aging people may have predicted. I didn't predict it at all. They're starting to age faster. Now, mitochondria regulate the pace of aging. Now, there are some great, there's a great photograph out there, and that is a photograph of the lady who was up on the space station for about a year, when she should have been there for a few weeks before and after. Look at the comparison between the two. She has aged enormously. Now, everybody kind of seemed to pass by that photograph, but a lot of the aging people went, "Hang on. What's going on here?" That environment in the International Space Station is solid, hard white LEDs. So, NASA have admitted it's a mitochondrial problem. They haven't put their finger on exactly what it is, but I think the path is actually rather clear. They are suffering from excess short-wavelength light dampening their mitochondrial responses. Great example.
>> So, the, the NASA team must measure a lot of parameters for their astronauts while they're up there. Um, do you know what they used? So, did NASA say that they aged more, or was it just kind of like visually, she looks older?
>> They said the whole team was showing signs of premature aging. So, NASA put their hand up, and I think they put their hand up rather naively. Now, think about the consequences. NASA and the American government want to, want to unload space flights to Mars. They want to unload them to a commercial company. Now, if you're a commercial company having employees that you're sending out to Mars, and those employees all start to age quickly and all start developing diabetes, there are going to be some lawsuits, you know, that that is going to be really bad news. So, I don't know what's bubbling on below the surface, but there are conversations about this. And if I were, if I were running a private space company, um, I would probably dump the idea of long-haul space flight unless we can find a way to balance the mitochondria in the people on long-haul flights. So, yeah, I, let's come back to some of the things we can do. And, but can we talk a little bit more about what is the impact of blue light and, and what is, what, in what data do we have about the impact that blue light has on mitochondria? And so, we have, you've done some mouse studies, or there have been some mouse studies, but in fact, you mentioned one, I, I think, where they, they shone light on mice for, I don't know, six hours a day. What was the impact of that?
>> Oh, the impact on that was quite shocking. Um, and I was genuinely surprised. Really surprised. This is a study which is, uh, probably, probably be submitted in the next couple of months. The data are all super clear. When the data came out, my first response was to say, "Go away and do that again. I don't, I, I'm not happy. Go away. Go away. I want to see the inside of your animal house. I want to make sure there's nothing in there that's nasty." So, they took the le, they took an LED panel, um, which was producing 420, 450 nanometers, which is the big spike in our environment. And they exposed mice to it for, I think it was about five hours a day on a 12-12 light-dark cycle. So, they did all the things that you should do. And then people noticed a few things. I mean, it's already, already been published that mice under blue light put on weight. They put on actually quite a lot of weight. Well, that's fine. I can get my head around that, because mitochondria consume glucose and oxygen to function. If you reduce their function, they're going to demand less glucose. So, you're going to have more blood glucose. You're probably going to start storing that as fat. So, when they, when they did the second study, which is yet to be published, I said, "Well, let's have a look at the whole body, you know, so fat, where is this fat? You know, is it, is it fat in the normal place?" So, the first thing that came back was, "No, the fat's not in the normal place. The fat is building up in places we weren't expecting it." Okay. So, they'd open the animals, the mice up to do that, and pictures of these horrible pictures of mice with you, uh, pinned out, looking at fat deposition. But then I said, "Well, if you're going to do that, let's, let's, let's go for the whole body. Let's just look at, let's look at systemic impacts. We know there's a systemic impact. Mitochondria talk to one another." So, the first thing they did was they took out the key organs from the mice. And much to my surprise, liver, heart, kidney were all smaller. They weighed less. Uh, I was, I was really surprised at that. So, you know, next thing is, if it's smaller, let's do the histopathology. Let's cut the tissue. Let's put it under a microscope. Let's see what's going on. And the tissue is pathological. You know, these are middle-aged mice. They shouldn't be like that. The controls that were under normal lighting didn't have this. Then there are some tests that you can do very easily for function. So, there are some blood tests which are done very standardly, routinely in hospitals for liver function. And I said, "Let's run, let's run functional tests, not just look at it, let's run a functional test." So, liver ALT function, um, that goes up with age, goes up if you booze a lot, um, goes up with pathology. ALT really high in these animals. So, something is happening which is systemic. We know that these animals get fat. We know these animals are a bit behaviorally, a bit dodgy. They, they don't like open field environments very much. They kind of look as if they're a bit stressed. Um, and we've got a systemic effect on, on their key organs. Um, we haven't looked at the brain. Um, it's a key, it's a key one, but we're a bit overwhelmed with it so far. So, the only thing those mice had was around five hours exposure to short-wavelength light in a, in a spectral range that you find in LEDs. So, I find, I find that really, put that together with NASA. Something is going on here. Now, there are other little things out there that tell us something. Um, an experiment done at Surrey University was where they cannulated people, so they can sample their blood all the time, and they moved them between different LED environments, moved them into that spectral range, and their heart rate and their blood pressure changed very rapidly. So, we're being bombarded by data that is telling us there is something wrong with a short spectral range that is a major component in LED lighting. Um, it's not only affecting our mitochondria, it's knocking on to blood sugars, it's knocking on to changes in key organs. Um, deeply, I, I find that deeply worrying. Um, so I was always running around saying to people, "Change your light bulbs. Change your light bulbs because you want more red light in them." So, get an old incandescent light bulb. That was my argument. I've got two arguments now. Change your light bulbs because the old incandescent light bulbs got lots of red in them, and also it doesn't have that big blue spike. Now, as you wander around the world from building to building, you're wandering around from different LED lighting settings. And you may think the lighting's different. You may think this is a bit more comfortable. You may, they've all got that big blue spike. So, I think that's going to be the talking point as an issue of public health in the not too distant future.
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>> So, in the mouse experiment, do we know what the power was? I mean, often in, like, animal experiments, like, we give them a very high dose or something like that. Yeah. Right. So, is it the same? Was it like an overpowered blue light, or just the same as normal humans get?
>> No, it was greater. Um, I would say it's approximately in the ballpark of two or three times greater than the energy you would receive from an LED lighting in your immediate environment. By that, I mean a desk light. Um, and it was given over a series of months. So, we have higher energy. We have, uh, an older mice. Older mice are always, like us, more vulnerable. And, um, we ran it for a number of months. So, yeah, it was a, it was a little bit more extreme than you might get in our world, but our world, let's say you're up for 12 to 14 hours a day, particularly in places in winter, and if you're working in an office, you are then exposed for 12 to 14 hours a day to LED lighting. Go home, read your book in bed for 20 minutes before you go to bed, LED lighting. So, it's difficult to balance exactly the mouse experiments with the human experience, but there's enough warning signals there flashing at you, telling you LED lighting may not be great news for you. It's great news for your energy bills, but it's not great news for your health.
>> So, I, in the human trial, well, it wasn't actually, it was a human trial, right, where they, they went from different, through these different environments, I believe, like the blood pressure went down, is that correct?
>> Yeah.
>> And the heart rate went up?
>> Yeah.
>> So?
>> Okay.
>> So, so some physicians say, "Well, hang on, that's good news." And the people that published the story, published it under a title, it was in the European Journal of Cardiology, and they published it under a good news banner, basically. Uh, I don't want to walk from one environment to another and have a profound effect on my physiology. I don't want, I don't want that to happen. Um, we've already just dipped our toe in some of these problems. Where's, where's the bottom? I don't know where the bottom is. And I want to be able to walk around the world in natural light and not have man-made light disrupt my physiology. And, and I, I'm not overtly, um, it's not the best phrase ever, but I'm not overtly a tree hugger. I believe in general health and I believe in minimal intervention to obtain general health. So, I think there, there are lights flashing on this one, definitely.
>> I, I, one question I had. So, the, if you have the, the red light, it improves your glucose control, and the blue light decreases it. If you were on a ketogenic diet, would it have the same effect? If it's not glucose, you're talking about ketones.
>> I don't know. I genuinely, and that's a, that's a, that's a phrase that scientists use a lot, should be using a lot more often, particularly in a field that's expanding at, at a vast rate like this is. There are so many big questions. We don't know. I don't know the answers to that, and I'd love to, I, I would genuinely love to. Um, we are very limited by resource. Um, but another issue that I would throw in here is that, one of the experiments are expensive. They're really expensive. How do you get around it? And, and I can't do them on humans because it's immoral. Um, so, one of the things you fall back on is doing things, doing experiments on things like flies. So, in my lab at the moment, I've got a whole series of fly incubators, all with different light bulbs in them. And all I'm doing is checking how long they live. It is super clear that that flies under LED lighting have much shorter lifespans than flies under incandescent lighting that has got a spectral range similar to sunlight. Now, I, I get, in, in the morning at 8:00, you know, the first thing I do, I, I run into the lab and I, I lift these vials of flies up and I'm going, "One, two, three, four, five." And, yeah, it's really exciting. Quite sad that I'm saying that, but it is really exciting. And it's consistent time after time after time that the LED lighting with its big blue component is killing flies faster than it would do under their normal light, which is a, actually not great, is a strip light, small fluorescent light that you get in incubators, and it's killing them hell of a lot quicker than under old incandescent light. The incandescent light's the winner. I rush, I'm rushing in at the moment to see if my five, cuz I've got five flies that live, live longer than any flies I've come across. They're still alive this morning. They're sitting there not doing much, but technically they're alive. So, that's a plus. So, we can think about all these mitochondrial effects. We can think about lifespan. Our astronaut came back looking really old. Our flies in the incubator under LED light just dying quickly. Flies under the incandescent light like daylight doing super well.
>> I was, yeah, just thinking about the ketones thing. I mean, by the time it gets into the mitochondria, um, it's pretty much the same chemical, I think, whether it comes from a fat or it comes from a sugar. So, just thinking about it, sounds like, but yes, we need it. You, we need to test.
>> Yeah. Yeah, we do.
>> Do you, do you know why there's that big blue th, that big blue thing in LEDs? That the big blue spike is, is it like a choice, or is it something in the way LEDs are made?
>> Okay. I'm, I'm certainly not an electrical engineer. However, my understanding is, and, um, uh, I'm not, not writing this in, in, in concrete. And one of, one of the guys in the lab is an LED designer, is that the fundamental light in an LED is a blue light, and that blue light then falls on a phosphor surface, and it's a stimulation of that phosphor surface that produces the wider spectral range. So, my understanding is the fundamental light in the, in the modern LED is blue. Now, can you get around that in a different way? I don't know. But one experiment we have done, which I have extended towards humans, is let's take an LED, a bog-standard LED bulb. Let's take the front off, and then let's plug into that bulb a, um, a long-wavelength LED. So, so we've got all these LEDs. Let's now plug in something that hasn't got, which is say, 850 nanometers. 850 nanometers of wavelength. I play with it, improves loads of things. Let's put the bulb back together again, and let's hand the bulbs out. Now, the people with the standard LED bulb do badly on color discrimination. But the people who have the LED bulb where we've plugged a long wavelength into it, do as good as normals. So, we can potentially correct the problem. Okay. We can add something into the system to try and, try and rebalance the system so that blue is not this big dominant feature in the LED, and that could be done commercially.
>> Okay. In terms of sources of blue light, so we've been talking about LEDs, but screens give off lots of blue light too, like computer screens.
>> Yes.
>> Is that, is that a significant component, or is it, it's just small compared with the LED?
>> It's really small compared to the other. Well, first of all, yeah, I mean, we're all concerned about our blue backgrounds. Um, it's just beyond that 420, 450 nanometer range. It is, putting it crudely, it's a lighter blue, and it's a blue that our mitochondria don't really respond to particularly badly. It's just beyond their range of absorption. So, we've had people sit down staring at blue computer screens, including myself, for three or four hours. Um, this was some time ago. I can't find any detrimental effects. Um, we've had people walking around with yellow glasses on all day to try and block blue and see, you know, do they get an effect? And we don't really get an effect on that. And I'm really pleased, because everyone else I've talked to, they've not got an effect either. So, we're talking about very specific, tight wavelength ranges that just happen to be in LEDs. They're not on computer screens, and they're not on your mobile phones. That doesn't mean that it's okay to look at computer screens for for ages, or particularly for kids to spend ages looking at screens, but the blue light effect, if it's there, is minimal, and I can't detect it.
>> So, you said blue light doesn't get through skin. Does it get through clothes?
>> No, it doesn't very well. Um, we published a paper a few months ago showing that long-wavelength light goes through your body. Um, and we did get, um, we did get a whole pile of M&S clothing and we hung it up, and we put different deep infrared lights behind it, and they shone through it brilliantly. Uh, no. Doesn't go through clothes. And, and it obviously doesn't, because on a really sunny day, hot sunny day, and you're walking around with a shirt on, a short-sleeve shirt, your arms get sunburnt, which is short-wavelength light absorption, but it doesn't, you don't get a suntan generally through your clothing. Not unless you're wearing a string vest or something like that. So, clothing is a very effective blocker of short-wavelength light. Um, as is window glass. You tend not to get, um, sunburn, um, through light coming through your window. Uh, you, it needs to be direct contact on the body.
>> I wonder whether, would sunscreen protect you?
>> Well, sunscreen, sunscreen certainly protects you from from ultraviolet and sunblue. Yeah. Uh, I think it depends on the sunscreen, because I did look at that, and not all sunscreens are exactly the same. So, the sunscreens that have got a refle, high reflective surface, and I think it's they have aluminum in them or something like that. Anything that reflects light away from the body. Yes. Yeah. But what about, what about if, like me, you're really thin on top, and you don't put enough sunscreen on your head, and you leave a square inch? Well, that square inch will get blue light. The mitochondria will go, "We don't like this," and they'll tell the rest of the mitochondria in your body. So, um.
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah. It's, you don't have to leave, you don't have to leave much area of the body surface, uh, unexposed to get to get a significant effect. When we played with blood sugars, uh, with red light, we were playing with a really small percentage of body surface area. So, I know, I don't know what the minimum is, um, but, you know, I'm thinking along the lines of, minimum is probably about, you know, four or five square centimeters. If you go below that, you won't get too much of an effect.
>> Do you see that there is understanding in the building environment, like in, in the, I guess the architects or the engineering departments, that this is a problem? I mean, is the industry kind of trying to address it?
>> Well, uh, the architects are becoming very aware, and they're becoming aware, I think, for one solid reason. They're worried that in five years' time, someone is going to come along having, you know, become pre-diabetic and start prosecuting architects. So, the architects are very aware. They're starting to become very aware. Um, the architects are, and some of the lighting engineers are thinking very hard. And I think we'll be in a different situation in a few years' time. But let me give you a terrible example. Um, I'm in University College London at the Institute of Ophthalmology, and right next to my building is Moorfields Eye Hospital. You know, I'm in and out of there once or twice a week. The basement of Moorfields Eye Hospital, one of, one of my colleagues said, and she was a Scandinavian architect, she said, "I could not put this lighting in a prison." So, the lighting is absolutely terrible. We, we've undertaken a lighting survey of the building, but the building is going to be pulled down in four years' time, and there's a new Moorfields Eye Hospital going up, and it's all in glass, and it's all going to have horrible LEDs in it. And here we have an eye hospital full of horrible LEDs. And you might think, "Oh my god, that's terrible for the patients." Well, actually, as the nursing staff said, "Well, I'm not too worried about the patients. I'm worried about the nurses, because they're here from 8:00 in the morning till about 6:00 in the evening." The staff are the people that suffer. And, you know, so people are paying attention, and the right people are paying attention, but the time lag is really long. The time lag. I've told all the authorities about the lighting, and I think their attitude is, "Well, by the time, you know, the problem might arise, I'll have retired." That was the attitude I got. So, there are many examples, and the defense industry is just beginning to pick up on it as well. What happens with members of the defense industry when they're in environments without daylight for long periods of time, extended periods under economic blue-rich LEDs? So, it's there. I think we'll be in a very different situation in five years' time, but we should be making those changes now.
>> Okay. But okay, so the strip lights, the incandescent, they're not incandescent. The strip lights don't have the same problem. So, it's only LEDs?
>> So, the strip lights, fluorescent tubes, their spectral output is a series of spikes. They are not good news, but they're nowhere near as bad news as LEDs. Okay. So, they've got, they've got some spikes in, in the nasty blue range, but they're not very big spikes. As a proportion of the light that they produce, it's relatively small. If you look at the proportion of light that an LED makes that is in that unpleasant range, and it is, it's not part of the big spectrum. It's, it's almost a separate spectrum point. You know, I'm guessing completely off the top of my head, but it's 15 to 20%, and there's no long-wavelength light there to correct it. There's almost nothing above 650 nanometers. Even if you've got this warm LED light, you know, which certainly is a lot easier on the eye.
>> Do you know when was it, when did LEDs start becoming the standard in offices? So, I'm just wondering, you know, are we going to see everybody getting, well, everyone is getting diabetes, but even more people getting diabetes in?
>> Yes. So, this became popular in the early 2000s, and, and there was a very obvious push for it. Now, a couple of guys got the Nobel Prize for LED, for developing LEDs, which I think was in the 1980s, 1990s. So, because they are so efficient in the light that they produce, they only produce light that we can see. Um, there was a very, very strong argument for putting them in all buildings. We're not wasting energy. The incandescent light bulb wastes lots of energy because you can touch it and it's hot. That light is coming out as heat rather than light. So, from about the, you know, the early 2000s, we start to get the, uh, LED. So, I'm, when I'm walking to, when I'm talking to architects, I start saying, "Right, hang on, we've got to change the lighting here." And they say, "Oh, hang on, in the UK, building regulations now do not allow you to put in incandescent light." So, we then start talking about, "What about if you've got an art feature? What about in your, in your canteen where people are for a proportion of the day?" So, we struggle with that. And their first reaction of architects is, "We can't do that. Building regulations on a new building." So, we're working with some architects on a, a complete refurb of a building in central London. It's been stripped out to its core, and we're talking to them about how we can balance light to get around building regulations. Where can we put light where we can say this isn't standard light? It's not standard office light. It is light related to a very specific feature. Now, we're lucky in the UK, we can, we can wiggle our way around these problems. In America, they're going to be banned completely. Right? But no question, they're going to be banned. And that, I think, is going through Congress sometime in the very near future. And there, there are, there are rumbles coming from some elements in, in, in the, uh, in America trying to get petitions running to say, "Okay, let's restrict the use of incandescent light bulbs, but let's still have it as an option." I'm not sure whether that will be successful or not.
>> Is, is anyone trying to fix the LED so that it works better? I mean, so that it's more human-friendly?
>> Yeah. Um, yeah. So, there's a company that we, we asked to put those 850 LEDs in. Um, and yeah, we got some good effects from that. Um, and it would be relatively easy to do, but this is a very limited patch on a problem. If, so, we took an environment with only LEDs in it, and we, and no windows, supplemented that with 60-watt incandescent light bulbs. Big, it was a big space where architects had their models made. And people were not sitting by their desks, they were moving around and coming back to their desk. So, we changed environmental lighting in a real-world situation. Now, when we, when we took that light, so they had a big improvement in their, in their color perception, which is our metric, because I'm a vision person. I've got the toys to do that. Um, when we took the lighting away, the improvements lasted for a couple of months. Now, if you now compare that with an LED, the improvements you get with an LED, say an 850 or a 670 LED, the improvements are not as great, and they only last five days. So, the importance of the light, and I, I, there's a lot to be done here. The importance of the incandescent light was the fact that it's like sunlight. It's smooth. Its spectrum is very, very smooth. Whereas, if you look at LED lighting, it's a series of peaks. So, we've tried to make LEDs like sunlight. First of all, doesn't matter how we engineer it, it's really difficult to iron out those peaks. So, you add loads and loads and loads of LEDs. In the end, you're drawing more power than you would do with an incandescent light bulb, and you've got something really big and clunky. That's not going to be acceptable. It really isn't going to be acceptable. So, I don't know how we, how we get around that at the moment. I mean, people are talking about OLEDs. Um, that's fine, but the energy that, the amount of energy they kick out is actually quite small. Um, it's going to take a major change in the way that we think. Um, but some people caught on. I spent some time in two critical care units at major London hospitals where there has been talk about LED lighting and the problems of LED lighting. Certainly, if you've got someone who's on the, who is struggling on the point of light and life and death, you do not want them under an LED light. And I think there are a few smart people in critical care who are thinking, "Is this an issue?" Cuz you've got someone on the point of life and death, you can give them an extra 3 or 4% on the positive side of the fence, that might make a very big difference. So, a few people are coming in from different sides. Some of the architects are coming in and saying, "What would happen if we changed the ratio of blue to red light in the changing rooms of major football clubs?" Well, I don't know. I'm, I'm really not that interested in football. But it implies that people are thinking. It implies that people are thinking different situations. You know, where, where are the situations where this is important? So, again, it's another example of me saying, "Five years' time, we're going to be in a different, we're going to be in a different place."
>> Yeah, that's good. That's good. So, I did want to, uh, kind of review a little bit of the benefits and maybe an update from what you see from red light. So, as I recall from last time, we, we talked about the benefits of red light, and it, it, it makes the mitochondria more active. They use more glucose to create more ATP. Uh, so, have you, what have you done with that?
>> It was actually a year ago we spoke, last year ago. Okay. And this is a fast-moving field. Um, there are things that have gone on. First of all, there's been much greater traction. People are paying attention, and you can see that in the commercial market. All these commercial sort of things for red light, which, you know, we don't have a, we don't have a commercial interest. We're separate from that. So, there's an explosion in red light masks. There's an explosion in gyms with, you know, red light devices, most of which are far too powerful. You do not want to put vast amounts of energy into your body. You really don't. Um, I'd say two things have happened. The first thing is we have now a much better understanding of the mechanism. Um, and that's really been done by, uh, a guy called Bob Fosbury, who's an astronomer. And he has, you know, fundamentally, he said, "Well, here's a mitochondrion, and to make a mitochondrion work, it has to pass an electron along it, and when it gets to the end, then you produce more cellular energy." And he said, "Okay, the resistance along that circuit is matched by the amount of energy that long-wavelength photons carry with them." So, this year, we published an article showing that long-wavelength light, sunlight, and then also in the lab, passes through the body. We can measure it coming through the body. Bob Fosbury's come up with a really great explanation for why the red light works, which is it overcomes the resistance in this, what we might imagine as a circuit in the mitochondria. So, that's one thing. Second thing, which I think is really interesting, not done by me, done by a group of workers at Westminster University in London, and they've just broadened it out. So, they've taken those light bulbs with an 850 nanometer bulb in it, so they're red-rich. And they found that people's grip strength improves. Now, that is really important. It's really important because it's not Glenn talking about vision all the time. It's, I'm saying to people, "Look, these are systemic effects. They're systemic effects. You should be getting effects in other places." They've got an, they've got an effect on grip strength. Think about that for the older person in the care home. Their ability to grab hold of that Zimmer as they're walking along. Grabbing hold of the Zimmer means less chance of falls, less chance of falls, less chance of broken hips, increased probability of survival. They've also done at Westminster some absolutely great experiments by taking significant amounts of blood from people exposed to red light, and they're finding a whole range of messages in the blood which we were very, very suspicious that they were there, but a whole range of messages in the blood that are that are consistent with the notion that your physiology is improving. So, on both counts, it's not about Glenn doing things with vision with people, which is fun and all the rest of that, and my, it's my toys. Other people are coming in with their toys, doing different things, and are producing data, which I'd like to believe I could have predicted, but we really need it out there. And the final actual point, which is I think is terribly important, which is the government agency in the UK for assessment of new drugs, etc., called NICE, have started to ask questions. So, they've sent me a long letter asking me my opinions about various things. They must have sent it to other key workers, other key researchers. Don't know who they are yet. So, government is saying, "Okay, hang on, maybe there's something in this, maybe we should be paying attention." And one of the commercial companies which was having a bit of success for macular degeneration, Luma, has just been bought out by Alcon, is a massive player in, um, ophthalmology, a real, I mean, big international company. So, I think that the, I, I think that the product that was made by Luma was questionable as to whether it suited the patient, but a big international company has said, "Let's buy this out. We think it's got legs." So, in the last year, since we've spoken, quite a lot has actually happened. And I think that you can encapsulate that in the phrase that it's got a lot more traction. People are not, um, I, I get less stick along the lines of total and utter disbelief, and I get more questions now. People ask me questions, and they ask me questions about application. How do we apply it? They don't, I don't get socially shunned in the way that I certainly did at some point. But, you know, someone walks into the room and says, "You know, we can, we can slow the pace of aging. We can do, do this, you know, just by changing the lights." But of course, it reeks of of magic crystals, doesn't it? So, you've got to work hard at the cutting edge to to say, "This is not about belief. This is about scientific evidence." And I, I think, you know, I don't know how much longer I've got before I retire, but I'm, it's very nice to know that I could walk away from this and it's going to run without me now. It doesn't need me.
>> That is really good. I saw, did you do a study with like an, an 850 nanometer wall panel?
>> Yeah, we did that. So, what we did with that was that was the light through the human body. So, I lined up my colleagues outside on a sunny day in, actually, ah, yeah, just over a year ago, June last year. And I, I didn't need to get them to take their tops off, but I did, and I stuck on their back a radiometer, and they were standing in sunlight, pushed it hard into their back or onto their chest, and I measured light coming through their body. No one, people, "What light goes?" Yeah, the light you can't see, the long-wavelength light goes through your body. The peak in that light, peak, the peak kind of frequency was around 800, 850 nanometers. So, I then had a wall panel made. Actually, it wasn't a wall, it was a ceiling tile, to a ceiling tile, and we stuck a whole load of 850 nanometer LEDs on it. And we got people to stand in a room without looking at it, and we found we improved their vision. That I then started to get a bit jumpy. And, and the people, the people we were doing this to, the subjects were all lighting engineers from a major, um, engineering company. It was Hi in London. And then I thought, "Hang on, hang on, hang on. Is this light? Where's this light going?" I started measuring light around the room. And long-wavelength light bounces everywhere. So, then I thought, I have to differentiate between what they see and what their body experiences. So, these lovely characters from Hi, I then started wrapping their head in aluminum foil so that I could guarantee that no light went in the eye. And only, only light that hit their body surface was having this effect on vision. And, yep, uh, when we wrapped their head in aluminum foil, we got a significant effect. It wasn't as good as the effect without the aluminum foil, but the point was, and this kind of bounces back to blue light as well, the light does not have to hit your eyes, right? So, the aluminum foil clearly demonstrated that the effect on your vision was being mediated by long-wavelength light hitting your body at a wavelength that is present in sunlight, and that we know not much of it comes out the other side of your, your body when, when, when I shine light and you, because most of it is absorbed by the mitochondria in your body. But I can measure it coming out the other side as long as you keep really still, and I've got an expensive radiometer to do it. So, uh, the physicist again, Bob Fosbury, said, "Well, of course it's going to go through long wavelength." I'm going, "Everyone's saying you can't. Doesn't work." So, yeah, so with sunlight, then I had to take that experiment into a laboratory into a darkened room to test vision. And, yeah, the color vision of those people improved quite a lot. And in that, that was a study where we, we also put light through people's hands. You could see it with an infrared camera, the light coming through and through their bodies. Again, you could see it coming through if you got a sensitive infrared camera. It was, I must say, the reason I do the things I do is because I find them fun and I enjoy it. And that was that was a fun experiment. We all enjoyed it. We thought it was really fun finding out the sunlight goes through your body. Really fun. Yeah. Everyone saw the funny side of wrapping their head in aluminum foil.
>> Yeah. No conspiracy theories, right?
>> Okay. So, is, so what can we, so many, many people do not control the environment they work in. Um, you kind of have some control at home, right? But we still have LEDs. Uh, so, is there anything that we can do right now? Um, I mean, yeah, I mean, we could wrap our head from head to foot, I guess, in in clothes, or, but anyway, yeah, is there anything that we can do now?
>> Well, I, I go back to the same point every time. Sunlight. Go out in sunlight when you've got your, even if it's cloudy, right? There's, there's loads of infrared light. It bounces around more because it gets bounced around by, uh, water in the atmosphere. Go outside. Secondly, if you are going to sit for absolutely, you know, enormous periods of time in front of LED lighting, well, I'm not going to recommend a commercial device, but there are some devices that are just simple LED lights that have got 850 or 700 nanometers in them. Supplement it, or just get an incandescent light bulb. I'm sitting, I've got two lights on my desk. They're both incandescent light bulbs. And then people go, "Oh, I got to replace them, you know, every so months." Go and spend £10 on Amazon, buy a dimmer switch, and get a 100-watt incandescent light bulb and run it at quarter power. It'll last forever. It'll give you vast amounts of infrared light. Um, and it will counter affect the negative side that you get from your blue LEDs. It, it, you know, it works. We've done it. And so, $9.99 Amazon, I don't work for Amazon, for a dimmer switch, standard bog-standard dimmer switch. And on Amazon, you can still buy incandescent light bulbs. Don't buy incandescent like light bulbs. Buy incandescent light bulbs. Yeah. Simple.
>> Cool. Okay. But the, but the LEDs, so there aren't any kind of LEDs. Yeah. I was thinking about that, whether there was any, any LEDs we could get.
>> Okay.
>> Is there any way for a consumer, like an ordinary person, to check their environment? I mean, would like a spectrometer on a mobile phone, would that give you any data, meaningful?
>> The sad thing is, and this applies to many of the people flogging stuff on the marketplace, is they don't have the right spectrometers and the right radiometers. The spectrometers to measure the wavelength, the radiometers to measure the amount of energy. Um, the unit cost of each of those for a decent one that's doing what it should do is around 5k. So, people don't have it. Take it as red that if you grab hold of your lighting and you can keep your hand there for one or two seconds, that is an LED. LEDs.
are universal in having that blue spike. Okay. So, you, you just the simplest way forward is take it as red. If you've got an incandescent light bulb and you turn it on, you put your hand on it and you go, "Ouch," you've got an incandescent light, and that is giving vast amounts of infrared, and it balances out the negative effect of the blue spike in in LEDs that you know, you may, you may have LEDs above you. I mean, when we, when we, when we go and we do experiments in environments, we do them where they're all LEDs. We just give people desk lights, simple small little desk lights, cheap ones, and an incandescent light bulb. At the moment, it's the cheapest and best way forward, right? And you're looking for this to be continuous background lighting. So, like sitting in front of a red light LED panel for 20 minutes would not have a big difference. Well, it would, it would be better than nothing, but the, but the incandescent light bulb, the old incandescent light is doing so much more than those LED panels that you can buy on Amazon. And, and I'm, I'm, I, I think this is going to cause a little bit of a wave because people are investing in all these, all these red light devices. I've got loads of them that people send me asking me for opinion. Um, and they cost a fortune. Um, but they are not doing the same as a broad-spectrum incandescent light bulb. No. And that generally they're pumping far too much energy into your body. God knows what's going to happen to you in five years' time. I have no idea.
>> Okay. We'll leave that there.
>> Okay.
>> So, just a thought that occurred to me. So, we, we looked at, you've looked at blue light, 450, 420, and red light. So, have people looked at all the other wavelengths of light to see what they do? Or is it that nobody's looked, or that it doesn't do anything?
>> Um, I think that my first response for that is, you know, I've only got so many heartbeats left. Um, and, and this could be an infinite series. Secondly though, when I look at, when I look generally across the data sets, you can see that mitochondria respond to blue, and you can see mitochondria respond to red. Now, it may well be the case that mitochondria respond to yellow and green, but it's not a big effect. I mean, we're talking about very, I think, relatively small issues. We, we, we pay scientifically, if you take out eyes and you take away plants, we pay very, very little attention to light and the body, and, and that's one of the reasons why we've got ourselves into this issue with LEDs. Um, so there's a big, there's a big hole in our understanding, but I don't think at the moment it's worth driving down into the deep, into the full spectral range to see what's, to see what's going on. There may be something in there, but it would take an army of people to work it out. And it's not where the big low-hanging fruit is scientifically. You know, it's, it's, it's to be frank, it's tedium. You're not, I don't think you're going to find much there. I could be wrong.
>> Right. No, that, that absolutely makes sense. And there's so much that we still need to understand about the, the wavelengths that we are looking at, or that you are looking at.
>> It's not, not like we need to. Okay. So, Dr. Jeffrey, so where can people go to follow your work? What?
>> Well, everyone says, Glenn, you need a web page. You need. And Glenn doesn't have one. Um, Glenn doesn't have one because he's struggling to, he's struggling to, to get stuff done as it is. If you want to look for, if you want to look for for the science, then you can always find me on PubMed, which is an open access site that shows all the publications that people do in biomedicine. And you just type in Glen Jeffrey. Spell it right correctly. E R Y, not R E Y. Um, and maybe one day, one day I will get a website set up. But it's people like you that are actually doing us the big favors. So, we've run a number, we've had a number of of of interviews like this, and you spread the word for us. You know, I get people emailing me saying, "I heard this podcast. Was that you?" you know, and I'll always try and answer. Um, you know, my job, I, I suppose, is doing the science. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm no good at advertising, and certainly no good at advertising myself. Uh, but you, you people do that for me, and that's absolutely great. So, you can, you can type in Glenn Jeffrey UCL and, and, and podcast, and you'll probably find a few of them. You find a few of them coming out. Um, sadly, don't listen to more than two because I think I'm saying the same thing every time. Um, but, but that, that's your field. It's, it's, it's not really mine, but if anyone wants to contact me, I'll always do my best to respond.
>> Excellent. Thank you. Yes. And, and yeah, I, I have read your papers, so they're definitely there, and they're, they're all open access, as I recall.
>> I don't publish anything that isn't open access. Everybody should have access to the things that we do. Taxpayer fundamentally pays my salary. So the taxpayer should have access to what we do.
>> Brilliant. Love it. Okay. Thank you so much.
>> Uh, total pleasure, and thank you for doing it.
>> Okay.
>> You are welcome.
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